Before my mom died, Scarlett and I used to talk about the concept of the perfect day. What would have to happen—from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to sleep—to make that day better than all the others before it. We didn’t dream big. At least, I didn’t. My focus was mostly on the absence of things. I wanted a day during which I didn’t stub my toe or spill on my shirt or feel shy or awkward or unattractive. I wouldn’t miss the bus or forget a change of clothes for gym. When I looked in the mirror after lunch, there wouldn’t be food in my teeth or something in my nose.
Sure, it wasn’t all omissions. I’d sprinkle in a first kiss, though I couldn’t have told you who—some nameless, faceless guy who in the fantasy made me feel comfortable and known and also pretty. Maybe I imagined eating my mom’s pancakes for breakfast before school, which always came in the form of my initials long after I was too old for that sort of thing because it turns out you are never too old for that sort of thing. And her veggie lasagna for dinner. I loved her veggie lasagna.
Nothing crazy.
Who knows? Maybe it would have been pizza day at school. Our school had surprisingly good pizza.
A perfect day didn’t have to include a fantasy trip to the Caribbean or skydiving or hugging someone’s leathered back on a motorcycle, though all of that and more was of course on Scarlett’s list.
But I’ve always liked simple things.
Now, on the other side of everything, I can’t wrap my head around a perfect day. Now, without my mother, what could that even look like?
I think back to before, before before before, and they all seem like perfect days. Who cares about a stubbed toe or the hint of a booger in my nose? I had a mother, and not just insert generic mother here, but my mother, who I loved in a way that not everyone gets to love their mom. I mean, I know on some level, everyone loves their mother because of the whole she is your mother thing, but I didn’t love my mom just because she was my mother. I loved my mom because she was cool and interesting and warm and listened to me and continued to make me pancakes in the shape of my initials because somehow, even though I didn’t, she always understood that I’d never be too old for that sort of thing. I loved my mom because she read the entire Harry Potter series out loud to me, and when we were finished, she too wanted to start all over again.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last two years, it’s that memory is fickle. When I read Harry, I can no longer hear my mother’s voice, but I picture her next to me, and when even that fails, I imagine the weight of someone against me, an arm against my arm, and pretend that’s enough.
I loved my mom because she was mine.
And I was hers.
And that belonging-to-each-other thing will never happen for me again.
Perfect days are for people with small, realizable dreams. Or maybe for all of us, they just happen in retrospect; they’re only now perfect because they contain something irrevocably and irretrievably lost.
CHAPTER 10
“Sorry, we only hire Starbucks-experienced baristas,” the guy at Starbucks tells me when I inquire about an after-school job. He looks like he’s in his early twenties and spends most of his milk-steaming money on hair-modeling clay. “This is a serious job. We take it very seriously.”
“Wait, what?” I ask, because now he mouths words I can’t quite make out.
“Sorry, just practicing my lines.” He shows me a script he has hidden under the counter. “Have an audition later. I’m really an actor.”
Coffee Guy, whose name—if his tag is to be believed—is actually Guy, smiles, but it’s an insincere smile, the kind that looks like it’s doing you a favor.
“I just did a guest bit on that new show Filthy Meter Maids.”
“Cool,” I say, wondering if the polite thing would be to say he looks familiar. He doesn’t look familiar. “So how did you become a Starbucks-experienced barista if they only hire Starbucks-experienced baristas? Chicken, egg, right?”
“Huh?”
“I just mean, how’d you get the job?”
“Oh, right. I lied.”
“You lied?”
“I said I’d worked at Starbucks before. For years.”
“And they believed you?” I think about going home, editing my résumé, adding a line—Starbucks Oak Park, 2013–2014—and coming back tomorrow. But then I picture my first day as a faux-experienced Starbucks employee. No doubt I’d scald myself or get yelled at by frustrated customers. People are nasty before they’ve had their coffee.