The Mall - Megan McCafferty Page 0,33

say about it.

“Your mother has known us for years,” Drea said. “But she never set foot in our store until this morning. And why do you think that is?”

“Because she’s having a midlife crisis?” I guessed.

“At Bellarosa, we prefer to think of it as a midlife metamorphosis.”

“Of course you do,” I muttered bitterly.

“She’s changing,” Drea continued. “She’s not the uptight wife and mom she thought she was. And she came to Bellarosa Boutique because she wanted that inner transformation to be reflected on the outside, through her clothing.”

The advertising copy practically wrote itself.

“So for all those years she was married to my dad she was a lowly caterpillar?” I asked. “And now she’s a beautiful butterfly?”

“Not exactly,” Drea said. “I’m saying that she’s evolving from one kind of butterfly into an equally beautiful but totally different butterfly.”

“That’s not how evolution works…”

She slapped her hands against the bench. “Can you shut off your nerd brain for, like, two seconds so I can try to make you feel better?”

No. I didn’t think I could.

“Let me tell you a story,” Drea began.

Resistance was futile. I uncrossed my legs and made myself comfortable.

“Gia was supposed to be a hairdresser. Her mother was a hairdresser and her mother’s mother was a hairdresser. My dad’s family were the ones in the clothing business. When my parents got married, my dad’s father let him run Main Street Haberdashery, a menswear shop in downtown Toms River.”

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“Right,” Drea said. “Because my dad was as shitty at selling menswear as he was at being a husband and father. It was only as successful as it was because Ma was a quick learner and worked her ass off while my dad got drunk and boinked cocktail waitresses.”

This was the most I’d ever heard Drea say about her father. I didn’t know where the story was going, but I definitely wanted to hear more.

“Ma got fed up and filed for divorce when I was ten,” she said.

“That’s when you moved to Pineville,” I said. “Switched to my school.”

“Right,” Drea said, nodding. “At that point, she wanted nothing to do with him. And he wanted even less to do with us. So against all advice from her divorce attorney, she offered to give up any claims for child or spousal support if he signed over full ownership of the haberdashery. He never wanted to sell suits in the first place, so for him it was a win-win.”

“Wow,” I said. “That could’ve backfired spectacularly.”

“Yeah,” Drea replied. “But it didn’t. Because the last we heard, my dad had run up a ton of gambling debts and doesn’t have a dime to his name. Ma sold the shop and its inventory to Men’s Wearhouse, then used that seed money to start her own business.”

“Bellarosa Boutique?”

“None other,” Drea replied. “Mom named the store after herself, taking her maiden name as a final ‘fuck you’ to the husband she never should have married in the first place.”

A shiny, pink-tracksuited mom dragged her toddler across Concourse B on a leash. She was in a hurry. Her daughter was not.

“Come on, Ashley,” Tracksuit whined. “I do not have all day for this.”

In fact, she looked exactly like someone who had all day for this.

“If Gia hadn’t married your dad,” I pointed out, “she wouldn’t be where she is today.”

Drea looked me in the eye.

“You almost got it right.” She gave me a second to figure it out for myself before proceeding. “If she hadn’t married, then left my dad, she wouldn’t be where she is today.”

Okay. So I sort of understood where she was going with this story. But Gia was not Kathy.

“You’re out of here in a month, right?”

“Five weeks,” I answered. “Orientation starts on August twenty-third.”

In exactly thirty-five days, I’d be moving into Sulzberger Hall and meeting my roommate, Simone Levy, from Rochester, New York. So far, she had not responded to the letter I’d sent when I had mono, and I was trying not to hold this slight against her.

“In five weeks you’ll finally get out of here and live the real life you’ve always wanted,” Drea said. “Isn’t it about time your parents get to live theirs?”

Drea was speaking from experience. And yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to agree. I shrugged noncommittally.

“Until then,” Drea said, “what do you want to do?”

I shook the cup, removed the lid, and stared into the dregs of my Orange Julius. I wished I had the power to read them like tea leaves. That’s how