“I’m in a group project with a football player in my Bible class,” she says, “and I needed to tell him to stop blowing me off and do his part.”
“Ah, yes.” Her mom grimaces. “Mandatory Bible class.”
Bringing up Bible class always works. Her mom isn’t any happier than Chloe is to be stuck in False Beach, which is the main reason Chloe can’t be mad at her for dragging them here. Resenting Willowgrove has been a bonding activity for them these past few years.
“Yeah,” Chloe says. “Coach Wilson takes time away from his busy schedule of training the baseball team to inform six classes of seniors every day that premarital sex is a sin and homosexuals are an abomination. It’s great.”
Her mom looks like she has something to say, but then the automatic doors slide open and there’s her mama, looking the same as ever in a pair of loose linen overalls, tugging along a suitcase full of opera gowns. She has Chloe in her arms in a second, scooping her up and burying her fingers in Chloe’s short hair.
“Oh, sweet girl,” she says in Chloe’s ear. Chloe feels her throat go tight. She coughs into her mama’s shoulder. “I missed you so much.”
“Did you get grayer?” Chloe asks into her hair.
“Probably.” She releases Chloe, then turns to Chloe’s mom, gathers her up at the waist, and gives her a long, open-mouthed kiss like they’re on the bow of the freaking Titanic.
“Okay, okay,” Chloe says. “We’re still in Alabama. Let’s go.”
On the way home she recounts the story of Dixon’s party. She does get in trouble for lying, but the extent of her punishment is having to endure a thirty-minute lecture from her mama about the importance of open communication within a self-policing community, even one as small as a family of three. Chloe checks Shara’s Instagram for updates and says “uh-huh” in all the right places. There’s nothing new, just the same purposefully curated grid of warm-toned fake candids.
When she’s done with Shara’s Instagram, she returns to her group chat with Smith and Rory, where they’ve been discussing the postscript on Shara’s latest note. Chloe’s sure the word “records” is a reference to Rory’s music collection and wants to do a search of his room, but he responded via perturbed voice note this morning that he’s perfectly capable of looking on his own and neither of them are allowed back in his room ever again.
?????, Chloe texts, which the others know by now is her way of demanding a status report. Rory replies with a middle finger emoji.
At home, they eat the accursed turducken, over which her mama describes her hotel in Portugal and its fancy balconies and the room service custard tarts. After dinner, there’s homemade cheesecake with sugared cherries on top, which reminds Chloe of Midsummer and Shara, and then she’s itching to take her phone out and check Instagram again.
She drops her plate in the sink and heads for her bedroom.
“Hey, where are you off to?” her mama says, brushing a long lock of graying hair back into her braid. Her mom grunts past her in the hallway, hauling an armload of blankets out of the master bedroom. “We’re renting You’ve Got Mail.”
“Yeah,” her mom says as she dumps everything on the couch. “Aren’t you gonna watch Tom Hanks put an adorable indie bookstore out of business with us?”
And God, she missed her mama, she really did.
But … Shara.
“I have a huge paper due on Monday,” she says.
Her mama pouts. “Why did I raise you to be so responsible? I was supposed to raise you to be an anarchist.”
She shrugs. “Dropped the ball, I guess.”
Down the hall, she flips on her light and flops onto the bed.
If she were in her old room, she’d know what to do about Shara. It was easier to think there.
She loved the apartment in LA. It was right on the edge of the city, a three-bedroom on the fourth floor, and she still has the layout committed to memory. The single bathroom, the hall closet Titania liked to hide inside, the pink wingback chair in the living room. To the left of the kitchen sink, there was an antique hutch her moms salvaged from an estate sale and painted mint green. Her room had a sliding glass door to a tiny balcony and views of the skyline. When she was ten, her moms finally let her have the key to it, and she never felt as cool and adult as she did while reading books on a beach towel on her own private balcony all summer long.
The house here in False Beach is only slightly bigger than the apartment, but it feels too big, somehow. She misses hearing her neighbor’s daily routines through the walls and getting sweet tea from the kitchen without losing the Bluetooth connection between her headphones and her laptop. She misses her old room, the lavender-yellow-green layers of paint as she got older and the spot on the closet door where she stuck a Legend of Korra poster and never got the tape off. It’s hard to learn everything you know about life in the same room and then pack everything up one day and never see it again.