this dubious plan—becoming a beach bum, making Hilary my new BFF and hooking up with the sunburned summer kids—vanished when I got home that afternoon. The minute I turned the corner to our house, I could see it: my mother’s hatchback, packed to the gills with boxes and Hefty bags. I walked up the driveway and stood there, staring through the windows at the jammed back seat. I could see my patched-up moon boots, pressed up against the glass. And I couldn’t stop myself anymore: I began to cry, big hideous sobs of despair at how everything could go from wonderful to awful in just a few weeks.
Eventually my mother came outside and approached me, her arms extended for a hug. “I’m sorry, baby. I really am.”
I sidestepped her, swiping at my nose with the back of my arm. “You promised. We’d stay until I graduated.”
She looked like she might cry, too. “I know I said that. But it’s not turning out how I hoped.” Her hands worked at the bottom of her shirt, rolling it and unrolling it. “It’s not about you, baby. You kept up your end of the bargain. It’s just…” She hesitated.
The expression on her face stopped me. “This is about Benny, right?”
Tears were pooling at the corners of her eyes, but she didn’t deny it. “Nina…”
“They called you, didn’t they? His parents, the Lieblings? They called you to tell you that he and I were involved? They told you to keep me away from him because I’m not good enough for their son.”
I looked at her and she wouldn’t look back at me, just kept rolling and unrolling the hem of her shirt as her ruined mascara ran in rivulets down her face. And as I stood there watching her, my entire life packed into a pitifully small number of boxes, I knew. They’d driven us out of town. To the Lieblings, we were just trash, a minor nuisance in the way of their world domination, and therefore we had to go. And because they were rich, they had gotten their way.
I wondered about the strings that they had pulled, in order to get us to leave. Because how else could they have forced my mom to give up a job, a home, her daughter’s glorious Future? They’d strong-armed, they’d threatened. That was the Liebling way, Benny had already told me as much: My dad’s a bully: If he doesn’t get what he wants at first, he’ll just threaten you until he does. A call of complaint to North Lake Academy, my scholarship yanked. A well-placed word at my mother’s job, threatening her livelihood. How easy it must have felt for them to take away the little that we had. After all, we were insignificant to them.
I felt my mother’s arm creep around me. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. You don’t need him. You have me, and that’s all you need. You and I, we are the only people we can trust,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “Besides, you are better than anyone I have ever met. You are better than their horrible son.”
“Then why are we letting them get away with it? We don’t have to let them do this to us,” I insisted, growing frantic. “We shouldn’t let them have what they want. We should stay.”
My mom shook her head. “I’m so sorry, baby. But it’s too late.”
“What about the Ivy League?” I managed. “What about Stanford summer school?”
“We don’t need a fancy private high school for that.” She straightened, squeezed my arm, turned to the car as if something had been decided without me. “You’ll do well wherever we go, if you just apply yourself. That was my mistake. We never needed to come here in the first place.”
* * *
—
And so we moved back to Las Vegas, and I started my junior year at yet another enormous, concrete institution. And maybe my mom was right that I didn’t need a private high school to excel, but our year at Tahoe had also broken something critical inside me: the ability to believe in my own potential. I knew now who I really was: a nobody, disposable, destined for nothing.