‘I will. Good-bye, sweetheart.’
I shut my phone, then just sat there, feeling that lump rise in my throat again. I’d always had to work so hard to keep my mother’s interest, wresting it away from her work, her colleagues, her students, my brother. I’d often wondered if it was ridiculous to feel this way. Clearly, though, my instincts had been right: her attention was not only hard to come by, but entirely too easy to lose.
I sat there for a long time, watching as people walked up and down the beach in front of me. There were families, kids running ahead and dodging the waves. Couples holding hands. Groups of girls, groups of guys, surfers dotting the distant breakers, even as darkness began to fall. Eventually, though, the sand grew empty, as lights came on in the houses behind me and on the pier in the distance. The night was only just starting, and there was still so long to go until morning. The very thought made me tired, so tired.
‘Auden?’
I jumped, then turned my head to see Maggie standing beside me. Her hair was blowing in the breeze, her bag over her shoulder. Behind her, the boardwalk was a row of lights, one right after the other.
‘You okay?’ she said. When I didn’t respond, she added, ‘You seemed kind of sad when you left.’
I had a flash of my mother, the dismissive way she’d looked at Maggie, the bikini bottoms, the Booty Berry, and then me, all of us grouped in the category of Not to Her Liking. But it was vast, that place I’d struggled to avoid for so long, as wide and long as the beach where we were right then. And now that I finally found myself squarely in it, I realized I was kind of glad to have company.
‘No,’ I said to her. ‘I don’t think I am, actually.’
I wasn’t sure what I expected her to do or say to this. It was all new to me, from that second on. But clearly, she’d been there before. It was obvious in the easy way she shrugged off her bag, letting it fall with a thump onto the sand, before sitting down beside me. She didn’t pull me close for a big bonding hug, or offer up some saccharine words of comfort, both of which would have sent me running for sure. Instead, she gave me nothing but her company, realizing even before I did that this, in fact, was just what I needed.
Chapter
EIGHT
‘What I find,’ Maggie said, ‘is that when you get gum, you always need something else. Because gum isn’t really a snack.’
‘So true,’ Esther agreed.
‘If I do get gum, I always grab some chips, or maybe a cookie two-pack, as well. That way you know you’ve got your food and something refreshing for afterward.’
Leah shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What about Tic Tacs? They’re like gum, but I’ve been known to eat them for a meal before.’
‘Tic Tacs you actually swallow, though,’ Esther pointed out. ‘You own a Tic Tac. Gum is just borrowed.’
Maggie turned to her, smiling. ‘Impressive.’
‘Thank you,’ Esther replied. ‘I always feel inspired here at the Gas/Gro.’
I, however, was not feeling inspired. Or impressed. If anything, I felt completely out of my element, a stranger in a strange world. One minute I was alone on the beach, and the next, I was here, a girl among girls, maybe even a store-goer.
When Maggie had first sat down beside me, I’d had no idea what to expect. I had friends from the various schools I’d attended, but the one common denominator was that I’d never really done the girly thing with any of them. Our interactions, instead, were mostly limited to academic discussions, our solid common ground. So all I had to go on were the snippets of chick flicks I’d caught here and there on basic cable, where women only seemed to bond while drinking too much, playing disco music, dancing together, or all of the above. But since none of these things was going to happen on my watch, even in my depressed state, I had to wonder what, exactly would. When Maggie finally spoke, though, she managed to surprise me. Again.
‘So your mom’s kind of a badass, huh.’
I turned to look at her. She was staring out at the water, her hair blowing around her face, knees pulled to her chest. I said, ‘That’s one word for her.’
She smiled, then reached over for her bag, plopping it between us and then reaching a hand in to dig around for something. After a moment, she pulled a magazine out, and I braced myself for some celebrity analogy, God help me. Instead, I was shocked to see it was a college catalog from the U as she pulled it into her lap, flipping through a few pages until she found one with the corner folded down. Then she handed it to me.
U ENGLISH AND YOU it said. The words were somewhat hard to read, as I had only the distant glow of the house behind us to go on. But the picture of my mom – sitting at the head of a seminar table, her glasses in one hand, clearly mid-lecture – I would have known in any light, any distance.
‘Where did you get this?’ I asked her.
‘It came with my application package. The English department was the main reason I applied there.’