The Implosion of Aggie Winchester (19 page)

I clenched my fists. “How can you be mad at my mom for something
you
started? She lost her job over it, you know.”

“Your mom burned the ballots!” Sylvia cried. “She deserved what she got.”

“She didn’t burn those ballots,” I said. “But even if she had, they were fakes. You and Beth forged them.”

Sylvia stamped her foot in the empty hallway. “I was just doing what I
needed
to do! Why can’t you get that through your head?”

“Stealing an election? You
needed
to do that?”

“My reasons for everything were to keep my family together.”

“Really? Is that what you’re going tell your kid? Is that the explanation you’ll give when you’re asked why you lied to the whole school and let everyone believe you’d been elected prom queen fair and square?”

Sylvia had enough of me. “Screw you,” she said, and started walking away.

“He won’t care, you know.”

Sylvia stopped. “What?”

“Ryan Rollings. It won’t make a difference to him whether you’re the prom queen or the mayor or the next president. He doesn’t care about you, Sylvia. Not really. And you being queen won’t make him care about the baby, either. I wish it would. But it won’t. And you can trust me because I’m speaking from experience. It’s not going to happen.”

For a second, I thought Sylvia might go for my throat, like a wild cougar ripping apart a jackrabbit, but I didn’t care. I forged ahead. “You deserve better than Ryan Rollings, Sylvia,” I said. “I hope you wake up one day and realize it. But if you don’t, then too bad for you and your kid.”

“You’re a loser who doesn’t know anything,” Sylvia said, walking away. “I
hate
you.”

Tears stung my eyes. “See you at the dance,” I called after her.

Chapter Thirty-six

TUESDAY, APRIL 28 / 10:30 A.M.

My mom’s car
was in the driveway when I got home. Looking at it, I suddenly wasn’t sure if, after my mom dressed in her suit and did her hair this morning, she’d ever left the house.

I walked inside and set my bag down. Everything was quiet. “Hello?” I called, as loudly as I could with my swollen face.

I heard the study door open and listened to my mom pad down the hallway. I imagined she was surprised to hear my voice. When she saw me, she bent over a little, like the sight of my face sent pain shooting down her spine. “Aggie?” she asked, as if she wasn’t sure it was actually me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

My mom cupped my chin in her hand. I held on to the kitchen counter while she turned my face gently to the left and right. “My God, who did this to you?”

“Beth Daniels,” I said. “And Sylvia Ness.”

My mom let go of my chin and just looked at me. “When?”

“At school.”

“Did you report it? Are they expelled?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No. We all agreed the best thing was to let it drop.”

“What? After what those girls did to you? Absolutely not.”

She moved toward the phone. “I might not be principal anymore, but I’ll be damned if I let someone beat up my daughter and get away with it.”

“Mom,” I said, blocking her path. “Mom, it’s okay. I wanted this. I wanted us to have it out.”

“You wanted them to hurt you?”

“Well, maybe not kick my ass. But then again, I don’t know. I mean, they did the worst they could, and it’s not so bad. Right? Maybe I just needed to prove to myself that I shouldn’t be scared of them.”

My mom tilted her head. “You were scared?”

“Well, yeah. Sylvia’s a pretty tough person, you know?”

My mom nodded. “I do. I worried a lot about you hanging out with her. I can’t say I’m sad that your friendship seems to be coming to an end.”

I looked at my fingernails. “Losing her was hard, Mom. But I don’t want you to think everything I’ve done that’s disappointed you is her fault.”

My mom inhaled slowly. “I don’t think Sylvia is to blame for all your actions, no. I know she was there for you when Tiffany Holland and her friends turned on you freshman year. It’s just that, when you were with her, it’s like suddenly you were this different person.”

I was struck by how honest my mom and I were being with each other. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d talked like this. “I thought I
needed
to be a different person,” I said. “To protect myself. And I gotta say, it worked for a while.”

My mom nodded. “I think I knew that. At least intellectually. Certainly I searched for articles and read books about Goth behavior, and I thought I had a handle on it. But none of the books explained how to talk to your daughter who suddenly felt like a stranger. I was used to my good girl, my baby, and overnight you became an angry woman. I didn’t know how to get to you.”

I wrapped my arms around my torso. “Well, it would have helped if you’d started by listening. I told you lots of stuff, and you never let it sink in. You just heard it through your principal filter.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact that I’m a virgin. You didn’t believe me when I told you Neil and I didn’t have sex. But we didn’t, Mom. If I was going to get pregnant, then it was going to be another Immaculate Conception.”

My mom moved to the kitchen table and sat down heavily.

“And also,” I continued, still standing at the counter, “Sylvia really did steal ballots from the school and mess with the election. I know it wasn’t probably the greatest move ever to run down to the superintendent’s office to try and tell you that, but it was true. I wish you would have listened.”

My mom looked up at me. “I’m sorry I didn’t, Aggie. But I don’t think I knew how. I was reeling from so much. And your presence just seemed like one more thing I needed to deal with—and I couldn’t.”

I felt like I had more to say, so I kept going. “Look, I know I’m not perfect, and I’m not proud of everything I’ve done. But what you just said? It seems like that’s how you handle
everything
. Me being Goth, cancer, the prom. You just try to manage it and think about it instead of, I don’t know, experiencing it. I know I screwed up, but at least I tried to tell you what was happening about the prom. It didn’t work, but at least I tried. I can at least say I didn’t just sit around and try to make it go away.”
Like you
was the implied end of that sentence.

I shut my mouth and waited for her to say something. For a moment, we looked at each other, neither one of us blinking.

Then my mom stood and walked over to the window. She started picking dead buds off of one of the potted plants on the sill. “You know what I thought about when you left this morning?” she asked quietly.

“No.”

“I thought about how, when you were a little girl, we went to see
Titanic
together. Do you remember that?”

I nodded. I’d hounded my mom for weeks, begging her to let me see it in the theaters, but she’d argued I was too young. Finally, I wore her down enough that she agreed to take me.

“Aggie, do you remember what you asked when we drove home after the movie?” my mom asked, still facing the window.

“No.”

“You asked me whose fault it was that the ship sank and all the people died. I remember that because it was such a complicated question, and it took me a minute to answer it. And I told you there were lots of people who had a role to play. The lookouts, because they didn’t spot the iceberg in time, and the architects, because they said they’d built a ship that couldn’t sink but that wasn’t true, and all the people who said there were enough lifeboats on the boat but there weren’t, and . . .” My mom took a deep, shuddery breath. “And in the end, I said, it was the captain’s fault. Because out of everyone who had a role to play, he was the one with the power to really change the course of events. He was the one who could have slowed the ship down, or not left the harbor with too few lifeboats, or made sure that the lifeboats were as full of people as possible before they were launched. But he didn’t do any of that. And he was the one who—who
should
have.”

My mom turned away from the window and I was alarmed to find tears in her eyes. It’d been years since I’d seen my mom cry. But here she was, tearing up, talking about
Titanic
. What was going on?

“When Mrs. Wagner came to me,” my mom continued, “I should have either told her to put Sylvia on the throne or, if I’d somehow known the ballot boxes were stuffed, I should have authorized a revote. I should have . . .
directed
her about how to deal with the fact that there were so many votes for a pregnant girl with spiked hair. But, honey . . . I couldn’t. I just didn’t have it in me. At the time, all I could think of was what a ruckus it would cause among school board members and what the faculty would think, and I just figured it would be easier to go with the status quo. I just—washed my hands of it. And when she torched everything—how could I really blame her? It was stupid, yes, but I hadn’t told her not to. I hadn’t told her
anything
.”

“But why?” I whispered.

My mom turned away from me again. “The thing is, Aggie, I’m tired. Really, really tired. And I just don’t know how much fight I have left in me.”

I felt my stomach sink. “What are you talking about? Is the cancer back?”

“No, it’s not. But I’m just not the same person I was before it came. I’m certain I went back to work too soon after the lumpectomy, and every day I’m just so damn tired. I haven’t been making good choices on a lot of fronts, not just the prom. I was looking at radiation on top of everything else, and I just wasn’t sure I could handle it.”

“Is that why you resigned without a fight?” I asked, watching my mom’s shoulders shake through her suit. She nodded.

“At first, I thought the whole thing could just blow over. That’s why I was so furious when you spoke to Rod Barris. At that point I realized that I might not be able to keep the whole thing quiet. But then I slowly realized that maybe things
shouldn’t
be quiet. That maybe I should rethink my priorities and just step down.”

My mom walked back to the table. She wiped away the tears that had left her face blotchy and swollen. She looked like she was allergic to her emotions. “When the whole thing happened with Neil, I was so upset, Aggie. It was such a blow. Not because you’d been caught, but because I realized I knew so little about what was going on with you. Not only had I been tired, but I’d convinced myself that because I was an
educational professional,
I understood you. But really, I think I just told myself that because I couldn’t think of a way to overcome all this . . .
difference
we’d built up between us.”

My heart contracted and pushed a bubble of emotion into my throat. I tried to keep it down.
Don’t blame yourself
, I wanted to say.
I’m at fault, too
.

“Mom, it’s okay,” I said. “I hid stuff from you and sort of shut down too. I haven’t exactly been the easiest teenager ever.”

The bubble was back in my throat, but this time it popped and tears started rolling down my cheeks. “I’m really sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to let you down. I’m sorry if you’re ashamed of me.”

“Oh, Aggie,” my mom said, then kissed the tip of her fingers and placed them on my swollen eye. “I’m not ashamed of you, honey. I’m sorry that I made everything so complicated and awful. I love you, and I’m so very proud of you for trying so hard to do what you believed was right.”

“I love you too, Mom,” I said, taking in the cool feel of her fingers on my hot, swollen face.

We sat that way for a long time, fingers and faces touching. For the first time in days, the frantic anxiety of the prom faded, replaced by the quiet of the kitchen all around us.

After spending a half hour in the bathroom soaking my face to cut down the swelling, I made a phone call.

“Hey, shit dick.”

“Why, Aggie. It’s good to hear your voice,” Rod Barris said. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever hear from you again. I figured you were done speaking to me.”

“Well, you did totally scam me,” I said dryly. “You made me think you’d change your stupid story if I told you who the father of Sylvia’s kid was.”

“It’s not such a stupid story if you think about it. It’s all over the evening news. The story I just did—‘Investigation into Prom Scandal’—got a lot of attention. In fact, I may get a new job out of it. I have an interview at the
Paul Bunyan Press
in Minneapolis next week.”

I suddenly pictured that scene in
Planet Earth
where thousands of cockroaches crawl on top of the massive piles of bat poop in those caves in Borneo. Rod was totally one of those cockroaches, crawling all over St. Davis’s crap.

“Well, good for you, Rod,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could. “My mom and I will think of you when we see Sylvia get her crown at the prom.”

There was a pause. “You and your
mom
? Are you going to prom together?”

“Well, technically, I do have a guy meeting me at the dance,” I said, thinking of Fitz and trying not to smile, “but as my official, bona fide date, yes, I’ve decided I’m taking my mom.”

Rod laughed again. “Well, I’ll be. And I suppose you’re calling me so I can print the story and get you some good press?”

“Something like that. Just so people don’t think this is the last they’ve seen of Gail Winchester. Or me, for that matter.”

“Well, I can’t guarantee we’ll have the column inches free. The paper has plenty of content these days, as I’m sure you can imagine. Getting this story in will be a long shot.”

“Well, you must be used to that. I mean, look at the odds stacked against your gene pool evolving.”

Rod scoffed. “Tell me, just out of curiosity, what’s your motivation for doing this? I mean really. Your mom? At a dance?”

“I just want people to know that I’m not ashamed of my mom. And she’s not ashamed of me.”

“Hmmm,” said Rod, apparently thinking this over. “Very touching. You think you guys will wear matching dresses?”

I could hear the sarcasm in his voice, but I refused to let him get to me.

“Thanks for your time,” I said. And then hung up on him.