Gym rat doesn’t say, You feel like hooking up? but he does say, You feel like hanging out? so I was close.
I shake my head as I walk past, and I see his mouth say, bitch, silently.
So yeah, sad face. I really missed out there.
I make a gesture that leaves him standing with his mouth open, and I go over to Mom. She’s, it turns out, got one of those patterns in her bag, because she’s doing the antlers of a stag standing in a glen when I get up to her.
I roll my eyes when I see it. I mean, she’s obsessed. But then, I think, there are worse things to be obsessed with. And it’s not like she drinks anymore, I mean, hardly ever. And I guess it’s kind of cute, the stitching thing. Also crazy! But a little bit cute.
Those antlers are huge, I say, because I can’t think of anything else.
Beautiful, isn’t he? says Mom. She looks up. I ever tell you my dad’s family came from Scotland?
No, Mom, I say. I don’t think you ever mentioned it.
Oh, well, they were from—
She catches my eyes. Then she shakes her head. Very smart, Shelby Jane Cooper, she says.
I was wondering, I say. I was wondering if you could tell me about how cold it is in Alaska. I don’t think I’ve heard—
Ha-ha, she says. She gets up. Coming?
I nod and we leave the batting cages and go to the ice cream place. It isn’t hard: it’s right next door, within this parking lot square, which is about as close as Scottsdale gets to a downtown. There’s a family restaurant too (ten kinds of burgers!) and a bookstore that’s surprisingly good. Sometimes we go in there, but Mom can’t afford to buy too many books, and unlike the library they get pissed when you read stuff and don’t buy anything.
We pull up stools at the counter, and Mom orders the usual, talking to the barstool of course instead of the girl with the pink hair and piercings who nods blandly as she scoops the ice cream. A mint choc chip cone for Mom, and a cup for me, with one scoop butterscotch and one scoop cookie dough. I reach over to the toppings rail and hit mine with chocolate sprinkles, popping candy, chocolate sauce, edible glitter, M&Ms, the works.
Mom says, You’ll give yourself a stomachache, as she does every time, but it’s like a ritual, or an actor saying lines in a play, because I always have the same, and I never get a stomachache. Mom told me once that I got my sweet tooth from my dad—it’s one of the only things she ever said about him. I mean, I know that he died when I was very young, and I have this dim memory of him hugging me in a room somewhere, wood paneling on the walls, so I guess maybe this was some cabin in Alaska or something; the way he smelled of pine trees. But that’s it. His face isn’t there in my memory. Mom doesn’t even have any photos of him.
Sometimes I think: I’d like him to come back, not because I miss him, but just to see what he looks like. Mom hates talking about him so much, it’s almost like he never existed, and I’d like to undo his death just so I can know that he really did exist, once. It’s hard to explain. Anyway, the problem: in the baseball cage, you feel like you can turn back time. But you can’t. Not really.
Mom’s smiling as she watches me destroy my ice cream, so I figure it’s a good time to mention my birthday again.
Mom, I say. You know I’m going to be eighteen soon.
Mom flinches, like I’ve just pulled out a knife. Yes?
I was thinking, you know, about what we talked about before. Me taking my SATs, maybe. So I can study.
She sighs. It’s not safe, Shelby. College! Think of all the young men. Think what they’d do to you.
I nod. I’ve seen the news. I’ve seen the films, with Mom. I know what young men do. Even if there’s a tiny bit of me that would like to find out for myself. With Mark from the library, for example. Sometimes I think about him, late at night. I mean, he doesn’t seem like a serial killer or a rapist. Of course Mom would say that you can never tell.
What about, like, training to be a librarian? I say. That would be mostly girls and you can’t get safer than a library.
We’ll discuss it later, says Mom.
Later when? I’m eighteen in a couple of months.
Just later, Shelby, she says, and I know the conversation is over. Her face has gone all weird, like a shadow has come across it. Now I feel bad for making her worry so much.
When we’re done Mom calls a cab. We go out onto the street and she walks on the outside of me, like always, as if a car is just going to jump up onto the sidewalk and hit me. I don’t know if she even knows she’s doing it—the habit of protection is so deep inside her, like oil rubbed into wood.
At the corner, our cab pulls up. Then she reaches out and turns my face toward her as the car idles by the sidewalk. Okay, honey, I’ll see you at eight, sharp, she says. The judge will want to wrap it up. It’s Ricardo: he likes to get to his cabin at weekends.
Okay, I say.
And you’ll go straight to the library?
Yes, Mom.
She kisses my forehead. My little princess, she says. I love you …
… all the way to Cape Cod and back, I finish.
She smiles, and more or less shoves me into the cab. She tells the cab driver to take me to the library, then starts to walk toward the courthouse. I love you too, I think. I don’t know why it gets harder to say that as you get older, but it does.
I do love my mom, though, even if we’re really different. I mean, everything: our personalities, our hair color—she’s a redhead—our physique, our eyes. It’s like we’re not even related at all. Plus she is officially the most nervous person in the world and I’m, as she puts it, reckless. So when I was younger, I thought for sure, because of all the fairy tales and kids’ stories she used to tell me, that I was really a princess, put here with my mom by accident, that my real mother was a queen who lived far away in a beautiful castle.
Now I figure that every kid thinks this kind of thing. Me and my mom, we may be different, but she looks out for me. She keeps me safe. She teaches me. And yeah, sometimes I feel stifled, but that’s life, isn’t it?
The driver pulls away. After two blocks he stops.
He turns to me. Here you are, he says.
I can tell from his expression that he thinks it’s weird, me using a cab to go, like, half a mile. I mean, people don’t walk here, but people dressed in Walmart clothes like Mom don’t blow ten dollars on a pointless cab ride either. I shrug at him, like, what do you want me to say? It’s like he’s never had a mother. I count out the money Mom gave me and hand it to him, then get out.
The library is just in front of me. If you’re imagining something with columns, like on TV, then stop. Pretty much everything in Scottsdale and most all of Phoenix is just flat, single-story: bungalows, malls, offices. Every building, including the library, just looks like an unbranded Rite Aid, for real. The only variation, I guess, comes from a few fake adobe things, made to look like old Mexican houses.
Fake, because Scottsdale is new. Really new—since the silicon boom in the eighties, mostly. A whole patch of desert just turned into city, in a decade. Mom says, the thing about the silicon boom is that before that, there were all these kids in Phoenix with no future and a meth habit.
Now there are still kids with no future and a meth habit, but because of the companies making computer chips, now they have people to steal from.
Then, she will wink and say, hey, it keeps me gainfully employed.