begin? Where, oh where do I begin? I didn’t know what to do with myself. I stacked three pencils in a row. I scooted my chemistry book toward me until it was in line with the edge of my desk. I looked at my watch. It was after one o’clock, and still raining hard. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about Jimmy.
“Answer me.” My mother leaned forward. She was trying to see my eyes. “You have no right to speak to her—to speak to anyone like that. Do you understand? Veronica! Are you listening to me?”
She grazed my arm with just her fingertips. When I didn’t move, she sat on the foot of my bed.
“Honey?” she said, her voice soft, a little shaky. “Are you…are you doing drugs?”
I actually laughed, only for a second, but the pressure caused tears to spill out from under my eyes. I glanced down at her. She wasn’t laughing.
“No,” I said.
“Then what is it? What in the world would make you act that way? How could you say that about not being her mother, when she just lost hers? What is wrong with you?”
I looked up. Lost. For a moment, I really thought that she meant that Marley had lost her mother by leaving home and coming to college. What I’d said still wasn’t so bad. My mother was overreacting, looking at me like that.
I shook my head. “I don’t…What do you…?”
“Her mother just died last spring. Cancer.” She turned her palms up, holding them out, as if holding something fragile and round between us. “How do you not know that?”
I looked at the floor, at the bag of M&M’s. I looked back at my mother’s face. I tried to think what I knew of Marley’s mother, what she had told me. She played the piano. She gave lessons out of the house, and she accompanied the church choir. Those details had all made it into my long-term memory somehow. If I had been told she’d also just died of cancer, I would have surely remembered that, too.
“What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that? How was I supposed to know if she didn’t tell me?”
But already I understood that I had just outdone myself. Out of all the stupid things I had done since Friday morning—the car, the party, Third Floor Clyde—yelling at Marley was the most shameful, the error I would remember the longest.
My mother crossed her arms. “She told me in about ten minutes. What’s the longest you’ve ever talked to her?”
Bowzer woke and started scratching his chin with his back paw. My entire bed moved with the vibration he made, the mattress rattling in the frame. I wanted to get up and lie down next to him, the way I might have done when he was a puppy and I was a girl. I wanted to press my face into his fur and scratch him behind his ears until he sighed with pleasure and forgot about his aching bones. Even my mother would not ever forgive me, perhaps. She might still love me, but she would not think of me the same. She loved Elise, too, but for different reasons. I had always been the nice one.
“Isn’t it your job to look out for the freshmen on your floor? Veronica, that girl is just dying of loneliness. Don’t tell me you can’t see it.”
I closed my eyes. “Mom. If you had any idea how much stress I’m under…You were just telling me that I need to focus on my schoolwork…”
She waved her hand. “Don’t give me that. You took this job. You signed on for it, and it’s important. If you’re not going to do it right, you shouldn’t do it at all.” She started to say more, and then stopped. She looked at me, frowned, and started again. “You’re doing all this studying so you can be a doctor? You know, doctors have to deal with people, Veronica. And I’m pretty sure the stress doesn’t stop in school. Is this how you’re going to treat patients? You sure you want to go into a caring field?”
I started crying. I worried she would think it was a ploy, but really, I just couldn’t help it. She handed me a tissue. When I looked up to take it, she did not smile.
“I’ll talk to Marley tonight,” I said. “I’ll apologize.”
“Okay.” Her voice was neutral, her expression blank. She seemed to be waiting for something.