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“Don’t worry about that, bunny, just focus on your health,” she says, starting to soften, right in front of my eyes, pushing a strand of hair away from my face. I pull away from her. Instinct. She hasn’t touched me in a long time. “Are you stressed out at all? What are you eating at lunch? Are the girls mean to you at school?”
I love when Mother acts like this so I scoot closer to her again, asking for more. I know it never lasts, but I soak it in when I can, these moments when she likes me. If I say the right thing, maybe she’ll stay close to me for a little while longer. I think hard about what she might like to hear from me. How can I make her like me?
“I’m mostly friends with the boys,” I finally admit to her, hoping she’ll be proud. The boys at school don’t talk much, they just want to play sports, and I’m good at soccer and basketball so they let me play with them during recess. The girls are into gossip, and while I find the camaraderie appealing, telling secrets to each other before school,whispering by the swings while I hang back with the boys, passing notes during class, it still seems too risky to me.
I can’t tell them anything real anyway.
The boys are easier. Sure, they talk a lot about boobs, sometimes snapping my bra from behind, and they sing aloud to “The Whisper Song” like they aren’t all still virgins and they talk about which girls they want to “bone,” but that’s all simple enough stuff to fend off. I make fun of their mothers while I kick a goal, or their sisters while I shoot the ball, or their dicks before I sprint to the other side of the field, faster than all of them, and they laugh and get back in the game.
It’s so easy to be a guys’ girl.
“The boys at school are your friends?” Mother asks me, more interested, more curious, but not exactly impressed.
“Justfriends, Mother.”
Truth is, I don’t want a boyfriend in junior high. I don’t see the point, especially after closely observing other relationships all year. They hold hands at school for a couple weeks, the boy feels up the girl in his garage and then tells all of his friends about it the next day, just to dump her a few days later, becoming the only topic of discussion in school for at least twenty-four hours or until the next breakup of some other doomed couple.
There’s nothing to gain there.
Still, Mother asks me about the boys at school almost every day after that conversation. She never asks about my grades or French Club or the soccer team, like Dean does. She only wants to know if I got a boyfriend yet.
No boyfriend.
No period either.
Thank God.
•••
FOR MY THIRTEENTHbirthday, Dean gets me a fancy chocolate cake with two whole tiers. It’s soccer themed. Black and white and green, vanilla frosting. They sing the song to me. Dean practically shouts it at the top of his lungs. Mother merely mouths along. I smile because I do love the attention.
“Being a teenager is a pretty big deal, you know.” Dean beams, handing me a small wrapped gift. The paper is silver foil, really pretty, I think he paid extra for a professional to do it. “That’s from me and your mother. We love you.”
No one has ever said that to me before.
My mouth falls open the slightest bit. I’m shocked, dying to say the words back to him, tothem, but I close it back up and immediately start to cry instead. It’s so embarrassing, and Dean rubs my back sweetly while she watches. Mother doesn’t touch me. I wish she would, but she scratches the back of Dean’s neck adoringly. She knows I love him, too, and it delights her for all the wrong reasons. Dean can tell this is an important moment for me, but he thinks it’s because it’s the first time he’s said it to me. He has no idea it’s the first time I’m hearing it at all and that I’ll always remember it and I want to tell him how much it means to me that he loves me, how muchhemeans to me, but I’ll never be able to say any of that to him.
“Okay, Miss Waterworks, you don’t even know what’s in the box yet!” Dean laughs good-naturedly, soothing me with a small squeeze on my arm, helping me through my emotions in the best way he knows how. “Go on, sweetheart, open it.”
Inside the silver foil wrapping paper is a tiny black velvet box. Jewelry. I crack open the top lid to find two diamond solitaireearrings, sparkling. They’re pretty, too, and I wonder if Mother helped to pick them out. Probably not.
“See?” Dean said, proud of the gift, and maybe of me. “Big deal. Happy birthday, honey.”
A week later I get my period and it feels like a death sentence.
I mean, I guess it was.
You know.
For Dean.
CHAPTER
7
MY OVERALL TREATMENTat the agency was markedly improved when I started swanning about the workplace with that offensively large rock on my finger. I was officially engaged to Collin Case, heir apparent to the agency’s biggest client. They would have been fools to cross me again and they knew it. Oh, how they all tried to make me forget.
Len Arthur hosted a catered luncheon in my honor the Tuesday after the Newport weekend. Nothing says “We’re sorry” like an assortment of flavorless sandwiches from Au Bon Pain. It was unclear who tipped them off to my marital success. My best guess was Syl, wrongly assuming I would relish the attention, but the last thing I wanted to do was spend a free hour with a bunch of idiots I had to look at all the time anyway. The hideous event was essentially a pseudo–bridal shower wherein I was bestowed with midlevel to upmarket wines, gift certificates to department stores and a fair amountof tacky household items I’d never use, like coffee mugs or pillowcases, etched withmr.& mrs., brideortaken. And I had to sit there and smile with a miniature veil atop my head in the middle of the day like an absolute loon. Alas, I supposed I’d just have to get used to this sort of thing for the foreseeable future. It was sure to be the first of many parties in celebration of my forthcoming nuptials.
