for them to be a good shape
Behold, the paper snowflake—
It is perfect!
And has so many points to make
I reread it, not comprehending what exactly it is that I’m seeing right away. Poetry? I’ve never heard him express an interest inpoetry. There are only two finished poems in here, all the rest blank or occupied by rhyming word banks. He’d gotten a few other poems under way, then abandoned them, lines crossed out, frustrated inkblots leaking between pages.
“Bettie, did you make these?” Kaia’s voice grabs my attention. She’s holding up a colorful fan of papers.We should do something about all those cans of paint in the basement, one reads. Then another:Divorce is very sad. It might help you to know that we never liked him.
“Yeah...” I’m tense for a moment, but then she grins.
“I love them.”
Mom is beside herself with enthusiasm in a way that only a mother whose child presents them with colorful doodles on craft paper could be. “Oh my gosh!” she cries. “You used to draw these when you were little! Remember, Jim?” She pokes on a pair of reading glasses to examine hers.“You let my birds pair off into cliques while I was in Atlantic City and I won’t forget it.”She frowns. “I don’t remember you ever having birds. Bettie, when did you ask me to watch your birds?”
Athena laughs, the sparkly ink on hers flashing in the early light. Her illustration is of two pineapples riding a skateboard past a toxic waste plant.Please don’t make me choose what we eat for dinner.“Look, Sean. It’s our relationship in a nutshell.”
Felix shows his to Marilou:I didn’t understandThe Goldfinch.
“Neither did I, to be honest,” Marilou muses. Baby Adrian sticks a red ribbon to her cheek, and she blows raspberries into his palm. He giggles wildly.
There are no duplicates, so my family starts passing their cards around, reading the ones they didn’t get.
Mom’s wide blue eyes are confused. “It’s hard to find episodes ofThe Mentalistanywhere. What? I don’t get it.”
“The randomness is the joke,” Kaia informs her. I cover my face with my hands and smother a laugh. “It’s supposed to be weird.”
Mom reexamines the card. “Oh. Hah.” Then a minute later: “Have you looked on Hulu forThe Mentalist? Sometimes when I can’t find something, it’s on Hulu.”
Watching everyone, I don’t think they would have enjoyed the extravagant gifts nearly as much as they’re enjoying (well, with the exception of Mom, whose humor doesn’t quite match mine, but you can’t please everyone) these extremely stupid homemade cards.
Grandma reads hers aloud, mouth tilted. “You’re my abettor half! See you at the trial.Imagine getting something like this in the mail. Watch your back, Hallmark.”
I smile at her, butHallmarkmakes me think ofHalland how much he’d love this tableau. My eyes burn with tears. How dare he not be here for this.
It’s so utterly unfair.
One by one, members of my family notice his absence, and question me about it. I expect to be berated—What’d you do to screw it up?—so it knocks me off my balance when they’re supportive instead. Marilou brings me a waffle, even though my appetite has shriveled up. Dad asks if I’d like to help him with a puzzle. Grandma forces me to wear her lucky wig (a platinum bob with green glitter), and Grandpa whips up a bucket’s worth of hot chocolate and passes me a handkerchief for my damp eyes.
Their unexpected affection prompts me to blubber, which I do privately in the kitchen pantry with my waffle (I’m not hungry, but maybe eating something sweet will help, I tell myself).
While I’m sagging against a box of Ritz crackers in the dark closet, soaking the scarf around my neck with tears, it hits me:Maybe I can bring him back somehow. Maybe if my behavior is really, really good, the mystical cosmos will reward me with Hall, but this time he’ll be here for keeps, and then I can properly tell him how I’ve grown to feel about him. We’ll have more than just two kisses.
“Everything all right?” Mom asks when I cut back through the living room on my way upstairs.
“It will be,” I reply firmly, thundering up the staircase with purpose. I don’t have to be sad. This can all be temporary.
I whisk into my bedroom, which is exactly as it was when we arrived: cramped, dim, with an odor of disuse. It contains a single twin bed and one flat pillow. It’s as if Hall was never here at all.
I haven’t accessed the Internet in days, haven’t Googled myself. This is the longest social media hiatus I’ve ever taken, and my fingers itch to log into those portals to hell when I open my phone. Like an addiction. But those spaces haven’t been healthy for me, which is more evident than ever now that I’ve gotten some distance from them and feel better about myself. Hall’s wall-to-wall schedule of activities for this week has incited a cleanse—now that I’ve gotten a taste of what it feels like to not care so much about what others are saying about me, I want to keep that streak going.
I’ve been so angry for so long, but I’ve been telling myself I don’t care. But I have cared far too much, for far too long, about what everyone else thinks of me.
What is the best way to earn good behavior points? It can likely be determined by behaving polar to my impulses. If there’s any way to get magic on my side, it’s got to be holiday do-gooding.
I typehow to start an online auctioninto my browser’s search bar and giddily run through all the possibilities. At first, I’m conservative with what I decide to donate. What if I want to learn how toplay the guitar someday and wish I hadn’t sold the one originally meant for Kaia? What if I end upneedingall the costumes from the 2013 filmThe Great Gatsby? But as I add items, I find myself liking the way this feels, feeding the high by giving more and more. I’m going to sell all this shit, which, it turns out, I maybe don’t actually need as much as I thought I did, which will make the world a better place. No exaggeration! I am actively contributing to society—me, Bettie Hughes. What a thrill!
