Page 64 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
Outside the gray sky is turning darker and soon the festival will make a turn for the spooky and be overrun with teenagers as the young ones go home with their parents.
“You’re perfect,” Bram says as he kisses along my hairline. “I need you to know that you’re perfect.”
For the first time in an incredibly long time, I feel like myself. I feel like the person Bram claims to see. And maybe I’ve been here all along, lying dormant and protected from the threat of Gentry and his family and Penelope Pike.
When we finally move to get dressed, Bram helps me into my tights, rolling them up my legs. We both make no move to clean his ejaculate from the inside of my legs. I want it—the evidence of us—there just as badly as he does.
We return to the festival, and I take the twins home to get ready for bed while Bram stays late with Fern and Leo and Sloane.
When they get home, Fern is buzzing. The numbers aren’t final, but it looks like she has secured free menstrual products for every student bathroom at Mount Astra High Schoolandis the reigning student body president. With the twins tucked in bed, the three of us celebrate Fern’s victory with late-night pizza and the firstScreammovie, despite Bram’s protests.*
Fern falls asleep halfway through and Bram switches over to the nature series narrated by Barack Obama that he loves so much. I fall asleep splayed across his chest as he plays with my hair before loosely braiding it for me and walking me to bed.
The next day, Sloane takes Fern and me to her salon. When I sit down in the chair and see myself reflected back in the mirror, nearly an inch of dark roots coming in and the ends of my hair so obviously dead, I begin to swipe through the camera roll on my phone.
“What are we thinking for today?” the stylist asks as he snaps the cape around my neck.
“I think it’s time to get back to my roots,” I tell him. “And not as a metaphor.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Bram
Time for the big reveal!” Sloane calls from the glassed-in walkway leading out to my greenhouse. I look up from where I’ve been helping the twins harvest basil for dinner to see Fern bouncing behind her honorary aunt, the apples of her cheeks a bright red and a big smile on her face. She comes in front of me and the twins and gives a little spin, making her newly shortened hair fly out around her face.
The twins clap and then a solemn Berry throws scraps of torn basil at her, like aromatic runway confetti.
“What do you think, Dad?” Fern asks me, and I open my mouth to speak, and then find that my throat hurts a little, and then take a minute.
“I think you look beautiful and so grown-up,” I finally manage to say. With her hair cut away from her face, I can see her sparkling eyes, the almost-adult shape of her features, so much like her mother’s. She has Sara’s eyebrows and forehead and a little bit of my nose and she’s my baby and also she’s going to leave for college before I know it and—
“Aw, Dad, don’t cry!” Fern pulls me into a hug. She smells like a salon only Sloane Saint James could afford. “It’s just a haircut.”
“I know, I know.” My voice is gruff while I sniffle into her hair. “You look very pretty and I hope Simon shits his ileum*out when he sees you.”
“Actually, maybe we don’t want Simon to shit his ileum.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, so he wrote me this letter after I won our bet and I guess he started going to therapy after his parents separated over the summer and apparently he learned about this thing called weaponized incompetence and he apologized for using that to manipulate me into doing basically all of his work for him.”
“That’s a... good thing?” I venture.
“You need to be careful with the guys who overuse therapy vocabulary,” Sloane warns.
“Oh, we’re definitely not getting back together. Ever. But I did ask him if he would stay on as copresident. Plus, he’s so good at doing the public-facing stuff like talking at pep rallies.” She wrinkles her nose. “Maddie said I’ve got the upper hand now and I should call all the shots including making him do my bitch work.”
“Your bitch work?” I ask.
She nods. “Yeah, all the stuff I don’t want to do. And pep rallies are at the top of the bitch work list.”
“As long as you’re happy, sweetie. Just let me know if I need to change my stance on him shitting out his ileum anytime soon. And thank you,” I say over Fern’s head to Sloane.
Sloane’s expression turns a little devious. “You’ll thank me even more in a minute. Girls, do you want to go upstairs with me while we put makeup on Fern and see what look suits her best?”
There’s another cloud of bruised basil confetti, chants ofglitter gloss glitter gloss, and then I’m alone in the greenhouse.
Well.
