11

I wanted to get through the next day at school without seeing Jake. We might have hung out yesterday, but let’s be honest, it was more of a playdate for our siblings. Besides, I knew enough about the way the world worked to know that when at school, in front of his friends, he wouldn’t be talking to me. Guys like that didn’t talk to girls like me in front of their friends. Those were just the unspoken high school rules.

Besides, I was too embarrassed to talk to him anyway. He’d seen me seminaked. What did he think of me? He was probably used to seeing girls from the Hot List like Nina-M and Amber naked; all long and svelte and impossibly pretzel-thin.

But Jake proved hard to avoid at school, because he was absolutely everywhere. I spent the day ducking behind pillars and walking in the opposite direction, and at second break, I confined myself to an empty class at the end of the hall where I spent time doodling in my drawing book. But when the bell rang and I looked down at my book, I realized that I’d drawn what looked like the waves in Jake’s hair.

I had my first session with Dr. Stride that afternoon. My mother had sighed loudly and told me that although she had numerous wildly important things to do, she would look after Zac. She said this as if it was the biggest imposition in the world. As if she was doing me the greatest favor known to humanity. When I was growing up, my mom was the kind of mother who would rush to school and drop off a book, or my lunch, if I’d forgotten it. She was the kind of mom who drove me across town for extra art lessons. Everyone used to tell me what a great mom I had. How she was always there for me—for everyone.

That Barb is a saint, they declared when she swooped in and saved the school bake sale after one of the tables collapsed and all the cupcakes slid off and fell into a sticky pile on the floor.

How does she do it all? they asked when she took me to school, rushed off to do soup kitchen for the needy, defrosted the freezer, cooked supper, and still managed to help me with my biology project and organize my dad’s end-of-year office party.

But that was then, and this was now. And the mother of now was not a person I understood at all. On one hand, she acted like Zac was an imposition, but on the other, she’d uprooted our lives to put him in the best school money could buy. My mother was this basket of contradictions that didn’t seem to fit together quite right, much like the features of her face. Over the last few days I’d started to wonder if moving here had more to do with fulfilling her dream of becoming a luxury real estate mogul in Africa’s most expensive city than finding the right school for Zac. Could she be that selfish?

I drove down the main street of Clifton. It was glistening—pristine in the afternoon sun. It sparkled with cleanliness in a way that was almost unnatural, as if someone had run a disinfectant wipe across its surface. No germs. No dust. No dirt. Nothing to tarnish its appearance of perfection.

I hate perfection. Well, that’s not entirely true. I have a complicated love-hate relationship with it. I seek it out, yet I’ll never admit that out loud. I want it, I don’t want it; I try to loathe it, I pretend it offends me, but I always strive for it. But for someone like me, it’s an elusive dream. Because I’m nothing like those perfect girls at school, and if you ask outside Lori whether she wants to be like them, she’ll say no and roll her eyes, but if you ask the other Lori—inside Lori—what she wants, you’ll get a totally different answer.

Perhaps that’s why I love art. It’s the one place in the world I get to be honest, because inside-Lori makes the art and her art is perfect. Every line. Every smudge. Every soft contour and darkened purposeful shadow. Whether ink, paint, or charcoal, every time I bring my weapon of choice down to the paper, I strive for perfection. Maybe it’s how I make sense of my messy outward world. I take all the disorder—the colors and splashes and strokes and stripes—and order them all. Just like Zac does with his remote controls. He makes his little part of the world less overwhelming when he puts them all into neat lines.

I stopped at the traffic light and looked to my left, and that’s when it caught my eye. It hung in the middle of the shop window as if framed. As if it was special. Dangling from an invisible pair of hands that were presenting it to the world. The dress was long and glittery gold. It hung in a way that made it look alive and moving, like a waterfall. But not a violent crashing one; rather an elegant trickle of water slipping down a rock face. Gliding down, long and smooth, and pooling at the bottom in a frothy, thick impasto of lace and beads. A girl like me would never admit it out loud—I could hardly even admit it to myself—but I envied girls who could wear dresses like that. And in some fantasy in my mind, some made-up version of myself and my life, I am the girl in that dress. I am the girl at the dance with that boy on my arm and everyone is looking at us. Barbie and Ken. The belle of the ball. All eyes on me, and I’m smiling my huge, white, perfect smile—because in my fantasy I also go to the same dentist everyone at BWH goes to. I have defined cheekbones and no double chin. I have collarbones so deep that when I climb out of the shower, small pools of water gather in them.

I sighed. Because all of that couldn’t be further from reality.

But still, the dress was gorgeous, and it reminded me of Joburg . . . golden, shimmery, Egoli. It looked like the dress that the singer Miriam Makeba wore on the front cover of Drum magazine in 1955. And what could be more Jozi than that? Her pictures hung on the walls of Maggie’s, and suddenly I missed home so much I wanted to cry, and this dress seemed like the only thing in this entire place that reminded me of it.

A loud honk made me jump, and I realized that I’d been looking for so long that the traffic light had turned green. I pulled away and told myself not to think of that golden dress in the window again. Thinking about things like that only caused pain.