Later, after Advil, after pizza, after Shelly and Mary Ann had tried on multiple combinations of tops and jeans and left Jade, not exactly without a backward glance, but with only a very small backward glance, she tucked herself into the daybed with her accounting textbook. She dozed briefly and when she started awake she found she was thirsty. She crept down the stairs and toward the kitchen for a glass of water. She could hear unfamiliar voices coming from the living room: Bob and Kathleen had friends over. Everyone was with friends except Jade! Should she have gone to Chris’s with the girls? Who was Chris? It would have been fine, probably, except if it wasn’t, and then it would have been terrible.
The lights in the kitchen were turned down low. There was a bottle of red wine open on the giant square island, and two wineglasses, their bowls almost as big and as round as globes, were set beside them. Jade opened a kitchen cabinet, taking care to be quiet—but no need, because the cabinet closed with a sigh so soft it sounded almost regretful. Jade couldn’t have slammed it if she’d wanted to. She filled her water glass from the little spout on the outside of the refrigerator door and was turning to make her way upstairs when she heard the murmur from the living room resolve into a voice, Kathleen’s, and the words resolve into something recognizable:
“...seems like someone who doesn’t want to take up too much space.” Murmur murmur murmur. “...heart is sort of breaking for her.”
Then the lilt of a question from another female voice, and after that this:
“I think she was in the system... or maybe sometimes lives with a relative or something? She doesn’t seem to have family...”
Jade froze. They were talking about her. The heat of a deep, deep shame started in Jade’s feet and made its way up her legs, throughher torso and arms, all the way to her face. Her cheek, when she put her hand to it, was hot to the touch.
“...goodness she has you all... so generous to include her in your—” Murmur murmur.
“Oh, well. It’s nothing, really,” said Kathleen. “I couldn’t bear for her to be left all alone; you know what an empath I am.” Her voice was louder now, too loud; it was impossiblenotto eavesdrop. Jade held tight to her glass of water (chilled, it should be noted, to the perfect temperature) and slunk out of the room and up the stairs.
Though that humiliation had been grave enough, the next day, Thanksgiving morning, a graver one developed. The girls woke and ate breakfast together in the kitchen; Shelly and Mary Ann, clearly hungover, dissected the events of the evening before. (Max had beenout of control, ohmygod,so funnyShellycouldn’t even believe itand Jadeshould have been there.)Breakfast was a platter of bagels with three different kinds of cream cheese plus a fruit salad, and as they ate,Jade wondered why there seemed to be no meal preparations afoot. No turkey roasting since 5a.m., no potatoes in a colander in the sink, ready for peeling. Maybe rich people simply ate Thanksgiving dinner later in the day.
The answer became clear soon enough, when Mary Ann broke from her repast to walk to the bottom of the stairs and call, “Mom! What time are we leaving?”
Leaving?
Two forty-five, came the answer. Cocktails at three, dinner at four.
“Leaving to go where?”
Both Mary Ann and Shelly stared at her and said in unison, “The club.”What club?“Did I forget to tell you? We always eat Thanksgiving dinner at the club.” Mary Ann shrugged and rolled her eyes and said, “Honestly, it gets old, but what are we going to do, start cooking turkeys all of a sudden? That’s not really my mom’s MO.”
“Ah,” said Jade, in a voice that she hoped conveyed,Oh, yes, theclub.“Am I supposed to wear—is there like a dress code or something?” She’d never been to “the club”—to any club. She took a panicked mental walk through her suitcase: sweats, jeans, a nice-enough sweater she thought she could wear for the holiday meal. “I didn’t bring anything to wear out to dinner,” she added. Her palms started to sweat.
Kathleen swept through the kitchen just then, refilling her coffee mug and dropping a “Hey, girls!” like a DJ dropping a beat.
“Just, like, whatever, a dress or a skirt or something. It’s pretty casual.”
“Okay,” said Jade.
Upstairs, not so long after this, Jade emerged from the shower in the bathroom that attached to Mary Ann’s bedroom to find a dress laid out on the daybed. It was a wrap dress, hunter green, with a high-low hemline and a band of silk along each side of the V-neck. It was a beautiful dress. Next to the dress, on the floor, was a pair of black wedge ankle boots that looked brand-new. Jade approached the outfit cautiously, like it might bite her.
“Where’d this come from?”
Mary Ann, entranced by her face in the makeup mirror on her vanity, looked over causally and said, “My mom. I told her you didn’t bring stuff for the club.” Then she walked over, fingered the dress fondly, and said, “I used to love this dress, in high school. I thought she put it in the giveaway bin.”
High school had been not even a year ago for either of them, but never mind. Jade thought she’d remember forever the flood of warmth to her cheeks when Mary Ann saidgiveaway bin.Mary Ann didn’t mean anything by it, unless she did.
Maybe in fact she did.
Probably she did.
She definitely did. If it wasn’t enough that she said it once, when they trooped downstairs, the three of them, dressed for Thanksgiving dinner at the club, Mary Ann said it again: “I thought youput that dress in the giveaway bin, Mom!” For extra, unnecessary emphasis, she pointed at Jade.
Kathleen’s face softened when she looked at Jade; she said, “Don’t you look lovely in that dress, Jade. Doesn’t that color just make her skin glow? I swear, at this time of year I’m about as pasty as a dinner roll. How I envy you your skin tone.”
Mary Ann and Shelly agreed that yes, Jade looked wonderful, and no, Kathleen did not look like a dinner roll, and then Mary Ann uttered the phrasegiveaway binfor an unfathomable third time, in this context: “If it was in the giveaway bin she should just keep it, right, Mom?”
“Of course,” agreed Kathleen, who was already distracted, looking through her handbag for something. “Jade. By all means, keep the dress.”
Never again, thought Jade at the end of the long weekend (emphasis onlong) as they packed to return to campus, and she folded the green dressever so neatlyand left it on the pillow of the daybed. Never again would she be at someone else’s mercy like this, wearing cast-off clothes, trotted out like a charity project. Before she was thirty, in ten years, she vowed,shewould own the home.Shewould dictate the guest list, buy the bagels, have the dresses. She would take up all the space she wanted, wherever she felt like it. Nobody would ever speak about her in soft, fake-empathetic voices. Nobody would feel bad for Jade Gordon, for anything, ever again.
The remnants of fall faded; winter arrived. Shorter days, the buzz of midterm studying, final papers. Football ended, and the winter sports began in earnest: hockey, basketball, indoor track. An early snow fell, melted, another snow came. Students from warmer climes may have wondered why they turned down that acceptance to William and Mary, to UC–Santa Barbara, to Clemson or the University of Virginia. But for Jade, who’d been living through a much drearier version of New England winters her whole life—the snow in Lawrence sometimes seemed to fall from the sky in shades ofgray—there was nothing so beautiful as a light snowfall over the quad, students bundled against the cold and darkness, moving from the warmth of the dining hall to the warmth of the library to the warmth of the residence halls with the bright squares of light set against the darkening sky. Everywhere was warmth, to someone who had come from such cold. The food in the dining hall that students complained about was an unfathomable feast to Jade; the library where they didn’t feel like going to study was a bastion of safety and reliability.
