White Lines (15 page)

“He hasn’t
called,
” she repeats miserably, reaching up and pulling the headband from her head, releasing a cascade of hair. “Maybe it didn’t . . . mean anything to him, you know?”

She forces the words from her throat like she’s trying to get rid of them. Tears well up in her eyes and she blinks them away, looking off to the side. Despite the armor she’s built up around herself, this is the soft candy core of Alexa Forte. I picture her hunched over the toilet in the girls’ bathroom, her finger down her throat, the taste of fried dough and disgust lingering on her tongue.

“I’ve messed around with tons of guys, OK?” She raises one hand and swipes at the moisture collecting in her lower lashes, darkening them. “But this was the first time I . . .” Her voice trails off into innuendo. “Well,” she says, looking up at me, her expression tentative, almost shy. “You know.”

“Did
he
know?” I ask gently, knowing that we’re in dangerous territory, that I could say the wrong thing and she might explode in righteous anger or melt down into a puddle of jelly. “Did you tell him?”

“Not in so many words.”

“In
any
words?”

“No, but I’m sure he could figure it out,” she adds sarcastically, the old Alexa rising to the surface like bubbles in Perrier. “I mean, really. Hello, Captain Obvious!”

I giggle a bit. She looks so incredulous that it’s actually kind of funny, her eyes so wide they’re practically bulging out of her head.

“But you’re going to see him on Saturday, right?” I ask once I’ve stopped laughing. “I mean, that’s something at least.”

“He asked me to come watch him lug ice and empty bottles,” she deadpans. “He probably asks every girl he bangs the same exact thing. I’m sure I’m
so
special.”

Sarcasm is clearly Alexa’s default mode, a guise she slips into to protect herself from whatever emotional messiness she’s feeling, and to this I can relate. Underneath that practiced exterior she’s vulnerable as a flower in the August heat. The big difference between Alexa and me—well, not the only difference but a major one—is that I learned long ago just how unremarkable I really am. It’s hard to believe you are exceptional in any way when your father abandons you for a girl half his age, calling you only to sign a lease that serves no other purpose than to take you away from him permanently. And your mother . . .

I blink rapidly to clear the thoughts from my mind, erasing them like a damp rag moving efficiently across a blackboard.

“So, why him? Ethan, I mean. You’ve held on to it this long—why now, with him?”

“Everyone else I know lost it at thirteen,” she blurts out. “By the way”—her eyes narrow as she peruses my face—“if you talk about this with anyone, I’ll fucking kill you.” Alexa pushes her hair back with one hand until the entire mass of it falls sleekly over one shoulder.

“They all look up to me,” she spits out as if the words themselves are rotten, and though I don’t question her further, I assume she’s talking about the salad girls, how they follow her around, worshipful as petitioners at a church service. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she says, taking a deep breath, gulping the air as if she’s trying to overdose on oxygen. “The benefits, the dinners—always having to be so goddamn perfect. At my debutante debut last year, I had to bite my tongue the entire night to keep from screaming, I was so fucking bored. Plus, my dress was kind of hideous. Well, you know,” she says, sighing loudly. “You were
there.
”

“For about a millisecond,” I say, laughing.

My mother forced me to go to Alexa’s debut, and I retaliated by showing up in a black dress and pink combat boots. The only reason I was even invited is that I suspect Alexa’s mother forced her to ask me, since our mothers are friends in the loosest definition of the word.

“Sometimes I think I’m going to start screaming and never stop.” Alexa looks down at the carpet, running a palm over the plush strands as if it’s a grassy lawn. “Sometimes I wish I could just run away to Paris or Switzerland and never come back.”

“The land of chocolate and cuckoo clocks?” I raise an eyebrow.

Alexa grabs a pillow off the foot of the bed, lobbing it expertly in my direction. It hits me squarely in the face, the soft cotton muffling my laughter. I hold the pillow in my lap, cradling it in my arms.

“So I’m supposed to feel sorry for you. Is that it? Everyone worships the ground you walk on, you can get any guy you want, but you’ve got it so tough?”

I can’t believe that I’m talking to Alexa Forte like this, but somehow I am.

“It’s not as easy as you think,” she says after a long pause, her eyes squarely locked on my face. The hair on my arms rises as she stares at me, unblinking. “In fact, it’s not easy at all.”

“Nothing ever is. And neither is being a freak. Even if it’s your own choice.”

“Trust me, I’d rather be a freak than what I am right now.”

Her voice is an urgent whisper, and I can tell that she thinks she means what she’s saying, means it desperately.

“You just say that because you think it’s easier, and in some ways, it is.” Even as the words leave my lips, I can’t help wondering if they’re really true. “But it’s also hell. I don’t think you’d like it one bit,” I tell her, my voice a low murmur. “Instead of people looking up to you, envying you every time you walk by, they’ll either avoid or fear you—sometimes both. Neither is any kind of fun.”

I think of all the lunches I’ve eaten alone since transferring to Manhattan Prep, all the times I’ve watched Alexa and her group saunter by, their perfume floating along the breeze like an anesthetic, and my eyes grow damp at the corners.

Alexa walks over to her bed, flopping down on her stomach, her face buried in the softness of her pillow. “Maybe you’re right,” she says after a long moment, her voice muffled.

Alexa rolls over on her back and stares up at the ceiling, strands of blond hair she doesn’t push away strewn across her face. I sit there on the floor listening to the sound of the silence that descends, the rush of air animating the room as night closes in, deepening the sky outside Alexa’s bedroom windows like the coming of some kind of judgment, rushing toward the dawn.

TWENTY-THREE

THE WEEK HURTLES ITSELF
toward the weekend, the question of whether or not I’ll actually meet my mother looming over my head like a raven, talons bared and ready to strike. Each time I close my eyes and picture walking through the front doors of the restaurant, toward the corner table she favors by a large bank of windows overlooking the park, my mind goes utterly blank. And don’t even get me started on the whole Christoph situation. I don’t know what I think about more—my impending date with Christoph or meeting my mother. Neither option offers any kind of solution. I used to think that when I moved out of my mother’s apartment things would somehow magically be OK, a wand waved, gold glitter falling from the tip, erasing everything. Now I’m beginning to wonder if it’s all been an illusion, if my life has somehow shifted from bad to worse in just a few short months . . .

On Thursday afternoon, Sara and I sit on my rumpled bed, rubbing polish remover over our toenails. It’s less than a week before Thanksgiving, the stores full of chocolate turkeys, cloves, cinnamon, the tang of apple cider hanging over the streets. The harsh, acrid smell of acetone fills my mouth as I take a deep breath, releasing my words like a series of cannonballs.

“My mother called. She wants me to meet her for lunch at Tavern on the Green.”

Sara’s hand halts mid-swipe, poised over her foot. Her eyes widen in shock, her mouth falling open slightly before her lips snap rigidly shut.

“Ha,” she says with a clipped, mirthless laugh. “That’s funny. Oh, by the way, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you you’re not going.”

Sara holds my eyes with hers for a long moment before bending back over her foot and removing the last bit of red polish from her toe. It’s clear from the way her back muscles suddenly bunch up beneath her thin gray T-shirt that she means business. The guilt rises up in my chest, threatening to drown me. I imagine my mother sitting at a table set with white china and neat rows of silverware, her hair like onyx shot with bronze in the afternoon sunlight. A vase of pink roses sits before her on the white linen tablecloth, the petals the color of an open heart. She checks the gold watch on her wrist impatiently, ordering a third glass of Chardonnay while her eyes search the door of the restaurant, expectant and somehow sure, despite all that has come between us, that I will arrive on time.

I swallow hard, feeling as if there’s a Nerf ball stuck in my throat. It’s amazing that someone who hates the very sight of me can make me feel so completely guilty for refusing to cooperate. How can I feel so torn about something I should be able to resist without even trying? It is, as Sara would say, a no-brainer.

“I might,” I say, clearing my throat and picking up a bottle of blue polish Sara brought with her, turning it over to look at the name stamped on the bottom, Blue Bayou. I picture mossy swamps, the banks of a river running with mud, sucking at my toes as I approach the water’s edge, smelling the rich mineral scent of the earth. “I might go.” I turn the cap, pulling the brush from the bottle, and bend over my toes, dabbing at them unevenly, my hand shaking with the effort.

“Are you
serious
?” Sara’s head snaps up, her expression fierce, predatory. “You’re going to meet her after everything she’s put you through?”

“It’s only lunch,” I say in a whisper so faint that even I don’t quite believe it.

I close my eyes and my mother smiles as she reaches out to hand me a stuffed tiger, striped golden and black, her eyes crinkling at the corners. A day at the zoo, the smell of roasting peanuts and sun-warmed hay drifting through the air, the promise of something rich and intoxicating, my future hanging like layered gauze in the distance, still mostly unspoiled. I am four.

Children should love their mothers, Caitlin.

“Bullshit, Cat!”

Sara throws the bottle she’s holding across the room, red polish streaking the white wall, recasting it as a butcher shop, a crime scene. She grabs my arm, her fingers squeezing my flesh tightly, trying to shock me back into the present. I flinch at the sudden touch, the implicit violence in it, and for a brief moment I see my mother’s face staring back at me.

“How many times are you going to let her hurt you?”

Her voice is pleading now, but she is yelling, still yelling, and something inside me begins to shut down and hide, the way it always does when I am confronted violently or with aggression. I see the hurt and fear in her eyes, and I know exactly what she is thinking. It is bad enough that my mother hits me, slaps me in the face until my vision is blurred, the sharp jewels in her rings opening up the tender skin at the corners of my eyes or the rough, chapped fabric of my lips, but the fact that I am willing to go back for more is unforgivable. It makes me what I have never wanted to be, what Sara has never wanted to see me as—a victim.

“Cat, you have to listen to me.” She releases my arm and shakes her hands in front of her for emphasis or to shrug off the tension between us, I’m not sure which. “I’m sorry,” she says, quietly now, pulling her hair back with one hand and twisting it into a white rope. “I don’t want to hurt you. You know I’d never do that. Not to you. Not ever.” We stare at each other, unblinking, her eyes glistening with regret. “But she is never going to change and you know it.”

“It’s not about that,” I say, trying so hard to keep my voice calm and measured when it is taking every fiber of self-control I possess not to bolt into the streets, away from everything I don’t want to hear and feel. I wish I could push all the rage, fear and pain back inside me where it belongs, safe and locked in the velvet dark of my body, but those feelings have somehow sprung to the surface like an evil jack-in-the-box popping up to surprise me, grinning maniacally at their liberation.
See?
they seem to say with no small degree of elation.
We were here all along!

I see the incomprehension fogging her sharp features, and I know she will never understand. Sara, with her two loving parents who make sure she is safe in her room at night, studying for finals. Parents who reach their arms out for hugs, not slaps. Sara, who sleeps each night without fear as shafts of rose-colored morning sunlight make their way into her room. Sara, for whom I am—as much as she ultimately loves me—an enigma. My childhood an unfathomable island Sara peruses from a distance, binoculars held up to her squinting gaze.

“I’m meeting her in public. At Tavern on the Green. In broad daylight. Not even she would try anything there.”

Reasonable,
I am thinking.
This sounds reasonable.
But even as the thought flashes through my brain, it is replaced by another thought entirely, the timbre of a sonic scream or Sara’s angry voice.
What are you DOING?
it wants to know.
What good could possibly come of this?

“Oh,
public,
” Sara says, sarcasm poisoning her words like cyanide. She jumps to her feet and stands over me, grabbing her leather jacket from the pile of clothes on the floor and throwing it on, wrapping her bright red scarf around her neck. “Right. Did that stop her when she slammed your hand in the car door, Cat? Because that technically happened in public, too.”

Even in the fading afternoon sunlight her hair shines whitely, her face bloodless as bleached bone. She zips her jacket, collecting herself with a deep breath and exhaling loudly. “I’ve told you what I think,” she says woodenly. “But you’ll do what you want. You always do.”

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” I say. My voice sounds small, like it belongs to someone else entirely. I stare down at my hands, cap the bottle of polish and push it to the side. “This isn’t about you. It’s something I have to do—for me.”

I don’t even know if these words are true, but I cannot stop them or take them back. I don’t know if it’s for me or for my mother, but I know that I am drawn to her like a drug, that I must play out this scene to the end, even if I don’t know how or why. I have to see her for myself and face her down, this monster in my head.

Sara leans down and hugs me fiercely, squeezing my ribs so hard that a small, involuntary squeaking sound leaves my lips.

“I love you, Cat,” she whispers urgently. “If you have to do this thing, please be careful.”

“I will,” I whisper back, my eyes strangely devoid of tears, the sockets hot and dry. “I know you don’t get it, but . . .” My voice trails off into her hair, the tight curls that lie at the nape of her neck that smell of hairspray and musk. “I haven’t seen her since I moved out, and she’s my mother, Sara. My
mother.
”

I say these words like an incantation, as if they mean anything at all, and with them I smell the rush of my mother’s exotic perfume, feel the touch of her hands on my shoulders. Despite everything that’s happened between us, I still hold out hope that somewhere beneath that cold, chiseled exterior there is another mother buried there entirely, one who might, if the stars are aligned, love me.

Sara releases me, stepping back. “Right.”

Her face is expressionless. I’m reminded of the dolls my father brought home for me one year after a business trip to Japan, their blank affectless faces and perfect white skin, their bodies folded into kimonos tight as origami. My father was always more comfortable giving gifts rather than hugs.

“Your mother,” she repeats tonelessly before heading for the door, her brown-fringed bag slung over her shoulder. “Whatever that means.”