Page 24 of Spectacular Things
It goes on for pages. The allegations, the lawsuits, transcripts of the cases that traveled all the way to the state supreme court.
After the third page, Mia puts her head down on the desk, her hand still gripping the mouse, ready to click on another disturbing article, but her head is about to explode and her jaw is set, expecting to vomit.
She closes her eyes. The reminder to breathe comes in her mother’s voice.
Her mother.
Liz has always pitched her relationship with Q as a tragic love story, but Mia now understands it’s all a lie her mother has been telling herself and selling her daughters for nearly twenty years. It’s an actual crime. Richard Quimby should be in jail.
Mia lifts the mouse in her hand and slams it against its pad as hard as she can.
Her mother let that creep into their house, she’d encouraged Mia to spend time with him, fall in love with him, imagine a future with him as her father.
How delusional must her mother have been when she was clearly just a number to Richard Quimby, a malignant tumor of a human who now must be either in hiding, in prison, or deceased.
Mia decides it doesn’t matter. He was a predator then, so he’s dead to her now. She vows she will never search his name again, never look for him, never wonder “what if” about a grown man who preyed upon young girls and derailed countless lives.
The library closes at ten p.m., but Mia can’t bring herself to move until half past eleven.
She makes sure to erase her search history before shutting down the computer, turning off the overhead lights, and locking the doors.
Mia usually clutches a small bottle of pepper spray when she crosses campus alone in the dark, but tonight she dares any man to emerge from the shadows and try her.
She even imagines it, how she will scratch out his eyes, use her teeth if she needs to.
She has worked too hard and come too far to allow any man to change the course of her life.
Even if it kills her, she will not be a victim.
And here they come now.
A whole group of stumbling silhouettes. Drunk men, goofy and gangly and fearless.
She will take them all if they so much as whistle at her.
“Mia!” someone shouts from the pack. It’s Nell, staggering toward Mia with the ambulatory finesse of a newborn giraffe.
Under a streetlamp, Landon’s grinning face floats behind Nell’s, along with a few other familiars from Silliman.
“You’re coming with us,” Nell says, linking arms with Mia and spinning her back in the direction from which she came. “We’re not taking no for an answer.”
In the past, Mia has pitied her classmates for wasting precious time humiliating themselves after drinking too much, but who is she to decide what’s worthwhile in college when her very existence is not only mortifying but criminal?
She is done being her mother’s best friend and MVP.
From now on, Mia Lowe is just a regular college student and it’s Saturday night.
Landon offers her the plastic Poland Springs water bottle filled with brown liquor that burns as she takes it down.
She resists the urge to say that Poland Springs is in Maine, not far from where she grew up.
None of it matters. She’s here now. Mia tilts the plastic bottle up toward the sky.
She drinks with the abandon of someone who has long denied her own thirst.
Landon reaches out for the bottle and they both laugh because it’s empty.
Mia is at Yale because she is smart and makes good decisions—better decisions than her mother ever made.
She understands choices and consequences, can decipher wrong from right, and, starting now, she is here to connect with other people.
By midterms, Mia is an expert at so-called independent living.
College is far more fun—and debauched and liberating and excruciating and enlightening—than she could have gleaned from reading any number of primary sources in the archival library.
When she’s out, Mia ignores her mom’s calls and her sister’s texts.
Instead, she stays up late with Nell, Landon, and their burgeoning group of friends, roaming parties until someone demands they go to Yorkside for slices.
It’s there, eight of them impossibly smushed in a booth, that opportunities are passed around like paper napkins from the metal dispenser at the end of the table.
Internships in New York and spring break at someone’s aunt’s house on Tortola and a group study session tomorrow night on the lower level of Bass with a borrowed copy of the exam.
Mia bites into her pizza and says hell yes to all of it.
She has four years to capitalize on this opportunity.
These are her shots to take and her glory to seize.
She nods along to everything that her mom was forced to turn down as a result of her own foolishness.
Because Mia is not her mom and she is not the sum result of her mother’s mistakes.
She is Mia fucking Lowe. When she orders a round of tequila shots for the table, she understands this is how an intelligent, capable woman of limited means expands and strengthens her networks.
This is how she fits into this booth with Nell and Landon and everybody else, giggling as they lick salt and approval off each other’s open palms.