and sticking out from the curls. Gray hairs. She’s thirty years old, and she’s getting gray hair. I move toward her, holding a strand of her hair between my finger and thumb. “Mom, you’re getting gray hairs. Did you know that?”
She swats my hand away. “Evelyn?”
I close my eyes, nod. Everyone can see it. “I’ve got a bad aura, Mom.”
This stops her. She moves her hands up to her face, cupping her cheeks. “What?”
I nod again. “It’s black. My vibe, my aura, is black.” I shrug, looking over her shoulder. “Do we have some chips or anything? Pretzels?”
She leans in close to me, sniffing me, like I’m a flower in a vase. “Evelyn, have you been drinking?” “No.”
She holds my chin steady and moves my face from side to side, looking at me from different angles. She looks puzzled, almost amused, her eyebrows high on her head. “Evelyn. Have you been smoking pot?”
I laugh, turning away. But inside, I am scared. She has extra-sensory powers, I think. She really does.
She turns me back around, sniffs my hair. She steps back. “Evelyn?”
“I didn’t. God. Everyone else did. But I didn’t. It was too cold to roll down the windows.”
She sort of falls backwards when I say this. Luckily, the couch is behind her. “I’m having a nightmare,” she says. “Oh my God. You’re fourteen.”
“Honest, I didn’t. It was because of my bad aurora.” I point at my head, laughing. I can see how this is funny now, this whole night. You’ve got to be able to see the humor in things, I realize, and I do now. I really do. “Can you see it? My aurora? My evil vibe?”
Her eyes are slightly crossed, staring hard at me, but I can tell, just by looking at her, that she doesn’t see the humor in things. She is no longer amused. “You’re so grounded,” she says. “You don’t even know how grounded you are.”
“We’re all grounded, Mom,” I tell her, walking back to my room. I’m not sure what I mean by this exactly, if I mean anything at all. “We’re all grounded now.”
The next morning, she is standing over me, still in her robe. I try to close my eyes again, to make her go away, but she doesn’t. She walks back and forth alongside my bed, one hand in her hair, the other one stretched out in front of her, as if she were a blind person, feeling for walls.
“Okay,” she says. “Let me just start off by saying that even without the pot thing, I feel like I don’t understand you at all. I don’t know you anymore. I know I used to have this nice girl, this nice little girl. And now, you’re…” She stops walking and looks at me as if she has just realized that I am really from Mars, or Russia. “One minute you’re reading the Bible for three hours a day in your bedroom, which is weird, okay? And then you come home last night, and you’re high. You’re talking about vibes.”
I pull the covers over my head. She pulls them back down.
“So, as your mother, I’m having a little trouble keeping up, Evelyn. I was wondering if you could help me out. Is this a completely new personality, or just an extension of the old one?”
I start to close my eyes again, but she claps her hands in front of my face.
“I didn’t smoke anything. I told you that. I was just in the car with them, and the windows were up. It was cold out.”
She nods. “Who were the boys?”
I shake my head, saying nothing. If I tell her it was Travis, she will call Mrs. Rowley. More humiliation. Even more. It is unthinkable.
She waits. But I wait too, and we both know, from experience, that I can wait longer than she can.
“Well,” she says, “whether or not you want to tell me, we still need to talk.” She sits down on the foot of my bed, rubbing her eyes with her thumbs. “I didn’t think I’d have to talk to you about this yet. But you’re out with older boys, doing drugs, and I don’t know where you’ve been.”
“Mom, I didn’t smoke anything.”
She makes a quick, cutting motion with her hand, like a conductor telling an orchestra to stop playing. “Just let me talk, Evelyn. Okay? Shut up for a second, and let me talk. I want to tell you that I’ve learned some things the hard way, especially lately. And I