“Come over more, will you?” she says. “I’d love to see you around the house. You girls are always out and about.”
You have no idea, I think as Bailey’s eyes flick to me. “I’d love that,” she says.
Ashley beams a motherly smile, then flounces off to fix the crooked chalkboard in the front window. I wonder if maybe I imagined Bailey being weird. She seems perfectly normal now. Then I remember the schedule she made Jade and me for the weekend and realize there’s a party tonight.
“Hey,” I say quietly, still holding her food. “Isn’t Sully’s party tonight?”
Bailey’s upper lip twitches and her happy face folds into a frown. “You actually want to go to that?”
Of course I don’t; I would rather be in bed or playing Mario Kart with Lauren and Andrew than drinking piss-warm beer in the freezing basement of Kevin Sullivan’s McMansion, but I nod, because I know Bailey wants to go.
She and Jade make it a point to avoid high school parties. They always say they’re stupid, but really everyone knows that’s because Bailey doesn’t want to run into Cliff—or Bridget, who is bold enough to hiss go home, skank at Bailey’s back after a few sips of peach schnapps. Rumor has it tonight is going to be a rager, though; Kevin’s older brother is home from college for the weekend and allegedly bringing a bunch of hot Canadian college guys with him. Everyone except the losers and mouth-breathers will be there.
I hand Bailey the food and meet her eyes.
“Okay,” she says, almost looking amused. “We’ll text you when we’re on our way to pick you up.”
—
I steal a glance at my phone the second Ashley starts cashing out the register for the day. Normally at the end of my workday, my screen is bloated with group messages from Bailey and Jade. When are you getting out of work/what are we doing tonight?
But there’s nothing. No mention of the party Bailey said we would go to.
Silence is never golden with Bailey and Jade. I wonder if I’m being punished. If being ignored is my penance for letting Lauren come last night, for almost getting us caught.
On the ride home, I rest my cheek on the seat belt, pulled taut, as Ashley prattles on about dinner plans.
“I was thinking maybe Chinese, since your father’s working.” There’s a silent again at the end of her sentence. My dad works night shifts in a pharmacy at a hospital in the city, forty-five minutes away.
At a red light, Ashley examines her part in the mirror. Moves a piece of bottle-brown hair until she finds a pesky gray strand and yanks at it. She’s five years older than my father and has a serious complex about it.
But when I saw her for the first time, I thought, Now, she looks like a mom.
Here’s the truth: my actual mom sucks. She’s always sucked. Even when I was little, like really little, I could tell that she sucked at being a mom. I remember sitting at my best friend’s kitchen table for dinner, because my mother was late picking me up again, mouth watering at the buttery rolls and Tater Tots, and thinking, This is what a real dinner looks like. This is what a real mom looks like.
When I think of my mother I think of Happy Meals for dinner, paid for by the change scrounged up in her car, the one that smelled like cigarettes because she let her boyfriends drive it and smoke inside. I think of the surprise on my teachers’ faces when they saw how young my mom was, the hot shame in my cheeks at always being the last kid to get picked up from the after-school program.
It wasn’t all bad—especially when it was just the two of us, and we did things like drive to get Carvel at midnight in our pajamas, or sit on the living room floor and cut out all the supermodels from her magazines, turning them into paper dolls.
I wish I could say it was my mom who ruined everything, but I was the one who changed. I grew up and couldn’t stand the boyfriends anymore—the way they smelled, the way they talked to her, the way they all seemed to use my mom up and leave her in pieces. I got angry, and I took it out on her.
I was thirteen the first time I said I fucking hate you and she said she fucking hated me too. The fights always ended with something in the house broken and both of us in tears, with her telling me she loved me and she promised to do better.
The thing is, I love my mom. But I’m starting to think it’s possible to love someone and hate them at the same time.
Anyway, how I wound up in Broken Falls with the father I’d never met and the stepfamily I didn’t know I had: my mom’s latest boyfriend, the one I called Tattooed Douche, was so bad that I decided I would rather live in a friend’s basement than my own apartment any longer.
A social worker got involved, phrases like no possibility of reconciliation were uttered, and phone calls were made to Russ Markham, the man I only knew by the signature on the checks he sent every year on my birthday.
Ashley welcomed me with a special dinner and a brand-new comforter set from Target; Andrew talked my ear off about my school schedule and promised to introduce me to all his friends—cross-country runners, soccer players, future Ivy League graduates, and girls who wore pearl earrings.
But I chose Bailey and Jade. Or rather, they chose me, drew me into their satellite, which seemed to orbit outside all the usual high school drama. Who was hooking up with whom, who was lobbying to win best smile. None of that mattered to them. They seemed to have their own private world where the only things that mattered were each other.
I really thought that I could be a part of it, the day Bailey pulled up to the curb where I was waiting for Andrew after school and said, We’re going to my house. I knew that it was an invitation to something much bigger. Two becoming three.
But three is an uneven number.
When there are three, someone always winds up out in the cold.
—
When Ashley and I get home from Milk & Sugar, Andrew is in the living room, hunched over his laptop. On the TV, the Netflix homepage is frozen, with the prompt: ARE YOU STILL WATCHING WHEN PLANES DISAPPEAR? I stop behind the couch. “That’s some light viewing.”
Andrew looks up at me. Rakes dark brown hair out of his eyes. That, he got from Ashley. The rest of him is his dead father, who was Korean. I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t reassuring that Andrew shares as much blood with the Markhams as I do.
Andrew looks at the TV as if he’d forgotten what he was watching. “Oh. It’s just background noise.”
I sit on the arm of the couch and skim the screen of his laptop over his shoulder. He’s working on an essay of some sort. “What’s that for?” I ask.
“Scholarship stuff.” He rubs his face with the sleeve of his thermal shirt. I imagine the bags under his eyes leaving black streaks, like mascara. “For Notre Dame.”
Andrew applied early action everywhere. He got into Madison, who gave him a full ride, and his dream school, Notre Dame—only they didn’t give him shit. They said Ashley and my dad make too much money, even though their combined salary isn’t anywhere near enough to cover four years at Notre Dame.