just earrings,” I said in the car. “Why do you care so much?” These earrings were the very linchpins of my appeal. They hinted at sex.
“They’re not appropriate,” she said. “Take them off.”
“But other kids wear them,” I said, aware both that this statement was true, they were nothing, and also that they were something, that she was partially right, although I wasn’t sure exactly why.
“I don’t give a damn what other kids wear.” She reached toward me as if she would rip them out of my lobes. I dodged.
“You’re grounded for a month,” she said. I’d already been grounded for two months for sneaking a miniskirt and black nylons to school in my bag. “You’re also grounded from using the phone, young lady,” she said, her jaw clenched. “You sneak, and you lie.”
It was true. I snuck clothing. I snuck into her shower when she was out and shaved my legs for the way it made my calves reflect a line of light, and then I lied about using her razor.
“And no allowance this month.”
My allowance was five dollars per week, but I’d been in trouble for long enough for the clothing, my poor evaluations at school, and not doing my homework when I said I would that I had not received it for at least three months. Any money I had was from Kate Willenborg’s father, who would give us each a twenty-dollar bill and drop us off at the mall. I believed money should be used, transformed into objects as quickly as possible before it disappeared.
Back at the house, she screamed. I worried the neighbors would hear us. Some strange power was moving through her veins and her extremities, the voltage almost too high for the instrument it ran through. She waggled an index finger right up close to my face and her cheeks got pink.
“You’re wasting your life,” she said. “If you don’t study now, you won’t find what you love to do, and then you won’t get to work with intelligent people later.”
“But I’m only in fifth grade,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” she said, starting to cry. “The work you do now will lead to the work you do later. It will inform who are the people you spend your life with, how interesting they are. Your colleagues.”
“I don’t care about them,” I said. I pictured people in an airless room who thought they were enjoying themselves, but who were not. I believed my mother was lying to me, wanting me to become just like her. This made no sense—she didn’t have colleagues—but her insistence that I abandon my own sensibility and adopt hers made me assume the story would end with me as her. Were I to abandon joy for study and long-term gratifications, I was sure I would be rewarded with a situation as tepid and flavorless as the studying itself. It didn’t occur to me until years later that she had been referring to her own loss, having a child so young when she might have continued at school, at work. Working alone now, when she might have liked to work with a team of people. That she had been fighting so hard for me to apply myself to my studies to help me have a good life, the closest she could come to describing the eminence she felt she had lost for herself.
“You will care, you little shit,” she said, kicking my bedroom door hard, and leaving a hole in the white paint that looked like a mouth dropped open in surprise.
A few days later I found my mother leaning over her bathroom sink again, yanking her braces off with needle-nose pliers.
“What are you doing?”
“The orthodontist said one more year,” she said, “but I don’t think so.” The sound of something crackling.
“Mom, go to the orthodontist. Let him do it.”
“I can’t wait. I can’t live like this anymore.” I’d noticed she’d been complaining about them more than usual lately: they were painful, food got caught, she was sick of changing the bands. She wanted them off for good. The adjustment had moved faster given how often she’d changed the bands; her teeth were straight enough, she said.
“Please, don’t,” I said. I stood next to her in the small bathroom. The wires stuck out like silver whiskers.
“I’m not stopping,” she said. “Get out. Go do something else.”
Some nights Toby called. He was a popular sixth grader with white-blond hair, a long neck, and ears that stuck out like delicate shells. His voice