Free The Admissions by Meg Mitchell Moore

Cecily were too far apart in age to be competitive with each other, the way Henrietta and her younger sister were and the way that sometimes even Cecily and Maya were. Angela and Cecily simply coexisted. Cecily’s first word had been “Anla,” because she couldn’t pronounce the
g.
(Angela’s first word had been
libro,
owing to frequent viewings of a Spanish Baby Einstein video; her father had run with it as
substantiated
evidence of her bilingual capabilities, which were then nurtured in a series of early-childhood foreign language programs.)
    “I didn’t see you much today.”
    “Yeah,” said Angela. She twisted a piece of hair around her finger. “I know.”
    A crappy day, the crappiest of the crappy. Angela was having trouble concentrating on
Angela’s Ashes.
It all seemed very far away and irrelevant and
Irish.
She was on chapter four, the First Communion chapter.
They dried me. They dressed me in my black velvet First Communion suit with the white frilly shirt, the short pants, the white stockings, the black patent leather shoes. Around my arm they tied a white satin bow and on my lapel they pinned the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a picture with blood dripping from it, flames erupting all around it and on top a nasty-looking crown of thorns.
    What a scene. Man oh man. First of all, white stockings on a boy? Poor thing. The Hawthorne family as a whole had zero religion. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Angela’s mother had grown up attending St. Thomas More parish in Narragansett, a brown-shingled, high-steepled New England church with a low dark wood altar to which Nora dragged the entire Hawthorne family anytime they visited what Angela’s father always (ironically?) referred to as “the homestead.” Angela was
perennially
surprised to learn that her mother knew all the responses and spoke them along with the rest of the congregation, and that she even sang along with some of the hymns in a lilting, mostly in-tune voice. Except for those times Angela never heard her mother sing.
    In California: no church. Which was fine with Angela. Angela’s father had grown up “with the ranch as my chapel.” And Sundays, of course, belonged to open houses: real estate as religion.
    “Just wanted to check in, see how your day was.”
    “Checking in” was Angela’s mom’s
euphemism
for being extremely worried about her state of mind. Angela’s mother thought Angela worked too hard. She thought Angela pushed herself to extremes. She thought Angela didn’t laugh enough, didn’t hang out with her friends enough, didn’t eat enough or drink enough water or get enough sleep. Didn’t plan to apply to enough colleges…
    When Angela’s mother was young she had so much free time that she and Angela’s aunt Marianne were
bored
half the time. Blah blah blah, and etc. Angela loved her mother to the ends of the earth, but sometimes her mother just didn’t get it.
    “Fine,” she said. “Not bad.”
    Angela’s mother sat carefully on the edge of the bed. She folded a T-shirt that Angela had left crumpled on the floor and said, “Yeah? Good day?”
    Sometimes Angela wished she were still small enough to curl up on her mother’s lap, like Maya was.
    Did she have to say it again? “Fine,” she repeated, trying not to sound testy. But feeling it. Her mother was no longer acting like a bear in a children’s book.
    What a smart girl. Look, Gabe, it’s a chapter book, she read it all by herself!
    “Everything okay at school?”
    Unbelievable. “Sure. Same as ever.”
    “Lots of homework?”
    Angela yawned. “Always.”
    “Everything
really
okay?”
    Angela eyed her mother. “Yes, Mom, sure. Why?”
    Angela, did you do your homework? Did you did you did you.
    “Oh, it’s nothing. Just that Maya said something about she heard you crying sometimes in the afternoons—” Her mother stole a
surreptitious
glance at the calendar.
    “
Crying?
Me? Why would I be crying in the afternoons?”
    “I don’t know. That’s