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“No.”
I sighed. Fair enough. We’d never really talked much before all of this happened anyway. I decided to move on with what I had come in here for in the first place.
“I wanted to ask you something,” I said, a little louder than my previous questions, so I would actually get her attention. “About Dad.”
That finally jolted her out of her daze a bit. She actually looked at me.
“A lot of kids at school were saying things today,” I continued. “Bad things, about Dad’s work.”
Mom averted her eyes, pulling the covers closer around her. “You know I didn’t bother your father about his work, Cora.”
“Yes, but maybe you knew some of the things that he was doing? People were saying awful things… that he was the reason a lot of them lost their homes, or their families lost their businesses—”
“I don’t know anything about your father’s work,” she repeated sharply. “Stop asking me. This is giving me a headache, Cordelia. Don’t you care? I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t know anything.”
I deflated. Ugh, I should’ve known better than to try to talk to her when she was like this. I just wanted to know the truth. I’d stood by my father after his arrest, and I was still waiting patiently for him to be proved innocent—for this all to be dismissed as a horrible mistake. But I didn’t like being kept in the dark.
Tugging my bottom lip between my teeth, I stared down at the lump under the covers that was my mother as silence stretched between us.
Thoughts and questions, doubts and fears, pressed at the edges of my mind. There were so many things I wanted to say, and I wished like hell I could say them to her. I wanted to tell her about my day at school and have her actually listen, maybe even give me advice.
But when had I ever talked to my mother about my bad days, or my good days, or my days at all?
Knowing that any more attempt at conversation would be talking to a wall, I left the TV playing and slipped out of the room, leaving my mom to her self-pitying stupor. I was on my own in this new world, and I needed to move on to phase two of my post-first-day damage control.
My clothes.
There was no way I’d be able to buy new clothes, even non-designer clothes, just to try to fit in with everyone else at Slateview. But I’d found a pair of scissors in the kitchen. If I could ruin the designer clothes in my closet enough, distress them and rip them up a little, then maybe I could at least make myself a little more incognito than I currently was.
I laid my jeans out on the bed alongside several expensive tops, then picked up the scissors. I hesitated just a moment, opening and closing the blades. Every piece of clothing before me was a reminder of a life I no longer had, a world I no longer lived in. One defined by excess, privilege, and wealth. In that life, I could’ve destroyed every item in my closet, and Dad would’ve replaced it all without batting an eye.
Now? This was all I had. The last of my father’s money had bought these clothes, and I was about to deface them.
For survival. It was worth it. There was no point in nice clothes if I was going to have to suffer for it.
I attacked the jeans first, ripping and tearing into the fabric. I added holes to a few pairs and cut others into shorts.
Each cut felt like carving out a piece of myself, separating the new me from the old me, and I tried not to think about how pathetic that might have seemed to someone else as I moved on to the tops. I continued like that, altering the way my clothing looked until I was satisfied that the previous designer shine was no longer there.
I may have been a van Rensselaer, but I didn’t have to look the part. I didn’t have to give the other students any more reasons to look at me like a target. To hate me for what I’d once had. To associate me with my father in any way.
Because the truth was, I wasn’t any better off than anyone else at that school now. I wasn’t just trying to make myself look like them. I was one of them.
God, I hope this w
orks. I can’t make it through an entire year of days like today.
After playing fashion designer, I put my clothes away. Since I was trying new things, I decided to attempt to make a decent dinner for Mom and me. Maybe a warm meal would make her feel a little better, although I doubted it.
I decided to go for one of the boxed meals. It had everything in there to make a dinner—some sort of quick bake. The directions were easy. Open the can of meat and sauce, put it in a pan, sprinkle the topping over it, bake it. It was a no-brainer, and I followed the instructions to the T as I sat down to do my homework.
But time must’ve gotten away from me. I finished my geometry assignment and was just beginning to draft a US history essay when I caught the scent of something burning.
“What the—”
Shit.
I stood quickly, darting frantically into the kitchen. It was smoky and hazy—why the hell wasn’t the fire alarm working? I searched around for a pair of potholders, but couldn’t find them, possibly because we didn’t own any. I dashed to my room, got my bath towel, and used that to pull dinner out of the oven.
