Hearing her nickname for me makes the lump in my throat heavier. “Thanks, Mom. You aren’t mad?”
“Why would I be mad?”
I blink away tears, rubbing a finger beneath each eye and wishing it was someone else’s hand doing it for me. “I don’t even know anymore. It sounds stupid when I say it out loud. I just thought it would make you regret… you know, adopting me. I am an alien. Don’t you wish you’d gotten some basic daughter?”
I don’t mean it as an insult. Basic is exactly what I’ve always wanted to be. As someone preternaturally quirky, with niche and intense passions and a medically diagnosed brain, I’ve had people apologize to me for theirSex and the Cityrewatches and brewery trivia nights. As if I thinkthey’reboring, when really all I want is to fit into life the way they do. I want so desperately to be happy—thoughtlessly and simply. I want to scream with other womenabout a mutual interest and talk about what I love without worrying that I’m accidentally hinting a moral superiority that doesn’t exist. From my vantage point, basic is beautiful. It means being a part of the crowd, a part ofsomething.
Standing out, being nefariously and subtly different, is like having a splinter buried in your finger that you can’t see without a flashlight. It’s exhausting. I want to be like other girls. I want to be a human at all.
“Lilah, pumpkin, I will never regret making you our official daughter,” Mom says with enough tenderness to last me forever. “There were days when you were younger, I had less-than-kind thoughts about your birth family. But you? I’ve never not wanted you. I can’t imagine anyone feeling otherwise.”
“She emailed me. My birth mom.” Saying that makes me sick. “But I didn’t… I didn’t reply. I used to look for her, Mom. I waited. And now she’s right there, and I can’t. I don’t want to.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I always do,” I reply, tipping over into tears. “I always face the truth. I look at what hurts me. I’m—I used to be—a documentarian, and that was the one thing I had going for me. I could take the pain.”
“Ah, there’s where you’re wrong, young grasshopper.” I hear her soft smile. “Life doesn’t need to be painful to make it meaningful. Do you remember what we told you on your adoption day?”
“Kind of,” I croak.
“Your grandma always said the name Graywood meant a dead tree. Something that had stopped growing. But I don’t see it that way,” Mom says. “Gray trees grow despite the pain, not because of it, out in the cold, covered in moss. And you, my dear, will always be a Graywood. You’re a good documentarian—and a damn goodperson—because you still keep your eyes open when other people would’ve shut them for good.”
Her words trigger the memories. Mom and Dad had painted my bedroom dark gray before I’d moved in, and decorated it with glow-in-the-dark stars and filled bookcases and astrology posters. They’d advocated to our small-town teachers to learn more about ADHD and got me extra time on tests and big projects. They’d helped me get into college, editing my application essays about why my grades had slumped for a few years. Even when I hated myself the most, they’d picked me. They’d let me be—no, chose me to be—a Graywood.
I tilt my head to stop my tears from falling. Is she right? What ifI’mthe one keeping me away from life on Earth, trapping myself without air? “But… but there’s this guy, the one from the stories online,” I whisper. “And he loves me. I know he loves me. But we’re different, and he doesn’t see it. He’s really, really rich, and his family hates me—”
“Well, fuck them, then.”
“No, it’s…”
“No nothing,” Mom says with that Appalachian resolve I’ve missed. Chapter closed. “Because you know what? So what if you’re different? To hell with these rich folks, and screw this Arthur boy if he misses his chance with you because he’s too busy talking to some race-car team. You don’t exist to fit into his life. This is your life, too, Lilah Graywood. This is your one shot at this exact life. Go live it.”
When we get off the phone, I pull my locket out from under my shirt and slip my fingernail between the hinged heart-shaped sides. It opens, yesterday’s pill falling into my palm. I pocket it and look at the cut-out disposable-camera picture of me tucked into thesilver heart frame. In the picture I’m still six years old, chubby and smiling and laughing, round cheeks and awful bangs.
Photographed by my birth mom.
It all comes back when I look at this photo. Her patchouli perfume oil. The clink of her press-on nails, thick with satiny nail polish. Our house, and how it vacillated between sardine-stuffed with life, new boyfriends and loud cousins and spinning vinyl records, to silence. To nothing.
But this girl, smiling in the photo? She’s laughing. She’s okay.
She had been loved enough to be photographed.
I hadn’t only recorded Arthur falling for me. Every video I’d taken of him had been my love letter back, my battle against the ticking second hand to keep him frozen and safe with me. I’d loved him with glass between us, so clear that I don’t know if he’d seen it until it started to shatter.
My birth mom had loved me, too, once. Probably more than I’d ever know. But she’d loved me with her own glass walls. She hadn’t wanted the real me, couldn’t cope with who I became, only found me now that I looked good on the outside.
That’s the difference between her and me—I broke the glass. I only want the real Arthur. I learned from what happened with Max, stood my ground, and told the truth. Now any chance of making this film is over, and Arthur and I aren’t documentarian and muse anymore. We’re just… a man and a woman who met in a very unique way. I can’t control his narrative anymore, if I ever could.
Whatever happens next is his decision. And he has to live his life, too.
I close the locket, drop it beneath my shirt, and look around. There’s half an hour left in my friends’ meeting. My stuff is packed already. I could get a flight right now and go home.
Or… I could do the one thing my birth mom never did.
I can be the person who stands up for me.
That night, sandwiched between Delaney and Sarah, I send three emails.
