Page 28 of Meant to Be

CHAPTER 8

Cate

On the morning of my eighteenth birthday, just after Chip had left for work, I woke up my mom and told her I was moving out; my bags had been packed the night before.

“Where are you going?” she asked, sitting up in bed, rubbing her eyes.

“I’m moving in with my model friend Elna,” I said. “To her place on the Upper East Side.”

It was the first I’d told her of my plan, but she didn’t look surprised. “I’m so happy for you, sweetie,” she said, blinking back tears. I wasn’t sure if they were happy tears or sad. Likely they were both, which was how I was feeling, along with so many other emotions.

“I’m going to come back for you, Mom,” I said. “Soon. I promise. I just need to save a little more money—and get my own place. We can be roommates again. Like old times.”

“Oh, sweetie—you know I can’t do that—”

“Yes, you can, Mom. There are tons of waitress jobs in the city. Really nice restaurants where the tips are just huge. Or you could find something else to do—there are so many jobs to behad—I’d love to have a full-time manager. I could really use the help. What do you think, Mom? You know you aren’t happy here. You have to get away from him.” By that point, I was rambling—and a little frantic, because I knew it was pretty futile.

“I can’t leave,” she said, cutting me off, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

“Yes, you can, Mom!” I said, putting on my best life coach face. “You have to. You know you do.”

She took a deep breath and did her best to smile back at me. “Okay, sweetie,” she said. “We’ll see.”

“Yes, Mom,” I said, feeling so determined. “Wewill.”

—

A few hourslater, I was unloading my bags into Elna’s second bedroom, which had recently been vacated by another friend of ours who had quit modeling to get married. Aside from the guilt over leaving my mom behind, I was excited and hopeful. Elna was the most inspiring person I knew. She had grown up in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the thick of the apartheid era. After her real father was killed in the Soweto Uprising, her mother remarried a bigger monster than my stepfather. He hit her mother but also molested Elna, the abuse starting when she was eleven. Three years and a back-alley abortion later, Elna worked up the nerve to tell her mother what was going on, at which point her stepfather called her a liar; her mother sided with her husband, and they both kicked her out of the house. From there, Elna made her way to Cape Town, living on the streets until she was discovered by a British fashion photographer on the beach at Camps Bay.

Within days of my meeting Elna, she had shared this entirestory with me, sparing no gory details. Beyond the heartbreak of her story, the thing that struck me the most was her complete lack of shame. I had still never told a soul about Chip. Elna would end up being the first.

It was before I moved in with her, but while I was crashing at her place after a late night of work. We were exhausted and punchy, and had another early wake-up, but instead of going to bed, we opened a bottle of red wine, caught a buzz, and curled up in her bed together, talking. At one point, Elna asked why I never dated anyone or mentioned guys. “Are you a lesbian?”

“No,” I said. “I just don’t have time to date.”

“Yeah. But you have time to fuck, don’t you?” she said with a little grin. “I mean, everyone has time to fuck.”

I laughed, thinking that Elna could be so blunt—so different from Wendy and my old Montclair friends. But given the life she’d led, I guess there wasn’t much reason to sugarcoat things.

“Yeah,” I said, laughing. “I suppose Idohave time for that.”

“And?”

“And…nothing,” I said, staring at one of Elna’s dangling false lashes. She was so bad about removing them after we worked, sometimes not even bothering to wash her face at night, which was crazy given that she had the most flawless skin I’d ever seen.

“Wait. Are you a virgin?”

“No,” I said, then told her about Jared, the Burberry model I’d met on a shoot last summer, my only real boyfriend to date.

“How long did you go out?”

“Only about three months,” I said. “And the whole thing was long distance. He works in LA.”

“Were you in love?”

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