“Are you sure you want to go to the mall for a dress?” she says.
“Where else should we go?”
“I’m thinking of Bergdorf in the city. Something more highbrow. Something more avant-garde. The mall is for creatures of habit. For the cattle. Girls like Cate Sandoval. Girls who follows the herd.”
I look at her, surprised. Eyes back to the road. Her mania still there. The grandiosity not completely squashed.
“Listen, doll, Cate’s never been one to think for herself. Her mother used to drive me crazy. Every goddamned top you’d wear, she’d come over to our house about a week later with the same shirt. The same barrette. The same sneakers. It never failed. I don’t think I ever told you this, but I finally confronted Lucy Sandoval at the end of the year. I think it was that same weird year. Fourth grade.”
“Wait—what?”
“Cate is an autobot. You program her like an old-fashioned windup toy. She followed you around like a puppy dog, Blythe. She still does. This isn’t a secret about her. And it irritated me to think that people might believe you intentionally dressed like her little twinsie. It bugged me.”
“So what did you say to Lucy?”
“I told her that her daughter should focus on originality.”
That’s why Cate stopped dressing like me once we got to fifth grade. One day I called her in the morning to wear the same shirt as me (I liked that she always had a matching outfit to me back then), and she told me that her mother gave away that shirt—and all the other shirts that were like mine. Such a strange answer. I was too young at the time to put it together, that Lucy Sandoval gave away those clothes not because she didn’t want Cate to dress like me, but because my mother instructed her not to dress like me.
I pull into the Bloomingdale’s parking lot. My mother turns to me and slides her arm around the driver’s seat. “Do you want to be one of the followers, or do you want to be a true leader?”
This is a dare that I can’t escape. I don’t want to go into the city with my mother. This was supposed to be a predictable shopping trip. Not an adventure with unstable Mom. She starts out so empathetic. Now she’s goading me. She’s waiting for me to say, Mom, we really shouldn’t. It’s too much for you. But there’s a light in her eye that hypnotizes me. I like her when she’s a little manic. At least she’s alive in there.
And then I remember that Sean is in the city today with his grandmother. Everyone can say he’s an awful person and uses girls. But really, this is a person who, after soccer practice, spends the afternoon with his grandmother. She has a townhouse in Chelsea. Four floors. Six bedrooms. It’s like a mansion, but in New York City. She used to be a big art collector in the ’80s and ’90s. Now she sells paintings every few years and lives off the money. Sean’s taken me and Dev there twice, this majestic place with weird sculptures and books and paintings that make no sense. It’s only forty-five minutes from my house in New Jersey, but it feels like a world away.
I can text him to meet us. It’ll be a little adventure. Me, mom, and Sean. And Sean’s grandmother. And maybe a dress.
And so I peel out of the parking lot like her good little Queen Bee.
22
ALI
I don’t tell Sammi about how Blythe is pressuring me to go to the dance. I’m not exactly lying, but I’m also not telling her the truth. Let’s go to Black Cat Vintage, I tell her. We can buy weird dresses and make fools out of ourselves at the school dance. It’ll be fun. She likes that idea.
She files through the racks of velvet dresses because she’s looking for something green. She pulls out three that sparkle like the Emerald City. I’m talking bright. As in Oz. The dresses look like they’re from the 1970s.
“Tell me the truth. Why do you want to go to this dance?” Sammi says.
“You’ve been talking about it for years. It’s not just me.”
“I said that when we were freshmen, Ali. Have totally changed my mind now.”
I pick out this black chiffon thing with thick ruffles on the sleeves. I hold it up to my body, modeling.
“I think I want to wear it with red tights.”
It’s the first time I’ve noticed myself in the mirror and I’m not disgusted. It’s like I’m wearing a costume. A game. I can do this.
“I know this has to do with Blythe Jensen.”
“Maybe.”
She whips her green dresses against the dress rack.
“God, Ali, how did you become so predictable?”
“You’re the one who said it! And she’s not the only reason,” I say. “I just want to be normal again and do normal shit like other people. Like go to a school dance with my best friend. Or am I going to be punished for that too?”
I can’t explain to Sammi that going to the dance, the dance that will be filled with the same people from that awful party, will somehow allow me to get over the humiliation of what happened. That if I show up at this dance where I know he’ll be, where all those people will be, I can somehow relive the night. That I can show everyone that I’m not wasted like a freak running out of a party.
“I don’t
