Page 7

Lady Sings the Blues – Billie Holiday

After a crazy first two days on the road, we decided to spend the third day putting serious distance between us and Seattle. The weather was starting to clear up as we headed into Idaho, with more blue skies and fewer clouds, and that seemed to put Brooke in a good mood.

We were on a stretch of two-lane highway that was full of truckers and tankers and not that many cars like Brooke’s.

We went for miles at a time without seeing anything, then a cluster of billboards would appear on the horizon, accompanied by a cracked parking lot and another strip mall.

Then they’d disappear in the rearview mirror, and we were back to looking at wide-open nothing.

I was worried that the Mustang would get us noticed far more than if we were traveling in some boring beige car, though I knew there was less than no chance of Brooke giving it up, so I didn’t say anything to her. Not when we were getting along so well.

We’d stopped the night before in another nondescript motel a few miles from the state border and eaten Chinese food on the bed while watching reruns of 30 Rock .

Brooke had let me choose the TV channel, and comedy was better for me at the moment than dramas – there was less chance of seeing a body covered in blood and having another intense flashback.

I didn’t want to wreck this fun, easy thing we had going. Not with my baggage, or my crush on her, or by asking for too much. She’d let me pick the music again, though, and I’d gone for wailing jazz this time, just because it was so different from everything we’d been listening to so far.

‘What’s your real name, Mouse?’ Brooke asked.

I had my feet on the dash of the Mustang, something Brooke only let me do when I took my shoes off. I swallowed the mouthful of Twizzler I’d been gnawing on before answering her.

‘Jessie. Jessie Violet Swift.’

‘That’s pretty. Short for Jessica?’

‘No. Just Jessie.’

‘Why do people call you Mouse, then?’

‘Oh, God, that’s a long story.’

‘It’s a long road,’ she said without apology.

‘Maybe it’s not so long. I guess it started in ninth grade.’ Had I really been dragging around the nickname for three years? Holy crap. ‘I was the new kid, and I was short and pale and weird.’

I also had light-brown hair and pale-gray eyes, and I jumped whenever anyone spoke to me.

I was the new kid in my first year of Catholic high school, and I had to navigate wearing a uniform and rules that definitely weren’t part of my last non-religious school.

On top of that, I was a scholarship kid, which made me super insecure.

I felt like everyone would be able to tell just by looking at me that I didn’t really belong.

‘You’re not pale and weird anymore.’

She had to be joking, right? I was definitely still both of those things.

‘You’re still short, though,’ she said, offering me a tiny smirk.

I tucked that smile away, sure I’d want to think about it more later.

‘You’re not wrong,’ I said. ‘So, yeah, the kids called me “the mouse”, and I guess it stuck.’

‘Since you started at St. Catherine’s?’

‘Yup.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘Yeah,’ I said honestly. ‘That time in my life wasn’t the best.’

Almost as soon as we’d settled in Seattle, my mom had a new boyfriend – not the Creep, a guy called Simon – and she immediately became obsessed with him, like she did with every new boyfriend.

Simon was okay. He could be weird sometimes, and he was fanatical about hockey, so I learned quickly to be somewhere else if he wanted to watch it at our house.

Simon wasn’t around for long. When he broke up with my mom, she would swing between crying for hours and a furious rage, and I never knew what mood she’d be in when I got home from school. That was my strongest memory of starting high school. My mom getting dumped.

‘Didn’t your parents do anything about it?’ Brooke asked.

‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘I never really bothered my mom about stuff that was happening at school. She was too busy with work for things like parent–teacher conferences, and my dad was long gone by then.’

I only had vague memories of my dad. My mom rarely spoke about him, keeping only a handful of photos of him in a battered envelope that I often had to dig through old boxes to find, since we moved so much and I never knew where anything was.

All through grade school I’d missed having a dad, though I’d never really spent much time with my dad, even before he left us.

He became this great, unknowable figure, and I filled in all the gaps in my knowledge with my imagination, turning him into an ideal that the real man almost certainly wasn’t.

‘I’m sorry,’ Brooke said gently, like she meant it. ‘When did he leave?’

‘When I was … four, maybe five?’ Like the Mouse thing, I didn’t want to dig into this with Brooke. I didn’t want her to know all the dirty secrets of my life.

‘Do you ever see him?’

‘No, not anymore. My mom knows where he is, just, like, on a general basis. I think he went to New Mexico and worked in construction for a while. She might be able to get ahold of him if she wanted to, but I don’t know.’

My mom had been the one to cut ties, and I didn’t really know how to bypass her and reconnect with him, or what I’d say if I found him.

‘Are you an only child?’ Brooke asked.

‘Yeah. I mean, I might have half-brothers or -sisters out there somewhere, I suppose, but if I do, no one’s ever told me about them.’

‘You’re not curious about that? Sorry if I’m being too nosy.’

I laughed, even though it sounded a little forced. ‘It’s fine. I guess I might look into it one day.’

‘What about your mom? Are you close?’ Brooke pressed.

‘We used to be.’ That was true. ‘She works a lot now.’ Also true. ‘Sometimes it feels like …’

‘Like?’ Brooke prompted.

‘It’s … whatever,’ I said, waving away her concern. ‘I got a job last year, so I can go out and do that now and she doesn’t have to worry about me.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Babysitting. Some tutoring. Over Thanksgiving and Christmas last year I worked at the mall on the weekends, too, in one of those stores selling fancy soap.’

I’d never minded working. My mom appreciated me helping out with extra cash and it took off some of the pressure on our relationship. Plus, I got to work with people who called me Jessie, not Mouse, and treated me like a normal person.

‘I never got paid for babysitting,’ Brooke said, sounding put out. ‘My extended family just expects it.’

I grinned. ‘That’s where being part of the church comes in useful. There’s a pretty big network of families, and they all know me, so there’s always someone around who wants me to watch their kids for a few hours.’

‘That’s clever. I should’ve thought of that.’ She paused and pushed her sunglasses back down on her nose. ‘What about your stepdad?’

I froze. ‘He’s not my stepdad, he’s my mom’s boyfriend,’ I said, trying to make my voice sound normal.

Brooke glanced over and raised an eyebrow at me. I’d clearly failed.

‘Sorry. Didn’t realize it was a sore subject.’

I forced myself to relax. ‘It’s all right. I just don’t like him. People think he’s a really great guy, and he’s not.’

‘Okay.’ She dropped it, and I was grateful for that.

‘What about your family?’ I asked, hoping to turn the spotlight off me for a moment.

Brooke groaned. ‘We are … dysfunctional.’

‘Dysfunctional how?’

‘My brother, Daniel, is at Harvard Law. He’s also vice president of the tennis club and clerks for Senator Duval in his spare time.’

‘He has spare time?’ I joked, hoping to cover my weird reaction at her mention of the Creep.

‘Apparently. My older sister, Julianne, is studying medicine at NYU. Back last year there was a moment where it looked like she was going to specialize in family medicine or general practice, but my parents staged an intervention and now she’s back in cardiology.

What a relief,’ Brooke said sarcastically.

Her tone had shifted into something that sounded like the Real Housewives , gossipy and obsessive. She flicked her fingers at me dramatically.

‘And my younger sister, Hope, is a music prodigy. Cello and violin. She’ll be going to Juilliard in a few years.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘And you already know she’s going to Juilliard?’

‘My parents do,’ Brooke said, with a twisted smile I didn’t think was genuine.

‘So what about you?’

A muscle in Brooke’s jaw twitched. ‘Well,’ she said, switching back into her Real Housewives voice.

‘Brooke was all set to join Julianne at NYU and be a doctor, but she’s recently shown a real interest in politics.

And you know how much we love to encourage the girls, so it looks like she’ll be going to study at Stanford or Berkeley.

A real woman-in-government triumph for the Summers.

’ Her words soured at the end, turning into something awful and bitter.

‘That sounds like someone else’s idea, not yours,’ I said softly.

‘That’s because it is.’

‘They really plan everything out for you like that?’

‘Mouse, you have no idea,’ she sighed.

‘Maybe they just … care?’ I suggested.

‘I wish they wouldn’t.’

She was wrong about that, but I didn’t correct her.

‘So your older brother and sister are already in college?’ I asked instead. ‘Do you see them very often?’

‘Julianne comes home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She stays in New York during the summer, and I usually go stay with her for a couple weeks. Daniel hardly ever comes home.’

‘You’ll be the only one staying on the west coast for college, then,’ I said, ripping apart another Twizzler, more for something to do with my hands than because I was hungry.

‘They need to keep an eye on me,’ she said darkly.

I didn’t get why. Brooke was practically the perfect daughter. She was in so many extracurricular clubs and teams, not just choir, but the debate team, soccer, the Shakespeare society, French club … all while maintaining some of the highest grades in our class.

She didn’t seem to appreciate, or even acknowledge, what she had.

To have parents who cared about you so much was something I literally couldn’t get my head around, and, sure, they sounded like a lot, but I’d spent years wishing someone would care about me just a little bit.

My mom was always more interested in the next guy than she was in me.

She wanted to get married, to settle down and have the big, happy family that had never been possible when she was a single mom towing around a shy kid.

The Creep had promised her that. He wanted a whole bunch of kids running around, and I could see the stars dancing in my mom’s eyes every time he mentioned it.

He didn’t need to spell it out that having me around didn’t feature in his plans.

The music cut off with a click, and I reached for the glove box to pick the next album. I was getting good at reading Brooke’s mood and matching it to my music choices.

‘I hate this part of Idaho,’ she muttered.

‘Really?’ I thought there was something bleakly beautiful in the dirt and scrubby grass and the endless blue sky.

‘It’s depressing as hell.’

I laughed and put my feet back up on the dash. ‘Where do you want to stop tonight?’

‘Somewhere outside of Salt Lake City. It’ll get too expensive if we go into the city. It’s better to find somewhere on the outskirts.’

‘That makes sense. Have you ever been to Salt Lake?’

Brooke shook her head. ‘No. My cousin Meredith came here once to check out one of the colleges. God only knows why.’

‘Did she get in?’ I asked, suddenly panicked. I didn’t want anyone to know where we were, and if Brooke called her cousin, we could have the police breathing down our necks in no time.

‘No, she went to Denver in the end. Do you want to go to college?’

What was I supposed to tell her? That no college in the country – in the world – would accept me after everything that had happened. The feeling of having no way out was crushing, and I pushed it down to deal with later.

‘I guess it depends on whether I get in anywhere,’ I said vaguely.

Brooke glanced at me, frowning. ‘I thought you get good grades.’

‘I do. Most of the time. I’m not an academic genius, though. And I’d need a decent scholarship to be able to afford it.’

‘You’re smart,’ Brooke said with a confidence I was sure I’d never feel. ‘You’ll get an academic scholarship.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, because I couldn’t bear to think that far ahead.

If I was honest with myself, I couldn’t think much past tomorrow.