Audre & Bash Are Just Friends(69)
“… anyway, I need to go,” her dad was saying. “Athena wants me to make her Cream of Wheat with barbecue potato chips sprinkled on top. Pregnant women eat the silliest things, don’t they? What a wild ride!”
Long after they hung up, Audre stared at her phone. Lost in thought.
Audre had a hard-and-fast rule, that she never read any of the fifteen books in her mom’s Cursed series. Erotica books about a horny witch and a vampire with a nonstop erection. So. Extremely. Embarrassing. Not the sex, but the fact that it was her mom talking about sex. Eva, to Audre, was specifically and exclusively her mother. She wasn’t supposed to know about stuff like that.
But Eva’s new book wasn’t fiction. It wasn’t sexy, and it wasn’t made-up. It was all true. And it was about the women in Audre’s family—including Eva herself—and her mom had been traveling to Louisiana, researching the book for years. Her mom’s new book was probably three hundred pages of tea.
If there was something to know about Eva, it’d be in there.
Audre lay on the floor for two more minutes, tops. And then, like she had been shot out of a cannon, she hopped up and scurried into Eva and Shane’s bedroom.
She had to work fast, before they got home.
Barely breathing, she sprinted over to her mom’s desk. Eva’s laptop was sitting atop a pile of novels. She didn’t even have to look for it; it wasn’t hidden. Eva had no reason to think that Audre would go snooping because she never had before. But there was a first time for everything.
Moving quickly, she opened it, typed in the password (ironically, GilmoreGirls2), and searched the desktop for the file. Audre pulled up the Word doc and quickly scrolled through to the prologue.
This is a story of my family. Me, my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. Four women, born into challenging circumstances, who did whatever they needed to do to survive.
For so long, I didn’t know where, or who, I came from—beyond my mother, Lizette, who regaled me with family lore that sounded more like fantastical fables. Was she a reliable source? Not sure, but she was the only source I had. We lived all over the country, but never close to Belle Fleur, Louisiana, the birthplace of Lizette and my ancestors. It’s a Creole town as old as America (by definition, Creole describes Black people who are a mix of enslaved Africans, French colonists, and Indigenous peoples). By the time I was old enough to travel there myself, my grandmother and great-grandmother had passed. I never met them.
Nor had I ever met my father, grandfather, or great-grandfather because they’re missing from this story. Which is a story itself. There were no sons and no fathers in my maternal bloodline. So, we just kept passing down our maiden name, Mercier. It was as if men weren’t even necessary. Were we too strong to have a man around? Or was it something else, something darker? Could be. After all, wherever we were, scandal and tragedy seemed to follow.
As a child, my mother told me that Mercier girls were cursed.
If there is a curse, it ended with my daughter. She’s different—a truly self-possessed teenager, a tower of strength. At her age, I was a self-destructive addict, racked with pain both physical and emotional. A runaway. A loner. A lost girl haunted by darkness.
My daughter broke the curse. Or maybe I broke it, back when I was nineteen and moved to New York to begin my adult life.
Back in the dark ages. When I changed my name from Genevieve Mercier to Eva Mercy.
1, 2, 3, 4… THRIVE!
A Teen’s Rules for Flourishing on This Dying Planet
By Audre Mercy-Moore
Rule 10:
You can’t un-ring a bell. And you can’t un-know the truth. So don’t chase it down if you’re not ready to face it.
Chapter 29
Audre didn’t know where she was going until she ended up at the F train. Two transfers later, she found herself at Rockaway Beach. Her internal compass had led her to the same pier that she visited with Bash. It felt like five years had passed since that day. Nothing about her life looked the same.
Audre sat on the sand, crisscross applesauce, staring out into the ocean. The waves weren’t quite high enough to ride, so the surfers were hanging out on the sand, picnicking, sun-worshipping. Shutting her eyes, she felt the warm, coconut-sunscreen-scented air whoosh over her skin, ruffling her braids. She had so many questions.
Why had she tried so hard to be perfect her entire life? For what?
Why had her mom lied to her about their family? Her past?
Why was her mom such a hypocrite? Eva was the bad teen, not her.
Did she ever even know her mom? Her mom, whose name was, in fact, Genevieve Mercier. Not Eva Mercy.
Audre felt tricked. She felt duped into a false sense of security, of familial pride. It felt like nothing had ever been real in her life. If she’d believed she was one thing and found out she was another, was there any security anywhere? Eva was so hard on her. She’d set unrealistic expectations for Audre, and the pressure had caught up to her. It was the reason for her panic attacks. Her constant anxiety. Her perfection addiction, with the bar rising higher and higher—to heights no normal teen could reach. What was the point of any of it?
Audre wondered who she might’ve been if she hadn’t been such a perfection addict. Who knows? Maybe she wouldn’t have busted her ass to win class president every year since 2019. Maybe she wouldn’t have taken to her bed for days after placing second at her fifth-grade science fair. Maybe her PSAT tutor wouldn’t have quit (in tears!) due to Audre’s intensity.