“Hi, Mom. Look who I found,” Esme said, and Cleo decided immediately that she loved this girl. She was a little bit cunning and also succinct and knew that she was slaying her mom just a bit in her guts.
MaryAnne’s eyes moved from her daughter to Cleo, who was doing her best to contain her adrenaline, and her jaw went slack. Just for a moment. Then it firmed up, as did her steely eyes and her rigid posture. (“I have a backbone,” MaryAnne once snapped at Cleo, after the mayoral internship debacle. She meant it metaphorically, but MaryAnne was also a debutante, so she meant it literally too. No one had better posture than MaryAnne Newman.)
It was only then that Cleo worked up the nerve to take in a wider view. She’d assumed that the “they” in Esme’s remarks had been MaryAnne and her husband, but now she saw that it was a table of eight, all faces she recognized, all faces from her yearbook and probably some of those Facebook comments too.
“Shit,” Cleo muttered under her breath. She turned and looked at Gaby, who was recording with the determined furrow of a documentary filmmaker. “Shit!”
Gaby paid her no mind, and Cleo spun forward.
“MaryAnne, um, hello.”
The back room had fallen so silent that Cleo could hear a bat crack from the Mariners game out front. Eight sets of eyes on Cleo—well, eleven if you counted Lucas and Esme and Gaby, but Lucas and Esme may have been staring at each other.
MaryAnne rested her hands in her lap and swallowed. It was so odd, Cleo thought, trying to remove the nostalgia and the crest of emotion that had swept through her just moments earlier, to see her after so many years. Her mannerisms were still the same, her face, though older of course, still a mirror of who she had been at seventeen. Twenty years had passed, and yet Cleo could nearly read her mind, just like before when they were inseparable.
“Cleo,” MaryAnne said finally. “This is a surprise.”
“I think it’s Senator McDougal,” Esme interjected, and Cleo wondered if she couldn’t adopt this child before she left town.
“Cleo’s fine. Of course.” But she smiled at Esme as she said this, an acknowledgment of their shared feminism, of the power that came with a title that so few women had yet to attain.
“Hey, Cleo!” From behind MaryAnne, Oliver Patel, her sole defender on that ruinous Facebook post, offered a wave. “It’s so cool to see you here!”
“Hey, Oliver,” she said back, and his eyebrows rose a little bit like he was surprised that she remembered him. But he had always been kind and also extremely handsome—dark hair, dark eyes as big and as entrancing as a full moon, just the right grade of stubble—so of course she remembered him. He was unattainable, a baseball player, someone Cleo passed in the halls and thought that if she were a different type of person—softer, prettier, the girl who laughed at jokes she didn’t get when he told them on the quad during a free period, the type of girl who actually spent her time on the quad during a free period—maybe he’d kiss her one night at a party after drinking a beer. Yes, Cleo remembered Oliver Patel. Cleo had been hard-core in high school but she hadn’t been impenetrable.
To his right sat Maureen Allen, who had less nice things to say about her, and Susan Harris, then Beth Shin, who, well, ditto. (Cleo didn’t remember the names of the three others at the table, though she knew she should have.) They’d all been on the debate team together, but Maureen and Susan dropped out their junior year to . . . Cleo couldn’t quite remember why—but she did remember thinking at the time that she was glad they had. Beth had been a decent debater, but those two were barely adequate, and Cleo thought they held the team back. But now, so many years later, well, she hadn’t really thought about how they might all still be friends—not just Facebook friends but real-life friends—how their world from back then wasn’t so different from their world now. Surely, if MaryAnne had wanted to, she could have made choices that expanded her scope beyond what it had always been. She couldn’t hold Cleo accountable for her sitting in the same country club with the same people discussing, likely, the same gossip that she had at fifteen. (Cleo didn’t want to judge—anyone should do whatever made them happy—but then MaryAnne dragged her into this whole thing to begin with, so perhaps Cleo had the right to do and think whatever she damn wanted.)
Maureen Allen and Susan Harris and Beth Shin, unlike Oliver, said nothing and just glared.
Then Cleo remembered, as Esme had been trying to remind her, that she was a goddamn United States senator, and MaryAnne Newman shouldn’t intimidate her, SeattleToday! op-ed or not, lurid (inaccurate) rumors or not, Facebook slander or not. She too righted her posture, and she was sure from the look in MaryAnne’s eyes that she remembered Cleo’s body language as well.
“I’m here because obviously I saw your op-ed.”
MaryAnne’s cheeks flushed, which surprised Cleo, because you’d have thought that MaryAnne wanted the fight, the confrontation, what with the public takedown. But maybe she had just wanted to air a bunch of dirty laundry without thinking through the consequences. God, wasn’t that at least what half of the internet was these days? Screaming into the void about someone or something or an airline or a coffee shop or a slow pedestrian or a lousy driver and getting it off your chest? Never once did you think any of those people was going to respond.
“Also, I saw your Facebook post, and then, of course, I saw all of your comments.”
Oliver Patel grinned, and Maureen and Susan and Beth pulled back from their glares and looked as if they might turn figuratively green. Consequences. Regret. They’re tied together.
“Well, it was all true.” MaryAnne sniffed. “You were not very nice by the end of high school, and I am doubtful that you should be president. If you can’t get those who know you well to vote for you . . .” She flipped her hand as if to say, Well, then you’re screwed.
“It wasn’t all true,” Cleo said. “You didn’t fact-check the date of my son’s birth.” At this, she gestured toward Lucas, who really was not paying too much attention and instead stealing sideways glances at Esme. Gaby had been right: something was happening between the two of them, that unknowable alchemy that ignited teen hormones, and Cleo lost herself for a beat, considering the consequences of a romance between the two. These days, with social media and text and FaceTime (did kids use FaceTime?) and who knows what else, a three-thousand-mile lovesick relationship didn’t seem far-fetched. Cleo turned back to MaryAnne. “That was low, and I would at least think beneath you.”
MaryAnne sniffed. “I went with the information I had been made aware of. And I don’t like cheaters. But if that affected you”—she pointed her chin toward Lucas—“I’m sorry. I am. Perhaps that was out of bounds. Children should be off-limits. Not, however, their parents.”
“Apology accepted,” Lucas said and offered a little shrug. He was used to political sniping, and he was used to his mother defending herself, Cleo supposed. It occurred to her that she didn’t want to raise a son who grew up thinking this was all normal. None of this was normal. If she had her list here now, she’d add this one—have raised son in a toxic bubble of Washington, DC, where he thinks launching metaphorical grenades at your opponents is just your average day. Cleo considered this notion. Of course Lucas thought this was normal. She was his mother. He’d learned it from her. Regret.