in my teens when she and I stopped talking, around the time Malcolm and I experienced our first clumsy fumble in his car, after we had made the step from “least desirable” to “in crowd.” Oma didn’t like me very much then.
I tried to tell her about how awful things were in the before times, when I flushed red with embarrassment if our gym teacher insisted we practice cartwheels, when my feet got tangled up in a jump rope, when I teetered and fell on my ass before completing even one evolution of hopscotch. Name a playground game—catch, capture the flag, hide-and-seek, tug-of-war—and I sucked at it. I didn’t come home with skinned knees and bruised elbows, but I still felt the sting of scraped skin and the throb of ruptured blood vessels. They were invisible wounds, but real to me.
My mother, ever clinically sensible, applied the best salve she knew.
“You don’t have to be exactly like them, Elena,” she would say. “You’re better in your own way. You’re smart.”
Yes, there was that.
I took her words to heart, grinning smugly each time I finished a test first and walked my paper up to the teacher’s desk with thirty minutes to spare, each time the national aptitude reports came in and my scores shone with dark bars and ninety-ninth percentiles. I taught myself insults in Latin and ancient Greek, used them whenever some mush-brained cheerleader flopped next to me in her short little skirt on the day of a game.
Eventually, I found balance, fell in with the smart overachiever set while still finding time for things like makeup and trendy shoes.
Fell in with Malcolm.
Now that Madeleine Sinclair isn’t penetrating my personal space, the car is too quiet. I set the Bluetooth to connect with my phone and ask my pal Siri to play me something upbeat. Siri screws it up and throws Lucinda Williams’s “Joy” at me, which is fine. If I can’t have upbeat, ferocious and angry will do.
I’ve got so much of both.
I put the song on repeat and by the seventh time Lucinda tells the world she’s going to Slidell to look for her joy, I’m pulling into my parents’ driveway and parking behind their Volkswagen.
After two days of Malcolm hovering whenever Mom or Dad called, I’m itching to have a conversation with them that doesn’t consist of coded messages and subtext.
The day is cold for early November, but not as cold as yesterday. Still, I feel the chill of it, a blanket of icy air clinging to me, seeping through my pores and worming its way into my very bones as I walk up the porch steps.
“Well, I say fuck the lot of them,” my mother says when she opens the door. Then, with only slightly less bitterness in her voice, “I’m sorry. I just can’t say anything nice about these people. And your father. You should have heard him on Saturday afternoon. The air in the house turned blue he was cursing so much. Come on, let’s have a glass of beer. Oma’s not well, but I think she wants to talk to you.”
Lucinda Williams failed me. Before we even get to the kitchen, I’m a hot mess of tears, sick with everything. Dad sits me down in his big chair, pours two fingers of Kr?uterschnapps into a small glass, and holds it up to me. The smell of sugar-sweetened herbs and alcohol drowns out everything for a moment; my mother’s long fingers stroking me like I’m a beloved pet takes me back to nicer times. It’s a temporary reprieve, but I savor it.
“You want to stay with us tonight?” Mom asks.
I nod and blub and somehow manage words that sound like consent. “I have teacher assessments tomorrow morning, though. At nine.”
“It’s all about money, you know,” my mother says. “All of it. When I was still teaching, I submitted a request for extra funds. You know what the review board told me?”
“I can guess.”
“Three hundred seventy-five percent. That’s what they told me. In other words”—she makes a goodbye gesture with her hand—“no more money. A three-hundred-seventy-five-percent increase in cost per child since 1970. Just before I retired, they