Blair
I miss you, Henry says.
Lol. It’s only been two hours.
Send me a picture.
She snaps a selfie, grinning in her soccer uniform, her hair loose around her face, her cheeks still flushed. She thinks she looks pretty. Herself.
That’s cute … but I was thinking more of a Hailey Delman picture.
Blair has a feeling like a stone dropping in her gut.
Everyone knows what a Hailey Delman picture is because last year Hailey Delman got into a fight with her boyfriend and he sent the pictures she shared with him to the entire lacrosse team, who in turn sent them to the whole school, spreading them like a virus.
Blair laughed at Hailey like the rest of them, but the truth was, she was awed.
By Hailey’s lips outlined with dark liner, filled in with shiny gloss.
Her legs crossed, a thong that tied in black satin ribbon at each hip.
No bra, just one skinny arm drawn across her chest. It was her eyes that shocked Blair the most. The steady stare at the camera.
The eyes that seemed, in the half second it took for the camera to capture her face, to say devour me.
And that’s what everyone did.
She wonders how Hailey Delman is doing. If she’s found new friends or if the photo made it to her new school, too. If everyone calls her the same names there. If a fresh start is ever even possible, when delete never actually means gone.
I hope your silence means you’re getting undressed for me
She is standing in her kitchen, a half-eaten banana on the island, the last bite she took glutted thick in her throat, shivering from the combination of her cooling sweat and the air conditioning.
She and Henry have been hooking up for the past six weeks, ever since they made out in the backyard at Avery Huang’s pool party.
So far they’ve only kissed and groped, grinding their hips into each other in Henry’s room, or Blair’s on the rare occasion Blair is home alone.
But things are getting more intense. Last week Henry moved Blair’s hand to where he was hard, underneath his jeans, and she guided his hand under her shirt, let his finger graze her nipple.
She likes him, likes experimenting together, likes the tingle of anticipation she gets whenever she knows she’s going to see him.
But she doesn’t know about this. Giving him a piece of her that she can no longer control.
She could take the picture just to have it and then see how she feels. File it away in the Hidden album on her phone until she decides what to do. No harm in that.
She has half an hour before her mother will be home with her two brothers after pickup over at the middle school.
Half an hour could be enough to strip down, arrange herself.
She doesn’t have any satin-trimmed underwear like Hailey, but she does have a black cotton thong that could do.
Maybe her mother has something she could borrow.
Not lingerie, not anything weird, but something to make it more grown-up.
High heels. A necklace that will disappear into her cleavage.
Her mother’s closet is a study in contrasts: the stiff, bright scrubs she keeps around from when she worked as a home health aide, way back before Blair was born.
And the things she wears for the PTA lunches, the date nights with Blair’s father.
Silky camisoles and soft, thin knits. She examines a pair of black pumps but they seem so brisk, businesslike, the heel too low to be sexy.
Her mother favors them for library fundraisers, the holiday party for her father’s work.
She opens another shoebox to find a pair of brown suede loafers, scoffs, and puts the lid back onto the box.
She knows it is a paradox—that she derides her mother’s ordinariness, and yet, how she would hate it even more if her mother were unordinary.
If Blair had opened the box to find a pair of stilettos studded with rhinestones, or boots that went over the knee.
She’s about to give up when something else catches her eye.
A duffel bag in the corner that had been hidden underneath an old blanket, the hint of weathered brown leather peeking out from beneath orange-and-white crochet squares.
Though she has no reason to, Blair pushes the blanket aside and tugs on the zipper pull.
Inside she finds three pairs of black cotton underwear, one nude bra.
A pair of jeans and a pair of sweatpants.
A white T-shirt and a pale-blue button down.
A small cloth toiletry bag containing a travel toothbrush, travel toothpaste, dental floss, a comb.
In one of the side pockets there are three small envelopes, her initials and her brothers’ in her mother’s handwriting.
Inside the one marked BER she finds a single curl of her baby hair and the tiny, hollow pebbles of her first lost teeth.
Flat against the bottom of the bag is a manilla envelope containing three black-and-white snapshots of Blair and her brothers, Blair’s front tooth missing and the boys’ cheeks padded with baby fat, that her mother took with the first DSLR camera her father bought her when Blair was small.
There’s another side pocket, a smaller one, but now she’s curious, wonders what pieces of herself she might find. Her fingers graze something cool and smooth and hard.
It’s a lighter. Not the long, thin kind that she’s seen her mother use to light taper candles on the dining table when they’ve had guests over for dinner or that her father uses to start the firepit in the yard.
This is heavy, metal, a lighter designed to slip into a pocket, to be concealed.
She turns it over in her palm. On one side, an S scratched into the surface, rough and crude.
Oh my god, she thinks. Does my mom smoke pot?
The thought can’t help but make her laugh out loud, picturing her tidy, order-obsessed mother sparking a joint or bending over a bong.
But the sound of her own laughter in the quiet house, holding this unexplainable object in her hand, soon leaves her feeling unsettled.
She runs her hand along the seams of the inside of the suitcase and uncovers a small film canister, black, that rattles when she shakes it.
There’s another, smaller envelope underneath of that, the size someone would use for a letter.
Inside there are two sheets of waxed paper, and when she peels them apart she finds a single pressed flower that might have been bright yellow once but has aged into a brownish-gold hue.
There’s a scrap of paper folded in half also stuck in the envelope, and when she handles it, it feels worn to softness, like fabric.
On it, a note in unfamiliar handwriting.
I love you. Forgive me.
She stares at the words until the sound of a car door slamming startles her.
Her mother already back with her two brothers, Kyle thumping a basketball up the drive, Jake asking if he has time to play a video game before they eat.
She takes another second to weigh the heft of the lighter in her hand before putting it back in the pocket of the bag, drawing the blanket over it again, closing the door, tiptoeing her way out of the room.
Over dinner she tries to tell herself it is nothing to worry about.
The bag. This lighter. The note. So what if her mother allows herself one secret cigarette a month?
So what if she occasionally lights up a spliff when everyone is asleep?
But she doesn’t think that’s the story. Blair doesn’t like it, this side of her mother that she senses but can’t see. Like the dark side of the moon.
Throughout the meal Blair finds herself staring at her mother the second she’s not looking—when she rises to get more meatballs for the boys, or to fetch another stack of napkins because Kyle keeps getting sauce on the ends of his sleeves.
And maybe because Blair has Henry, has her own secrets now, she can see it.
Not the secret itself, but the halo of something untold.
“So, looks like they’re moving the construction date up for the condos,” Blair’s father says, making his voice gentle.
He and Blair watch Iris. The condos are a difficult subject in their house.
Iris had attended zoning meetings, written letters to the local paper on the value of protecting the woods alongside the river.
“Moving the date up?” Iris asks. “When?”
“They break ground next week. They want to be able to lease to people by the start of the school year next year. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I thought you might have heard already.”
“Oh,” Iris says, turning to look out the bay window at the end of their dining table. Blair looks at Iris’s reflection, the pale oval of her face, her mother’s features blurry and indistinct.