“That’s fine. Who’s joining us?”
“My daughter.”
◈ ◈ ◈
Somehow, I’d forgotten that the last time I’d seen Chloe Gibson, three years ago in Rockwood, she’d been pregnant. Now, I was sitting on the floor of her duplex, getting introduced to a three-year-old girl with curly brown hair and a rainbow-striped shirt.
“This is Ariel.” Chloe was sitting next to me on the carpet, holding the little girl in her lap, looking down at her. Once Chloe had gotten off work, we’d both hopped into her car, stopped at a nearby pizza place, and driven to a quiet street where Chloe’s grandparents lived. Chloe had picked up her daughter—who’d been asleep at the time—from her grandparents’ house and driven only a few more blocks to the duplex she was renting. She explained to me that her grandparents owned it and gave her a good deal on the rent.
“This is my old friend, Drew. Can you say hi?” Chloe brushed her fingers through the girl’s hair while Ariel just looked at me with big, circular eyes.
“Hi, Ariel. It’s nice to meet you.” I didn’t really know how to talk to children. This fact became painfully validated when Ariel responded by turning away from me, burying her face into her mother’s body.
“She’s just shy,” Chloe said.
“I’m sleepy,” Ariel mumbled, her head still tucked away in the crevice of Chloe’s arm.
“Let’s try some pizza before bedtime. We got a plain cheese one for you. No weird veggies on there or anything.
“Grandma fed me.”
“Oh. Okay, baby. You’re ready for bed?” Ariel nodded. “I’ll be right back, Drew.”
She got up, holding Ariel in her arms, and returned fifteen minutes later with some paper plates and a bottle of ranch.
“Okay. I guess it’s just the two of us after all. Hungry?” She thrust the plates toward me.
“Seriously hungry.”
We loaded up our plates with as much pizza as we could, while still affording some space for ranch, and we leaned back against her couch as we ate on the floor.
“She’s beautiful,” I said. “Ariel. Wasn’t that your favorite movie when we were kids? The Little Mermaid?”
Chloe chewed, swallowed, then spoke. “I always wanted to be a princess. I guess it’s like I’m projecting that onto my daughter. That’s what parenting is all about though, right? Projecting.”
“If you say so.”
“I always liked the idea of royalty. Popularity was the closest I could get back in high school.” She paused. “You know, I’m sorry about that. How I ditched you to join the popular crowd.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said, and I meant it. “I had River, and then Riley came along. I was fine.”
“River.” She said it like it was a word she’d forgotten existed. “How is he? Are you two still friends?”
I saw his face in the rainstorm in Seattle, checking my twisted ankle. I saw him smiling down at me on the pull-out mattress in Riley’s house. I saw him going through the door, leaving for Vancouver, his backpack over his shoulder.
“We are,” I answered. “He’s good.”
“Anyway. Still. I wish I wouldn’t have cared so much about being popular. I wish I’d been more like you. I wanted it so badly, and I got it. But even then, I was always second to Grace.”
The note she’d written in my yearbook came to mind: I’ve always been jealous of you. Maybe that’s what she had meant all along—that she envied how little I cared about popularity. I started mulling over what she’d said about Grace, too. I had never quite seen it that way in our high school days, but I recognized that it was probably the truth. I remembered Grace McDonald being the bossy one when we were all friends in elementary school. I remembered her being the leader of our group, the one we always listened to.
Chloe continued: “Grace made sure of that. She told me to try out for cheerleading with her freshman year, but she managed to always keep me in the back of our formations. She always had the first pick of which boy to date. Even if a guy asked me out, if it happened before she found a boyfriend, I had to tell him no. And she got whatever guy she wanted.”
“She was Prom Queen,” I remembered, my mind flashing back to our Senior Prom. She and River had been crowned that night. High school royalty.
“Exactly. And I never asserted myself. I just went along with whatever she said. That’s how . . . I got pregnant.”
A piece of pizza dangling in the air, I paused before taking my next bite. “By doing what Grace said?”
Chloe had finished her food. She set her paper plate on the floor beside her.
“The day after we graduated, she told me about a party we had to go to that night. It was actually here, in Freya. A college party. I didn’t really want to go, but she said we had to. We were graduated, she said, and free. She was eager to get into the college scene, meet the college boys, get offered beer.” Chloe took one of her braids in her hand, started fiddling with it. “So, I agreed, like always, and we went. I wasn’t planning to, but I met a guy that night, a college student. He was really nice—at least, I thought. I slept with him that night. I wanted to. He made me feel good. And I was tired of Grace ruling over me, telling me what I could and couldn’t do all the time. I guess I overcorrected.”
I had set my plate down before she finished talking, leaving my last piece of pizza half-eaten. I sat there, trying to absorb all she’d said. “And . . . that’s how you got pregnant?”
She shrugged. “I told the guy when I found out. The college student. He didn’t seem so nice after that. Then I knew I was going to be having Ariel on my own. A single mother. I broke the news to my friends at the end of Summer. Grace and the whole popular crowd. They stopped talking to me and inviting me places. They all moved away for school, and I haven’t heard from them since. I ran into Grace once, in Rockwood. She must have been home for one of her college breaks. It was when I was working at the pharmacy over there in Rockwood, and she just turned away, pretending not to see me.”
Unsure if that was the end of her story, I kept quiet. I didn’t think she minded the silence, anyway. Her words had poured out of her so fluidly and vigorously, I thought maybe she just needed someone to listen to her. I wondered if she’d told anyone that whole story before.
“Pretty lame, huh? Now I’m back here in Freya, where all this started. I can’t really complain, because I love Ariel to death. She’s everything to me. It’s just made things harder. My parents moved across the country to be with my brother last Fall, so I came here to be near my grandparents. They help out a ton with Ariel. Babysitting, food, this duplex.”
“It’s not lame,” I said. “You’re making the best of things.”
“Well, anyway.” She slapped her hands on her thighs and looked at me. “What about you? And what’s with that blonde guy you were with at the store?”
I shifted my tailbone around on the floor. “You will happy to learn that I broke up with him.”
“What, already?”