Trauma Queen (4 page)

“Look, gotta go,” Emma says quickly.

“Your mom?”

“Yeah.” She laughs awkwardly. “You know how it is.”

“Has she . . . you know. Said anything?”

“Not specifically. But I'm still thinking that if we give it enough time, she'll calm down. And then maybe you can visit in the summer.”

I swallow. “That would be so great, Em.”

“EMMA,”
I hear. “
WHAT DID I JUST SAY? DO YOU THINK I'M DEAF? DO YOU THINK I DON'T KNOW WHO YOU'RE TALKING TO?”

“See you online,” she whispers. And then she hangs up.

We moved to Aldentown with only three weeks left to the school year. Most parents would have waited until summer vacation, I knew, but Mom had insisted that Beau and Bobbi were counting on her to perform, and that we had to get to Aldentown as soon as we possibly could. And then of course once we got there, and all the boxes had been re-unpacked, she insisted that Kennedy and I start school the following Monday to “get into the swing of things.”

“Can't we just wait until September?” I begged her. I was convinced that the least she owed us was the chance to start school with everybody else. Plus I was
just fine hanging out in my tiny new bedroom, talking with Kennedy, working on my patchwork Thing. Right before we moved, Gram had mailed me a big box of scraps, and I guess it kind of comforted me to be stitching them together. I liked designing patterns with the weird, clashing fabric, and also making something that kept changing shape. But mostly what I think I liked was the soothing rhythm of sewing: poke, pull, poke, pull.

“No, Mari, you can't,” Mom answered me firmly. She put her hands on my shoulders and looked right into my face. “Let me tell you something, baby: Whenever I add a new dog to my Walkers, I can tell right away if it's going to work out. And you know how I know? I watch if the dog joins right in, sniffing all the other dogs' butts, or if he hangs back, like he's afraid. The ones who hang back always tangle the leashes.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, great. You're comparing me to a dog?”

She threw her head back and laughed. “I mean it as the highest compliment. Get in there and sniff everyone's butt, Marigold.”

Another thing about my mom: She knows how to make a point.

So I started Aldentown Middle at the end of May, the time of year when everybody is sick of school, and also sick of everybody else, and fights break out. But it didn't take a whole lot of butt-sniffing to figure out that at this school, the sixth grade wasn't just fighting. It was at war.

For some reason nobody seemed to know, Sarah Wong and Ally Ferrara, the two most powerful girls in the grade, had decided that they were mortal enemies, and that everyone had to choose sides. You had two choices at lunch: You could sit at Ally's table or at Sarah's table, and once you made your choice, that was it.

Of course, if I was the kind of join-right-in dog Mom approved of, I'd have immediately walked right up to these girls, and decided who would make the better friend, or at least the worse enemy. But I'm a leash-tangler. I admit it. In most new situations, I hang back, take my time, try to figure out what I'm thinking. And feeling. Anyway, my point is, I wasn't going to show up at Aldentown Middle School and make a whole bunch of quick decisions about people, especially when those decisions were the kind you couldn't unmake. So I kept to myself in the lunchroom,
painting cream-cheese pictures on a rubbery bagel. I was fine like this for three straight lunches. And then on the fourth lunch, I realized that Emma Hartley had slid into the seat beside me.

Right away I could tell she was hiding. This shocked me. I mean, I'd been in school less than a week, but already I'd noticed how popular she was. And not just popular: athletic, fashionable, smiley. Girls like this usually totally psyched me out, and I didn't even
try
to get to know them. But there was something about the way Emma was sitting there, scraping the crust off her sandwich with grape-colored fingernails, that made me ask if she was okay.

She looked up at me. Her light brown eyes almost matched her auburn hair. “No,” she said, a little too loudly. “I
hate
all this fighting.”

“You mean between Ally and Sarah?”

She nodded. “It's not even
about
anything. And I've always been friends with both of them, so how can I possibly choose sides?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it's so much easier when there's a villain.” I'd been thinking about this a lot lately, how Mom loved it when she had something—or someone—to make her angry. It wasn't even just that
it gave her material for her art. It's like it gave her energy.

Emma smiled at that. “Your name is Marigold, right? That's so funny; I just bought some nail polish called Marigold.”

“You did?” I laughed. “Was it orange?”

“Sort of a yellow-orange. I thought it would be fun and summery, kind of a different look, but on me it didn't work. Can I give it to you?”

“Sure,” I said excitedly, even though I never wore nail polish.

“I have soccer practice this afternoon. Are you free tomorrow?”

Of course I was; I'd just moved in, so it wasn't like I had a whole bunch of after-school clubs or dentist appointments all lined up.

And so, amazingly, starting the very next day, Emma and I began spending practically all her soccer-free afternoons together. We didn't do anything special, mostly just listening to music, encouraging each other's crushes, polishing our fingernails. I was the official polisher; Emma's nails came out blobby and tacky if she did them herself, and I liked being careful, so I always did us both. We'd go to Rite Aid after school and pick
out the colors with the best names
(Hot Date! Puppy Love! Cotton Candy! Sugar Rush!).
She'd pay for the polish with her allowance money, and never ask me to pay her back. And usually we'd end up at my apartment, where we'd watch MTV or old episodes of
The Simpsons
, and apply three glossy coats, first to her nails, then to mine.

The other main thing we did was complain about our moms. In fact, the more I got to know Emma, the more I told her about Mom's performances, and the dogwalking, and the moving, and the marbles. Once I even told her I wished I could switch places with her, and live in a big, soap-smelling house with a dad whose life wasn't Dedicated to Art, and a mom who knew everybody in town and didn't yell at principals and pour oil all over her head.

“Listen, Mari,” Emma said to me. “You
think
your mom's harder to live with than mine, but she's not. I mean, okay, so maybe she drives you crazy in public”—this was about the time Mom had taken up unicycling on the school soccer fields to improve her balance—“but at least she doesn't nag you about lining up your sneakers at a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree angle to your bed. And I bet she doesn't go ballistic if there's a leftover hair in your hairbrush.”

“Wait,” I said, laughing. “Stop. Your mom cares if there's a single hair in your hairbrush?”

Emma shook a bottle of Pink-tastic so hard I could hear the little brush rattling inside. Then she twisted off the lid and handed it to me.

“I'm not exaggerating,” she insisted. “And she won't let up until the hair is gone.
‘Emma, have you taken care of the situation? It's been three minutes since my last reminder. Do I really have to jump up and down and turn purple again?'
I'm serious, Mari. My mom's obsessed. She never relaxes about
anything
.”

“Whoa,” I said, slowly and neatly brushing the Pink-tastic on Emma's ragged thumbnails.

“And does she go after my brothers like that? Even though all four of them are total slobs? No. She cleans up after them. You know why?” She blew on her thumbs. “Because they're boys.”

“That's so unfair!”

“Tell me about it.” A very sweet mutt that Mom was babysitting named Maxie came over and licked Emma on the nose. She laughed. “Just be thankful for what you've got.”

“Oh, I am,” I admitted. “I was just kidding about switching places.” And then I scratched Maxie between
the ears, which wasn't easy to do with my own sticky nails.

That was during the summer. By the fall of seventh grade, Emma was getting so frustrated with her mom's constant nagging that she started eating dinner with us every Friday night, and sometimes during the week, too, when she didn't have soccer practice. Mrs. Hartley wasn't too sure about Mom—I could tell this by her eyebrow angle and her no-teeth smile when she asked polite questions about Mom's “stage act.” But she had four sons who did a million team sports each, and I think she was glad sometimes that she didn't have to rush home from whatever practice to fix dinner for Emma. So she always let Emma stay at our apartment, even though, from Emma's side of the phone conversation, you could tell her mom was starting to put up some sort of argument.

One Friday evening in early November, Emma and I were sitting in the living room waiting for our nails (that day, Juicy Passionfruit) to dry. Suddenly Mom walked in the front door and immediately flopped on the sofa next to Emma.

“Well, girls, I give up,” she announced.

“You give what up?” I asked.

“The whole performance thing,” Mom said. “All of it.”

I sighed. I'd heard this one before. “What happened?”

“What do you
think
happened
,
Mari? They rejected my grant proposal.”

“Who did?” Emma asked, outraged.

“The American Arts Council.”

Emma squinted at me like
Who? What? How dare they?

I examined a passionfruit-colored pinky nail. “Did they say why this time?”

“No,” Mom said. “My guess, and this is based on pure speculation, is that they think paintball is more of a
sport
than an
artistic medium
. And they think ‘random'
is a curse word. Just my theory, of course.”

“Maybe you can get the money for your show somewhere else,” Emma suggested.

“Hmmph,” Mom said. She put up her feet on the coffee table. She twirled her wild frizzy hair into a ponytail, then let it sproing out angrily. “What money? What show? Mari, I hate to say it, but this looks like a definite Chocolate Night.”

Emma's eyes lit up. “A what?”

“Chocolate Night,” I said. “It's sort of a family tradition. It's what we save for those special sucky moments.”

Mom poked my arm. “Like the time my beloved daughter took sides with The Horrible Mona Woman.”

“Dad's girlfriend,” I explained.

Mom snorted. “Or the time I rented the Lewisville Community Theater for a special performance of
Swan Lake
—”

“Mom played all the parts,” I said. “On rollerblades.”

“You bet,” Mom said. “It was fantastic. Except for one small detail: Nobody showed up.”

“Gram did. And Uncle Robby.”

“Uncle Robby doesn't count, Marigold. He left before intermission.”

“Yeah, well, he had to go to work. And anyway Gram loved it.”

“Because she's my
mother.
She's
required
to love it.
”
Mom stuck out her tongue at me. “So after that fiasco we had a huge feast of Snickers bars and Tootsie Rolls.”

“And Kennie threw up.”

“But not from the chocolate. From the excitement.” Mom got up and did a yoga stretch. Downward Dog, or some semi-alarming name like that. “Anyway, Emma, the moral of the story is, you're welcome to stay for dinner. If you don't mind shameless self-indulgence.”

“Why would I mind?” Emma said, laughing.

A few minutes later, Mom went back out to Stop & Shop. When she came back, she called us all to the table and passed out Dove Bars and Twizzlers and Tootsie Rolls and Milky Ways. (The Twizzlers were mainly for Kennedy, who was still a little shaken from the last Chocolate Night.) We drank gallons of milk and Emma told hilarious stories about her four slobby brothers, like the time the oldest one, named Seth, microwaved an unopened can of SpaghettiOs and almost incinerated the house. By seven thirty there were candy wrappers all over the kitchenette and we were feeling a little sick. But at least Mom was laughing along with the rest of us, which was the whole purpose of Chocolate Night.

Only then, unfortunately, Trisha Hartley showed up.

When I was a little kid, I thought my mom was the coolest mother in existence. No, I
knew
she was. Because everybody said so.

I remember one time in second grade when all the parents were supposed to come to our classroom and talk about their jobs. Matt's mom went first and talked about how she was a dermatologist, and how you should always wear sunscreen. Will's mom talked about working in a bank. Emma's dad talked about marketing, only it was so boring I didn't listen.