“Why do the plumbers need to meet me?”
“What the heck are you talking about?”
She exhales over her shoulder, flicks the butt onto the lawn, and lights another cigarette. She smokes when she’s frustrated with me, but she also smokes for a lot of other reasons.
I look over to the Mercedes that has commanded her attention. The car has a rich, creamy yellow body, and its hubcaps are painted to match the sunny shade. The fact that, at this moment, there isn’t a fellow student of my own age to introduce myself to anywhere near it is irrelevant. My mother wants to go over and make acquaintances between adults, and as she stares at the mother and father, she gleams like lamé. In her mind, she’s no doubt advancing way past dinner in the small town we went through about two miles down the road. She’s spending a late-season week at their summer house. Then they’re all skiing together wherever people like that ski together in Colorado during Christmas break. Finally, three years from now, she sees them all sitting together at graduation, sharing in-jokes and reminiscing with a tear about how fast the young ones have grown up, and how lucky they are to have found each other.
Lifelong friends in a blink, the assumptions and the fantasy as real to her as my own assessment that the last thing those two wealthy people want is for a pair of scrubs like us to do anything other than wash that pretty, buttercup-colored sedan of theirs.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she announces. “We’re going over there.”
My mother links her lower arm through mine, and I think of the old-fashioned Wizard of Oz movie, Dorothy lined up with her friends, skipping down the yellow brick road. It’s an apt image on one level, at least. We’re going to my mother’s version of the wizard, and out of the two of us, I’m the only one who cares what’s behind the curtain. My mother is not just content to be on the surface; staying superficial is necessary for her survival.
The parents of the Mercedes—and, presumably, a student who’s also in this dorm—look at us a second time as we approach. I’m embarrassed by everything about my mother: the dress, the lipstick stain on her cigarette, her peroxide yellow hair, this Hail Mary “introduction” that has taken us over a boundary line that to me is as obvious as a border wall. I’m also ashamed of my cheap black clothes, even though they are a persistent expression of my inner self, a signal to the world that I am different and apart from the crowd. Armor.
The good news about looking like a freak is no one tries to talk to you.
“Isn’t this a marvelous campus!” my mother says. “I’m Theresa—Tera Taylor. This is Sarah Taylor. She goes by Sally. How do you do.”
Ah. She’s switched into Rich Person Dialect. I’ve heard her do this before. She picked it up while watching Robin Leach.
And so much for my going as Bo here.
The father’s eyes go to the V in the top of my mother’s dress. Then he looks at her mouth. My mother recognizes this perusal and shifts her body so that one hip moves out of place, the inquiry on his part answered with an affirmative on hers. Meanwhile, the wife notices no part of this currency exchange between her husband and what could arguably be called a tart. The other mother’s eyes land on me, and the pity in them makes me look at the pavement.
I don’t want any part of this. But this whole thing, from the clandestine application and shocking admission to the excited way my mother talked all summer long about my coming “to St. Ambrose” to this “introduction,” is the same rabbit hole for Tera Taylor, a glossy magazine she is creating for herself. The defect in her reasoning, which is a blindness similar to the other mother failing to see her husband’s flirtation, is that no one else is going to buy this bullshit. I’m no more a St. Ambrose girl than Tera Taylor could be.
“Greta will be down in a minute, I’m sure,” the mother of the Mercedes is saying. “She was here last year as a freshman so she’s excited to see everyone.”
“Greta and Sarah!” My mother claps and ash falls on the back of her hand. She shakes it off with a grimace she almost hides. “The two of them will be the best of friends. It’s fate.”
“Here is Greta now.”
My eyes swing like the boom of a sailboat, an attempt to come about and salvage this poor tack I’m on. What I see emerging from the darkened interior of the dorm gives me no relief. It is blond. It is tall. It has limbs that would be described as willowy in a supermarket romance novel.
It has the eyes of a predator.
Even, if not especially, as it assumes the facsimile of a pleasant expression.
“Greta’s” smile is shiny and white, a second sun. She has freckles dusting across a nose that is so straight and perfectly proportioned, you might assume she’d had it done—until you look at her father and realize that all that aquiline is the result of breeding, no donkey in this bloodline of thoroughbreds. She also has cheekbones with hollows under them—which makes me decide her baby fat was ordered to vacate the premises years ago—and her clothes are expensive and right out of Seventeen magazine: a boxy turquoise jacket, a coral crop top, a kicky skirt with contrast leggings, ballet flats.
She is a jewel.
“Greta,” her mother says, “this is your new best friend, Sally.”
There is no awkward pause because the girl puts her hand right out. “Welcome to Ambrose.”
My mother golf-claps around her cigarette again, but doesn’t burn herself this time.
I glance at Greta once more in case I was wrong, in case my insecurities have misconstrued what is actually going on. As our eyes meet, she somehow manages to smile wider and narrow her stare at the same time. It’s a cute trick.
If you’re Cujo.
My heart pounds sure as if I am already running in the opposite direction, throwing myself in the trunk of the Mercury, and refusing to come out until I am released from this ruse.
My mother is wrong. Greta and I will never be friends.
And one of us is going to be dead by the end of the semester.
chapter TWO
It is forty-five minutes later. I’m back down by the car, and the Mercury is empty of my things, the laundry basket returned to the front seat without its load of folded sheets and blankets. My mother is embracing me, and I breathe in the familiar scent of cigarette smoke and Primo, the knockoff Giorgio perfume she buys at CVS. She’s leaving not because I have unpacked, but because she is getting no further than the introduction stage with Greta’s parents. They’ve made the disappointing choice to help their daughter settle in across the hall, ignoring the incredible opportunity of forging a relationship with Theresa who goes by Tera.
I know this dose of reality is challenging my mother’s imaginary world so she’s got to go before the spell is broken, Cinderella pulling out of the ball early before she realizes she’s actually at a pool hall. I’m the glass slipper in this analogy, and I’m very certain that my mother’s already anticipating a Parents’ Weekend reunion with her new best friends, my residence at Tellmer the thread that will connect her once again with the objects of her aspiration.
Things are going to work out for her. She just knows this.
She’s getting behind the wheel now. She’s lighting another cigarette. Absently, I note that she has only four left in the pack. She’ll stop for gas and more Virginia Slims at the Sunoco down in the little town, but I have to believe the fumes of her fantasy are what will really carry her back to our meager existence, not whatever unleaded she pumps into the tank of her old car.