Page 15 of The Unraveling

Her words fade as she disappears back down the hall.

I stand there in the empty room, letting her words ring through my ears, watching the smoke she left behind as it swirls and rises in the light.

Is she right? Do I have trouble needing people?

I don’t know. I don’t feel like the trouble is that I can’t accept help so much as I never need help. I’ve always done it all myself, and—oh my god, she’s right.

This strange, explosive little Spanish girl whom I barely know and who barely knows me has completely accurately figured me out.

And what had I just been thinking earlier? I’d been thinking how much I wish I had an adult. Someone to just…fucking…figure it out with. In the past few months Mimi has been worse than usual, and I haven’t even tried to talk to her.

Tomorrow is Monday. What I’ve been dreading all weekend. I have a call with the friend of my mother’s, Joel, someone who is back home figuring things out. I don’t know why. I don’t really know him or how he knows my mother. Knew. Knew my mother.

I don’t know anything. I just don’t want to think about it.

That night, after the other girls leave, Arabella pours us each a small glass of vermut and opens a bottle of Pellegrino to bring to the bedroom.

She offers me something to sleep in, as she herself takes off her clothes completely and slips into a threadbare white T-shirt.

“You need something sexy tonight,” she says. She pulls out a silk button-down. “Vintage Versace. My last donor bought it for me. I fucking hate Versace, you can keep it if you want.”

I slip it on and am stunned by how soft the silk is on my warm skin.

I take a sip of my vermouth and get into the bed. “Oh my god,” I say. “This bed!”

“It’s the Palais from Kluft,” she says. “Another gift from my donor.” She sits down on her knees on the bed and puts on a pouty, baby-girl face. “ ‘Arabella needs her best sleep if she wants to dance well for everybody, doesn’t she?’ ”

I have no idea what Kluft or a Palais is, but I smile anyway. “Well, you can’t really deny that. When I was in school for dance, we would sleep as much as possible so that we wouldn’t eat too much or do anything else that could be bad for us. It would have been a lot easier with something like this.”

“A few hours of sleep in this bed is like a full night’s sleep anywhere else.”

I’m feeling drowsy already. She dims the lights by shouting in Spanish at an unseen robot, and then gets into the king-sized bed with me.

She looks pretty even with all the makeup gone. There’s still a smudging of black eyeliner rimming her eyes, but it looks intentional. Unlike how, on me, it would look like I was just released from the hospital.

“I don’t know what happened to you in your past,” says Arabella as she shuts her eyes, “but you’re going to be okay, Jocelyn Banks.”

Jozzleen Bonx.

And she drifts off to sleep. I should feel too awkward to sleep lying next to this woman I’ve just met, but it’s the most relaxed I’ve been all week. The chaos is more soothing than the comfort.

It’s not long before I’m asleep, too, my dreams coming as a dark montage of things I’ve tried to forget.

Chapter Five

EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO

Mimi’s house was always cool. Summers in Tristesse, Louisiana, reached highs of over one hundred degrees. My house was always sweltering. The walls were hot. The floors were hot. When you turned on the shower, the water was hot. Fans blew constantly, but all they were doing was exhaling heavy, hot sighs. In the dead of summer, I would often wake up in the middle of the night with a pounding heart and pulsing skin, and go to the bathroom where I would take handfuls of water and paste it over my body so that the fans in my room would waft over my wet skin and make me cooler.

But Mimi’s house was always cool. Her backyard was lush with dewy grass intermittently being sprayed by sprinklers on timers. Things could grow in her garden. She tried to help me plant some flowers in ours once, but they died so fast I’d barely cleaned the soil off my hands before they were gone.

It was on a hot day in August, a few weeks before school started up again. I was seven years old, getting ready to start second grade. I felt very grown-up, finally being well into the grades instead of just kindergarten.

I was lying on the floor in front of Mimi’s box-shaped TV, eating a homemade raspberry-lemonade popsicle, watching Some Like It Hot. I was considering putting my bathing suit on and going out back to play in the sprinklers with Benny, Mimi’s sweet old mutt. My plan was interrupted at the sound of tires and squeaking brakes outside.

My heart sank as I realized it must be my mom.

I pretended not to hear her come in, even though the screen door slamming behind her was unmistakable, and even though I was tucked away in the back den where I could hear but not be seen.

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