“I was quiet.” I stared, hypnotized and slightly grossed out by her eyeball.
Mom straightened. “Come here.”
I didn’t want to, but I pried my hands free from the doorframe and moved to the place she gestured in front of her.
“Tilt your head and don’t blink.”
“I don’t really—” But she was already lifting my eyelid and bringing the pencil to my exposed eyeball. It tickled more than anything when she ran the pencil back and forth. I blinked furiously as she turned me by the shoulders to face the mirror.
“See how much thicker your eyelashes look?”
I looked but I didn’t really see a difference and my eye still felt ticklish. “Wow.” I tried to move away, but her hands tightened on my shoulders.
“I could teach you. Maybe for special occasions.” She brushed the side of one finger down my check. “You wouldn’t need much.”
My gaze shifted from my reflection to hers. “Like a school dance?”
Still stroking my cheek, she said, “I was thinking dinner tonight. I could do your hair and you could smile and tell Tom that you’re going to help me, that you want me to be happy, hmm? Doesn’t that sound nice?”
I lifted my hand to move hers slowly away from my face, but she only lowered it to rest on my shoulder along with the other. “Mom. Tom isn’t—he’s not—” But then I stopped. Because it didn’t matter. I’d told Tom that there was no money coming Mom’s way, and he’d been pulling away ever since. I saw it; Mom saw it. The truth was, I couldn’t help even if I thought more money would make her happy. Dad wasn’t stupid enough to leave anything around the apartment that could be used against him. I’d told her that so many times, and she never heard me. She never heard anything. And soon, Tom would be gone for good and all her playacting with me would be over.
So I sucked in a deep breath and took my shot. “I want to go to a dance. With a boy. And I need a dress.”
As soon as I’d spoken, the dark side flooded thick into the bathroom. I wouldn’t have been the least surprised to hear Darth Vader’s voice come out of Mom. Her hands dropped from my shoulders.
* * *
Shelly was painting her toenails when the Uber dropped me off at Dad’s apartment thirty minutes later. She looked up with surprise when I let myself in. “Jolene. Hi. Did you forget something?”
“Is my dad coming here tonight?”
“Oh, um.” Shelly started fiddling with the cap of her nail polish. “He has this—”
“He does it to you, too? Whatever, I don’t care.” I smoothed my face. “I need to ask him something.”
A wrinkle appeared between her perfectly groomed brows. “Okayyy.”
I gritted my teeth. She was gonna make me say it. “Can you give him a message? He doesn’t take my calls anymore.”
I had to think about Adam and his flushing cheeks and the chance to see him in a suit, and not the perfect O Shelly’s mouth made when I admitted that my own father wouldn’t answer my calls. Not that I called him anymore.
“That can’t be right. I’m sure he would if he knew you—”
“Can you not be the complete cliché right now? Come on, Shelly. You went to college. I know you had a job before my dad whisked you away to this paradise. He knows. Now, will you give him a message or not?”
Shelly twisted her nail polish bottle shut. The wrinkle didn’t disappear from her forehead. “What’s the message?”
“There’s a school dance that I want to go to. With Adam from next door. It’s not one of Dad’s weekends—I know how much he treasures those—but I need a dress. My mom—” I tried really hard to block out my memory of the way she’d screamed at me, the accusations she’d made and finally the way she’d shoved me out of the house with hissed orders to ask Dad for the money I wanted. “She made it clear that I need to ask my dad cover it.” My face was burning. I would have rather licked the scuzzy carpet in the hallway than ask Shelly for help, but at least it was done. I hadn’t looked away the entire time, though she had.
“I’ll call him right now.” And before I could stop her, she was dialing. Right in front of me.
I backed up a few steps until I couldn’t hear the ringback through her phone. Until I was sure I wouldn’t be able to hear him either.
“It’ll be real quick,” she said after he presumably answered. “It’s about Jolene.”
My mind was an evil thing, and it all too easily invented responses for Dad.
You deal with her. That’s why you’re there.
“There’s no problem. It’s good actually.”
What is it?
Shelly glanced at me. “She needs a dress for a school dance.”
Her mother can take care of that.
“Apparently she can’t.”
There was a rather extended pause and I imagined several unflattering but not untrue things were said about my mother. Possibly a few that weren’t true, too.
“Well, with the dress and shoes and everything...” Shelly rattled off an amount that sounded extreme until she added in a low voice, “That’s less than half what we spent on dinner the other night. I know you bought her a laptop for Christmas, but...”
I stopped listening when Shelly started arguing with him, because even my brain decided it wasn’t a good thing to imagine Dad’s objections. And that was what they were.
I left the apartment without a word. If I’d been smarter, I would have told both my parents that the other wanted to buy me a dress. Then I could have just sat back while one threw money at me to spite the other. But I wasn’t smart. I was something else, and I didn’t care to spend another second thinking about what that was.
* * *
I took another Uber to the movie theater and watched something I’d already seen until it was late enough that I thought Mom would be asleep or passed out, assuming her date with Tom had ended as early as all the others lately.
Someone leaped out at me as I walked up my driveway. I realized it was Shelly within half a second, but that was enough time for all my internal organs to try to evacuate my body. “You’re just determined to star in all the scariest moments of my life, aren’t you?”
“I was five minutes from calling the police, Jolene. Five minutes.” Shelly held up her open hand, then crossed her arms. “I didn’t know where you went or if something had happened to you. I couldn’t call your mom. What was I supposed to do?”