Page 80 of Late Bloomer
I gulp, trying to stop the words tumbling out of me. This isn’t safe. This isn’t smart. I keep talking anyway.
“My mom had a revolving door of boyfriends,” I say coolly, ignoring the pang the memory jolts through my chest. “And, like, I don’t mean that in a slut-shamey way, or whatever. But they were either guys she was conning or guys she was partnering up with to do a con on someone else. My mother has never interacted with another human unless she thought she could get something from them.”
Including me.
“Most of the guys were scumbags at best… but there was one. Robert.” I suck in another breath as his kind face surfaces in my memory.
“I made the mistake of getting attached to him. He was so…” I think back on Robert, how he’d ask me about my day, always bought the cereal I liked.
An angry laugh cracks from my throat. “He wasnice. He was the first grown-up to be unconditionally nice to me. I latched onto him like a duckling to its mama. Robert wasn’t uber rich or anything like that, but he had more money than anyone I’d ever known. I mean, the fact that he had a working dishwasher and garbage disposal and central cooling meant he belonged to the one percent to someone like me.”
Opal is quiet, breathing steady, silently encouraging me to keep going.
“I was fifteen when my mom met him. And they wereserious. She’d had ‘serious’ boyfriends in the past too, but they all crashed and burned sooner rather than later. She swore up and down that things were different with Robert. That she was settling down. No more cons. No more switching schools and moving states and life on the run.”
I wanted so badly to believe her, so I did. I entertained the fallacy that life wouldn’t be a blur of peers at new schools I’d never have time to connect with, a fresh set of faces and names and places I’d have to memorize, navigating the awkwardness of small talk and social niceties time after time.
“They got engaged pretty quickly. I do think Robert cared about me. He’d talk to me. Try to get to know me. Encourage me with school. And when I started actually doing well in classes after gaining an ounce of stability at home, he opened a small college fund for me. It wasn’t anything huge, but it was enough for me to at least get through community college. And, stupid me, I let myself hope. I got these big ideas of getting my associate’s, maybe transferring into a four-year program.”
Opal is still in the momentary silence. “What would you have studied?”
I snort, pushing away the big hopes of the past that try to hook into my brain. “I had no clue. But that was the allure of it all. For the first time, I’d have a real chance to learn. To explore things. To focus on what the world has to offer and not what my mom could take from it…”
I suck in a breath, fighting the what-could-have-been demons as they elbow for space.
“Anyway, my mom left Robert. I guess she was telling thetruth; as far as I know, she didn’t actually con him or steal from him or anything. And he wrote to me, letting me know that he had no plans of closing the college fund. That the money was mine to put toward school. He… I think he actually believed in me. Isn’t that funny?”
Opal doesn’t laugh. But that’s okay, it makes sense. I’m not sure how anyone could believe in me to reach any higher than the bar my mom set a millimeter above the ground.
“Well, after my mom left me here and made it pretty obvious she wasn’t coming back, I started looking into schools in the area. I was all set to apply, and I still had the account information Robert had given me. But when I called, they said the account was empty. Overdrafted, actually. Because the account was in my name, my mom had forged a letter and pretended to be me on the phone. She’d said the money was going toward the SAT, application fees, dorm stuff, all that bullshit.”
She’d used it all. Every last cent.
“I was… I’m not suredevastatedis a large enough word for it. I’d clawed my way to that moment, hanging on as best I could to finally reach my future. And she’d burned it all down. Grandma Lou tried so hard to scrounge up the money for me to still go, even offered to take out a loan, but at that point, I was so angry and lost it didn’t even seem like a future I could have. It didn’t belong to me. So I turned down the offer. Stayed here.”
Sometimes I think of that ghost life. That version of me where that one thing worked out. I wonder what she studied. What she knows. What kind of clothes she wears. What cityshe lives in. Her favorite spot to get coffee. It’s so silly, but I’m rooting for her. For the me that never was. I’m sure she’ll do better than the me that is.
“I don’t talk to my mom anymore. I can’t. I tried for a while—a few years after she abandoned me, she’d contact me here and there—but eventually I realized that feeding into her games was like psychological self-harm, setting myself up to hurt over and over again.”
Opal is silent, and I squirm at the ugliness of my truth, the way it looms over me, large and dark.
“So… yeah. That’s my sob story. Pretty pathetic, I know. But it’s mine all the same.”
Opal squeezes me close, and I feel something hot against my throat—tears or her breath or maybe both.
It feels nice.
But it also feels like too much.
And for the first time since that first night together, I put control in the passenger seat, seeking out her lips. Needing them to touch mine.
Opal indulges me for a moment, her soft mouth and sweet taste—like plums and sin and unwritten words from a pool of ink—flood my mind.
But she pulls back. And an angry phantom of desire takes control of my voice.
“We aren’t doing very well with our hooking-up plan,” I say, trying not to be too vulnerable as I nestle against her.
“How so?” she whispers, hand trailing from my rib cage down the dip of my waist to the curve of my hip.
