Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [37]
But on second thought, this tidbit has little positive value and could even have a detrimental effect on the young girl. Jessica can just imagine the withering replies from Amber’s pretween cohorts. Um, like, did you get any free stuff? No? Then, like, who gives a flying crap? More likely, Amber would predict the pointlessness of sharing such a lame story with her friends back home, yet still end up feeling bad about herself because she wasn’t born to a family of millionaire entrepreneurs enabling her to become the internationally recognized face of a brand by the tender age of seven. Jessica knows that all the Be You Tea Shoppes will shut down within the year, which only reinforces the futility of such a comment.
It’s a career objective that has crossed over into Jessica’s real life: No one should end a conversation with her feeling worse than when it began. In her many hours of listening to the Girls tell their stories, and listening to the Girls react to the stories they’ve been told, Jessica has discovered a certain tactfulness she lacked when she was younger. Just because she has something to add to a discussion doesn’t mean she should. With this in mind, she puts a restraining order on her tongue, wishing she had an unopened sample of a future must-have something-or-other to offer Amber instead of a silenced anecdote.
Amber pounds the nozzle on the soap dispenser once more, rubs the cheap soap into her hands, and waves them under the electric eye to start the water. Then she begins to sing. “Happy Birthday to You.” She has a high, tinny voice, befitting all the metal in her mouth. “Happy birthday to you …”
Jessica is stunned by this song in this place. “Is today your birthday?”
“No, my birthday ith in Auguth,” Amber says. “Why?”
“You were singing the Birthday Song.”
“Ith juth a hand-wathing song,” Amber replies with a shrug. “So I wath my hanth long enough to kill all the nathy germth that make you thick. We were juth talking about birthdays, and I gueth it wath on my mind. But it workth with the alphabet thong, too.”
“Oh,” Jessica says, feeling sheepish. “Right.”
After two years of working with the Girls, who always know better than she does, Jessica has also developed a talent for reading unspoken questions. She goes out of her way to pose such queries rhetorically, so none of the Girls feels embarrassed by ignorance or curiosity. Even though the youngest high school storytellers are a few years older than Amber, Jessica can see the obvious question forming in Amber’s mind: When is your birthday?
Amber’s about to ask it, too, when a toilet flushes and a stall door bursts open to reveal a permatanned anatomic impossibility in the same pink outfit as her daughter, a foolish attempt at agelessness that only draws more attention to the long decades of hard living separating the two. She is what Las Vegas would look like if it suddenly decided it didn’t want to be Sin City anymore but, rather, the high-strung mom of a ten-year-old girl.
“Amber! What did I tell you about talking to strangers?”
“To not to,” Amber answers in a monotone.
“You won’t be happy until you get kidnapped, raped, and left for dead.”
Jessica is shocked by the violent outburst and wonders if such demonstrations of maternal anxiety are the cause or effect of the woman’s screeching colon.
Her daughter, however, is unfazed. “I’ll get my own Amber Alert,” she says tartly.
“What did I do to deserve this?” her mom snarls heavenward before grabbing her daughter by the hoodie and dragging her out of the bathroom without, Jessica notes, washing her hands first. Both mother and daughter have messages of female empowerment, positive body image, and healthy self-esteem advertised across their asses: BU!
Jessica isn’t disgusted by Amber’s mom;