And I still don’t. Meeting Georgie didn’t necessarily make that any more or less clear. It gave me a way of coping—the writing and the journaling really does help—but I don’t know Georgie well enough to know if this is part of her, or just a part that’s all my own. And the way we left it, I’m not sure if I ever will.
“Well, I think I do,” says Heather.
I frown at her. “You do?”
“Well, yeah. Some of that is just being a teenager. It’s par for the course.” She sees the frown on my face deepening and adds, “I know you don’t want to hear that, because it’s unhelpful until you’re old enough to know it for yourself, but it is what it is.”
Deeply unhelpful, in fact, but I keep that to myself.
“And the other part?”
Heather looks thoughtful for a moment, staring at the spot where my dad’s whole office setup is in the living room. “The other part … I think you got from Coop.”
I shake my head. “Cooper Price is the most emotionally stable man in America.”
“He’s also the most anxious man in America,” says Heather pointedly.
“Yeah, but—that’s Dad. That’s not me. I make Galinda look shy.”
Heather sighs. “I think for your dad, he deals with anxiety by staying close to home. That’s why he’s always needed people to shove him out of the nest. People like you and me.”
People like Georgie, I realize. She would have elected herself the boss of him then the same way she does everything now. The picture is already startlingly clear in my mind, of a teenage Georgie dragging a teenage Cooper out into the streets the same way Heather and I have a thousand times.
It makes me recognize, then, that this displaced sadness I feel isn’t for myself. It’s for them. I never needed Georgie, but my dad must have once. I wonder if that feeling ever went away for him. I can’t imagine I’d be able to fill that space if Teddy left me behind.
“But I think with you, the anxiety’s different. I think it just sort of bottles up until it’s got nowhere else to go. With Cooper everything goes in, and with you it all goes out.” She smiles at me sympathetically. “But I think the root of it is the same.”
It’s the kind of realization I could never have come to on my own, but one that desperately needed making. I look up at Heather, my eyes misty. I am not such a mystery after all, maybe. At least not in the ways I need to understand. And nobody would ever have been able to make me see it better than Heather, who has always understood me best.
She tilts her head at me, lowering her voice. “I think that’s why your dad’s been so worried about letting you go,” she tells me. “I think he’s always known that.”
But he had friends. He had Farrah and Beth and Georgie and maybe Steph, even if he doesn’t fully remember. And now thanks to his angst-fueled LiveJournaling about it, I have them, too.
“I think he just doesn’t want that to happen to you. You’ve always had these big dreams, but I think he’s always been relieved that they’ve kept you close to home. And this one wouldn’t.”
It’s the ache I’ve been trying so hard these past few months to ignore. The one that kept me not just from telling Heather and Dad but from telling my friends. The one that only seems to get deeper and more pronounced as the summer goes on. The one that now feels too loud to ignore.
My voice is quiet when I speak, but it’s sure. “Maybe I need some time to break in the shoes.”
This time it’s Heather’s eyes that get a little misty.
“Good,” she says after a moment. “Because you’ve got plenty of it.”
She sets me to task, then, on cutting up the baguette she procured that morning and setting the table for a late-night feast. We talk about Oliver and we talk about Farrah, teasing each other until we’re both giggling the same high-pitched giggle I can only have gotten from her. Then before my dad gets back she finishes wiping off the smudge of lipstick I missed, then ruffles my curls and says, “If Oliver breaks your heart, I promise we’ll never book the Four Suns again. Or at least for a month or so. They’re good.”
I laugh, then watch as she flits over to her bedroom, almost certainly to grab our matching fuzzy slippers.
She disappears for just a moment, but in that moment, something else comes into focus. All the years leading up to this one, I’ve had friends ask me why I didn’t wonder so much about my mom, and I’ve never known what to say. Now I do. Now I understand. I may not have had Georgie, but I’ve always had Heather. I’ve always had someone who knows what I need to hear, someone who knows exactly what I’m feeling before I fully feel it, someone who knows me better than I know myself.
I’m a lot of things, maybe, but chief among them is that I am her kid. I’m everything she taught me, everything she sacrificed for me. And whatever she is to me, she’s mine, too. I’ve never had to name it to know that it’s forever.
“So,” says Heather, coming back with the slippers. “If you do stay for senior year, what’s the next transformation going to be?”
I look down at Heather’s boots still on my feet, well-worn and well-loved, lasting me through all these years. I may feel like a blank slate right now, but I’ve always had these as an anchor. Something that has reminded me who I really am, even when I was determined to be anything but myself.
“I think I’ll try something truly radical,” I tell her. “I’ll just be myself.”
Heather’s lips soften into a knowing smile. “My favorite look yet.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Later that night, after we’ve eaten our fill of pasta and gone to town on a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream, Heather heads down to the club, and I head into my room to put on sweatpants before I let myself into Teddy’s apartment. I’m still trying to decide what plot twist of these last eight hours to tell him first when there’s a light knock at the door.
“Come in.”
My dad’s holding a thin purple box I’ve never seen before. For a moment I think he’s also giving me my birthday present early, but when he walks in, he doesn’t offer it to me. If anything, he seems to hold it closer to himself for a beat, like he’s not sure how to let it go.
“I’ve been thinking about our conversation about your mom, and … well.” He drums his fingers over the lid of the box. “This has some things in it. Your birth certificate. An email address. A picture of her. Enough that you should be able to get in touch with her, or just … know about her, if you ever want to.”
Instead of handing it over to me he sets it down on my desk, like he’s putting it in neutral territory. It’s mine to open or mine to ignore. He offers me a small smile, letting me know he’s fine either way.
“Thanks, Dad.”
He takes a step back, unconsciously distancing himself from it. “I probably should have just offered sooner. You’re old enough to make this decision on your own.” He looks at the box one more time and then back at me. “I’m here for any questions you have. Just—let me know if you are going to get in touch with her, okay?”