A small sense of relief washes over her. List or no list, Candace Kincaid is pretty. She knows it. Everyone knows it.
And that is all that matters.
Lauren Finn and her mother agree the sedan still smells like Lauren’s dead grandfather — a musty blend of pipe smoke, old newspapers, and drugstore aftershave — so they drive to Mount Washington High School with the windows open. Lauren splays her arms across the window frame, resting her chin where her hands overlap, and lets the fresh air rouse her.
Mondays are always the most tired mornings, because Sundays are always the worst nights. The anxiety of the coming week speeds Lauren up when she wants to be slowed down. She feels every lump in the old mattress, hears every creak and sigh of her new old house.
She is three weeks into this new life and nothing is comfortable. Which is exactly what she’d expected.
The wind whips Lauren’s long pale hair like a stormy blond ocean, all but the section pinned with a tarnished silver barrette.
She found it last night, after the first hour of tossing and turning in the same bedroom, the same bed, where her mother had slept when she was a fifteen-year-old girl. The slender bar stuck out like a loose nail where the wood floor met the wall, its cloudy rhinestones blinking in the moonlight.
Lauren crept across the hall in her pajamas. Her mother’s reading light cast a warm white glow out the seam of the open door. Neither of them had been sleeping very well since moving to Mount Washington.
Lauren cracked it wider with her foot. Pairs of caramel drugstore panty hose hung on the coils of the wrought-iron bed frame to dry after having been washed in the sink. They reminded Lauren of the snake skins shed in the warm dunes behind their old apartment out west. Their old life.
Mrs. Finn looked up from the thick manual of tax laws. Lauren weaved through unpacked boxes and hopped onto the bed. She opened her hands like a clamshell.
Mrs. Finn grinned and shook her head, looking a bit embarrassed. “I had begged your grandmother to buy me this when I started high school.” She pinched the barrette between her fingers, examining the fossil of her youth. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had this feeling, Lauren, but sometimes, when you get something new, you trick yourself into believing it has the power to change absolutely everything about yourself.” The corners of Mrs. Finn’s mouth pulled until her smile stretched tight and thin, turning it into something entirely different. With a sigh, she said, “That was quite a lot to ask of a barrette, don’t you think?” Then Mrs. Finn threaded it into Lauren’s hair, securing a sweep over her daughter’s ear, and pulled the quilt back so Lauren could lie beside her.
Lauren hadn’t experienced the feeling her mother had described, but one much more unnerving. Like with Randy Culpepper, who sat one desk away in her English class.
On her very first day at Mount Washington High, Lauren had noticed that Randy smelled strange. Woodsy and sort of stale was how she’d first categorized it, until she overheard in the hall that Randy was a small-time pot dealer who smoked a joint in his car each morning before school.
That Lauren now knew what an illegal substance smelled like encapsulated how much her life had changed, whether she’d wanted it to or not. She swallowed this secret, along with so many others, because knowing them would break her mother’s heart. She could never confirm that things in her new school were as bad as she’d been told.
If not worse.
A while later, after Mrs. Finn had finished studying and turned off the light, Lauren stared into the dark and held on to her mother’s words. Despite all these changes, she would stay the same girl. Before falling asleep, she touched the barrette, her anchor.
Lauren reaches for the barrette again as the sedan slips into a free space along the curb.
“How do I look? Like an accountant you’d want to hire?” Mrs. Finn turns the rearview mirror toward her and regards her reflection with a frown. “It’s been so long since I’ve had an interview. Not since before you were born. No one’s going to want to hire me. They’re going to want some beautiful young thing.”
Lauren ignores the sweat stains in the armpits of her mother’s blouse, the small run in the panty hose that betrays the paleness of her mother’s skin. Paler still is Mrs. Finn’s hair, blond like Lauren’s, but dulled by gray.
“Remember the things we talked about, Mommy. Focus on your experience, not the fact that you haven’t worked in a while.”
They’d done a mock interview last night, after Lauren’s homework had been finished and checked. She’d never seen her mother so unsure of herself, so unhappy. Mrs. Finn doesn’t want this job. She wants to still be Lauren’s teacher.
It makes Lauren sad, their situation. Things hadn’t been good the last year out west. The money left by Lauren’s father was running out, and her mother cut back on the cool field trips they used to take to get a change of scenery from The Kitchen Academy — what they called their breakfast nook between the hours of eight and four. Lauren hadn’t even known her mother had stopped paying rent on their apartment. Her grandfather dying and leaving them the house was a blessing in disguise.
“Lauren, promise me you’ll talk to your English teacher about the reading list. I hate the idea of you sitting in her class for the whole year, bored to tears with books we’ve already read and discussed. If you’re afraid to do it —”
Lauren shakes her head. “I’ll do it. Today. I promise.”
Mrs. Finn pats Lauren’s leg. “We’re doing okay, right?”
Lauren doesn’t think about her answer. She just says, “Yeah. We are.”
“See you at three o’clock. I hope it goes fast.”
Lauren leans across the seat and hugs her mother tight. She hopes for that, too. “I love you, Mommy. Good luck.”
Lauren walks into school, barely a force against the tide of students flowing from the opposite direction. Her homeroom is empty. The fluorescent lights are still off from the weekend, and the legs of the upturned classroom chairs spike four-pointed stars, encircling her like oversize barbed wire. She turns one over and takes a seat.
It is terribly lonely at school.
Sure, a couple of people have talked to her. Boys, mostly, after daring each other to ask her stupid questions about homeschooling, like if she belonged to a religious cult. She expected as much — her male cousins were just as goofy and awkward and annoying.
The girls were only slightly better. A few smiled at Lauren, or offered tiny bits of politeness, like pointing out where to put her dirty cafeteria tray after lunch. But no one extended herself in a way that felt like the start of something. No one seemed interested in getting to know her beyond confirming that she was that weird homeschooled girl.
It shouldn’t have surprised her. It is what she was told to expect.
Lauren lets her chin rest against her chest. She pretends to read the notebook lying open on the small patch of desk attached to her seat. Really, though, she discreetly watches the girls filter into the room and take chairs beside her. She picked up the trick from Randy Culpepper, who used the same posture to sleep, undetected, in second period.
She doesn’t see the girls’ leader with them, the pretty one with the icy eyes. It’s a rare