Lawless Spaces

by Corey Ann Haydu

Genres: YA Family

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of Deb Caletti, this poignant coming-of-age novel in verse follows a teen girl who connects with the women of her maternal line through their journals and comes to better understand her fraught relationship with her mother.

Mimi’s relationship with her mother has always been difficult. But lately, her mother has been acting more withdrawn than usual, leaving Mimi to navigate the tricky world of turning sixteen alone. What she doesn’t expect is her mother’s advice to start journaling—just like all the woman in her family before her. It’s a tradition, she says. Expected.

But Mimi takes to poetry and with it, a way to write down the realities of growing into a woman, the pains of online bullying, and the new experiences of having a boyfriend. And all in the shadows of a sexual assault case that is everywhere on the news—a case that seems to specifically rattle her mother.

Trying to understand her place in the world, Mimi dives into the uncovered journals of her grandmother, great-grandmother, and beyond. She immerses herself in each of their lives, learns of their painful stories and their beautiful sprits. And as Mimi grows closer to each of these women, she starts to forge her own path. But it isn’t until her mother’s story comes to light that Mimi learns about the unyielding bonds of family and the relentless spirit of womanhood.

 

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Release date: January 18, 2022

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 493

Sample

Mimi, 2022

“A locker room is a lawless space,” they say on the news.

Mom and I are on our separate corners of the big brown couch—

the one that Eric brought three years ago when he moved

in.

It is the kind of leather that

sticks to your thighs

even in the cold of December,

and makes you wonder if it is actually

leather

at all.

It is a lot like Eric.

Uncomfortable and

never

quite

fitting in

to this house

with its yellow flowered curtains and

overstuffed armchairs.

It is a little like me

too

right now

not quite sure how I fit in

here

with them.

Or anywhere

with anyone.

While we watch, Eric

plays some card game on his

phone

at the kitchen counter,

and I stitch a dress into a T-shirt, gathering and snipping thread and

reimagining who I might be

in it. The dress was too short, the kind of thing I wore

before,

but I miss the lace sleeves and the pale stripes and

how soft it was on my skin.

“Always thinking you’re some

fashion designer,” Eric

mumbles from the other room

like always. “Some famous

insta-whatever

girl.”

I look for Mom to correct him and tell him to

shut up,

or at least tell him that the dream isn’t

as ridiculous

as his frowning mouth

and rolling eyes

seem to suggest.

But.

Mom

is just

watching the news.

“Walter Bruce wasn’t just talking in a locker room,” the lawyer with the short, neat haircut

says.

“Walter Bruce was on his set

and in his hotel rooms

and in their trailers

and in dark corners

at parties. And he wasn’t just

talking.

He was

assaulting—”

“We’re talking today about the comments

captured on tape,

the evidence we have,

the things he said that we have proof of. In the locker room,” the reporter says.

She is blonde;

her mouth is tight.

Mom keeps calling her

a bitch,

which doesn’t seem very helpful

at all.

And Mom’s never called anyone

a bitch

before.

(this isn’t quite exactly true

because

once she called me

a bitch,

but we are both trying to forget

that day, we are both trying to

forget a lot of

days)

“Hey, isn’t that the guy you did the movie with

once?” Eric says,

wandering in from his spot in the kitchen,

sitting between us.

His legs slide apart,

his elbows find the tops

of the cushions.

I hate them there

and everywhere.

He shifts

and it’s an earthquake

and it makes my needle slip and poke my thumb.

I gasp,

but no one hears.

I have been sewing my whole life—

outfits for dolls and stuffed rhinos and

now outfits for me.

And someday

someday

outfits for other people who can’t decide

if they want to stand out or blend in—

other people who like loud patterns all mixed together in ways that could seem wrong

but that I make right. Other people who

want their dresses to be the main event

and not

ever

what’s underneath.

I have been sewing my whole life, but still

sometimes

I poke myself with the needle or make the wrong stitch in the wrong place

and Eric always

notices, like he is adding up all the reasons I won’t ever be

special.

“That’s him, that’s the guy,” Eric says again and Mom

shakes her head.

Not as an answer

I don’t think

more just a general

no

to it all.

She was an actress

once

but not now

and she doesn’t like to talk about it, which he should

certainly

know. There is a long list of things

Mom doesn’t talk about.

“And you believe a locker room is a lawless space,” the lawyer on TV repeats,

like she wants the anchorwoman

to hear herself.

“So the things he said there, the way he spoke about

those young girls,

isn’t anything to—”

“It’s not illegal to call someone

hot,” the anchorwoman says with this

smirk. “Some of us

even

like it.”

My needle finds my thumb again.

I want to turn the TV

off.

I don’t want to hear those words

in this living room

with these people next to me. I decide to add a turtleneck to the dress

and another inch to the hem.

Mom’s thighs unstick from the couch

loudly,

then re-stick.

They unstick again

louder.

“Oh my god, I hate that sound,” I say

to no one,

really.

“Women have come forward,” the lawyer says. “I am in conversation with many

women who have come forward.”

“Anonymous women,” the anchorwoman says. Like anonymous means

fantastical;

like it means

paper-doll women made of cardboard.

She is not much of an anchorwoman,

really.

I don’t think journalists can look so

smug

or draw so much attention to their

hotness. She is always wearing shirts that

hug

and

dip

and I know a lot about shirts that

hug

and

dip

and how careful

you have to be

about what people will

think.

(right now my shirt is

l o   o  s e

but light

which is also sort of

bad

because when your body is like

mine

and Mom’s

and that reporter’s

you are really mostly always a little bit

bad)

“It is what it is,” the reporter says. “We can’t police

lawless spaces.”

The couch squeaks and

squitches against my thighs

when I try to get up from it,

like Mom’s did,

the sound I hate but can’t get away from,

and even just

here in my own home

I wish I could

quiet

my

body

and the way it

makes itself

known.

“Our bodies are lawless spaces,” Mom whispers,

the only thing she’s said

in ages.

She says it

right to me,

making sure I’ve heard her.

Her shirt dips

low

too. It always

does.

I heard what she said but I ask “what?” as if I haven’t.

Eric

looks

down.

“We are the lawless spaces,” Mom says

like it’s the truth

she’s been trying to tell me

all

along.

Mimi, 2022

Sixteen

This notebook is blue

and inside are three poems

about me

in my mother’s curvy, swervy handwriting.

It is the beginning of something that she gets to

start and I guess it’s my job to

finish—which is

the story of myself, or at least the story of

right now.

“Here,” she says. “Happy birthday.”

It is not a gift wrapped in silver paper,

it is not the things I wanted—

gold eye shadow and a ring light

for doing live posts.

It is just itself.

Soft-covered and lined,

crisp paper;

a lot of it. The poems she’s written about me are

short

and mostly about who I was

when I was little and we were

close. I guess she doesn’t know what to say about me

now. I guess I don’t

either.

“Oh, right,” I say. “These notebooks.”

“I know traditions can be…” Mom sort of trails off. She hasn’t been great

at traditions.

Unless her going out to dinner with Eric

and not me

for her birthday is a tradition.

Unless her open-mouth kissing Eric at New Year’s

is a tradition.

Unless Thanksgiving at Eric’s mother’s house

with Eric’s mother’s friends

where Eric’s mother asks him why he can’t find a woman

with less baggage

(I am the baggage)

is a tradition.

“Mimi?” Mom says. “It’s your birthday, so

you can be part of this

if you want.

Do you want it?

The notebook?

You remember about it,

right?”

I remember a lot of things:

tea parties with Mom in the attic, surrounded by notebooks

and the promise of some special day where I would have

notebooks

too. But instead there’s this

non-moment

and Eric’s footsteps echoing above

telling Mom to hurry up

and get this part of the day

over with.

Eric is

the kind of guy Mom thinks is

romantic

for wanting to move in after two months

and for touching her ass

in public.

“Happy birthday, Mimi!” he calls

now

from upstairs

where there used to be an aquarium

filled with tiny blue and green and gold fish

whose tails moved like

wind

and who were always in a sort of

beautiful

chaos.

Mom and I used to sit on the floor

and watch them

and wonder if it was all some sort of choreographed

dance

just for us.

Like maybe

there was magic

right in our own home.

But now there is a collection of weights

and a patch of fake

grass

to fake-golf on,

which is

basically

the most depressing thing a house could have in it

aside from

a mom who doesn’t care

much

about you

and a live-in boyfriend she loves more than you,

which is also pretty

fucking

depressing.

Mom didn’t even put up a fight

when Eric said we needed to get rid of the aquarium.

“But we love it,” I said, in a whine I knew she hated but I couldn’t

help.

“I love Eric more than those fish,” Mom said,

and I didn’t know how to say

couldn’t say

was too embarrassed to say

that it wasn’t the fish

I loved

exactly

but those hours on the floor,

wondering.

I don’t go in that room anymore.

“So I like, write poems?” I ask. Notebooks filled with

my mother’s handwriting

and her mother’s

and hers

have always been

around

in the attic with the now-empty

aquarium

and Mom’s old headshots

and newspaper clippings of things

people said about her when she was in shows and

movies. They are alongside all the things I used to wear but

don’t,

now that I know

what people think when you wear something that cuts

low

or hugs tight

or rides high on your thighs.

They are there in the attic,

the notebooks

with the other versions of ourselves we used to be but aren’t

now.

I don’t go to the attic

ever;

it’s cold and also sort of

alive.

The boxes of notebooks

seem to hum.

I guess now that I think about it

there’s a lot of places I don’t go

in this house.

(and a lot of things we don’t

say)

“It’s what we’ve always done,” Mom says. “The girls in this

family. When we turn sixteen—”

“And now I’m sixteen.”

“And now you’re sixteen. We’re all connected. All of us. You’ve seen. We look—”

“I know how we look.”

On the mantel

above the fireplace

in the living room

is a row of photographs. They are all

black-and-white.

They are all

the same rectangular shape, framed in the same

gold frames that stand like soldiers saying

yessir, this is who we are.

The photographs are my mother and her mother

and hers and hers,

and all of them look

a little bit

the same with

golden-blonde hair and a body that is too

much

while also being too

little.

We are short and we have

curves—the kind people are comfortable commenting on

right

to

your

face.

There is a threshold I’ve found—

a type of body that is up for public discussion—

and it is mine

and my mother’s and my grandmother’s

and her mother’s too.

(they think their words are

compliments:

you are so tiny! but also so

…

…

…

buxom)

“Well, so, we have these photos and we have

the notebooks

and that’s our history,

that’s

who we are.” Mom’s voice is

too quiet

and a little

shaky—

the way I sound

answering questions in class

about the Revolutionary War

or

chemistry. Maybe she doesn’t quite exactly know

who we are.

“We have to take your photo,

too,

so we can make one of these for you.”

I don’t want

to be up on the mantel, looking like an inevitable

destiny. I prefer

the photos I post online,

with no ghosts

around,

no ancestors

putting me in some

category that I never asked to be in.

“Okay,” I say, though, because what else am I going to say? I don’t know how to say

anything

to my mother

lately.

And besides,

saying no would make her

confused. You love taking photos of yourself, she would say.

But that’s not it,

really.

I like being

the idea of a girl online

and not actually

this girl

here

in the kitchen

with a mom who keeps looking at her phone

instead of at me.

Online I do not have history. I only have

followers,

so many that a tampon company

wants me to do an ad for them.

Online

I am not

4' 10". Online

I do not have

breasts so big my shirts

strain. Online I have

friends and a really fun mom and hundreds of feet of space between me and

everyone else,

which is how I like it, or how I’ve

learned

to like it.

“So we’ll take a photo,” I say now, though.

“And I’ll write in a notebook. Poems, apparently.”

“When you want to, Mimi.”

“I’ve never wanted to write. I want to make clothes and I want to

move somewhere far away where no one knows me except as

the girl with the cool account with the amazing clothes. That’s

what I want.”

“Well, your cool account has a lot of writing on it,” Mom says. “You write all kinds of things there.”

And I’m about to tell her that’s

stupid

because captioning one of my posts online

is hardly writing,

but what I mean

is that captioning one of my posts

isn’t writing about anything true.

Not true the way it is

true

that Eric sometimes forgets to mention me

when his clients ask about his life.

Not true the way it is true that Mom asked if I was okay with him moving in

and I said no

and he moved in

like

a day later.

Not true the way it is true

that I made my mother a skirt

from soft yellow material I thought she’d love

and

later

it ended up in the pile of clothes we donated

to make room for

Eric

and I never said anything because I knew

she’d forgotten

I’d made it at all.

Not true the way it is true that Mom looks out the window

or at her phone

or at Eric

when I talk

and never

at me.

So I guess I need

a notebook

to tell things to

because she’s not listening

anymore. ...