plan. It was part of the reason she had initially spurned Senator Jackman’s free housing proposal: she’d told her constituents she wouldn’t give away something for free, even while knowing that many of them didn’t understand that by lifting up some members of their community, they lifted up the community as a whole. But still. She had promised, and she kept her word. Until last week, when she realized that part of her job was convincing her constituents that an unpopular proposal was still the right proposal. That’s why they’d elected her. Not just to be a mirror to their own reflections.
She was enjoying a free Clif bar (breakfast) and an orange at the finish line when two young women approached. She figured that they would press her on her broader GreenUpNow! plans—what could she promise them about a hope for a better tomorrow? She was running through her standard lines, but they caught her off guard.
“Hi,” one girl said. Cleo didn’t know if they were even old enough to vote. She thought they looked older than Lucas but maybe not by much. My God, she thought. Is this what Marley Jacobson looks like now? With actual breasts and legs like a gazelle’s and eyes wide enough for Lucas to convince himself that he’s in love? No wonder he was smitten with more than one girl. She had realized, obviously, that her son was smack in the middle of puberty, but seeing young women so close in age to him and seeing them as, well, adults—those were two separate realizations.
“Hi,” the other girl said.
“We’re best friends,” they said together.
“Hi!” Cleo said, pushing her smile as wide as it could go.
“Do you have any advice for us if, like, we want to be successful together, as a team?” the first one said.
“Oh.” Cleo furrowed her brow. “In politics?”
Girl One shook her head, her ponytail swaying behind her. “No.” She looked at the other one. “Well, maybe?”
Her friend said: “We saw your old friend’s article, and, um, we didn’t want to end up like you guys. We’re, like, best friends forever.”
In just a flip of a second, Cleo’s smile fell, and she worried that she might throw up. It had been only a 5k, so she knew it wasn’t from that. The New York air was too humid for May, and her tank top was sticking to her stomach, but it wasn’t that either. She looked from Friend One to Friend Two, their eyes wide, their words said with only openhearted generosity.
“You’re still in high school?” Cleo asked finally. Both girls nodded.
“Sophomores,” they said together. Cleo told herself that Lucas wasn’t even yet a freshman. He couldn’t yet be in this deep with breasts and long legs and beguiling eyes.
Then one added, “We think women can run the world. And you’re doing it. But . . .” She waved a hand, as if that ended her sentence.
“But we don’t want to do it being mean girls,” said the other one.
Cleo swallowed, found she couldn’t find her tongue. Why was it so hot out in May? Was this global warming? Why was she sweating more after the run than while she was actually running? She glanced around for members of her staff, but she’d already told them that once the photo ops were over, they should head home. They were reconvening tomorrow for bagels and lox at a Westchester synagogue, then moving on to muffins and coffee at a nearby church. Mean girl? Really? She’d never once, ever, ever considered herself a mean girl. Yes, obviously, what she had done to MaryAnne was unkind, but that didn’t rise to the level of those horror stories she sometimes heard from other moms on the sidelines of Lucas’s games. Those mean girls did all sorts of untoward things: texting ugly photos of their friends, spreading rumors about their rivals, acting sweet but ultimately pushing the knife into someone’s back just a little deeper. She was ambitious, but she wasn’t ruthless. She was cutthroat, but she’d never stab you in the back.
She found her breath, steadying herself. One of the girls offered her a water.
“Here,” she said. “Are you, um, OK?”
Maybe she had been all those things, though. In the pursuit of more, more, more, maybe she had been exactly the type to slice MaryAnne right through the trapezius, even if she had done it simply to get a leg up, to propel herself out of Seattle and away from her grief and on to something