MAYBELLINE GALANG HAD spent her final days of back-to-school preparation listening to the murmur of a Pakistani news channel from Apartment 206. This had mingled with a Spanish-language soccer broadcast thumping through the wall from 204, which suggested there were now eight satellite dishes on the street side of Building 2. Satellite dishes were fixtures not removable without damage to the premises, she wrote in an e-mail to building management, which made the dishes a clear violation of Article 16 of the Brae Estates lease.
She’d sent many such e-mails, printing and filing each for her records. Still, the dishes remained, spreading like gray mushrooms along the side of the building.
Today, however, a sense of promise rumbled within her. It had begun the moment she’d seen Dr. Barrios’s picture in the paper with his sweaty armpit exposed. Brae Hill Valley was in the “Believers Make Achievers Zone,” the article had said. The new superintendent would be watching. Judgment day was upon them, and soon the world would know: Maybelline Galang was in compliance.
Not like her colleagues. Not like her neighbors.
Definitely not like her sister, Rosemary.
Thirty-four years earlier, their mother had arrived from the Philippines alone and pregnant with twins. She’d raised the girls on a home-care nurse’s thin paycheck and thinner patience, and she’d had two main rules:
Maybelline had followed these rules and all the others, too. She’d kept her side of the bedroom spotless, while Rosemary’s stayed a mess. She’d brought home As, while Rosemary offered Cs and excuses. It should have been no surprise, then, that as soon as the girls graduated high school, Rosemary decided nursing was exactly what she wanted to do. Or that after taking four years to complete what should have been a two-year degree, she started her first nursing job and immediately hated it. Rosemary was like that.
Maybelline, meanwhile, had majored in math. She’d even found a program that would offset some of her student loans if she worked in a low-income school. These were accomplishments as undeniable as a report card full of As on a refrigerator. But as with so many of Maybelline’s accomplishments, the noisy clamor of Rosemary’s existence drowned them out. The week Maybelline signed her contract with Brae Hill Valley was the same week Rosemary announced she was breaking their mother’s other main rule: she was quitting her job to marry an ear, nose, and throat doctor she’d met at the hospital.
At the time, this had seemed like just another of Rosemary’s attention-stealing moves. Eleven years later, however, Rosemary and the ear, nose, and throat doctor were still married. They lived with their daughter, Gabriella, in an orderly, satellite dish–free suburb zoned to Grumbly Elementary, a school with such a good reputation it didn’t even need a nice-sounding name.
Maybelline, who shared the apartment and its attendant expenses with her mother, did not depend on a man. She had not become a nurse. And for her daughter, Allyson, she had rules of her own:
Also, added at this very moment:
“Why not?” Allyson was wearing a pair of too-tight stretch pants, the phrase You Wish! scrawled across the butt in sparkly letters. She accessorized these with the fiercest look her childish features could manifest.
“Because you are ten years old.”
“Ten and a half. ”
“Exactly.”
“Gabriella wore these before she gave them to me, and she was only ten then.”
Technically, Gabriella had been ten and a half, but that wasn’t the point. Maybelline and Rosemary had different standards for how girls should dress. There was also the issue that Gabriella, the product of two slim parents, was smaller than her younger cousin. Allyson took after her father. Only the largest of Gabriella’s hand-me-downs fit her, and these pants were not among them.
“Allyson, we don’t have time for this. Go put on the clothes we picked last night.”
“You mean the clothes you picked.”
“Go put them on. We can’t be late to your aunt’s house.”
Years earlier, when Maybelline had first considered using Rosemary’s address to register Allyson for school, Coach Ray had reassured her it was no big deal. Football coaches helped players do this all the time, he said.
Also, to be fair, the rules did not explicitly say the child had to live at the address. They only said one of the utilities had to be under the name of the child’s primary guardian. The bills in the apartment were registered to her mother, and it had been easy enough for Maybelline to put her name on Rosemary’s energy bill. She’d done it for a few other bills as well. In fact, on paper, Rosemary’s house might as well have been Maybelline’s. Moreover, it was simply out of the question to send Allyson to the local elementary school, Sunshine Gardens, where there would be no more respect for rules than there was at the apartment complex.
By the time Maybelline and her sulking daughter pulled up to Rosemary’s house, the garage was already open. Rosemary stood next to her new SUV wearing bulging designer sunglasses she’d probably seen on one of her reality shows. Even on the first day of school, she was wearing workout clothes. No wonder she had no standards for whether her daughter dressed appropriately.
“What?” said Rosemary from behind the sunglasses.
“Nothing.” Maybelline looked away. There was no use starting an argument unless she wanted Rosemary to get into her whole thing about how just because she didn’t work outside the home didn’t mean she had nothing better to do than take care of someone else’s kid. “Have a good first day, everyone.”
“Whatever,” said Allyson. “I look stupid.”
“What’s wrong?” Rosemary asked her.
“I’m wearing this baby outfit on my first day of school.”
“You look fine,” said Rosemary. “Just hurry up. I have a class at Fantastic Fitness after I drop y’all off. If I’m late, I’ll lose my spot.”
Maybelline took a deep breath and looked at her dashboard clock. “I’ll pick you up around five, okay, Allyson?”
“Yeah. Right. Sure you will.”
“Maybe a little after, but try to get your homework done here. Okay?”
“It’s the first day. I’m not going to get homework.” With that, Allyson grabbed her purple shoulder bag, slid off her seat, and stomped into the garage.
Gabriella emerged from the house. She was carrying a backpack, and Allyson gave Maybelline a look that said they’d be having yet another argument about why Allyson had to wear a shoulder bag when eeeeeveryone else had a backpack. But Maybelline couldn’t discuss that today. Not any time this week, either. There was just too much work at the beginning of the school year.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Allyson said to Rosemary. “Really bad.”
“Hurry!”
Maybelline pulled away from the curb, waving to her sister and niece and to Allyson’s back. Then she glanced at the clock: there was still time. Even with first-day-of-school traffic, she’d be able to drive to the far edge of Rosemary’s gated community before doubling back toward the expressway. This was a ritual Maybelline had developed, though she never spoke of it. She would never admit how calming it was, passing all these houses painted the same six colors, lawns that never dared to grow past regulation height, row after symmetrical row, until a series of crisp ninety-degree turns left her at the far end of the street she’d started on.
Finally, she headed toward the exit gate, so lost in the order of it all that she was almost on Rosemary’s block before she noticed the SUV, still idling at the curb.
The sight of it made Maybelline pause midbreath. She pulled behind a parked car and lowered her head, watching the SUV through the windows of the car in front of her. Rosemary waited in the driver’s seat, tapping her garage-door clicker on the steering wheel as she looked toward the house. A few seconds later, Allyson emerged, walking fast and looking so happy that Maybelline wondered if her daughter always became pleasant once she was out of sight.
But no. Something else was different. Maybelline couldn’t place what it was until Allyson climbed into the SUV’s rear seat, revealing the sparkly letters scrawled across the back of her pants.
Maybelline’s heart thumped. She wanted to lean on her horn, then drive up beside the SUV and demand that Allyson change back into her school clothes. Right. Now. But that would make them all late. Plus, how could she explain why she was still there? Her only hope was that Rosemary would notice the pants, and she stared hard at the SUV, willing this to happen.
But Rosemary’s eyes were fixed on the garage door as it rolled closed, protecting the orderly life that lay inside. Until the girls arrived at school, the message on the back of Allyson’s pants was for Maybelline’s eyes alone:
You Wish!