The Spring Girls

“It’s that you’ll be in tenth grade. Freshman year is always tough, for sure, but you’ve had a break. Do you think it’s time to try it again? Now that Jo could get you into Yearbook with her? You’re so smart, Beth.”

This wasn’t the first time Mom had brought it up, but this time was much more direct than ever before.

“You don’t get it. It’s not about being smart, Meredith,” I said accidentally. It threw her off, I could tell. My sisters had picked up Jo’s habit of calling her by her name, but I liked to call her Mom. Sometimes I would call her Meredith out of my sister’s habit, but I tried not to. “It’s not about me being smart, it’s about the majority of the school day having nothing to do with actual school.”

“What does that mean?”

I sighed. I felt like I had explained this enough times in the last year.

“Is this about bullying? Because—”

“It’s not about bullying, Mom. It’s about no one getting that I don’t want to be around people the way that Meg and Jo and Amy and you and Dad do. I can’t learn with a room full of people. I’m sorry if it’s not normal—”

“Beth . . .” Mom paused. Her tone was unreadable and her eyes were full of guilt. I didn’t ever want her to feel guilty, I just wanted her to see that this wasn’t about her. “I wasn’t saying you have to go back to school. I was only bringing it up because of the email. You know what’s best for you, okay? I trust you to know what’s best for you, and if you want to be homeschooled until college, that’s okay.”

I knew I was lucky to have the option of staying home. Most parents would have been the opposite of mine and forced me to “work through my anxiety,” which my parents did try until I couldn’t handle it anymore and started skipping.

“Thank you.” I sighed, leaning against the counter.

I would have brought up that my college would be in home, too, but I just wanted the conversation to end.

My mom continued to make breakfast until Jo came down with her arms full of newspapers and said Laurie was going to come over later. He had been spending a lot of time with Jo, but I thought it was a good thing. She wasn’t good at making friends like Meg and Amy. She wasn’t as bad at it as I was, but still.

“What in the world?” Mom asked, gaping at Jo and her baggage.

“I’m looking for something,” Jo said, as if that explained what in the world she was doing. The smell of bacon smothered the kitchen until I added onions to my mom’s famous farmer’s breakfast. It was a mash-up of potatoes, oil, butter, salt and pepper, bacon, sausage, eggs, and cheese. Jo got her own skillet with no meat, and I ate from both.

When we had devoured our plates, Jo said, “That was so good—thanks, guys,” and went back to her stack of papers while I started washing the pans.

The phone started ringing again and I hit silence. Seconds later someone knocked on the door. Jo set down the newspaper she had in front of her face, and my mom stalled a moment before asking me to get it.

I hoped it wasn’t Aunt Hannah, but when I saw the two officers standing in the doorway, I immediately took back my wish.

29

meg

I called John twice before Shia and I came back to the Ritz. He didn’t answer, and I couldn’t just barge into the room with Shia and wake John up. So while we waited for John to come back to life, Shia and I hung out in the hotel’s Club Room, and I somehow found a way to eat more food. The room was actually three rooms, one with an extravagant lunch display set out across a huge banquet table. Meats, cheeses, little finger sandwiches made from cheeses I had never heard of. They had fruit cut into shapes and grapes on sticks.

The other two rooms were for sitting. I couldn’t count how many couches and recliners filled the space. Inside these rooms, time hadn’t moved forward in a while. I didn’t know what year the decor was supposed to be representing, but it was definitely sometime when people loved floral-print everything. Shia and I found ourselves a nice four-person table in the corner, next to a flatscreen TV that had to be at least fifty inches.

Shia moved a cracker around his plate and scooped some hummus onto it. I didn’t know anyone else who loved hummus. I smiled thinking about how Amy once called it “rich people food,” and Jo told her to shut up and google something for once in her life.

“How long are you staying here in this hotel? It’s nice, right?” Shia popped the entire cracker into his mouth. He chewed quietly; all that fancy Southern table training came in handy. I took an etiquette course on post when I was twelve, but Shia was groomed since birth to be a gentleman.

“One more night,” I said, the bottom of my throat on fire. I reached for my water and finished answering his question. “And, yeah, I would say so. Look at this space.” My eyes bounced around the room and Shia’s followed.

“You do love shiny things.”

I snapped my gaze back to him. “And what is that supposed to mean?” My annoyance barely held behind the corners of my smiling mouth.

He shrugged.

I looked around the room and focused on the hotel employee who was relining the table he had just cleaned with a fresh, crisp white tablecloth.

“Just saying. Do you not?” Shia challenged me. I saw his eyes flicker from the powder scattered across the chest of my dress.

“Not all of us want to throw away our trust funds and not go to college.” Shia’s eyes bulged and his knee hit the table before I registered that I had really said that.

Were we fighting?

I had just started a fight, I knew it, but sometimes that was the only way we communicated. What I had just said felt much more personal and a splash too harsh for our usual banter. Such banter didn’t entail fighting normally; it was mostly calling each other out on our crap, but it never felt malicious, no matter how many times I told my sisters I hated him.

“Throw away? You literally have no idea what you’re talking about. But you just stay up there on that pedestal, Meg. I had a call this morning with my friend in Cambodia, and she told me she removed two girls in one month from a whorehouse with the money we raised for her. One of the girls was twelve—the same age as Amy—and had been a sex slave for three years.”

My stomach twisted.

He continued, “What have you done? Beside paint my mom’s face on and take her dogs for walks?”

I sat there taking in every single word he said and stirred it and stirred it until my phone rang on the table between us.

I somehow found my voice. “I better get that,” I said, biting my tongue.

John’s name flashed across the screen and I swiped to answer. He told me he had just woken up, and when I mentioned Shia, John said he was going to work out in the gym, take a shower, then meet us.

When I hung up, Shia laughed, but it wasn’t snarky. “Work out

? He just doesn’t stop.”

“He’s been in a routine.” I thought he would have at least asked me to come back to the room while he showered, or to tag along with him to the gym.

“Yeah.”

Shia looked up at the TV and rolled his eyes at the screen. “Our country is—”

“Don’t start the political talk. I need more coffee.” I groaned. He was like Jo: when you got them going, they didn’t stop. I admired it most of the time, even though I wasn’t as involved as they were, but not today. My mind went to the twelve-year-old girl in Cambodia. I tried to remember if Jo’s essay was about the same place . . .

“Fine. How’s everything going with you? Did you enroll in that makeup course yet?”

I instantly wanted to press rewind. I shook my head and took another drink of water. “No. Not yet.”

“Why? It’s coming up, in what—May?”

That he remembered that blew my mind.

Of course he did, the honest part of my brain countered.

“Yeah. I’m sure it’s full now. The summer will be busy for me anyway.”

I didn’t know why I’d put off signing up for the course. I’d met an artist when he came into Sephora for the launch of a brand. He told me about a course he was going to in Los Angeles in the summer. The person teaching it was a celebrity makeup artist, and she was supposedly the master of the newest techniques. I wasn’t technically trained as an artist and the course would give me a little more credibility, but it was all the way across the country, and expensive.

“Are those reasons or excuses?” That was one of Shia’s favorite things to ask about anything, from the reason I didn’t return his calls to life choices.

“Both.”

“What’s going on, Meg?”

I fidgeted in my chair and looked around the room. It was much less crowded than when we first arrived. Only four or five people were in the room, and one was an old man who had fallen asleep sitting quite rigidly on the couch with his glasses resting on the tip of his nose.