Page 75 of Kitten

“No.”

“You do. You always have. I don’t blame you. You shouldn’t have had to see me like that.”

We were both thinking about it now. Her reflection in my mirror, the training bra I never saw again, all the things we never talked about. The memory was still terrible but, I was surprised to find, no longer weighed the same. “I don’t feel sorry for you,” I said. “I miss you.”

She was quiet. I’d taken her by surprise. “Don’t be silly,” she finally said.

There was a rapping at the kitchen door. “Open up,” Lou yelled. “You’ve been in there forever.”

“Are you not alone?” my mother asked.

“I am, I’m in the kitchen. Give me a second.”

Lou looked flushed and cherubic, curls backlit like a halo. She removed a handle of tequila and a plastic bag of lime wedges from the refrigerator.No,I mouthed.

“I can hear you’re having fun,” my mother said.

“Lou is, yeah.” I kissed Lou on the cheek, went to her bedroom, and shut the door.

“Are you having a party?”

“Kind of. This happens a lot. Lou can turn any day into an event.”

“And you thought this was a nice time to call.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s like I said. I think about you all the time.”

Silence again on her end. Hints of faint and familiar sounds, the microwave beeping, a drawer opening. I wondered what she was making. A plate of pizza bagels, maybe, which we used to love, or just a mug of tea, green with honey. I could see her now, in the kitchen I grew up in. Movie posters on red walls. Her black hair a sheet over the side of her face as she leaned over to blow on whatever it was that was hot. The background noise faded, and her voice came out clear again.

“I think about you, too,” she said. Something inside me relaxed. Being thought of, little tongue of love.

I lay on Lou’s bed with my feet propped against the wall like James and I did the night we met. “Do you remember the summers we used to lie on your bed and listen to the storms?”

“You hated them.”

“No, I didn’t.” I pressed my toes into the wall. “I loved them. I loved lying there and listening to the rain. I always wanted to open your window and touch it, remember?”

She laughed. “No, you went to my bed because you were scared. You hated how sudden the noises where. I knew there was a trick to working out the time between each thunderclap, but I didn’t know how. I felt horrible. So I just pretended like it was exciting to not know. To just listen.”

That couldn’t be right, yet as soon as she said it, I knew it was. My mother was the only person who knew which of my memories were true and which were my own creation. If I could go back, I’d skip past my childhood and go to hers.Spend one day with the girl she was before her mother left her. Witness her happiness. Braid her hair. Remember everything.

“I actually am sorry that I’ve called you so out of the blue,” I said. “A lot has changed in the past month. I thought you’d want to know.”

“Tell me, Kitten.”

I caught my reflection in Lou’s vanity. Cheeks pink, lips stained with cherry liqueur. I smiled. She hadn’t called me that in a long time.

“I’m in Lou’s room right now. I have my own room, but it’s also the living room. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I’m paying rent and everything. The money you sent, it’s been so helpful. It’ll pay for the first month while I wait to hear back from jobs.”

“That’s good. And your boyfriend?”

“James is okay. At least, I think he is. We haven’t been speaking. He needed space from me. Needs. He struggled with what happened with Silver.”

“He’ll recover.”

I laughed. She used to say the same thing when I hurt myself, or when something bad happened at school:You’ll recover.The way she said it, so curt and confident—I always believed her.

“Lou thinks so, too. She thinks he’s obsessed with me, but really, I think he just loves me like a normal person does, only he’s not feeling very normal right now.”