There’s a zipper pull pressed directly into my spine. It’s matte white, sharp-cornered, a spiteful metal rectangle. I know because I spent eight sweaty minutes wrestling with it backstage, trying bitterly to tug it over the waistline seam of the flouncy, floral dress Magnolia set out for me. I got it settled between my shoulder blades seconds before Mags burst into my room and now it’s back to haunt me, piercing my vertebra like a punishment. Or a warning.
“That sounds like a good question for Audrey,” my mother says. She looks over at me, and in the hot stage lights dust motes float like pollen between us. “Honey?”
I lean forward in my blush velvet chair, the perfect aesthetic accompaniment to my mother’s mint-green one. Try to swipe at the zipper. Miss.
“Hmm?” I haven’t been paying attention, which is off-brand for me. But there’s something impersonal about this, personal as it’s meant to be. With two thousand people staring up at us, it nearly feels like no one is. Ten people, sure. Five, even more pressure. But two thousand? They may as well be fake—a soundless sea shifting in the dark beyond the glaring lights.
My mother laughs, the rehearsed titter that’s as familiar to me as the sound of my own name. “Laz asked what we’re proudest to share on the tour this summer.”
I look at him. Lazarus Leblanc: media darling, beach-chic tastemaker, he of the laminated eyebrows. My mother’s Malibu neighbor, and the exact kind of Los Angeles Ken doll to moderate an event like this. I’m 90 percent sure his legal name is Scott.
“Proudest,” I repeat. Laz cocks an eyebrow, tilts one ankle so his snakeskin boots catch their polish in the light. We’ve known each other for a lifetime, and not at all. “Hard to say.” It’s the easiest truth within reach. Because really, I left everything I’m proud of back at school. I boxed it up and hoisted it into a windowless container that’ll ship directly to my dorm in Baltimore mid-August, first day of freshman orientation, the minute my life picks back up. This is an interlude—this tour, this summer, this conversation on this stage—an exercise for my mother’s pride that has absolutely nothing to do with my own.
“Understandably so,” Laz says smoothly, “when there’s so much to be proud of. What about you, Camilla?”
My mother preens. I brace myself, watching every shift of her body like the adjustment of so many jewel-colored feathers. The level setting of her freckled collarbones. The blonde hair she tips over one shoulder, so lustrous it could be liquid. The calculated angle of her smile: the warm one, the one that invites you right in.
“I’m proudest to share my relationship with Audrey.” It’s the worst thing she could say, and the inevitable thing. She isn’t looking at me but instead at the audience—that dark, faceless sea. “To throw open the doors to our bond, and get real with our friends across the country about what it means to share a relationship as mothers and daughters, as parents and children, as women.”
Finally, she looks at me, our mirrored blue eyes meeting across the glossy, echoing stage. I can tell I’m supposed to be honored she’s called me a woman in front of all these people. Me, six months past eighteen. But I know what they don’t: that I have never been Camilla’s equal, and that she will never see me that way.
“She’s grown up with all of you,” my mother says, sweeping a delicate hand toward the audience. Her smile broadens. “And now, this
summer, you’ll really meet her. Get to know her. See her the way I do.”
I have bristled down to my marrow, every cell inside me growing spikes to keep this out.
“How special,” she says. She leans back, letting her words settle in the rapt, reverent air. “What an undeniable thing of beauty.”
Applause rises from the audience for absolutely nothing. The wall-to-wall screen behind us illuminates and I turn to see my own face, gridded out like a gallery. Photos of me stretching back over a decade, my mother’s social media handles bolded in the upper corner of each one. Me at seven, holding a palm-sized turtle in Camilla’s sloping yard. Me at eleven, casting a backward glance from the steps to my dorm at the Summit School, the year she launched Saint and sent me to boarding school. Me two days ago, robed and capped, standing next to Ethan at graduation.
All those Audreys compiled like postage stamps for my mother’s collection. I don’t recognize myself in a single photo.
I blink up at the screen. I lean back so the zipper gnashes my bones. I think, Who are you?
And then I run.
The alley behind the theater smells like hot garbage. When I spill sideways through the metal door, my foot lands in something wet enough to splash me, though this is Los Angeles and it hasn’t rained in weeks. Horrifying. I suck in a lungful of trash air and collapse against the door as it whooshes shut, zipper pull promptly gouging my spine.
It’s muggy as murder out here, moon rising over the smog haze of downtown LA. Inside, my mother is doing damage control. Magnolia is probably on a rampage already, hunting me down one hallway at a time. I’ve got maybe thirty more seconds to myself, so I smash my eyes shut and start counting my fingers.
Thumb to pinky, thumb to ring finger, thumb to middle, thumb to index. I repeat it quickly, over and over, counting out loud.
“One, two, three, four.” Breath of disgusting air. “Five, six, seven, eight.” Another breath, and a steadying swallow. “Nine, ten, ele—”
“What are you doing?”
For a moment, I don’t move. I stand suspended—hand lifted in front of me, tips of my thumb and middle finger pressed together, zipper pull lodged into my skin—like maybe if I don’t open my eyes, I’ll still be alone.
But then the voice comes again, a pointed little cough. I open my eyes and lower my hand.
“Conjuring a spirit?” I can only see half the guy’s face, one knee jutted into the yellow cast of a streetlamp. He’s leaning against a dumpster, and moves even farther into the light to get a better look at me. “Don’t let me stop you, if so.”
“I’m clearly not conjuring a spirit.” My voice is as acrid as the garbage keeping us company back here. The last thing I need, after being paraded like a prize calf by my mother, is some stranger joking around with me in a trash pit.
The guy steps into the glow of the streetlamp and, finally, I place him: one of the interns staffing the tour. I saw him backstage before the reading, huddled over an enormous video camera.
“Not super clear,” he says. His hair is dark and curly, tied at the nape of his neck with a few pieces shaken loose to scrape his jaw. It makes him look like some kind of colonial pilgrim. Or Tarzan. “I didn’t realize magic would be part of the show.” He tips his head toward the theater’s giant marquee, just visible at the end of the alley: Camilla St. Vrain: “Letters to My Someday Daughter” Anniversary Tour.
“It’s not magic.” I reach for the zipper, trying to twist it so it isn’t jutting into me. “It’s a centering practice.” I can’t quite reach, and I spin so my back is facing him. “Can you help me with this?”
Silence. I glance over my shoulder, and he’s watching me with his eyebrows raised. “What?” I say.
“Do you need to be naked for the next phase of the conjuring?”
“I don’t need to—” He’s smiling when I turn around, lopsided and easy-looking, one crooked canine visible in the dim light. “I’m sorry, what are you doing back here?”
He huffs half a laugh. “I’m not answering until you tell me what a centering practice is.”
“I don’t need to explain myself to you.” And I certainly don’t need to explain my finger counting, the habit I haven’t quite been able to break, the quickest way to calm myself down when I’m worked up—by my mother, by her demands of me, by anything. “Just help me with the zipper.”
I turn back around, hands on my hips. For a moment there’s nothing—just the hot, motionless air and the distant honks of evening traffic. Then I feel fingertips on my back, cool and light, and finally—finally—relief from the zipper. The guy takes two steps away from me before speaking again.
“That was rough in there.”
I straighten, smoothing my hands over the floral skirt as I turn back
to face him. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Really,” he says flatly. I don’t like how he’s looking at me, like I just showed all my cards and have no way to clutch them back to my chest now. “So it’s typical for you to flee mid-event like you just remembered you left your flat iron plugged in?”
I feel my face scrunch into itself, rake my eyes over his dark hair. “What would you know about leaving a flat iron plugged in?”
“Little sister.” He lifts his phone, dark-screened in the space between us. “I’m out here because she called.”
My own phone buzzes in the depths of my dress, and I reach into the frills to find it.
His name is enough to make me remember: I need to get out of here.
“Look,” I say, glancing up, “um—”
“Silas,” he supplies, watching me patiently. As if it doesn’t smell like a landfill on fire back here, as if he has all the time in the world.
“Silas,” I repeat. I gesture at myself. “Audrey. I’ve—”
“I know who you are.”
I wince. “Right. I’ve got to go.”
“Where?” he asks, glancing toward the dark end of the alley. There’s a town car waiting there, sleek black and sleeping, ready to whisk my mother away. “Driver’s still inside.”
“No,” I say. I open my phone to call a rideshare and in my peripheral vision, Silas shifts. “Like, go go. Go home.”
“To Colorado?”
I look up at him. I shouldn’t be surprised when people do this, when they’ve read enough of Camilla’s Wikipedia page to see where she sent me to school. But still, it grates: I don’t know this person at all, but somehow he knows where home is to me. I don’t answer, just look back down at my phone and start to call a car.
“Hey, don’t,” Silas says. Our eyes meet, and there’s something there—like this matters to him. “We’re just getting started.”
The Letters to My Someday Daughter tour has barely begun. There are nine more cities to visit, eight more weeks of travel, so much more money for my mother to make. And yet.
“I’m leaving.”
“No.” An icy voice rises from behind us, and there she is: Magnolia Jones herself, haloed in the light from the doorframe. My mother’s assistant, and the most tenacious woman to walk the earth in four-inch stilettos. “You most certainly are not.” ...
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