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“You are an embarrassment.”
Evelyn tried to ladle Chicken Tikka Masala from the Styrofoam clamshell with a flimsy plastic fork. “I don’t mean to be harsh, but it needs to be said, and you need to hear it. Seventeen years old; on the cusp of adulthood, ostensibly on the verge of independence, yet you appear to be trying to ruin your life and everything around you. I’ve provided you every possible advantage in life. It’s all been handed to you—perhaps that’s your problem. And what do you do with these opportunities? You throw them away. You discard them like they’re worthless. No— . . . no, that’s not entirely accurate. You don’t discard them, you actively and maliciously set out to destroy anything in your life that’s helpful or productive or useful. Your grades are abysmal. You’re unpresentable: I cringe to be seen in public with you. You gravitate to scum; to the dregs of society. You take opportunities that most people would kill for, opportunities that I would have killed for at your age, and you spit on them.”
From her customary chair at the foot of the dining room table, Evelyn’s only child watched the sun settling behind the Zakim Bridge and waited for the metaphoric storm to pass around her. The lights of the cars on the I-93 traffic weren’t quite on yet. Two sailboats were tacking up the Charles River together. Carla imagined being a bird, swooping between the masts. It occurred to her that this would probably be the last time she had dinner with this ever-so-familiar view framed in the plate glass wall behind her Mother’s place at the family table.
Leaving again. Starting over again, just when things were getting bearable.
Carla realized that no one was speaking, and she looked up across the table. Judging from her mother’s expression over the paper napkins and take-out containers, the expectant silence was threatening to get very loud. Her mother couldn’t abide being ignored, so Carla’s mind’s ear auditioned responses, searching for one that struck the appropriately derisive tone.
“Embellish much?” Carla said.
“You think I’m embellishing the truth? Are you joking? Let’s reflect together. You stagger home at three in the morning more often than not; nevertheless I manage to secure for you a place in one of the most prestigious private schools in Boston—at considerable expense—and what do you do? You contrive to get yourself thrown out within a few months. Expelled. ‘Don’t bother reapplying,’ they said. Do you have any idea how embarrassing that is? My daughter expelled? Then you wreck the thirty-thousand dollar car that I bought for you; and as if that wasn’t enough, you flee the scene. Need I con—”
“Oh my God! How many times do I have to say it? I wasn’t driving!”
“That you allowed one of your hooligan friends to total your Audi is no defense. You’ve already forgotten what the lawyer said? The lawyer that I paid for? You’re liable for negligent entrustment because this hoodlum, while unlicensed or incompetent or unqualified, drove the car with your permission. Or in your case, drove your car while unlicensed and incompetent and unqualified. Does any of this ring any bells?”
“ ‘Hooligan’? ‘Hoodlum’? Seriously? You’re like from a ’40s B-movie now?”
“What term would you prefer? Loser? Career petty criminal? But we’re talking about you. Do you realize how lucky you are that no one was seriously hurt or killed? Incidentally, the probation department called on Wednesday. We had a nice talk. Kudos on passing your drug test: it was a pleasant surprise.”
“Thanks, Mom. Your vote of confidence means a lot to me.”
Evelyn tucked a lock of hair behind her right ear. “I give you an allowance that’s more than I had to live on throughout grad school, and what do you do with that money? You fritter it away, and you allow yourself to be the victim of every thief and swindler and ne'er-do-well that you stumble across. They’re using you. When will you learn that money can’t buy friendships?”
“Yeah, well, you don’t know what it’s like to have to change schools a million times and have to leave all of your friends in the middle of your senior year—do you now.”
“Spare me. These so-called ‘friends’ of yours? The ones that left you holding the bag when the police came? The ones I’ve forbidden you from socializing with? Those friends? Just save the dramatics. With the exception of art, you’re barely passing all of your subjects. It would’ve taken an Act of God for you to graduate on time.”
“I’ll do it—you know I can.”
Evelyn drew a measured breath. “It’s never a matter of your ability, Carla—it’s your attitude and disposition that I question.” She switched to a safe subject. “Would you like any of my Chicken Tikka Masala? What did you order?”
“I got the Chicken Biryani again,” Carla said.
“You ordered two chicken dishes?”
“Well, you said you wanted the Tikka Masala and I like the Biryani.”
“But you could have ordered the Gushtaba or the Lamb Vindaloo—they’re both excellent.
“But I hate lamb!”
“So you ordered two chicken dishes.”
“My God! . . . . I’m sorry, okay?” Carla covered her face in her hands. “This was my last chance to have the Biryani!”
Evelyn drew a slightly less measured breath. “They have Indian restaurants in England, you know. More and better than anywhere in the U.S.”
“But I’ll never have anything from Star of Pradesh after tonight.”
“Carla, why are you so resistant to moving? Boston has been a disaster for you. And you’re far from the only person in this situation. Thirty-some employees will be relocating with us by the end of the quarter. Do you remember Lincoln Bourke, one of the veeps? You met him at the gala. Lincoln asks about you every time I see him. Anyway, he has a son, Aaron, that’s a year younger than you. Aaron is an excellent student—NHS 3 years—and he’s been at Wolfbrooke for a month now. Why can’t you develop a friendship with him?”
“Aaron Bourke? That little pervert? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Could you please do me the basic human courtesy of reserving the four-letter words for when you’re with your friends? The friends of yours that I’ve forbidden you from being around, perhaps?”
Carla slumped a little further in her chair and concealed an eye behind a wall of ash-blond hair. “Why do we have to move again? You’re telling me that two hundred, three hundred thousand a year or whatever isn’t enough? How much more money do you need?”
“Says the girl who can’t walk through her room because her closets are crammed to overcapacity. Says the girl who regularly overdraws her account on a three hundred dollar a week allowance. Every time you do that, incidentally, it costs me thirty-seven dollars. You had eight overdrafts in March. Care to do a little remedial arithmetic?”
“I wish I were dead.”
“Grow up. This is not about money, Carla. We’re moving because my leadership of this project is the culmination of a lifetime of work. Now that phase one trials results are public, I can tell you that we may be on the verge of the greatest revolution in medical knowledge since Semmelweis and Pasteur, or Watson and Crick.” Evelyn laughed. “Maybe since Mendel and Darwin.”
“You’re not ‘leading the project.’ You didn’t invent anything—you’re nothing but an MBA.”
“You of all people are attacking my credentials? Don’t flaunt your ignorance. I have an M.S. in pharmaceutical administration, with a Ph.D. in pharmacological science. Tell me, Carla, how’re the undergrad applications progressing? Heard anything? Getting a little late, isn’t it? When I was a high school senior I wor—”
“I’m not you—I’ll never be anything like you.”
“On that we agree: you’re nothing like me. Nevertheless, you need to understand that in the adult world, when opportunities are squandered, they are irretrievably gone. Unlike you, I don’t squander opportunities: I capitalize on them.”
Eternally unable to withstand her Mother’s glare without withering, Carla turned her face to the weirdly empty living room with its absent television and quartets of circles mashed into carpeting where furniture used to be. She read her Mother’s neat printing on the stacks of shipping boxes: KITCHEN – 1 of 6, 2 of 6, 4 of 6 . . . BATH#1 – 3 of 3, 2 of 3, 1 of 3 . . . . The emptiness was too much to bear. “Why can’t I just finish out the year here and move this June?” she asked.
“You? Stay in Boston alone? Now I know you’re joking. We’re not having this discussion. The work won’t wait until June; I’m needed in Malton now. It’s time you learn that the world doesn’t revolve around your desires. It’s past time you learned it. For weeks I’ve been begging you to pack but you’ve ignored me and done nothing. Now I’m through begging. The movers will be here Saturday morning at ten to finish up, and if your bedroom, bathroom, and closets are not packed, these men will do it for you. We’re leaving here. Our flight departs 7:30 A.M. Sunday and we will be on it. That’s final. Are you finished with dinner? Then get up and get packing.”
Carla stood, nearly knocking her chair over. She fled to her room and slammed the door behind her, abandoning the nearly untouched Biryani.
Carla’s passage into her bedroom suite was impeded by clothes that were overflowing from her walk-in closet, and by a stack of cardboard sheets designed to be folded into sturdy shipping crates. She ignored the stack except to step over it. Piles of clothing in every stage of cleanliness covered the floor and every horizontal surface. The task’s magnitude would have been overwhelming, even if she did want to leave. Carla’s phone announced a new text.
From Angela: “duuude! u still movin or wat? ru cummin 2 rileys l8r? can u git more kpins?? :-D get ur ass dwn here naowwww!1!”
Evelyn had shown none of the usual signs of getting called back to the office: there’d be no escape tonight, then. But Carla held no illusions. Despite tearful goodbyes and vows of eternal friendship, she knew that 3,300 miles and an ocean of distance would end any pretenses. For weeks, Carla had been noticing a subtle shift in the foundation of her relationships. She selected ‘delete’ from the phone’s drop-down, and her phone counseled restraint. “Delete all messages with this contact? Are you sure? This operation cannot be undone,” it warned. Carla was sure. For the first time in 5 years, she turned her phone off.
On eggplant-colored walls hung five intricately cross-hatched and stippled pen and ink drawings, all with the microscopic initials ‘cat’ camouflaged in the lower right corner. Each drawing was tastefully matted and expensively framed. “You’re so talented,” Evelyn had gushed as Carla had unveiled a drawing. “It’s such a shame they’re always so tiny!” A few days before her sixteenth birthday, Carla had returned home and all her drawings were missing. Evelyn was in meetings and unreachable. When Evelyn finally arrived home, she’d hurriedly presented the anguished Carla with five square, flat, giftwrapped presents. Carla recognized sizes and instantly knew what her mother had done. Each drawing had been elaborately double-framed, double-matted, and sealed behind UV-glass: parental encouragement of a rare positive outlet.
Carla climbed onto her unmade bed and lifted a frame from the wall over the headboard. The drawing—her favorite—portrayed either a nightmare-fueled hallucinogenic scene or a close-up of minutely intertwined tendrils of clover. The frame was a ponderous and solid vault. She considered origami-ing a cardboard sheet into a shipping crate to see if the frame could possibly fit within, but a venomous bitterness bubbled up from a dark well inside. Her throat burned with bile. You want me to pack? Fine. I’ll pack. Carla reversed her grip and with both arms she lifted the frame over her head and smashed it down on her bed’s pencil-post. Glass splintered. Carla froze, listening. There was no sound from outside. She powered her receiver on with the nightstand’s remote, chose a track, and thumbed the volume to a noise-masking level. She mincingly pulled daggers of glass from the frame and dropped them into a wastebasket. The drawing was undamaged except for a divot where the glass points had converged. She broke the frame to extricate her drawing, then she rolled the paper and slid it into a PVC storage tube. Carla freed her other drawings one by one, unselfconsciously accompanying the vocalist as she shattered glass. “Shut up and let me go / This hurts, I tell you so,” she sang. As she finished destroying the last frame, she saw tiny slivers glinting on the sheets.
The broken frames and ripped mats wouldn’t fit with the blades of glass. Staring at the overfull wastebasket and bare walls, Carla had a sense of doubt, of having made a horrible mistake: like racing into a curve and realizing too late that the road ahead is covered with ice. Feeling nauseous, she went into the bathroom and flipped on the frosted overhead light, as well as the harsh bulbs around the makeup-table mirror. Her reflection stared at her sourly. Hair too light and too straggly. Lips colorless and too thin. Complexion too pale, too ghostly. Eyes sunken, too short, too skinny, no breasts or hips or figure to speak of. Punitive light glared through her without even bothering to leave a shadow on the tile behind her. The invisible girl.
From under the bed Carla retrieved her special-use bag: a floppy knapsack-like purse. She dumped it out over the sink. Out poured a forgotten baggie containing mostly stems and seeds, along with loot from a dozen missions to various stores. There were art supplies jacked from Utrecht, assorted makeup boosted from Bloomie’s, a Penguin Classics ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ lifted from Barnes & Noble, a pack of unactivated gift cards ganked from Target, assorted nail polish and DVDs of Sleepy Hollow and Edward Scissorhands swiped from CVS, and four thirty-dollar boxes of Frédéric Fekkai dye nicked from Neiman’s. The Fekkai boxes boasted ‘3N-Darkest Brown’ dye, but the gorgeous vaguely Asian model on the box’s artwork had perfectly black hair. Carla looked up to stare again at the wan reflection in the mirror.
No point to braking, so might as well floor it.
Carla opened two boxes and swept everything else aside. She skimmed instructions as she undressed. In a way, starting over sounded right. New school, new person. She could remake herself—become anyone she wanted. Carla kicked though the clothes on the floor in the bedroom until she came across a frayed red tee to pull on. Back in the bathroom she tied her hair up with a rubber band and added a tub of Vaseline and a few white hand-towels to the pile on the granite counter. There were two tubes like toothpaste tubes; step one was to combine them to make the dye. Carla squeezed the tubes together into the kit’s plastic bowl. It looked like the bowl held a mating ball of white snakes when the tubes were emptied. “ ‘Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and caldron bubble,’ ” she quoted as she smashed and beat the ball out of existence with the Fekkai’s brush. Once the mixture was smooth, she rubbed a band of Vaseline across her hairline, around her ears, across the back of her neck. Consulting the instructions one last time, she noticed a bold warning in a red box: “IMPORTANT: Avoid all contact with eyes. Rinse eyes immediately and consult a poison control center if this product comes into contact with eyes. THIS PRODUCT CAN CAUSE PERMANENT BLINDNESS!” That reminded her. Black hair and light blonde eyebrows wouldn’t do. With her middle finger, Carla ringed her eyebrows with Vaseline.
Three hundred forty dollars in twenties in an old purse in the back of the closet. Not nearly enough for even a single month in the cheapest flophouse she knew of, and she knew of a few. Get a roommate? Carla didn’t know anyone who worked, and she didn’t know anyone with parents that could be counted on to let her crash for long. Get a job then. But without work experience? Well, there’s always waitressing, the second-to-last profession available to any able-bodied woman. Carla had no experience waiting tables, but surely a lifetime of eating most meals in restaurants would count for something. How much do waitresses make? They might not earn much more than her current allowance. Is that even possible? How could you live on your own on three hundred a week?
The white mixture was darkening, so Carla began. With the brush’s pointed handle she drew a straight line, parting her hair at the crown. She pulled on the kit’s disposable plastic gloves and she painted the dye into her hair, starting at the roots. Of course, there was a last ditch apocalyptic plan that Carla had buried away her mind’s recesses. In the old purse in the back of Carla’s closet was a VISA debit card tied to Evelyn’s checking account (2 months until expiration) and over thirteen thousand in the account last time she’d checked. Carla knew Evelyn’s PIN, but how much can you get from an ATM in one day? She recalled something about a three hundred dollar limit. Going into the bank was out of the question, so maybe make a thirteen thousand dollar online transfer into a PayPal account, then have a check mailed? Mailed to where? And a check payable to ‘Carla Teach’? That’d be pretty stupid—a sure way to get caught and probably a probation violation.
She parted her hair again and again, each time a quarter-inch to the right, painting the dye into her hair each time. Then she started on the left. “I don't know what's right and what's real anymore / I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore,” she sang. After she was sure her hair was thoroughly painted, Carla used a smaller brush for her eyebrows, then she read again to see how long to let the dye set. Thirty-five to forty-five minutes, the instructions advised. Say an hour, then. Another warning caught her eye: “IMPORTANT: It is necessary that you perform a skin allergy test 48 hours before each use of this product, as an allergy can develop suddenly, even though you have previously used the same colourant.”
Whatever. Would Evelyn press charges? Prosecute her own daughter? Carla couldn’t remember her mother showing any emotion besides anger, showing any compassion besides Evelyn’s patented FDA-approved formulation of ‘tough love.’ Could they actually put her in jail? The stakes to stealing Evelyn’s money seemed too high and the rewards too fleeting. For the millionth time, it occurred to Carla that she’d never seen her mother cry. It’d be interesting to see, but it’ll never happen, she decided. Some people just never cry—maybe that’s why others cry enough for two people.
Carla’s hair developed a weird dusky-violet color by the end of the hour. She hoped it was permanent. She got into the shower and turned the water on as hot as she could stand it. The dye looked like blood on the shower floor as it washed out. She dawdled, anxious about confronting herself in the mirror again. She shampooed, then conditioned, then washed until the soap was gone. Then she just let the water run over her head. Fine, then. She’d fly away to live in Malton. ‘Wolfbrooke Academy.’ The name sounded like the setting for a badly-written horror story. But it was supposed to have “a curriculum designed to encourage artistically gifted students’ creative expression.” No art teachers, just ‘Artists in Residence.’ That part, at least, sounded mildly interesting. She prayed that the New and Improved Carla would be a hit.
The water started getting cold, so she turned it off. Carla avoided looking at her reflection as she reached out of the stall for a towel. She dried herself and even with all the shampoo, the dye still left dark stains on the ivory towel.
At last she looked up into the mirror. She gasped. Her pale blue eyes looked artificial—machinelike and robotic—in the frame of jet-black hair. After a moment, she smirked at her reflection. The grinning girl in the mirror looked insane. Carla laughed, delighted.
She was singing and combing it out when there was a knock on the bedroom door. Carla’s heart and stomach lurched. She pulled on a robe but before she could get there, she heard the door bounce in its frame and the knob jiggle. Even from the hallway, Evelyn’s voice was shrill. “Carla? Open the door. The office called—there’s a bit of an emergency and I need to go in first thing tomorrow and . . . Jesus! What is that smell?”
Carla unlocked the door and scurried aside as Evelyn shoved it open. Wide-eyed, Evelyn gasped and staggered backward when she saw her daughter. Evelyn’s hand came up to cover her mouth.
“Oh, my God. What have you done?” she said.
Finally, Carla saw tears in her Mother’s eyes.
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