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Which seemed so very Dahlia.
“Who doesn’t?” Marianne asked. Except, she didn’t particularly like to remember. Even now, she couldn’t really sort through it. She had just been so emotional. And she remembered desperately wanting to connect with her parents and feeling like they couldn’t handle her. And that was the last thing she wanted with Ava. But Ava was getting withdrawn, and Marianne could see shades of herself there, and she had been certain that, if ever faced with this issue, she would know what to do.
“Maybe I should take her to a psychologist,” Marianne said.
“Why?” Lydia asked.
“I don’t know. Look, she’s a good kid—she gets good grades, she does art and she writes for the school paper, but... Kids order drugs on social media apps now. It’s scary.”
Ava came out, wearing a crop top that showed a stripe of her midsection and a pair of high waisted jeans.
“No,” Marianne said, before she could think.
“Why not?” Ava asked.
“It’s against school dress code.”
“I don’t spend a hundred percent of my time at school, Mom,” Ava said.
“But you do spend a hundred percent of the time being my daughter, and no.”
“Aunt Dahlia,” Ava said, turning to Dahlia. “This looks good, right?”
Dahlia looked between Marianne and Ava. “It looks good...”
“Hey,” Marianne said.
“The issue isn’t that it doesn’t look good,” Dahlia said.
“No,” Marianne said. “The issue is that... The issue is that you’re a kid. You don’t need to try and... You don’t need to try and show skin and things like that. You are a kid.”
“I’m fifteen,” Ava said.
“My point stands.”
Ava growled and turned away, heading back into the dressing room.
“It’s not that bad,” Dahlia said.
Marianne looked to Lydia. “I like it,” Lydia said.
“When Hazel is fifteen, I’m buying her low rise jeans and a coordinating thong.”
“A crop top is not those things,” Lydia said.
“Let’s just go,” Ava said, reappearing and breezing past Marianne.
“We don’t need to go. We have to choose things for school. I don’t want to order them online, because you’re just going to complain. And you don’t want anything that I carry in The Apothecary because it’s old lady clothes.”
“Which is why I don’t want your opinion on my clothes,” Ava said. “Because you like old lady clothes.”
Marianne felt her temper begin to boil over. “Oh, Ava. I am the crypt keeper. Of your nightmares. We can finish this trip and I will be your ATM machine, only because you need clothes but you are soooo grounded. This old lady will take everything you love. You can shop with Dahlia. Lydia and I are going to go get candy bars. And you can’t have any.”
And for the first time maybe ever, Marianne had sympathy for her own mother. Maybe the distance had been her fault. Maybe she had been so mean that she had pushed her mother away. Maybe she hadn’t recognized good intentions. Because she had good intentions.
“Are you really not going to give her any candy?” Lydia asked.
“Yeah,” Marianne said. “It’s my candy.”
