The Almost Truth (2 page)

“Nice outfit,” she said, her smirk in full force.

“Aw, that would hurt my feelings if I cared about your opinion,” I said. This was a concept Rebecca had never fully grasped. She felt everyone should want her love and approval. She was also open to ass kissing. It really chafed her fanny that I didn’t care what she thought of me. It must have made her job as the popular mean girl so much less enjoyable when what she said didn’t bother me. She was also apparently unaware of the fact that high school was now over, making her the queen bee of nothing. I noticed a glint of silver on her perfectly pressed polo shirt. “Is that your cheerleading pin?” I asked.

Rebecca fingered the silver megaphone. “It’s my captain’s pin.”

I couldn’t decide if it was merely sad or full-on pathetic that she was still wearing it postgraduation. Rebecca was going to grow up to be one of those overly skinny women who hang out at the country club bitching about how their husbands are never around, how their maids don’t scrub the toilets to their satisfaction, and how high school was the best time of their lives. Personally, I was planning on my life getting better from this point forward.

I picked up my bag of groceries. “You have a good rest of the summer,” I called over my shoulder at her as I walked away. Being nice to Rebecca would screw with her head more than any sarcastic comeback. I tucked my bag into the basket attached to
the back of my scooter. Rebecca might mock my secondhand clothes and Brendan might make fun of my five-dollar cons, but in sixty-four days none of it would matter.

Unlike Rebecca, I didn’t plan to look back on high school with fondness. I didn’t plan to look back on it at all.

Y
ou know what you never see embroidered onto a pillow?
TRAILER, SWEET TRAILER
.

Of course no one calls them trailers anymore. Now they’re called modular housing. It’s like how garbagemen are sanitation engineers, and instead of calling yourself short, you’re vertically challenged. I never understood the point of all of that. Calling it modular housing doesn’t change the fact that I live in a place that is basically a glorified tin can and can be moved by a really strong wind.

Bowton Island is made up mostly of multimillion-dollar estates for high-flying software executives who commute by ferry over to Seattle. When your house is called an estate, you can bet it doesn’t tip over in a firm wind. Back in the early 1970s, a farmer who lived out on the very western tip of the island decided
he was sick of raising sheep and instead set up cement slabs to create a trailer park. Now there are about two dozen trailers on the property. Most of the people who live in them work at the Keppler, the luxury hotel on the island. The trailer I share with my mom looks like it’s sinking back into the earth. The once cream-colored siding is coated with dark olive algae due to all the rain. It needs to be power washed, but this requires both access to a power washer, and the motivation to do it, and we have neither. Our neighbor Ms. Flick keeps her place in immaculate condition, although she goes seriously overboard with the lawn ornaments. She loves those gnome statues. She has something like twenty of them sprinkled around her house. She also has two plastic geese that she dresses up to match the season. Currently they were wearing their Fourth of July outfits, bright red, white, and blue flag dresses. They were very patriotic geese. As I pulled up in front of our trailer, I could see Ms. Flick lying in her lounge chair in a bikini. Seeing a neighbor in a skimpy bikini is one thing, but Ms. Flick is over seventy.

I pulled my helmet off and yelled over to her. “Ms. Flick! You wanton trollop! Have you no sense of decency? There are innocent children in this neighborhood.”

“You’re lucky I’m not topless,” she called back. “Not to mention, there isn’t anyone innocent living around here.”

I laughed. Ms. Flick was one of the few things I was going to miss when I left. “You’re the kind of bad influence parents warn their kids about.” I used my key to unlock our mailbox and rifled
through the mail. Other than a bank statement for me, there was nothing but flyers and junk mail.

“Probably. There are few things scarier to some people than someone who’s happy being exactly who she is. Just because the world thinks old ladies shouldn’t flash a little skin doesn’t mean I have to follow their rules.”

“You never did strike me as much of a rule follower.”

“Took me years to figure this out, so take advantage of my knowledge. It is far easier to make your own rules than it is to run around trying to follow everyone else’s ideas of what you oughtta be doing.” Ms. Flick wagged her finger in my direction. “Remember that when you’re off at that fancy college in California. That, and don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t wear a bikini.”

I climbed the front steps. The screen door was hanging at a slight angle. “Any other advice?” I could do worse than listening to Ms. Flick.

She rubbed her chin and seemed to give the matter a lot of thought. “If you go out drinking, don’t mix wine and hard liquor. If you start with the grape, stay with the grape. If you start with the grain, stay with the grain. Unless you want to spend the wee hours puking.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll be around tomorrow if you still want to move your bookcases.” Ms. Flick was widowed, so over the past few years I’d been helping her out with some of the heavier chores around her place. I planned to ask Brendan if he would check in on her once in a while when I was gone.

The inside of our trailer had to be at least thirty degrees hotter than outside. The aluminum siding seemed to absorb the sun’s heat. My mom was lying on the sofa still in her uniform skirt from work, but she had stripped off her shirt and had just her bra on. Her bra was the sort of gray, dingy color that comes from being washed with black pants because doing two loads of laundry costs twice as much. She had a spray bottle filled with water in one hand that she dowsed herself with while the box fan propped on a crate beside the couch cooled her down. Yep, that was my family. Classy.

“How was work?” I asked, passing by the sofa to put the few things I’d picked up in the fridge. This is the benefit of living in a metal shoe box. It’s small enough to have a conversation in opposite ends and still hear each other perfectly. I chucked the junk mail into the recycling box.

“We’ve got a convention in the hotel for the next couple of days, bunch of home-based makeup saleswomen.” My mom was a maid at the Keppler. It used to be a destination for presidents and Hollywood stars way back when. Now most of the business came from conventions, weddings, and random rich people who liked to pretend they were presidents or Hollywood stars. The hotel had been built in the 1920s. I was pretty sure my mom felt like she had been cleaning rooms since then. It wasn’t the kind of employment that was known for high levels of job satisfaction.

“I take it the makeup women are slobs?”

“Women are the worst. A woman traveling on her own is
just so glad she doesn’t have to be the one cleaning that she’ll go out of her way to let loose. They wipe their lipstick off on the towels, put their muddy shoes up on the bedspread, toss piles of empty wine bottles in the trash, and they don’t even leave a dollar on the dresser when they’re done. A man might be a slob, but his wife has trained him to know it, and he’ll at least tip. Except for the real jerks.”

“Huh.” I turned to put the apples on the counter and slammed my hip against the sink. Stupid small kitchen. “What were you thinking about for dinner?”

Mom sighed. “It’s too hot to make anything. Maybe we’ll just have sandwiches.”

When I was little, my mom had prided herself on being the übermom. She would have cookies waiting for me after school and would make all my Halloween costumes from scratch. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment she’d decided she couldn’t be bothered anymore, but it had been clear for some time that she had retired from the mom business. The most she was willing to do now was phone it in. “Sure. You want me to make them?”

“That would be great. Wait a bit though. I had a late lunch.” My mom closed her eyes. She would lie there all night. In a while she would turn on the TV as background noise and spend the night reading one of her hundreds of romance novels. She would fall asleep with the book propped up on her chest and dream of a world full of swarthy pirates with hearts of gold and women whose dresses kept falling off.

I went to my room. Incoming college freshmen all over the world were wondering how they would ever fit everything they owned into a small dorm room. I, on the other hand, was thrilled with the idea of having more space. My twin bed and a dresser barely fit into the room. If the drawers were pulled out, they actually touched the bed. Years ago when I was in sort of a goth phase, I’d painted the walls a dark navy blue. I’d left them that way because it seemed like too much effort to paint over it. The dark paint didn’t do much to make the space look any bigger. I flopped on the bed and looked up at the ceiling, bowed with age. I wondered if it was slowly going to press down on my head like a trash compactor. Maybe I should have gone out with Brendan. Sitting around here sweating and eating sandwiches made on day-old rolls my mom got from the hotel kitchen didn’t exactly sound like a rocking good time.

I pulled the box of all my Berkeley stuff out from under my bed. My version of porn was pictures of college students wandering around various campuses. I couldn’t get enough. I’d already memorized the college map for Berkeley and could tell you the exact distance from the Haviland building to the Calvin Laboratory. I’d gone online and toured every inch of the campus that was visible on Google Maps. I’d even ordered a sweatshirt with the giant University of California logo on the front. I would wear it all the time if I wouldn’t sweat to death in this heat. For now, it was perfectly folded on top of my dresser in a place of honor. I could see it every time I walked in or out of the room.

I unfolded my acceptance letter. It was practically a holy relic as far as I was concerned. It was my official get-out-of-jail-free card. Ms. Lee, our school guidance counselor, had been annoyed with me. She kept pointing out that “given your family circumstances,” I would have likely qualified for enough aid to get a free ride to one of the Seattle community colleges, or maybe even a university, as long as I was willing to stay in state. Ms. Lee wasn’t a big believer in people like me dreaming big. I suspected she thought I would end up cleaning hotel rooms like my mom. She kept pointing out that going to Berkeley would mean having to pay out-of-state tuition and that my aid wouldn’t cover all my costs. She kept stressing how challenging it would be. Maybe she thought a step up for me would be getting my hairdressing license and opening up some place on the island with a cheesy name like Kwick Klip or A Cut Above.

I never bothered to explain to Ms. Lee that the whole point of going to Berkeley was to get away. No one knew me in California. No one. I’d pulled a lot of cons over the past few years, but I was planning to pull the ultimate con starting in September. I was going to entirely remake my life. As far as anyone there would know, I grew up on a lovely resort island just off the coast of Seattle with a nice, normal family. I planned to leave off everything about my mom being a maid, us living in a trailer, my dad being in jail for another random “scheme” he had failed at, and the fact that I’d basically stolen the money to attend college. I was going to get a degree in architecture and
travel the world designing beautiful buildings. No one was ever going to look down on me again.

I knew what I could do tonight. I’d go online and do some shopping for bedspreads. I’d exchanged a few e-mails with Cheryl, who was going to be my new roommate. The housing department had matched us up. So far I was pretty impressed. I’d been afraid I’d be matched with some bubbly cheerleader type who would clash with my preference for being cynical. It isn’t that I don’t like chronically happy people; I just see it as sort of a minor deformity, like having a cleft palate. Cheryl is from Oregon and is really into politics. She could list what legislation was currently being debated and tell you the name of the Speaker of the House. She sounded really serious about her education, and I could tell I wasn’t going to have a problem with her swinging from the light fixtures while high on magic mushrooms. We were both going to be there to learn. She planned to change the world, and I planned to change my life. We’d talked about what each of us would bring in the fall and decided to buy new bedspreads so our beds would match.

I turned on my laptop so it would have time to warm up. It was ancient and practically the size of a briefcase. When I was done with it, I would have to donate it to a museum. That was one more thing I was going to have to get in the next couple weeks. I’d need something more up-to-date for college.

The list of stuff I needed to buy for school was huge. Brendan could laugh at my five-dollar cons if he wanted, but it had all
added up. In three and a half weeks I would send the college my deposit, four thousand dollars. Then I figured it was going to be at least another five thousand to cover everything from the laptop, a decent suitcase, some new clothes, a new bedspread, and a plane ticket to San Fran. Right now the only suitcase I had was a beat-up duffel bag. If we traveled anywhere that required more stuff than could fit in there, my mom shoved it in garbage bags. Can you say tacky? As a joke, for graduation Brendan had given me a card announcing he’d gotten me a new set of luggage. When I opened the package, it was a box of Hefty trash bags. He’d pointed out that he’d sprung for the fancy bags with drawstrings. Ha ha ha.

I’d arranged a student loan and some grants to cover the rest of my tuition, but I knew I’d still need money for books and everything else during the year. Even if I got a part-time job, I was still going to go through my nest egg pretty quick. I pulled out the bank statement that had come in the mail and tore it open. I didn’t need to read the statement; I could tell you exactly how much was in the account down to the penny, but seeing the figure in black and white made me relax. I’d been saving it for years, ever since I’d realized that if I wanted anything better than my current life, it was going to be up to me. And if I was going to go to the trouble of remaking my life, I didn’t plan to settle for good enough. I was going to live in a dorm room with matching bedspreads and a roommate who would probably end up in Congress someday. I was going to get an amazing education
and get a job that didn’t involve cleaning toilets, or hoping not to get caught stealing. My life wasn’t just going to be different; it was going to be
better
. It was worth every dollar I’d saved.