to end up like me, OK? And that’s what will happen if we don’t start taking advantage of the opportunities available to you.”
“What’s wrong with being like you?” And yet, even as I asked, I knew what she meant. I knew that mothers weren’t supposed to stay out all night and sleep all day; they weren’t supposed to monitor the neighbors’ mailboxes for credit cards and new checkbooks; they weren’t supposed to pack up the car overnight and move because the local law enforcement was breathing down their necks. I loved my mom, I forgave everything she did, but as I sat there on the lumpy bed in our latest cockroach-infested rental apartment, I recognized that I didn’t want to be like her. Not anymore. I knew that what I felt when I walked through the halls of my school with her—the teachers staring at her skintight bandage dresses and stiletto heels, her peroxided nimbus of hair and her berry-stained lips—was a desire to be anything but her.
But what did I want to be?
She looked down at the book in her hands, puzzling over the title. I was reading Great Expectations, which the English teacher had given me not long after she sent me for testing. “Very superior intelligence. That’s what the IQ tests said. You can be anything you want to be. Anything that’s more than a two-bit hustler.”
“So I can be a ballerina?”
She gave me a withering look. “I never got a fair shot at life and you’re getting one, so dammit, you’re going to take it. So we’re moving. Again, I know. But there’s a prep school up in the Sierra Nevada, Lake Tahoe, that’s offering us financial aid. We’re going to move there and you’re going to focus on your studies and I’m going to get a job.”
“A job job?”
She nodded. “A job job. I got work as a hostess, at one of the casinos up there.”
And even though I felt something jump and quiver inside me at these words—maybe we were about to become a normal family after all—the jaded fifteen-year-old cynic in me couldn’t quite believe it. “And so, what, I took a test and now you think that I’ll go to Harvard someday? Become the first female president of the United States? Come on.”
She sat back and regarded me with frank, blue eyes, wide as silver dollars and as calm as a moonlit night. “Oh, sweetheart. Why the fuck not?”
* * *
—
Needless to say, I didn’t become the first female president. Or an astronaut, or even a goddamn ballerina.
No, instead I went to a college (not Harvard in the end, not even close) and got a liberal arts degree. I walked away with a six-figure student-loan debt and a piece of paper that qualified me to do absolutely nothing of value whatsoever. I figured that just being smart and working hard would clear my path toward a different life.
So is it any surprise that I ended up a grifter, after all?
5.
“YOUR MOTHER IS RIGHT. We should leave. Today.” It is later that day and Lachlan and I have decamped to the darkest corner of an anonymous Hollywood sports bar, whispering as if someone might be listening in, although the only people in this bar are a group of frat types in football jerseys who are too drunk to pay us any attention. Sports games blare from televisions on every surface. “Let’s just get out of town for a little while, until we know what’s going on.”
“But maybe it’s nothing,” I protest. “Maybe it has nothing to do with us. Maybe the police just came by my place because…I don’t know. Community outreach. Maybe there’s been a crime spree in my neighborhood and they want to warn us.”
Lachlan laughs. “Darling, we are the crime spree.” He kneads the knuckles of one hand in the other. “Listen, I made some calls after the cops came by. Efram has vanished. No one’s seen him since last week and he’s still not answering his phone. Word on the street is that he was picked up by the police. So—”
“He owes me forty-seven thousand dollars!”