MA NEVER MADE ANY pretense that she wanted to be a mother or anything like that. He was the one who had wanted kids, and she couldn’t have any. Or she didn’t want to, after her first baby died, Billy, whose name she wore in a cursive tattoo on her inner wrist. So they got me out of foster care. I wondered what I was doing there—Had my real parents ditched me? Had I been adopted from birth, then put back into the system? My memories from before age four are just fragments: someone brushing my hair, someone yelling, a dark room. I don’t even remember the place I was staying before Ma came and got me. When I asked her about my history, she didn’t know much, or anything, really, about how long I had been there or what my story was. “I was using then, Libby,” she always said. “You could have been dropped at my door by a family of clowns in full getup and I wouldn’t remember it.” I knew it was hard for her to talk about that time, so I only asked once or twice, then I let it drop.
After he was gone, she got clean. That took some doing, and a few relapses: nights of screaming fits, no food for days. She didn’t feel like going back to her waitressing job. She decided she liked the checks. She liked not working. And to be honest, she did like me a little. Or she started to right around then. I think after she kicked him out, she wanted someone around. I watched the shows with her during the day and she started to take me with her, sometimes, when she went to the store. She would always light up when people would say “What a pretty little girl!” and “Don’t you look just like your mom.” With her hair a ratted, yellow blond, her teeth bluish from so many years of drugs, she loved the idea that she was seen as someone’s mom, practically the Virgin Mary.
At night, she went out on her own and left me in the house, still locked in my room, so I wouldn’t “get up to anything.” But she always came home the next morning and never left me for more than a day. And after she got clean, even that stopped.
Before kindergarten started for me in the fall, we had another talk, a serious talk like we had before our Very Special Visitor. About what I could say at school and what I couldn’t say. I wasn’t allowed to ever, ever mention him. No one could see the marks on my back. If anyone asked about my arm, well—that happened before I came to live with Ma. We went over it lots and lots of times until I had it all memorized. We were a team, the two of us. Me and Ma. We had to keep our stories straight or they wouldn’t let us stay together. “And you never know where they’ll put you next,” she warned me.
It was then, at age five, that I learned: The longer you tell yourself a lie, the more you believe it, until finally, it becomes your truth.
CHAPTER 22
I HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN that I’d even signed up for the tennis tournament; I blocked it out of my mind along with everything else that had happened that day. But Sarah remembered. A couple days before the tournament she got busy picking out a winning outfit for me, and insisted that I take my racket to be restrung. She even picked out new laces for my tennis shoes—to match the skirt, of course.
“Looking good is half the battle,” Sarah explained, trying a new visor on me at the sporting goods store while they worked on my racket. “High ponytail out the top—or maybe a braid?” She looked at me quizzically.
I laughed. “I’m going to be the best-dressed loser on the court.”
“Don’t even say that,” Sarah scolded. “If you tell yourself you can’t, then you’re right—a teacher told me that once, and it’s true.”
I wondered who had told Sarah that.