There was that one time in junior high school when Blue got roped into doing a bake sale auction. It was a charity event to raise money for soccer equipment for her team. Blue had played goalie. She decided she would bake Nana’s famous cream pie, which happened to be her mother’s favorite. Truth was she wasn’t much of a baker. She was more of a wood shop kind of girl, but that was part of the problem. Blue suspected that her beautiful, feminine mother might actually love her if Blue was a different kind of girl—pretty and dainty with a knack for cooking and shopping and ballet. These were the kinds of girls her mother would dote on and adore, the ones with bows in their hair and frilly dresses, delicate boned and shy. But Blue was built like her father, athletic and husky. It was a quality she’d felt proud of until around fourth grade, when society’s poisonous messages about femininity wormed their way in. That’s when Blue had the epiphany that her mother felt about her the way society did—that she was the wrong kind of girl.
Somehow her thirteen-year-old mind thought that if she could just make a perfect pie, she could earn her mother’s approval. She was always looking for the angle, the mathematical solution—as if she could rearrange herself in the exact dimensions that could squeeze into her mother’s heart.
The night before the auction she invited Renee over to help her bake, and the two of them made sure to copy Nana’s recipe to the letter. They made two pies to sell plus one to sample to “make sure it was right.” As it turned out, she had a lot of fun doing it, especially the sampling part. It was delicious, just the perfect amount of sweet, and by the time she went to bed that night, Blue was imagining a big stage and an enormous crowd, everyone fighting to get ahold of her pies.
In reality the auction was held in a small hot tent behind the gym, the unimpressive crowd comprising the parents and siblings of the soccer team members. The girls got up one by one and described into the microphone what they’d baked, using the most mouthwatering descriptions they could come up with, and then the auctioneer (their soccer coach—this was a low-rent affair) would open up for bidding. As the auction began, Blue noticed that pretty much the only people bidding were the parents of whoever was onstage at the moment. Blue sat to the left with the rest of her team and scanned the crowd for her mother. She’d told her about it several times, and each time her mother promised to come. Just in case, she’d left the flyer on the counter that morning with the time and location circled in red to remind her. Her mother would be there, she would. Blue looked at the clock. Her shirt was beaded with sweat and her heart was starting to pound hard against its dampness. Her mother was probably just late. She was always late.
The line of girls ahead of her was quickly dwindling. Blue watched with panic as the girl two ahead of her finished her presentation, sold her pie to her own grandfather for a cool hundred. Still no sign of her mother. The next girl was called. Blue wanted to dissolve into the grass beneath her chair. What if she got up there and no one bid? What if she had to stand there, exposed and humiliated, with her stupid, unlovable pies?
The room went suddenly fuzzy, the coach’s voice muffled in her ears. Her own name was called twice before it registered. She stood, her legs shaking so hard that one of her knee socks dropped to her ankle. Once at the mic she stammered into it, her wavering voice sounding so much louder than the girls’ before her. She kept repeating herself as she tried to describe what she’d so proudly baked. She could see the audience quickly drifting, losing interest. Who would want a pie made by a sweaty, brutish girl whose own mother didn’t like her enough to come?
Her coach opened the room up to bidding. There was silence from the crowd. Please, she thought desperately. Someone. Anyone. A woman coughed. People looked around, shifted, waited. Sweat was pouring off her forehead into her eyes. Oh God. Then at last a hand was raised. Someone’s mom she didn’t know, some kind, beautiful person who took pity on her and bid ten dollars. Blue was so grateful. She wanted to run out and hug her. She wanted to be adopted by her. She started to walk off the stage when her coach said, “We’ve got ten dollars! Can we get fifteen?” Blue turned to him, pleading with her eyes, Please don’t do this to me. Take the ten and let me go. She was so afraid she was going to start crying and make the humiliation worse.
Then suddenly a commotion from the back of the tent. A loud shout from just beyond it. “Fifteen dollars!”
Blue turned and peered out and there was Renee running in, waving her hand high, Hannah and Maya trailing behind her.
“We have fifteen!” the coach said excitedly. “Can we get twenty?”
There was a pause.
“Twenty!” Hannah called.
“We’ve got twenty, can we get—”
Maya’s hand shot up. “Twenty-five!”
Hannah whacked her. “Do we even have twenty-five?”
“Oh, shit, good question,” Maya said, completely oblivious to the judgmental looks from some of the parents. “Hold on a sec!”
Renee and Hannah pulled out crumpled dollars from their pockets, Maya retrieved hers from her shoe and they piled them together, holding up the auction as they counted. “Uh, never mind,” Renee said finally. “Our bid is twenty-three dollars!”
“And ten cents!” Maya added.
God, they were just so unbelievably embarrassing. Just look at them, all grubby and weird and oblivious. But Blue didn’t care! Because they were there, they showed up and now everyone could see that she had people. Ridiculous people but people!
“Sold for twenty-three dollars and, uh, ten cents to the young ladies at the back!”
“Suckas!” Maya said to the crowd. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Blue covered her face with her hands. Maya always took it too far.
Afterward they sat on the bleachers and ate the pies with their fingers and fed some to the birds and it was just normal, that they did this for her; she could take it for granted just like people with loving families did. In retrospect that was the best part.
For a moment the memory made Blue soft—to think of how friends are life’s greatest first responders, rescuing one another time and again from life’s little atrocities. It was the big atrocities that no one could help with. Which was why Hannah was nuts now and Maya was reckless and imprudent and none of them had spoken to Renee in twelve years, Blue’s anger toward her so solid and unmovable that even that moment of fond memory couldn’t make a dent. Pie auction rescue or not, Renee didn’t deserve her forgiveness, not after what she’d done.
She put away the memory and pulled out into the blare of car horns and the smoky breath of buses and an early evening sky as luminous and blue as the Hudson beneath the glow of bridge lights. The city had a particular lively beauty she could recognize but not connect with. She’d only moved here to be with Nana in her failing age, but she always felt like an outsider—a tourist who forgot to leave.