“I don’t like her,” Beth said.
“For thirty seconds, you do. Smile at her like you would a boy.” Lily snapped her fingers. “Now she’ll do what you say.”
It worked. Everything Lily told Beth to do worked.
When Beth was ten, a group of boys in her class noticed her. Beth was tall by then, with long red hair and wide eyes. The boys would corner her in the playground, pinch her and poke her, call her names. Try to push her down.
“It’s because you’re pretty,” Lily, who was twelve, said when Beth complained about this problem. “Get used to it.”
“I hate being a girl,” Beth said, throwing her favorite doll across her bedroom. She’d boxed up most of her dolls the year before but had kept this one out because she loved it so much. Now she’d get rid of it. “I hate it. Being a girl is awful.”
Lily only looked at her with that flat, dead expression she sometimes had in her eyes, as if she felt absolutely nothing—good, bad, nothing at all. “Being a girl is the best,” she said, “because no one ever believes you’d do something bad. People think you’ll do nothing, which means you can do anything. I’ll show you.”
That night, they snuck out at midnight and went to the school, their boots crunching in the snow. With Beth’s hopscotch chalk, they wrote bad words on the wall of the school—words that Beth knew in theory but had never said aloud. They wrote them in blocky letters that didn’t look like loopy, girlish letters. When Beth got back to school after the break, she found that the boys had been questioned about the swear words, and two of them had gotten in trouble for it. No one ever asked questions of the girls.
Beth felt a little bit bad about that. But she knew what Lily would say: that the boys shouldn’t have bullied her in the first place. And really, Lily was right. Beth was a fast learner.
* * *
—
The Christmas Beth was twelve and Lily was fourteen, Mariana stayed home. They played Snakes and Ladders, which the girls were too old for, and Mariana drank through the entire game. By the end, she was slurring her words, tilted over on the sofa, drunk. The girls helped her upstairs to her bed, where she promptly fell asleep.
In the dim light of the bedroom, as half-frozen rain pelted the window, Lily looked down at Mariana, sprawled on the pillow. Beth watched Lily’s face, her eyes, as Lily watched the woman on the bed. Beth stared at the shape of Lily’s nose and chin, which were so like Mariana’s.
She had always known, deep down. Even when she didn’t understand how babies were made, when she didn’t understand anything about her own mother or her parents’ angry and complicated relationship, she had known. She still didn’t understand everything, but she’d guessed enough. “Your parents aren’t dead, are they?” she asked Lily, her voice soft, so as not to wake Mariana.
“No,” Lily said, still looking down. “They’re not. That’s just a lie your mother told you.”
“Our mother.”
The words hung there, meaning everything, changing everything. Beth’s feelings were enormous, too big for her to contain: excitement, dread, guilt, shame. But when Lily looked up at her, she saw no answering emotions in Lily’s eyes. She simply looked blank again.
“She doesn’t want you to know,” Lily said. “She brings me here every Christmas because she feels bad for abandoning me. It’s always too much for her. Then she does it all over again.”
Beth made the words come out, the ones that were harder to say. “And my father?”
“He isn’t my father,” Lily said bluntly. “I don’t know who my father is. I don’t know where he is. I don’t think he’s dead. I don’t know what happened between them or why. I plan to find out.”