Chapter Eleven #3
After dinner I invite Daisy and Sam up to my room to hang out for a bit.
We sit on my bed, and I sketch my view from the window as we talk, trying my best to capture the beauty of campus in muted tones.
And it truly is beautiful despite the unsettling nature of all I’ve learned about it so far.
Bordered by dense trees and plummeting cliffs, pedestaled above Earnest like an idol.
Tonight, the forest tops have turned a deep, fog-shrouded indigo in the waning light, and the town below twinkles against the dark.
I’m adding canary-yellow splotches that blend into the surrounding lilac like the glow from a lightning bug when Daisy says, “I don’t know, I just don’t get her.
She’s so strict. I mean, she’s always talking about how Ama came all the way to the states from Taiwan so that we could have more opportunity and ‘freedom’ ”—she says with air quotes—“but then the second I try to gain some independence and actually, like, be a whole person, she shuts me down.
“Even when I got enough followers to join the creator fund, it wasn’t good enough.
It’s never good enough or wholesome enough or anything.
” She sniffles a bit, but no tears fall.
“Meanwhile she’s, like, clinically obsessed with reality TV and being the ideal American woman.
It’s like, ‘make up your mind, Minnie!’ ”
“She sounds a lot like my dad,” Sam says.
“The Used-Car King of the Carolinas.” They put on an especially deep voice when they say this.
“He worked so hard to build his businesses so that he could make a comfortable life for us, and that’s really cool, and I admire that, but he’s so old school.
So Catholic. So repressed. I know he’s trying—like, he doesn’t misgender me or deadname me anymore now that he’s gotten used to it, but it’s definitely a struggle.
I know he means well and wants what’s best for me, but on a fundamental level, he just doesn’t get it.
“Every day he texts me, ‘Ponte las pilas. Dios te bendiga,’ telling me to wake up and get my act together like I don’t understand what it’s like to work hard just because of where I grew up.
It’s like every day he can’t help but remind me that my problems will never matter as much as the struggles he went through to get here.
That he didn’t leave everything he knew behind to give us a better life only for me to be mediocre. ”
I nod, my heart hurting for my new friends.
I don’t even know where to begin when it comes to my own mom. Everything is so complicated in ways I’ve never tried to express out loud before.
“My mom loves me,” I start. “She’s so gorgeous and smart.
She helps people for a living, and she’s outspoken and funny, but she’s broken.
She’s been broken ever since my dad left.
And I don’t know, maybe there’s nothing we could have done to, like, stop ourselves from drifting apart, but also it feels like you shouldn’t be able to drift apart from your own mom, you know?
And I know she can’t help it, so I feel guilty every time I feel sad about it, or I feel guilty because maybe it’s all my fault, like maybe I’m the one who’s not doing enough—”
Daisy reaches over to put her hand on mine. “No! No way! Her feelings are not your responsibility! My therapist, Shannon, says that other people’s feelings are not our burden to bear—especially our parents’ feelings. Like, that’s your mom’s job, babe.”
Sam nods, and my smile is wobbly as I swipe the moisture from my eyes.
“Yeah, I guess so… it’s just… I’m so much like my grandmother, and my mom hates that.
Even though she loves me, she’ll always hate the parts of me that remind her of Gigi.
Or maybe I remind her of my dad. I wouldn’t know.
” I shrug. “He left us when I was little. But like you said, that was his choice. No one else’s.
” I shake my head. “Anyway, now there’s this ginormous gap between us, and I have no idea how to fill it. ”
It feels foreign, opening up to people like this.
Being vulnerable for once. Back in Pine Grove I had school friends, people to chat to between classes.
But my world was so eclipsed by my mom, by my art, by the anxiety of being away from Earnest, that I never really had friends like this. Except for in the summers.
We talk until lights out, and after Daisy and Sam leave, I watch the stars illuminating the sky outside my window. I hate that I can’t quite conjure the sound of Gigi’s voice telling me that they’re magic. Absently, I open the horoscope app on my phone.
Troubled waters ahead, Cancer. Not everything is as it seems. You’re a peacemaker, a balm for rough seas, so you’re inclined to ignore the signs. Now is not the time to suppress your suspicions. Remain on high alert, or risk surrendering your peace.
I roll my eyes. Whatever. I think this evening has been a good sign—finding new friends so quickly. Finding people who understand what it’s like to be other in a room full of same-same.
But still, through every moment since I left the chapel, something about that hidden door, about the feeling in my chest as I walked the narrow hall, is bothering me.
When Kate finishes her rounds and finally retires to her room, I swap my baby-pink cami for a black hoodie and grab some bobby pins. And then I put my plan into action.