By mid-October the weather had cooled. Each afternoon, my mother walked the countryside around my school: white gravel roads, tiered hillsides, gnarled grapevines. Arriving sweaty and cheerful, she stood alone at the side of the parking lot. The beautiful model-moms stood twenty feet away, decked out in jewelry and scarves, ironed jeans. When the temperatures fell, they wore fur coats.
Aria smiled at my mother standing alone in baggy jeans and shapeless sweaters, her hair a frizzy braid. “Your mother always wears tennis shoes.” I was afraid Aria would start assigning numbers to mothers. Standing in the distance, my mother looked very plain. She belonged more on the nanny side than the model-mom side, and I felt guilty for thinking that.
Only three of us in the fourth-grade class—Kelly, John, and I—were short term, meaning one or two semesters at the school. John Houser’s family had come the previous spring, so his father could do research with a pharmaceutical firm. But the family had been in a terrible car accident right after they’d arrived, and John carried photos of the smashed Mercedes in his backpack pocket, showing them to anyone who would look. He’d been on brain rest all summer and still wasn’t allowed to play during recess. Whenever he got excited, he twirled his hand in the air and whooped, “Still alive!” right in the middle of class.
“Poor you.” Aria stroked his curly hair like he was her pet. I wondered if she wasn’t also making fun of him because sometimes he leaned too close, and she had to push him away. “Maybe too alive.”
Kelly and I should have been friends because our situations were similar, academic parents here on research grants.
“Why don’t you invite Kelly over this weekend?” My mother urged one day after meeting Kelly’s mom in the parking lot.
“She’s a whiner.” This was the truth, according to Aria. “She never wants to do anything. She always says her stomach hurts.”
I had liked Kelly when I first met her. She had a halo of dark curls, thick black eyelashes. She wore leggings and turtlenecks in bright mismatched colors, reminding me of my cousins in Minnesota. Right away she asked if I would like to take riding lessons with her. She nodded toward the window that overlooked the stable. “My mother is going there today to ask about lessons.”
“I love horses,” I told her.
But the next day she reported back. “My mother found out you have to have your own horse to take lessons.”
I was actually relieved, because Aria had pulled me aside that morning during recess. “Do you like her?”
I shrugged.
“She’s so mousy, the way she slumps. Five max.” Aria imitated Kelly hunched over at her desk, arms folded across her stomach. She batted her eyelashes, asking in a whiny voice the way Kelly asked, “Are you going to sit outside at lunch?”
My mother would have been horrified at how much I wanted Aria to like me, how readily I agreed with her, laughing and turning my back.
Kelly brought novels to read during lunch. She seemed well prepared for rejection, and I told myself that meant she had been rejected before. Probably because she had always been a whiner, a mousy mouse. This was how I talked to myself, with Aria’s voice inside my head.
Sometimes when Aria and I laughed, Kelly’s face turned red and she excused herself to go to the bathroom, where she stayed until the teacher sent me to get her—assuming, since we were both new and daughters of academics, we must be friends.
“Kelly?” I entered the narrow bathroom with wooden stalls. “Mrs. Cantucci wants you to come back.”
“I can’t,” she whimpered from behind the door. “I feel too sick. I might vomit.”
The bathroom smelled of disinfectant, and I could see her blue tennis shoes under the door, heels raised so only the toes touched. Snacks were being handed out in the room. “What should I tell Mrs. Cantucci?”
“Tell her to call my mom to come get me.”