family was loaded, while my mother was struggling to pay the gas bill every month. There was no reason for us to talk, other than our mutual failure to be the right sort of wholesome, responsible citizens.
* * *
—
I kept my head down and focused on my studies; the years of bouncing from school to school had left me miles behind my classmates in most subjects and I had to scramble to catch up. Summer turned to fall and then winter descended, and with it came a kind of cloistering, the world bracing itself against the ice and slush. School to home and back again; heat blasting, mittens on. I sat on the bus twice a day, wearing my secondhand parka and leaky snow boots, struck dumb by the magnificence of the snowcapped forests, the achingly blue lake. It was all so foreign to me. I still dreamed in concrete blocks and mirrored skyscrapers.
My mother had settled into her job. She’d finagled her way into the high-stakes poker rooms, and even if they weren’t exactly the promised land she’d expected—hundred-dollar chips were still few and far between—she was happy to be there. In the evenings, I’d study at the chipped kitchen table while she clattered around the cabin in her heels, applying mascara, smelling like Shalimar and lemon verbena soap. The bills that I pulled from our mailbox didn’t have PAST DUE emblazoned on the envelopes anymore, which probably had to do with the extra shifts she was starting to pull. Sometimes she wouldn’t get home until I was waking up to go to school. She’d stand by the coffeepot, her sequins sagging and her hair tangled, watching me put books in my backpack with a dazed, complacent expression on her face that I interpreted as satisfaction, or maybe pride.
One day, I noticed that she’d taken her blond down a few notches, from Marilyn platinum to Gwyneth gold. When I asked her why, she just touched her hair and glanced in the mirror with a little smile. “More elegant, isn’t it? We’re not in Vegas anymore, baby. The men here, they’re looking for different.”
I worried that this also meant that she was looking for men. But as the winter went on, no one showed up in our living room at three A.M. and I took that to mean that things had changed for real. Maybe we really had gotten off at the right stop, for once. I imagined her working her way up the casino hierarchy, maybe to a floor manager, or even into a bona fide day job at the hotel’s front desk. Maybe she’d take up with a nice guy, someone normal, like the genial café manager with the salt-and-pepper beard who gave us extra lox on our bagels when we came in together on Sundays.
The shield of vigilance that I’d erected for all those years was slipping. And even if I wasn’t exactly Miss Popularity at North Lake Academy—even if Harvard was still an awful long shot—I felt some measure of content. Stability can do that to a person. My happiness was so tied to my mother’s happiness that it was impossible to figure out where hers ended and mine began.
* * *
—
One snowy afternoon in late January, a day when most of my classmates had decamped to the ski slopes after the last bell, I climbed on the bus back into town and found that I wasn’t alone. Benjamin Liebling was sitting there in the back row, limbs splayed across the seats surrounding him. I saw him watching me climb aboard, but when I caught his eye, he quickly looked away.
I took a seat toward the front and opened up my algebra textbook. The doors clattered shut and the bus shuddered and heaved, snow tires scraping against the icy crust of the road. I sat there trying to wrap my mind around the concept of logarithmic expressions for a few minutes, acutely conscious of the only other student on the bus. Was he lonely? Did he think I was rude for never talking to him? Why did our non-relationship feel so awkward? Abruptly, I stood up and lurched my way along the rubbery mat to the back and flung myself in the seat in front of him. I swung my legs