Their Vicious Games(3)
Toni scoffs to herself, like she doesn’t believe me. “Not there,” she says, and it’s times like these that I remember the grit she buries under glitter. I recognize that kind of pain, one in conversation with mine.
Toni smiles through it, though, baring her teeth in a grin. No wonder they’re secretly terrified of her.
“Finish your eyeliner,” she commands. She pretends her mask didn’t slip as she stows the half-sized bottle in her duffel and shoves it into the corner of my room, tucked carefully underneath three of my sweaters. It’s unnecessary—my parents aren’t in the habit of sneaking around my room, even after my massive fuckup—but I don’t say anything.
I swipe the black liner on, the only makeup I know how to apply semiexpertly, before I grab a jacket and tug it around the champagne-colored corset top Toni wrapped me in earlier, declaring, “It picked you.” She’s right. There’s something about its fine-boned elegance that draws me in, a borrowed thing that I want to make my own, like my life.
“Come here, your hair,” she says, fluffing it.
There are girls who have touched my hair before. I remember even when I was just a kid, all of six years old, a girl burying her fist in my curls because she wanted to know if they felt like dog fur. But when Toni touches my hair, it feels reverent, like I’m loved, the way it was with my aunt’s hand in my hair, with my grandmother’s fingers twisting my ends, with every ancestor who has ever touched me and ever will.
“Dangly earrings. Gold, I think,” Toni murmurs, pressing a quick kiss to the top of my head before breaking the moment. She bounces back, clapping her hands. “Oh my God, they’re going to be so pissed. You look so good.”
She cackles at the flash of my middle finger, and I grab the earrings, then my boots, holding them by the laces. We stomp down the stairs, into the living room, and I call, “Hey! We’re going now!” without stopping as we move to the door. But my parents are right there on the couch, curled around each other, and their soft conversation creaks to a stop.
Dad looks over Mom’s head with a little smile. Mom tries to echo it, but it looks more like a grimace. She’s always been more readable.
“All right, girls. If you need me to drive you home—”
“We’ll call,” Toni promises.
“Are you sure, Adina? You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”
She’s wrong.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
“Bye, Mrs. Walker. I’ve got her,” Toni says proudly, and I roll my eyes but Toni locks arms with me and tugs me out the door.
“You’re on aux, bitch,” she insists as we climb into her car. “You have the best playlist for this moment.”
This at least is the truth. I plug my phone in and scroll through my playlists until I land on “pov: you have the aux and you have something to prove.” When I press play, Toni crows loudly.
“God, you always make me feel like I’m the main character in a movie. Fuck, just music-direct my life,” Toni screeches over the bass.
“I live to create ambiance.”
For a moment everything is okay. It always is, driving in cars like this, speeding through the dark, our way lit by the neon-blue glow of the dashboard and the sharp orange of the streetlights reflecting off Toni’s silvery eyelashes. It’s the palette of an A24 movie made flesh, and it feels powerful. I am the main character, whom things are taken from, won then irrevocably lost, but while the open ending isn’t quite hopeful, at least it’s still about me. I’m not an asterisk or a footnote in my own life. I don’t have to hold my tongue here, because I’m the fucking star.
But as we drive through my neighborhood, if I look to the right or left beyond the lights, I see each cookie-cutter house. Every single one is the same, all two compact stories, wooden planks with navy-blue shutters and forest-green doors. Each lawn is perfectly manicured, modest, unassuming. And behind it are the boring lives of boring people.
When second cousins, aunts, or uncles twice removed learn that I go to Edgewater, they think of Gothic castles and uniforms and libraries and tweed. They think nihilism and wealth and Greek and blood so blue, it must be so much more special than the red of normal people. They think of a place that builds a generation of leaders, who will leave the green pastures of Massachusetts for chrome towers. For most of my classmates, that is their future, so my family is right to think all those things. Just not about me.
Because I live here, outside the great iron gates in capital-S Suburbia. Suburbia is sticky lip gloss and the same silver-gray sedan at the end of every driveway. It’s Chuck Taylors and blurry-eyed girls who stand on the edge of the local public school’s football field in cheerleading uniforms. It’s being stared at when they see you break the cookie-cutter mold in a plaid kilt, climbing out of a BMW that is not yours, wearing a gifted pair of diamond earrings that you cannot afford, and holding a purse that you borrowed. It’s the way they see you in all these things that aren’t yours, and know that they aren’t yours, because they see that you’re born from the same cookie-cutter house as theirs.
They know you’re Of Suburbia.
Because Suburbia sticks to you, like the chemical sugar of Yankee Candles and Bath & Body Works, even though you left the store hours ago. For years I was able to disguise the scent under borrowed Dior perfume and by sticking close to the shadows of girls who winter in Aspen. But one slip and the smell surfaced.