My head jerks with each stroke of the hot comb as my mom brushes and flat-irons my hair into submission. Apparently, I am tender-headed, which is a black thing. My hair is such a thing. To distract myself, I pull up some videos of the Get Up Kids on my laptop. In the mirror I see my mom wince and suck her teeth.
“What are these white boys so upset about? This whining is…really extreme.”
“It’s called emo.”
“It’s sort of irritating, isn’t it?” She laughs, and it’s not a ha-ha laugh. It’s some kind of mom code I can’t understand.
“It’s not just music, Mom. It’s a style. It’s a way of life.”
I know it sounds dumb, but whatever, it’s true.
“I guess I just don’t understand what’s so cool about being sad.”
This is a very popular sentiment at home, at school, in my whole tiny world. Every bad mood is temporary, just waiting to be overcome. I’ve always been told that the solution to all problems is prayer and serving others. If you are holy, you are happy. I guess I’m just not good enough.
(Now that I know what depression is, it’s glaringly obvious that I’ve been depressed for years, maybe since birth. I’ve always been wrong like this. For example, I’ve been banned from having a slumber party since I had my first and only birthday sleepover at age ten and was so aggravated that I screamed at everyone there and tried pulling my hair out. My parents always say I “threw a fit,” but it sounds like the way Susan describes anxiety.)
(Later, when my friends made fun of me about it, I pretended to laugh it off with them. I did the same when it happened on a school trip to Six Flags. And there were all those times at the crowded mall in Riverside when I “had a fit” on the benches outside the Body Shop because I thought I couldn’t breathe—panic attacks.)
Of course my mom doesn’t understand being emo. She still asks me every year if I’m going to try out for cheer, and she’s so unsubtly horrified by all my outfit choices. She can’t hide anything in her face, her over-the-top expressions. Dad, Malcolm, and I have started to retort, “You didn’t need to,” when she cries, “I didn’t say anything!” It’s sort of funny because it’s so blatant, but mostly it’s frustrating. I wish she would just say how she feels about stuff, what she really thinks—otherwise, why do I have to?
In high school, she was a cheerleader when she met my dad, a football player at a rival school. In college she pledged a black sorority. She always had a boyfriend. She’s trendy, at least in her mom way, wearing low Converses and Banana Republic sweater dusters over my brother’s jersey for game days. She makes sure the house is always cute, spotless. The mainstream works for her. And then she gets a daughter like me.
* * *
—
The best way for me to describe our little Southern California town is “nothing surrounded by something.” Mountains, Disneylands, Hollywoods, Laguna Beaches, casinos, Palm Springs hotels: we have it all. We have all of it only forty-five minutes away. Our town is known for its oranges; for 0.8 miles of Route 66; for its abundance of conservative churches and their simple, kind congregations. The houses line up in clean rows. Front yards are neat green squares, SUVs and raised trucks piously adorned with Jesus fish emblems and Republican party stickers. The sun is involved in every day, pressing on spotless sidewalks, the tops of shiny cars. Eyes glaze over with tracts of artificial grass. Shit is extremely pleasant.
I hate it here.
After only one and a half dreamy, grungy songs from Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, I arrive at Meg’s mom’s address. As I park I have a faint sense of having been to the house before, but I could be wrong. (In our landscape, things are like sitcom reruns, people and events repeating, all more of the same.)
My outfit is: a striped polo shirt from the boys’ section of Goodwill, cutoff jean shorts, and (just because) a pair of red kitten heels left over from my fifties housewife phase. (No “Is that what you’re wearing?” from Mom—a distinct Bummer Summer perk.) Making my way up the driveway, I wipe nervous sweat from my neck and tug at my cutoffs.
A little blond girl with a large forehead, maybe seven, greets me at the door before I even knock. She wears only a one-piece swimsuit, her stringy hair dripping wet all over the entryway tile. I panic—I didn’t know this was a pool thing.
“Who are you?” Her neck snaps back as if on a pulley.
“I’m here for the— I’m here for Meg.” She stares blankly. “Morgan,” I point to my chest like a caveperson.
If I have been here, it was years ago, before Meg’s parents split up—this is my first encounter with the result of Liz Sloane’s remarriage to a much younger, Scandinavian-looking guy.
“Okay,” she says, smiling creepily with gummy cheeks. Disclaimer: I really do not like children. I’m a little bit afraid of them. Malcolm’s only two years younger than me (sometimes we even say we’re twins), so I can’t imagine living with such a small, foreign thing. I don’t even babysit—I wouldn’t know what the hell to do.
The girl makes no attempt to hide her gaze, which starts at the top of my head and slowly moves down to my feet. Her verdict: “You’re brown. I like your shoes.”
I laugh, my first instinct. But I feel hella awkward. I mean, the kid is just stating the obvious. That I am brown and have awesome shoes on are two true things about me.
(So what’s this feeling, like dark, inky water suddenly rising around me?)
My mouth hangs open and I finally blink, noticing that Meg has appeared in the doorway.
“Geez, let her get through the door first, girl,” Meg says. She lifts up the little freak with one arm like a grocery bag and drags me by the other hand into the foyer. Muscles bulge like clementines under the pale skin of her sticklike arms.
“This is Jessie,” she says offhandedly as the girl wriggles from her clutch and bounces away. Meg flings up her free hands flippantly. “So, welcome to the party and all that good stuff.”
Every wall is adorned with yearly coordinated-outfit mall portraits of their entire blended family and school pictures of Meg, Jessie, and Meg’s older brother, Ryan. A ceiling fan hums in the sunken family room. It smells like any other white person’s house: a little musty maybe, like the past, and also like Sea Breeze Yankee Candles.
“Sorry I, uh, didn’t know it was a pool thing.”
“It isn’t,” Meg laughs. She’s wearing baseball sleeves under faded overall shorts, and a White Stripes pin. It is a very good outfit. “Wanna come sit outside?”
“Sure.” I present her gift. My mom bought it, as if I’m in first grade or something. It’s some lotions from Bath & Body Works that Meg will almost certainly never use.