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“I was watching her come out before. She’s pretty,” Elizabeth observed in a way that made me have questions about my own mother I’d never really thought of before, and didn’t intend to seek the answers to. “Well, did you have anything in mind for lunch?”
I usually said no, I was happy with whatever she picked, and I could tell she was expecting the same this time, the query just a formality before she barrelled on with what she’d already decided.
So I changed the script a little. I named the place I’d been to with Dad and Marcia just before she moved out for good. It wasn’t my favourite of the places I could have suggested, if I’d been determined to make a suggestion, but I thought the history I had with it would keep me focused.
“An interesting choice,” said Elizabeth, pivoting to of course she had meant for me to make one.
“We don’t have to—”
“No, we should absolutely go where you want to go when we are celebrating your new adulthood.” Elizabeth turned the car in a place I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to turn, so we were headed in the direction of the restaurant.
I didn’t think she was trying to psych me out, but I wished she hadn’t said that thing about adulthood. Instead of feeling elated, suddenly I felt adrift, nothing in my life tethering me to this world.
I started babbling about the one thing that would link me back to my old life again, if only for one night. “So I’ve decided I’m going to skip the formal next week, just stay at home that night and wait for the exam results to come in.”
Elizabeth shot me a look of annoyance across her central dash. “Is this change to do with a boy?”
“Who’s been saying what to you?” I demanded.
“Nobody said anything until you, this instant.” I hated the way Elizabeth was so smug having wrangled something out of me I never intended to give her. “This is just stupid, Aileen. Why wouldn’t you want to go along and show that boy exactly who he messed with?”
“He’s not the sort of boy you go out of your way to antagonise,” I said. If I really did do what I’d told Axel I would, go to the formal in my sexy dress and dance with Matt and his friends all night, what might Axel do? He could turn me over his knee and spank me in front of our whole class. But wo
uld he really care that much? More to the point, even if he did would he want our whole class to see he was that bothered by it?
He’d probably bide his time. Find a way to get me where we would have a less invested audience, and let loose.
Elizabeth shook her head. “Boys—and bigger boys—are designed to be antagonised. They don’t make them that handsome because they have the right to float through life unchallenged by anyone. It’s practically our duty.”
“I don’t hate that way of looking at it.” Actually, it made me realise I had been looking at this in the complete wrong way. It was just a negotiation, wasn’t it? It was just like what the two of us had been through with that ghastly shop owner, the latter parts at least, where I knew Axel had been saying some things to rile Cowen up, to let him know who was boss. Of course he wasn’t really boss, and sometimes he’d just riled Cowen up to the point where I needed to say something to soften things.
I couldn’t keep a lid on my sigh. We’d made a good team, before Axel made it obvious I would never be able to trust him.
“How about you reverse your decision on the formal?” Elizabeth said. “Put on your pretty best and go anyway. I’m willing to spring for whatever dress you want, although it’s getting a bit late in the piece to pick one…”
“I’m going to be fine with what I already have, thanks,” I told her. “Why do you care so much about this?”
Elizabeth grimaced. “I never went to my high school formal. Your dad wasn’t so keen on it—he liked to be in a social situation where he could control the room, and I’m sure you can guess he was not the most popular guy in high school. So instead we got takeaway and stayed in, and he told the girl at our drive-through window he was an inventor about to go full-time.”
“Sounds like all your dreams really did come true that night.” She was so invested in this it seemed like it might be worth my while to put up with that one night, if it put her in a frame of mind where she might agree to my own upcoming request of her.
When I tried on this possibility for size, it squeezed my chest so much I had to make one more attempt to get out of it entirely. “You realise this is sort of the opposite of your situation, don’t you? This is me not wanting to do what the boy wants to do.” Elizabeth shot me a look. “I can’t believe you buy into this idea that the school formal is the epitome of the eighteen-year-old experience.”
“You say that like one moment, one evening, can’t change your entire future.”
“I think that’s only in movies,” I said.
“To this day,” Elizabeth insisted. “I look back and I wonder how things would have been different if I’d just gone. Who I would have talked to, who I would have danced with… the way all the days after that would have been different.”
“Your life would have been just the same the day after, and the day after, right to this present day.”
“I spent the week after the formal drinking myself blind so I didn’t have to think about how disappointed I was that I hadn’t gotten to go.”
It wasn’t going to do much good to remind Elizabeth that she had been an absolute mess for years, and probably would have found a way to be an absolute mess even if she’d gone to that event.
“I’ll go,” I said. “If it makes you feel like you’ve done your job.”
Elizabeth grinned at me like it really did make everything stack up in her head: like the things she hadn’t been able to do in the past were compensated for if she could just push me in the door of that venue.
