Hanging on the wall behind my desk is a picture of me as a baby, just after I learned to walk. For whatever reason, I’m making this horrible scrunched-up face that Dad thinks is the funniest thing ever (he’s the one who blew up the picture and stuck it on the wall). Sometimes when I’m really frustrated, I make faces back at my younger self. Ridiculous, I know, but it’s less violent than punching a pillow. Besides, one-year-old me doesn’t know how good she has it.
My mom is in the picture, too, the top of her head half cut out of the frame as she stands over me with a “poor baby” smile, her arms reaching out to grab me.
I recognize so much of my face in hers. Arched eyebrows, wide overbite smile, olive skin. Dad shows up in my freckles and the shape of my chin, and I’m pale enough that I get the “What are you?” squint more often than the “You speak Spanish, right?” assumption. But I’m glad I got a lot of my mom’s looks. It seems only fair, since I barely got anything else. My mom’s name was Christina Lopez. She was born in Texas, same as my San Antonio Tejano grandparents, and that means my heritage is both a privilege and a weird liminal space. I used to love hearing Connie’s stories of growing up in Mexico, the nursery rhymes and the lullabies, because it made me feel more connected and proud. But my mom sang lullabies in English, so are those connections even really mine?
My mom and dad met in college. He wanted to save the world from pollution, and she wanted to run a museum. She played soccer and roller derby and loved to watch my dad perform in the school musicals, though she couldn’t carry a tune herself.
She had me when she was twenty-six. She died before she turned thirty.
I was almost four, which means that I both remember her and don’t. I remember the idea of her, the feeling of her presence, the warmth. I remember her hand reaching back to pat my leg when I was in my car seat. I think I remember the smell of her floral perfume, but maybe that’s a later memory, from when Dad still kept a bottle of it in his medicine cabinet, and we would take it out sometimes and smell it together.
I don’t remember her in the hospital. There are hardly any pictures of those months. I remember being happy to visit Aunt Mal, who gave me Skittles and let me watch as many movies as I wanted.
I remember what it felt like to lose her. I don’t think I understood it, not really, but I felt it. The universe changes when you have no mother, the way the air changes when it’s going to rain.
When I was eight or nine, I went through a phase of reading fairy tales. I got a little obsessed. All the Disney princesses had dead mothers, so I felt like we were kindred spirits. And besides, I liked the story that every fairy tale tells. That the world is full of danger, which I already knew, and that happy endings exist, which I wanted to believe.
They also give stepmothers a pretty bad rap.
I make one last face at my photograph, and then I check my phone. Still nothing from Xiumiao, so I type (and delete, and then retype) a message to Melissa instead.
So apparently I’m grounded forever because my parents are assholes and everything is terrible. See you never, I guess, and have a good summer.
Melissa’s not the complete night owl that I am, so she won’t see the message until she wakes up anyway. I feel bad. I don’t want her to have to wake up to that text, to that news. I don’t want to wake up to it.
My phone dings at 7:20 a.m., startling me upright because I fell asleep with it right next to my face again. I nudge the screen away so I can read the text glowing on it.
Give me ten minutes. I’m on my way over.
* * *
• • •
Fifteen minutes later, I shuffle groggily downstairs. Melissa sits at the kitchen table, her ponytail silky and her lip gloss bubble-gum pink, letting Connie serve her iced coffee.
“I’m, like, eighty percent sure that this violates the terms of my grounding.” I rub sleep out of my eyes, steal the coffee out of Melissa’s hand, and collapse into the chair next to her. Connie sighs at my breast cancer shirt and penguin pajama shorts.
“Melissa wanted a chance to talk,” she says, staring me down before I sip the stolen coffee. I guiltily slide it back to Melissa instead.
“Thanks, Mrs. Rourke.” Melissa turns to me and winks, sipping the coffee. Don’t worry, her face says, I got this. “This is really good—it’s got agave, right?”
“It does!” Connie beams. Melissa has always had a magical effect on grown-ups, but she must have an actual mind-control button she uses on Connie. “Just a few drops, but there’s some cinnamon in it, too. It helps curb your appetite.”
Melissa pokes me under the table, even though I already know not to roll my eyes or scoff or in any way express my (perfectly valid) opinion about fad dieting.
“Now, Melissa”—Connie hovers at the head of the table—“I’m sure you’re upset, but this is not about you or your summer. It’s about Ellen. I’m sorry.”
“Wait,” I start, “you’re apologizing to—?” Melissa shoves her coffee at me to cut me off.
Damn it, the coffee is delicious.
“I totally understand,” Melissa says. “I just wanted to talk with you and Mr. Rourke.”
Connie glances into the hallway. “He’ll be ready in a minute, but I really don’t think—”
“I’m ready now,” Dad’s voice calls from the bedroom, “but if I have to handle a negotiation, I need time for the coffee to kick in first.”
“Perfect.” Melissa steals her coffee back and takes a huge gulp. “Ellen’s going to get dressed, and then we’ll be back down. Five minutes.” She drags me out of my chair and nudges me past Dad, who walks into the kitchen with his tie crooked and his hair and shirt rumpled. Despite years of office work, he’s about as much of a morning person as I am.
Connie clangs dishes downstairs as we enter my room. The temptation to crawl back into bed is strong, but Melissa shoves me toward the closet and vaults over my dirty laundry pile to land in my desk chair.
“So that went well.”
“How do you always do that?” I ask as I dig through the clean laundry pile (also known as the closet floor). “Get parents to . . . you know.”
“It’s not that hard to get what you want if you ask for it. Besides, you’re not grounded. It’s the first day of punishment, and they’re already softening. They don’t have the ovaries to stick with this.”
“It’s too early for you to be this optimistic,” I mutter, pulling on a clean shirt and shorts and leaving the closet to flop onto my bed.
“It’s not optimism; I know what I’m talking about. They’re going to back down, because we’re going to give them something they want. The thing your dad is always forcing you to do when you’d rather be reading and interneting your days away.”