The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,60
skinny bottom between two candles on the railing. All the light was below her, hollowing her eyes as she looked down at Laurel. Her voice was matter-of-fact, a cool thing in all the heat. “This is a low point, and you came to get me because you had no idea how to handle it. You don’t have lows, or highs, either. You sleepwalk straight through the middle of things, mucking around with secret pockets. You make art for rich, spoiled people who love to button their own ugly parts shut, and here’s a blanket they can put over their sofa to mirror their protected lives. You could be one hell of an artist, Laurel. The way you understand color and the shapes of things, and God knows, you’d have a lot to say if you let yourself. But instead, you play with lift-the-flaps and macaroni, safe and tidy. You stay in half a marriage with a human-robot hybrid who does not love you. With just the one kid, so you never have to look away and let her take a single unsupervised breath.”
Laurel squeezed her eyes shut, pressing the pads of her fingers tight against her lids, and said, “I’m not having this fight right now. You don’t have a real marriage, Thalia. You don’t have a kid. So don’t give me advice on mine.” She rubbed her hand along the base of her skull, opening her eyes so she could look up at her sister.
Thalia leaned forward, looming over her. “Because I chose theater. I chose it wholly and fully, and I’m happy in a way you’ll never be.”
“Highs and lows,” Laurel said.
Thalia nodded, a vigorous jerk of her head, up and then down.
“I get it,” Laurel said, and she did. Thalia churned up the waters around her; she’d walk into a potluck and know within ten minutes who was sleeping with whom and who was thinking about it, who was nursing secret grudges, where the female rivalries were. Laurel thought a potluck was good if someone brought twice-baked potatoes, but that was never enough for Thalia. She’d put a word here, a whisper there, and in minutes a friendly dinner was vicious chaos and civil war. Then she’d get a cocktail and a good seat and watch it all play out. “You don’t know how to have things that aren’t highs or lows. Anything regular and nice, you know you’ll never have it, so you have to wreck it.”
“This is not about me,” Thalia said. She sounded angry. She flung one leg over the railing, then the other, and dropped to the ground outside the gazebo, standing up on the edge of the ring of light.
Laurel actually laughed, feeling a small surge of ugly triumph. “It’s always about you, Thalia. You’re mad because I’m right, and you don’t like to be seen through.”
“You’re full of shit,” Thalia said. “This is about you, holing up with David and your pretty accident—which, okay, you made the right choice there. Shelby’s amazing, but you’re trying to squash her into your half-life, and she’s like me, Laurel. She’s not scared. Shelby wants to live big. You have her wrapped up tight, tucked away in that private school. You screen her friends and choose all her activities. She’s never seen DeLop, even though she’s begged to go, because you won’t put something that real in front of her. Why not go ahead and poke her eyes out? Blind her. Save yourself some trouble.”
Thalia was pacing around the gazebo where Laurel still sat, circling it like a predator, moving along the edge of the light. “Shelby wants to see ugly. She wants to see ugly and see truly, truly beautiful, both. You may be some flaccid version of happy in all this muffled gray, but your daughter wants bright colors and then midnight, and you want to know what I think? What I really think?”
“No,” said Laurel, but Thalia bulled forward, circling behind Laurel, becoming part of the buzz at the base of her skull.
“I’m checking in to Stan Webelow on the off chance he’s depraved. If he is, I’ll dearly enjoy flaying the skin right off him and showing the world his ugly insides. I’ll check Chuck ’n’ Bunny, too, in case they did something to send that girl running off into the night. But you know what I think happened? I think that Shelby and Molly were planning to run away—”