Free The Girls by Emma Cline Page B

his voice easy, like he was trying to be my friend. “I get it. You wanna be out of the house. Tired of living with ol’ mom, huh?”
    “Pathetic,” I mouthed.
    He didn’t understand what I had said, only that I hadn’t responded how he wanted. “Biting your nails is an ugly habit,” he said hotly. “An ugly, dirty habit for dirty people. Are you an ugly person?”
    My mother reappeared in the doorway. I was sure she had overheard, and now she knew that Frank wasn’t a nice man. She would be disappointed, but I resolved to be kinder, to help more around the house.
    But my mother just wrinkled her face. “What’s happening?”
    “I was just telling Evie she shouldn’t bite her nails.”
    “I tell her that, too,” my mother said. Her voice rattled, her lips twitching. “She could get sick, ingesting germs.”
    I cycled through the possibilities. My mother was simply stalling. She was taking a moment to figure out how best to drive Frank from our lives, to tell him I was no one else’s business. But when she sat down and allowed Frank to rub her arm, even leaning toward him, I understood how it would go.
    When Frank went to the bathroom, I figured there would be some kind of an apology from her.
    “That shirt is too tight,” she whispered harshly. “It’s inappropriate, at your age.”
    I opened my mouth to speak.
    “We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said. “You better believe we’ll talk.” When she heard Frank’s footsteps returning, she gave me one last look, then rose to meet him. They left me alone at the table. The overhead light on my arms and hands was severe and unlovely.
    They went on the porch to sit, my mother keeping her cigarette butts in a mermaid tin. From my bedroom I heard their staggered talk late into the night, my mother’s laugh, simple and thoughtless. The smoke from their cigarettes drifting through the screen. The night boiled inside me. My mother thought life was as easy as picking gold from the ground, as if things could be that way for her. There was no Connie to temper my upset, just the suffocating constancy of my own self, that numb and desperate company.
    —
    There are ways I made sense of my mother later. How fifteen years with my father had left great blanks in her life that she was learning to fill, like those stroke victims relearning the words for car and table and pencil. The shy way she looked at herself in the oracle of the mirror, as critical and hopeful as an adolescent. Sucking in her stomach to zip her new jeans.
    —
    In the morning, I came into the kitchen and found my mother at the table, her bowl of tea already drained, sediment flecking the bottom. Her lips were tight, her eyes wounded. I walked past her without speaking, opening a bag of ground coffee, purple and heady, my mother’s replacement for the Sanka that my father liked.
    “What was that about?” She was trying to be calm, I could tell, but the words were rushed.
    I shook the grounds into the maker, turned on the burner. Keeping a Buddhist calm on my face as I went about my tasks, untroubled. This was my best weapon, and I could feel her getting agitated.
    “Well, now you’re quiet,” she said. “You were very rude to Frank last night.”
    I didn’t respond.
    “You want me to be unhappy?” She got to her feet. “I’m talking to you,” she said, reaching to snap the stove off.
    “Hey,” I said, but her face made me shut up.
    “Why can’t you let me have anything?” she said. “Just one little thing.”
    “He’s not going to leave her.” The intensity of my feeling startled me. “He’s never going to be with you.”
    “You don’t know anything about his life,” she said. “Not anything. You think you know so much.”
    “Oh yeah,” I said. “Gold. Right. Big success there. Just like Dad. I bet he asked you for money.”
    My mother flinched.
    “I try with you,” she said. “I’ve always tried, but you aren’t trying at all. Look at yourself. Doing nothing.” She