Rules for Being a Girl

Now she reaches up with her free hand, tucks my hair behind my ears. “You’re such a good girl, my Marin,” she says. “You don’t always have to be so good though. Lord knows I wasn’t.”

“Oh no?” I ask, unable to hide a smile.

“Don’t laugh,” Gram says. “I’m serious.”

“I believe you,” I say, although actually I don’t. For all her style and sophistication, Gram is one of the most buttoned-up people I’ve ever met: she married my grandpa when she was twenty-two, then raised my mom and her brothers while working part-time as a bookkeeper for a discount mattress company and hosting Tupperware parties on the weekends. I’ve literally never seen her without lipstick; she’s been wearing the same shade of Clinique since at least the eighties. “I want to hear more about this wild and crazy past, Gram.”

“Oh,” she says, waving her hand, the clear polish on her nails catching the sunlight trickling in through the window.

“Oh,” she says again, and just like that I know her mind is wandering. The most surprising thing about Gram’s illness is how fast it can make itself obvious, like she’s walked out of the room even though she’s still sitting right here.

“You want to see if Ina is on?” I ask before she can get flustered, reaching for the remote on the coffee table and clicking over to Food Network. My grandmother is obsessed with the Barefoot Contessa; my mom still buys her all the cookbooks on the day they come out, even though she only has a microwave and an electric kettle in her suite. Still, every once in a while we’ll come visit on a special occasion and find she’s made candied nuts or a specialty cocktail. I suspect Camille has something to do with it.

“She’s not on unti

l four,” my gram says now, frowning; her voice has taken on a different quality, thinner and a tiny bit peevish. “And I don’t like this other woman with all the cattle.” Still, she settles in to watch anyway, her knobby fingers wrapped around her glass of iced tea. I lean my head against the back of the chair.

My mom is prepping chicken cutlets for dinner when I get home from Sunrise late that afternoon, the kitchen warm and cozy even as the early dusk presses against the windows above the sink. The familiar smells of garlic and butter are heavy in the air.

“How was chess?” I ask Gracie, plucking a grape from the bowl on the counter and popping it into my mouth.

“Fine,” Gracie says with a shrug. She’s sitting at the peninsula, reconnecting my mom’s phone to the Bluetooth speaker my dad got her last Mother’s Day; no matter how many times Gracie does it for her, my mom always insists it doesn’t work. “I won my match.”

“She beat the pants off that smug little fish-face Owen Turner,” my mom—who has never let anyone’s age keep her from declaring them a blood enemy—says gleefully.

I laugh, reaching out and tugging the end of Gracie’s ponytail. “Well done.”

“Thanks,” she says, nodding with satisfaction as the speaker finally connects and the Italian opera music my mom loves fills the kitchen. “He said he was going to have to live the rest of his life in a remote village in Siberia to atone for the shame of losing to a girl.”

“Well, fish-face Owen Turner is welcome to do us all a favor and pack his bags,” I say brightly.

“That’s what I said!” My mom drops a kiss on my temple as she pulls a tub of frozen tomato sauce out of the freezer and sticks it in the microwave. “How was Gram?” she asks, once she’s hit the start button. Her voice is carefully casual, but she can’t disguise the flicker of worry across her face.

“She was fine,” I say, leaving out that one weird moment where she seemed to lose her train of thought. After all, it’s not like there’s anything anyone can do about it, and there’s no point in worrying my mom for no reason. I open the door to the refrigerator, waggle a bag of lettuce in her direction. “You want me to make a salad?”

My mom looks at me for another moment, eyes just slightly narrowed. Sometimes I think she’s psychic when it comes to me lying. “Sure,” she says finally. “A salad would be great.”

Five

Chloe wants to get an early start on her Christmas shopping, so we take the T into the city after school on Thursday to poke through the boutiques on Newbury Street. It’s feeling like the holidays for real now, the old-fashioned lampposts festooned with evergreen wreaths and all the store windows lined with twinkle lights and sprayed with fake snow. The dusky sky is a purple-blue.

“Did you know Bex is writing a novel?” I ask as we wander through the huge Urban Outfitters, pawing through racks of fuzzy sweaters and scented candles. I pick up a giant pair of white plastic sunglasses with heart-shaped lenses and wear them around the store for a while, making dumb faces into every mirror we pass.

Chloe looks at me over a display of coffee-table books. “How do you know that?” she asks.

I raise my eyebrows. “So you did know?”

“No,” she says, putting down the question-a-day journal she’s been considering and turning toward a rack of organic lipstick. “When did he tell you about it?”

“I saw him at Starbucks in Harvard Square over the weekend,” I tell her—aware even as I’m saying it that it sounds a little bit like I’m bragging, and there’s a tiny chance that maybe I am. “We wound up sitting there and talking for, like, two hours.”

Chloe looks surprised. “Seriously?” she asks. “What the heck did you guys even talk about for two hours?”

From the tone in her voice I can’t tell which one of us she thinks would have dragged down the conversation, Bex or me.

“I mean, I don’t know,” I say, suddenly wishing I hadn’t told her. “Random stuff, I guess. His novel, for one thing.”

I fill her in on the plot points, which actually do sound a tiny bit ridiculous now that I’m the one doing the explaining. “He does a better job talking about it,” I promise finally, putting the sunglasses back on the rack.