Chapter 30
On the drive to school, Rebecca plays the Disney Channel on Sirius, hoping to forestall conversation. Maddy mouths the words listlessly, staring out the window, troubled.
Distracted, she almost clips a bright-red Jaguar SUV pulling into the kiss-and-ride line. The driver slams the horn with the heel of her hand. Rebecca waves an apology, her mortification growing when she sees Sydney’s mom, Sheila, behind the wheel.
Sheila recognizes Rebecca, her face ripple-transforming into a practiced expression of affability. But her cheeks are too defined, her eyes feline sharp.
When it’s time to lurch forward in the line, Sheila flares her manicured hand, making a point of waving Rebecca ahead of her. Face burning, Rebecca gives a nervous gesture of thanks.
She pulls up to the drop-off point and taps the button for the minivan door to slide open.
But Maddy hits the button, and the door jerks shut again.
“Mommy,” she says.
“Time to go, Maddysaurus.” To Rebecca’s own ears, her voice sounds chirpy and fake. It sounds like the kind of voice Sheila Evans would use. “Let’s not hold up the line.”
But Maddy scrambles forward, leaning past the console to whisper hotly in Rebecca’s ear. “Bao-Bao isn’t Bao-Bao. Someone replaced him.”
Behind them, a horn blares. In the rearview, Rebecca sees Sheila give a lipsticked grin and a semi-aggressive wave for her to move along.
“No one replaced Bao-Bao,” Rebecca says on autopilot. She has long prided herself on her honesty, and yet now when it matters most, how easily she lies, how quickly it comes. “Don’t be silly, Maddysaurus.”
Maddy stays leaning forward, her backpack crowding the ceiling of the van, looking at her mom. Her expression is confusion and dismay. “I said, don’t call me that!”
The horn sounds again, and then another, a chorus of impatience.
“You have to get out, honey,” Rebecca says.
Maddy gives her a bruised look and slides toward the rear, tugged by the weight of her backpack. Rebecca glances back. Maddy’s brow is furrowed the way it gets when she talks about Sydney and the Mean Girls.
She looks betrayed.
Because she has been.
Patrick, a kiss-and-ride mainstay, helps gather Maddy out of the minivan and then knocks semi-aggressively on the side panel for Rebecca to get moving.
Rebecca pulls out.
In the rearview she watches Sheila shaking her head, rolling her eyes at one of the mom volunteers through the window.
Rebecca drives several blocks toward home.
Signaling responsibly, she pulls the minivan over to the curb.
She hears Maddy in her head, the scared whisper: Bao-Bao isn’t Bao-Bao. Then she replays herself gaslighting her daughter: Don’t be silly, Maddysaurus.
What is happening to her? What is she doing?
Her breaths jerk quicker and quicker until she lowers her face into her hands and sobs.