I saw jagged pieces of it sticking out of one of those big portable Dumpsters parked on the street. “It’s sad,” I said, and my mother nodded, saying nothing. She was quiet the rest of the day.
Much to my surprise, two years later, after the implosion of my own family and home, Haylie Butterfield resurfaced, as a resident of my dorm. I didn’t recognize her at first. In high school, she’d worn pastel cashmere sweaters and sometimes matching accessories for her hair. She wore small pearl earrings that she said had belonged to her grandmother, and the only time I saw her wearing makeup was at prom. The first time I saw her in Tweete Hall’s elevator, she was wearing black leggings, a black skirt, and a black cardigan with a tightly cinched belt, and also spike-heeled boots, even though it was still early fall and maybe eighty degrees outside. She’d cut her hair chin-length and dyed it black.
I had to squint at her a good five seconds before I could be sure it was her. She wore red lipstick that made her skin look very pale. She was still beautiful, maybe more so, just in a different way.
“Haylie?”
She turned. She did not look happy to see me. It was as if I’d popped a balloon by her head.
“I go by Simone now,” she said.
“What?” I asked. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk. I really just didn’t understand.
“Simone. It’s my middle name. It’s what I go by now.” There was no hint of friendliness in her voice, though I was certain that she recognized me. “That’s what you should call me, too.” She spoke quietly, and with a tight, fixed smile, though the other two girls in the elevator were speaking to each other in what sounded like Korean, and they did not appear either concerned with or aware of what we were saying.
“I’ll try,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. “I…I might mess up a few times…” I laughed, stupidly. “…since I’ve known you almost my whole life.”
She didn’t laugh. Her red-lipped smile was still. “Try hard,” she said. When the doors opened, she stepped out and glanced back over her shoulder. “If you don’t think you can manage it, that’s okay. You don’t need to call me anything at all.”
The next time I had a desk shift, I looked her up on the roster. She was listed as a freshman, with a hometown that I had never heard of. That was all I could find out: for the last two years since her father’s arrest, while I’d been in college, she had been doing something else.
The next time I saw my mother, I told her about Haylie’s dyed black hair, the dark clothes, and, of course, the new name. I didn’t believe Simone was really her middle name. It seemed to me I would have heard her middle name at some point, and if it were really Simone, I would have remembered.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” I said, pulling wads of newspaper out of our old drinking glasses. We were in my mother’s new kitchen; I was helping her unpack. “It would be like you all of a sudden telling me I should call you…Suzie, or something, instead of Mom.”
My mother, lifting her big Crock-Pot out of the bottom of the box, listened with a somber expression. “I wonder what happened to her mother,” she said, and she looked over my shoulder and out the window, as if she hoped to see Mrs. Butterfield running up the street in front of our house, though we were in my mother’s new apartment, three flights up, nothing to see outside but the side wall of another building. She turned around slowly, looking back at the empty boxes scattered around the floor. “Give her a break, honey,” she added. “Think of what she’s been through. Her father is in jail. Everything changed for her. If the poor girl wants to be someone else, let her be someone else.”
I actually agreed with the advice. I had no desire to torment Haylie, or to make whatever new life she was creating for herself more difficult in any way. The next time I saw her in the dining hall, I said, “Hi, Simone,” without so much as a smile. But she looked uncomfortable, even annoyed, her black-rimmed eyes downcast as I passed. She clearly preferred that I would choose the second option she had given me and