Seven Days in June by Tia Williams
Chapter 14
Girling About
“SPARROW ALWAYS DOES THIS,” WAILED PARSLEY KATZEN, WHO WAS TEN minutes into a diatribe. “She’s so thirsty. Such a try-hard.”
Audre was in no mood for this drama. All Parsley ever talked about was Sparrow Shapiro. And Riverdale. And now Audre was stuck sitting next to her for the next hour. As if detention could get much worse.
“I wore my new platform booties yesterday,” started Parsley, “and Sparrow goes, ‘Oh, I ordered the same ones from Urban Outfitters last weekend.’ Bitch, no you did not. You just need an alibi for when you come to school wearing my shit.”
Fighting off an eye roll, Audre gave the mildest response she could muster. “Maybe she did buy them. We all buy the same stuff. Look, we’re both wearing the Keith Haring Vans.”
“Vans are ubiquitous,” scoffed Parsley, who Audre suspected didn’t know how to spell “ubiquitous.”
This isn’t about Sparrow stealing your booties, thought Audre. This is about Sparrow stealing your bat mitzvah entrance song. As if anyone had the monopoly on “Old Town Road.”
Audre didn’t want to discuss this anymore. The good news was, distracting Parsley was easy. “Your brows are the cutest. Did you get them microbladed?”
“Yes! At Bling Brows. They’re good, right?”
“Iconic.” Audre stifled a yawn.
Parsley squealed and then checked her reflection in her iPhone. She stuck out her tongue, threw up a peace sign, and snapped a selfie. “I’m so cute, ugh.”
Perfect. Now Audre could mope in peace.
All day, she’d been holding back tears. But since her brand was Consistently Composed, none of the four other kids in Cheshire Prep’s strikingly low-stakes detention would’ve noticed.
Audre could count on one hand the number of times she’d been outwardly bummed at school. Or said a really inflammatory cuss word, like fuckshit. Or trashed a friend behind her back. No one ever knew how she really felt.
Audre Zora Toni Mercy-Moore was a leader, after all! And in the wrong hands, this social power could inspire cliquey shenanigans. Thusly, Audre always tried to seem positive, chill, sane. If her day sucked, she’d just go home, sketch something, read You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, and cuddle in bed with her mom.
Audre’s emotions were hers to deal with. Other kids really just wanted to talk about themselves, anyway. If you let them, unobstructed, they trusted you. Besides, therapists should never introduce their feelings into a session. (She’d learned this in third grade while reading Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.)
So despite being stuck in detention and devastated, she was cool. Never mind that the day before, her mom had implied that Audre was the reason she had no life, no love. No real happiness.
I’m a robot, so you can be a butterfly.
Had she always felt like Audre was holding her back? Had her birth been a mistake?
Audre and her mom had never had an all-out brawl before. They were bickerers, not fighters. But yesterday, in Cheshire Prep’s main hallway, her mom had glared at her like she was the catalyst for all the stress, strife, and strain in the world.
I’m ruining her life, thought Audre. I can fix everyone I know but her.
And it stung, because Eva was her best friend. Of course, Audre adored her dad and his big, bustling extended family in California. On Sunday, she was flying out to spend the summer in Dadifornia—and she already knew it’d be a blast. Her dad was vacation, though. Eva was home.
It had been only the two of them forever. Girling about, creating inane rituals for the hell of it. Taking adventure walks every Saturday. Watching midcentury musicals on Wednesday nights. Collaging vision boards to manifest Oscar wins. Attending drag-queen bingo every Easter. Ordering the entire menu at their June brunch at Ladurée (steak au poivre, macarons, chocolate éclairs, lavender tea, and a Pepto Bismol chaser!) each year before Audre’s flight to California.
Tweens were supposed to hate their moms, because most mothers had forgotten how confusing it was to be twelve, thirteen, fourteen. How pointless and powerless you felt. But Eva got her. She validated her thoughts, her opinions. Besides, she wasn’t like other moms. She was like the young, quirky aunt on a network sitcom. The one you ran to when your actual mom was too uptight to discuss Plan B.
Audre idolized her.
When Audre was four, she’d tried to hop into the shadow that Eva cast on the walls. What she wouldn’t have given to try her on.
On her sixth Christmas, she’d asked Santa to make Eva the same age as her so they could be BFFs.
In second grade, she’d snuck up on a napping Eva and colored her entire forearm with a highlighter. Because she was “important.”
On days when Eva was too busy to notice, she snuck her special ring out of her room and wore it. To be like her and to feel protected by mommy magic.
And to this day, insomniac Audre still crawled into bed with her, every night around 3:00 a.m. And Eva, usually balancing an ice pack on her head, big-spooned her back to sleep, her warm hand cupping her cheek. Her sheets always smelled of the peppermint and lavender oils she rubbed on her head at night. Audre loved sinking into this scent. And if Eva wasn’t in too much pain, she’d sing her an old lullaby.
Dors, dors, p’tit bébé
’Coutes le rivière
’Coutes le riviere couler
Eva didn’t speak Creole, so she sang it in a bastardized, phonetic way. Dough-dough, tee-bay-bay. Neither one of them knew what the song meant, but it didn’t matter. This was when the good sleep started. The peppermint-and-lavender, dough-dough sleep.
Audre’s thoughts slowly ratcheted up from miserable to indignant. She thinks I’m a burden.
As if it were so easy being Eva’s daughter. A babysitter for a twelve-year-old? Constant check-ins, even if she was just walking to a friend’s house? And then there was the whole Cursed thing. When Atticus Seidman texted the entire class a gross scene from book six of Cursed, Audre had to play along, when all the while her soul was cringing.
The sex itself didn’t freak her out. Audre was raised by a mom who used the correct words for private parts, was consistently honest about where babies came from, and championed masturbation (“Self-love is paramount!”). Sex was natural, but her mom writing about it wasn’t. Gross. She was so asexual! She was just…Mommy. Cuddly and cute. It was like imagining Pikachu writing porn.
Earlier that year, Ophelia Grey’s mom had forbidden her to attend Audre’s birthday party, because Eva was a “smut peddler.” Audre, despite her embarrassment, would defend Eva to the death. She told Ophelia that her mom was repressed, and suggested she try a dildo called the Quarterback, which she’d read about on BitchMedia.org. Eva had been furious with her. But after bedtime, Audre had heard her repeating the story to Auntie Cece and giggling till she cried.
Audre was proud of her mom, unconditionally. But because of one mistake, Eva was no longer proud of Audre.
What else could she do to please that woman? She was a model student. She’d never kissed a boy. Yes, she’d tried a Juul at Brooklyn Bowl’s teen night, but she’d barely even felt anything—until she went home and ate her entire bag of Halloween candy during the span of a six-minute YouTube cheek-contouring tutorial.
Eva didn’t know how lucky she was, having a daughter like her. If Audre couldn’t make her happy, nothing would. If living a dry, dateless life was good enough for her, then fine. But it wasn’t Audre’s fault. She hadn’t asked to be born. She’d learned this lesson from a powerful codependency-themed episode of Iyanla: Fix My Life.
Plus, the threat of being expelled wasn’t the end of the world. Audre was having second thoughts about her private school anyway. It just wasn’t real. She was secretly dying to go to public school, to experience true oppression. There, she could effect the most change.
How can I say I’m a plugged-in cultural force, when I’m surrounded by so much uselessaffluence? she thought. Private school is a dated, classist concept.
She was stifled at Cheshire Prep. And maybe that was the difference between Eva and Audre. Eva accepted being stifled. But Audre wanted to taste life, feel it, do stuff, go places. Be an adventurous woman. Like Auntie Cece! Or Grandma Lizette.
Audre wished she knew Grandma Lizette better. They FaceTimed on birthdays and holidays, but she’d visited Brooklyn only a couple of times. Eva said Lizette had a fear of flying—plus, they were always too busy with school and work to travel much—but Audre always wondered why Grandma Lizette wasn’t in their lives more.
In Eva’s stories, Lizette sounded divine. Too beautiful, too unique, too powerful for the world. When Audre’s Contemporary Art teacher assigned their final project, to paint a feminist icon—she knew she’d paint her grandmother. Lizette, who’d won a zillion titles in the notoriously racist, misogynist pageant industry and, with no education or resources, launched a career as a model and traveled the globe with her daughter. Eva was always talking about the years she’d spent in Switzerland. All that, and then Grandma Lizette had managed to send her daughter to Princeton, too! What couldn’t she do?
Grandma Lizette was a true American success story.
She would’ve loved me, Audre mused, her thoughts drowning out Parsley’s tirade about whatever.
As Audre continued to plummet, the supervising TA, Mr. Josh, was quietly freaking out. His blond pompadour was sweaty at the hairline, and his peaches-and-cream complexion had flushed a ruddy red. All session, he’d been glued to Book Twitter on his phone, following gossipy tweets with links from Lit Hub, LiteraryGossipBlog, BookBiz, et cetera.
Now he was pacing back and forth in front of the whiteboard, waiting for an opportunity to interrupt the girls. Parsley finally paused for breath. And then, summoning all the prep-school charm that kept him afloat at Vanderbilt while he really wanted to grow his hair to his knees, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, and write about the journey like a male Cheryl Strayed, he approached Audre’s chair.
“Hello, girls. How are you holding up?”
“We’re good, Mr. Josh,” said Audre. “Are we talking too much?”
“No, no, you’re fine! Audre, could I speak with you for a moment?”
Her heart sank. God, what did she do now? Pasting on a smile, she said, “Sure. Is everything okay?”
“No, no! You’re great. It’s just…ugh, sorry, I’m nervous.” He shook his whole body like a wet dog and started over. “Audre, your mom knows Shane Hall?”
Frowning, she asked, “Who?”
“Shane Hall, the novelist? He wrote Eight and See Saw.”
“Oh, him.” She wrinkled her nose. Shane Hall wrote what she called “F-train books”: the hardcovers grown-ups toted on the subway to flex that they were reading An Important and Culturally Relevant Book. Audre was a compulsive reader but wasn’t into F-train books. She knew about him, though.
“Didn’t he have a DUI or something?” asked Audre. “It was on TMZ, I think. My mom wouldn’t know someone like that.”
“Shane Hall,” mused Parsley. “His name sounds like a dorm.”
“I think your mom definitely knows him,” said Mr. Josh, thrusting his iPhone in Audre’s face.
There was Audre’s mom, snuggling up to Shane Hall on a bench. Eating ice cream. Looking happier than Audre had ever seen her look. A different kind of happy. The kind of happy that is, in fact, reflective of a person living their best life. The kind of happy that isn’t at all held back by a bothersome daughter.
Is Mommy dating this man?she wondered, her mind a swirl of confusion and hurt. Is she in love? What was that “who has time to date” speech about, then? Why did she lie to me? She’s out there, happy AF, while I’m feeling guilty?
“Anyway,” continued Mr. Josh, who Audre had forgotten was in the room, “Shane Hall is my favorite author. And I have a manuscript that I’d kill to get in his hands. I have it on a thumb drive. Do you think if I gave it to you, you could pass it to your mom?”
And then, for the first time in her school career, Audre let go.
“Quick question, Mr. Josh,” she said.
“Yes?”
“WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCKSHIT IS MY LIFE?”she wailed. Then she apologized. And burst into tears.