The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [10]
So, in my infinite eight-year-old wisdom, I said, “It doesn’t matter, Mommy. I know it doesn’t matter. I’ll go back tomorrow. I promise.”
And this seemed to work. Her body relaxed, but not completely. I could feel the tension still in her muscles, like she was nervous, anxious, that I might ask again, even if it wouldn’t be for a very long time.
I left her room and went back to my book. That night, I fell asleep in my own bed. The next day, when she dropped me off, I let go of her hand and walked right into the school by myself, past the kids who were crying because they didn’t want to leave their moms, past the moms who were hugging their kids tight because their kids didn’t want to be left. I didn’t want my mom to worry about me. I would turn off whatever was inside me that made me wonder why we were different.
After that, my mother always walked me to school and always came to pick me up, and I always dropped her hand and went right in, and then came out and took her hand for the walk home later—exactly like the other kids I watched so closely. I believed I could keep her calm, could make her happy. I didn’t ever want to talk about my father again, and I didn’t ever want to feel that skin-itching curiosity over him again. If I could just make myself be normal, then there would be nothing to wonder about. I just had to figure out a way how.
And then, one day, Emily Winters came into school and told me that her parents were getting divorced. She said the word loudly, almost proudly, because it was a big grown-up word with all kinds of big grown-up implications.
I tried not to smile; I knew I shouldn’t smile at Emily’s very serious grown-up news. But I was excited, because here was the normalcy I’d been looking for. Lots of kids had divorced parents—there were two boys in our class whose parents were divorced, and at least three kids in the other third-grade class. This was a new school—no one here knew us from before, no one here knew my dad was dead. So I decided to lie.
“You know,” I said, “that makes us the only divorced girls in Mrs. Focious’s class.”
Emily seemed to think I was an expert on divorce. I told her my father left when I was only two, that I barely remembered him. No need to be curious anymore: now I was an expert; now there was nothing I didn’t know, because I got to make it up as I went along.
Emily said her father was moving to Chicago, but she’d still get to see him all the time. “He’s getting a big house with an extra room in it just for me. And he promises that he’s still going to visit all the time—he’ll even still pick me up from school sometimes.”
“That’s great,” I said wisely. My father had to be even farther away than Chicago, somewhere I couldn’t get to—far enough that it would make sense that I never saw him, that he never visited. It had to be another country. Europe was too cool, a place the lucky kids got taken to on vacation. I thought of South America, but that was too strange, too exotic; there’d be too many questions.
“My dad lives in Arizona,” I said, the lie rising easily in my throat.
“I’m actually really lucky,” Emily continued. “My parents are getting joint custody.” She said the new words slowly, as if they were big in her mouth. “My brother says that there’s a girl in his class who never sees her father, because her parents hated each other so much, they never wanted to have to see each other again.”
I jumped at the explanation. “That’s like my parents. I haven’t seen my dad once since he left.”
“Wow,” Emily said, her eyes growing wide. “That’s really bad.”
“Yeah,” I said, proud of myself for the lie, happy to be like the girl in her brother’s class. “But I’m used to it. It’s always just been me and my mom.”
Emily and I walked around holding hands for the rest of the day. When I got home, I almost told my mother about the lie. But my mother didn’t believe in lying; she’d told me a thousand times that good girls didn’t lie. So I didn’t tell her, even though I wanted her to know that I’d found the