Identity Crisis Page 11

  I hesitate. “I’m not really in the mood,” I finally say. “I think I’ll go swimming instead.” Even though swim season doesn’t officially start until winter, I still go a few times a week to stay toned.

  My mom spots an opportunity. “Well, if you want to take a break, I could use your help. The winter line is in, and I brought home some last-minute product I need to sort before Monday’s photo shoot. Maybe you could help when you get back?”

  “Sure,” I say, hiding my lack of enthusiasm. My mom’s always trying to push her company’s product on me, insisting this eyeliner or that lip gloss would “enhance” my natural looks. Meaning, make me look less plain vanilla, more Chai Spice. But every time I put that goop on my face, I immediately want to dive in the pool and wash it all away.

  I’m about to head back upstairs, but something compels me into my dad’s office instead. I slip inside and stop by his desk, where I notice a notepad lying on top with his unintelligible handwriting scribbled all over it. Beside it, there’s a business card from the law firm of Haddock, Nelson, & Pike. I’m starting to get freaked out. Going solo? Lawyers? Lying about golf partners. What does this mean? Why would he even be talking to an attorney? Is it possible that my dad is thinking about . . . about getting a divorce?

  I wonder what Annalise would think. She’s the only friend I can think of who’s just been through this with her own parents. Even though it was an affair that broke them up, maybe she’d still recognize the warning signs. How to know when things are really getting bad. Bad enough to worry. I try messaging Annalise as Declan, but she doesn’t respond. Where is she? I really want to talk to her. Need to talk to her. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard from her at all since the day before yesterday. What’s going on?

  I decide the best way to distract myself is to head over to the pool. I change into my bathing suit and grab my gym bag with goggles and towel and flip flops. “I’m heading out,” I call to my mom, slipping out the door before she can answer. I bike the few blocks down to the local Y, enjoying the blue sky, the crisp fall day.

  When I get there, the place is empty, just the way I like it. Only one of the pool’s six lap lanes is occupied. Everyone must be out picking apples or enjoying one last beach day or a hike in the woods before the arctic winter sets in. Their loss. I dive into the cool water, kicking hard, wishing I could leave my troubles in my wake. Gliding below the surface always clears my head. Sometimes, it feels like the only place I can see things clearly. I hold my breath and stay underwater as long as I possibly can.

  When I get home, I find my mom in the dining room, surrounded by stacks of cardboard boxes. She pleads for me to stay and help her. “Come on,” she says. “You used to love doing this.”

  Yeah, I reply in my head. When I was, like, six. “Fine,” I sigh, even though I am on to her. She thinks this forced mother-daughter bonding time will get me to reveal my inner angst. Well, Mom, think again. We start opening different packages and sort the makeup into piles all along the mahogany table: mascara wands, lip liners, brushes, compacts, and gels.

  “Do you want to try this?” she asks, holding up a sparkly purple eyeliner. I take it, inspecting it before I wrinkle my nose. “A little too Lady Gaga.” I hold up the eyeliner. “But can I give it to Tori?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great.” Maybe if I keep bribing her with swag, I will be safe from her wrath. I pocket a few extra tubes of shimmery body lotion, too, just to be sure.

  “So how are Eva and Tori?” I grimace at hearing the names, but try to hide it.

  “Oh, that reminds me. There’s something Tori wanted me to ask you.” I tell my mom about Tori’s crazy idea that her company should sponsor her online beauty pageant and mention products in return for giveaways to InstaHotOrNot contestants.

  “Hmm.” My mom’s face is busy scrutinizing some label, making her reaction unclear.

  “It’s dumb, I know.” I backpedal, already sorry I asked.

  She raises her head and looks at me. “No, that’s very entrepreneurial of her. Tell her to write me a proposal. I’ll pass it around to the right people.”

  “Wait, really?” I guess I fail to hide the disdain on my face because my mother fixes her dark brown eyes on me.

  “Yes, why not? I know you think this is just a bunch of makeup,” she says, waving at the boxes at our feet. “But this is a real industry, a real profession, and besides all that, it happens to pay our bills. And, yes I use makeup and Botox. The reality is, the working world judges you on your looks. I’m in a youth business, and I have to keep my edge.”

  “I know that,” I tell her. Up close, I can see my mother’s laugh lines around her mouth and tiny crow’s feet by her eyes. Is my mother worried about losing her job, too? What if that happens? Or is she worrying about something else? The Big D?

  I finally work up the nerve to ask in a roundabout way what I’ve been wondering all day. “Is everything okay around here?”

  “What?” If she is at all caught off guard by my question, she quickly recovers. “Yes. Of course. We’re going to be fine. Not heading to the poor house. Yet.” She purses the corner of her lips, to let me know this is just a joke. “Wait. Is that why you didn’t want to go with your friends today?”

  I hesitate. It isn’t, but it’s easier to let her think that, so I kind of shrug again, like it might be. “Just because your dad’s not working, you can still go shopping. Don’t go crazy or anything—” She breaks off and leans towards me. “You know honey, I’ll tell you a little secret. I actually make more money than your dad ever has.”

  This is news to me. “You do?”

  “Yup. Unlike your friends’ moms, who’ve been busy taking yoga classes all these years.” I know she’s making a dig at Eva’s mom, who is part of this exercise-obsessed clique that Eva calls “the tiny hineys.” She nods with satisfaction. “Well, luckily for us, I’ve kept working.” I think back to elementary school, when all the other moms were room mothers and field trip chaperones, and mine was always too busy at the office. But now, they all thought her job was super cool, especially Tori, who was horrified and swore us all to secrecy when her mom took a part-time holiday job folding scarves at Chico’s.

  She gazes at me steadily. “A woman should never completely depend on someone else. She should be able to stand on her own two feet. Be prepared for the worst. That’s what I’ve always believed. That’s what Nana and Papa wanted for me, and that’s what I want for you, too. Don’t you agree?”

  “Sure.”

  As mottos go, it’s not the worst I’ve ever heard. I wish I had enough courage to stand on my own, instead of clinging to a sinking friendship. But inside, my spirits droop. Stand on her own two feet? Never depend on another? Prepare for the worst? It sounds like my fears could be right. My mom and dad’s marriage is definitely on the rocks.

  Chapter 21

  ANNALISE

  Bam. Bam. Bam. I’m running through a Plexiglass funhouse maze, trying to find Declan. But no matter which way I turn, I ram into something cold, glassy, hard. Bam. With a gasp I wake up to the ringing of the house phone. For a blissful moment, I don’t remember any of what went down the day before, and then my stomach sours and it all comes rushing back. Worcester. Declan. Catfishing. Humiliation.

  I groan and stumble down to the kitchen, fumbling to find the handset, to see who on god’s green earth would be calling us so early on a Saturday morning. On the land line, no less.

  It’s Elena. “Where’s mom?” my sister demands, not bothering with a polite hello or to ask how I am.

  “Hello to you, too,” I croak, still strangely comforted to hear her voice. Part of me wonders if I should confide in her, if maybe she might even have some good advice on what to do about the whole DecOlan-Eva disaster. Despite our rocky relationship, we’ve shared some rare moments of sister solidarity.

  “Hello, hello,” she says impatiently. “Is she there? I tried her on her cell, like, three times and she’s not picking up.”


  I rack my brain, trying to remember what my mom had told me sometime way early this morning, when she’d poked her head into my room and said she’d be back later in the day. I’d been half asleep, still trying to block out the cruel world.

  “No, she’s out,” I tell Elena. “Having brunch with a friend in the city.”

  “Who? Diane?” Diane was my mom’s only good friend in Boston, a Back Bay realtor she’d roomed with in college.

  “Dunno,” I shrug. She had only said something about brunch before she dashed out of the house.

  “Well, I need to talk to her about Head of the Charles,” Elena says importantly.

  “You’re rowing?” I ask, somewhat surprised.

  Head of the Charles is this super prestigious regatta for the top crew teams held every fall on the Charles River in Cambridge, near Harvard Square. When we were little, when my parents still enjoyed doing things together, they used to take us down to cheer on the boats, and I guess that’s when Elena caught the bug to become a rower.

  “Yeah, in the frosh boat. You guys are coming, right?”

  “I guess,” I say. “When is it?”

  She tells me the date and I make a mental note of it. “Well, Mom’s been spacey lately. You better make sure she puts it in her calendar.”

  “What, you mean because of your dumb tickets?” Elena says. “Yeah, she told me. That’s not spacey, Lise, she got in a car accident.”

  “No, I don’t mean the tickets,” I reply, annoyed. Clearly, she hasn’t heard the good news that I’m getting tickets from Colin Dirge, and there’s no way, now, I’m telling her the whole convoluted story of why I was running crying through the mall in the first place.

  “Then what?” I can tell she doesn’t believe me. Our mom has always been the most organized person I know, with lists and schedules and routines.

  “I don’t know, just forgetting little stuff.”

  “You don’t think she’s sick, or something?” Elena asks, her voice rising in alarm, which makes me feel slightly better. I was wondering the same thing, and it would have been so typical of my mom to confide in my big sister but not me. They both still treat me like the baby in the family, even though I’m only an inch shorter than Elena. But if she didn’t know anything, then maybe there really was nothing to know.

  “I don’t know. She hasn’t said anything to you?”

  “Nope. She’s probably fine, Lise,” she says in that annoying big-sister tone of hers. “She’s probably just, you know, menopausal or something. Dad didn’t say anything.”

  I can’t help but snort. “Like he would know.” Dad doesn’t have a clue about Mom’s life anymore. She’s in the past. His ex. Would he even care if there was something wrong with her? With me?

  “Well, he didn’t,” Elena insists.

  “So you talked to him?”

  “Yeah,” she says casually. “The other day.” I just don’t get how Elena can still have this super close relationship with my dad, after everything that happened. Our conversations, even this summer, always feel so forced. “You should call him.”

  “Why? Did he say something?”

  “Just that he hasn’t heard from you in over a week. You shouldn’t blow him off. Look, I just said I’d remind you. Don’t kill the messenger, okay?”

  Easy for her to say. She had to skip out on our annual August visit this year, since it conflicted with her freshman orientation, leaving me spending three awkward weeks with him, Claire, and the twins, all on my own. A fact I now remind her of. “I think I’ve had enough quality family time for one lifetime.”

  “He just wants to see how school’s going. That’s what we talked about. He’s bummed he can’t make it up here for the race. Oh, and he said he was sending me something.”

  “Just you?” I can’t help ask, jealous again that she is always the favored one.

  “I don’t know, Lise. I’m sure you, too,” she assures me.

  I half snort in disbelief.

  “Why do you have to be so hard on him?” Elena asks.

  “Why do you always let him off so easy?” I shoot back. Why didn’t Elena have as hard a time getting over Dad’s betrayal as I did? Was it because she loved him more? Or less?

  Her voice softens. “Look, Lise. I know the whole thing sucks.”

  I concede her point with silence. The phone line crackles as we listen to each other breathing. I wish I could be as forgiving as Elena, but I don’t know if I can. Most of all, I wish Elena hadn’t bailed on me this summer when I needed her to be there.

  “Elena?” I finally ask, my voice growing soft, too.

  “What?”

  “How can you just forgive him?”

  She pauses for a long moment. “Because he got swept up in something he wasn’t strong enough to stop. He was weak, I know. But also I know he didn’t want to hurt us. Can’t you, you know, give him another chance? Maybe he’ll surprise you.”

  I think about that but don’t have a reply.

  “So how is it, up there?” I ask, changing the subject, wishing I could get out of the next three years of high school early and join her. When I wander into her room now, it’s weird how it’s been stripped bare, how all her photos and trinkets have been reassembled somewhere else, in a dorm room miles away.

  “Amazing.” And she goes on and on about late night Dominos with her dorm mates, and this frat party she went to where everyone dressed as angels or devils, and her Intro to Psych course where they get to be human lab rats, until finally, she remembers to play the part of Concerned Older Sister and ask about my life back at Dansville High. “So, how is Dullsville?”

  I tell her about math with Pinella, whom she had sophomore year, too, and Maeve making the volleyball team. “How about those witches from last year—they’re not still trash-talking you, are they?” One night, early in the summer, Elena had forced the story out of me after rumors of the Freshman Fling melodrama somehow trickled up into the senior stratosphere.

  But the urge to confide in my sister is somehow gone, the moment passed.

  “No,” I lie, since technically they’ve moved on to way more sophisticated forms of torture. “It’s pretty much the same old, same old.”

  Chapter 22

  NOELLE

  I hope Eva realizes we are going to hell, or if not hell, at least, a state penitentiary.

  At church this morning, Pastor Reilly’s entire sermon thundered against the sin of lying.

  “Who among us has ever deceived another? Dissembled? Lied? Prevaricated? Told untruths?”

  Me, me, me, me and, oh yeah, me.

  The whole time, I was sure he was looking right at me, knowing that practically everything I’d said to Annalise online was based on a lie, and that even if God forgave me for it, she probably wouldn’t.

  Besides, it wasn’t just the higher power I needed to worry about smiting me down. I’d typed in the words “Internet” and “impersonation” and “false” into Google last night and discovered that what we’d done was breaking the law in a whole bunch of states and could cost us tons of money in fines—or even land us in jail. The main legal distinction was whether we’d done it as a prank or “maliciously” to cause “emotional distress.” I think again of Annalise, running through the mall in tears, and am positive we’re going to end up in a jail cell. The legal fees alone will bankrupt the little money my parents have left after they split their assets. I forwarded the link to Eva, who texted me back to quit worrying, saying that prison chic was so in, hadn’t I heard that orange is the new black?

  As we all file out into the banquet hall for post-sermon coffee, Cooper and his parents come over to greet my family. Our dads shake hands casually, while our moms air kiss and exchange pleasantries.

  “How are you?” I hear Cooper’s mom ask mine, scanning her face, as if she knows the answer is written there.

  I wish Mom would tell the truth: My husband’s out of work and considering divorce, my Botox bankroll is running low, and my
daughter’s close to being busted for online fraud. How ’bout you?

  “Great, just fine,” my mom chirps, negating the sermon we’d just listened to five minutes ago—although she does shoot me a look when I roll my eyes and audibly cough in disbelief.

  “Why don’t you and Cooper go get some cake?” she suggests.

  Cooper looks agreeably at me and I nod. The two of us duck over to the dessert table, where we always stuff our napkins with whatever baked goods the sisterhood has provided that week, then head out to the courtyard to scarf them down. The fall air is growing crisp, but still warm so long as you stand in the sun. I love being privy to Cooper’s church persona: a proper button-down shirt and shiny shoes, his hair damp and combed neatly, completely different from the bed head and T-shirt school version.

  We lean against the low brick wall and I dig into my coffee cake, getting crumbs all over my black woolen skirt. I brush them off angrily. Too angrily. Cooper notices.

  “What’s up with you and your mom?”

  Uncharacteristically, I find myself blurting out the truth. “I can’t stand when she’s so fake. Like, we could have our house burn down and be standing here in our underwear, and my mom would say, “Oh, we’re doing grrrreat, how about you?”

  Cooper nods like he understands. “Moms can be crazy like that. Remember, like, in fifth grade, when we went away to Argentina for a whole week to visit relatives?”

  “Vaguely.”

  He shakes his head. “Wasn’t true. Me and my brother got lice, and she couldn’t handle the shame of people knowing. We had to stay inside all week while she de-loused our scalps and disinfected the house. Every other kid just came back to school the next day with a shaved head, but not us.”

  “Seriously?”

  He makes the Boy Scout three-finger salute. “True story. You’re the only one I’ve ever told.” He rolls his eyes heavenward. “Ah, the relief. I’ve been carrying it around all these years.”

  I laugh, feeling a little bit better. For some reason, with Cooper, I’m never shy, like I am with other boys at school. Maybe because I’ve known him my whole life, practically. I wonder for the billionth time if this great rapport is just all in my head. If not, then why doesn’t he feel it, too? Is Tori right? Is it because I fail in the figure department? Does it really come down to stupid cup size—even for Cooper?