Page 105 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
Penelope’s words stir in my chest.More Maddies. Less Gentrys.
But I’m only one person. One woman who feels more like a girl on most days, who is so often guided by calculated anger. Who is too cunning and unlikable. And too fat. With a severe haircut and poisonous red lips that aren’t approachable or accessible.
But I am one person who has the ability to find others like me. Not only that, but I have the ability to make those women electable and I think—I truly think—I can accomplish that without forcing them to give up so much of themselves. Maybe it’s not about losing yourself. Maybe it’s a matter of curating yourself and saving the softer, private parts of yourself for the pieces of your life that aren’t up for public consumption. Maybe it’s about having a hard shell so that you can protect your soft interior.
I don’t think I want to fight the battle of one person. I want to build an army so that it can fight a war. And there’s only one man who I want waiting for me every night when I return from the front lines.
The echoing voice of overhead speakers crackles as a gate change for my flight to Kansas City is announced.
Quickly, I pay my bill and gather my bags, all while wedging my cell phone into the crook of my shoulder and my prickly pear cactus in one arm.
The line rings four times before I get an answer. I’m practically running to my new gate now as I realize it’s on the other side of the terminal.
“Madelyn,” Veronica Balentine says into my ear. “Are you heavy breathing into the phone right now? Please tell me you’ve not accidentally called me while in the act.”
“No,” I pant. “Running to my gate at LAX.” I cannot and will not miss this flight. I know what I want and I want it right now.
“That should be an Olympic sport. Now, that would get me invested in—”
“I don’t want the job,” I blurt.
“Pardon?” she asks. “You don’t want to run for office with a war chest at your back. Is that the job you are speaking of? This better not be for something silly like love.”
“It’s not,” I tell her. “Well, it is. And also, I love Bram Loe. So I’m fucked anyway and you do not want me as your candidate. Trust me. But it’s more about me and figuring out who the fuck I am and what the fuck I want, and Veronica, Ido notwant that job.”
“I presume you’ve received another job offer?”
I skitter to a stop at what I think is the line for my flight. “No, not exactly. But I know what job Idowant,” I tell her.
“Oh? And what job might that be?”
I hand my ticket to the gate agent and step with purpose onto the jet bridge. One step closer to home. One step closer to him.
“Your job,” I tell her. “I want your job.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Bram
It’s the last week before finals, and it hits the department like an asteroid. I find Dr. Mensah swaying on her feet in front of the vending machine, blinking hopelessly at a can of Diet Coke stuck in the chute, and Ali is in my office more than a Saint James cousin, anxious about this funding deadline or that professor taking family leave in the spring, and there is an unending parade of TAs with questions, problem cases, and mean emails from parents that they have no idea how to respond to. And that doesn’t even touch the students themselves, some of whom are overly scrupulous about their grades and some of whom feel entitled to extra credit or eleventh-hour make-up labs to earn points they didn’t seem to give a shit about earlier in the semester.
With Sara thankfully back, though, it means I can pass the parenting baton (and Hester Prynne can go back to a life free of menacing frogs) and I can work as late as I need. It means that when I leave Gerhart in the breath-puffing dark of December, the lights are out everywhere in Salih except in the stairwells, and I don’t have to wonder if Maddie’s looking out her window at a sleep-deprived dad in a peacoat and congratulating herself on making the right choice.
I don’t have to wonder if she saw the news about her ex-fiancé... if she’s figured out it was me. And that’s fine, because I didn’t do it hoping that it would send her running back into my arms. I didn’t even do it because I hate hypocrisy—even though I do hate hypocrisy—or because I’d hoped something about the scandal would show Maddie that she deserved so much more than what that self-righteous clot of a man and men like him could give her.
No, I did it because he hurt her and he needed to burn for it. It was that simple. There is plenty in this world that I can’t fix, but this... this I could do. This Iwantedto do.
And if I am alone at night, if I miss her snorts and sighs while she grades next to me, if I miss the way she looks in my old college shirts and the way she looks slipping off her heels after a bloodless victory, well, then I have no one to blame but myself. I went and fell for her. I chose to plant my heart in the earth at her feet. I can’t be upset when she tears it up at the roots.
It’s what you do with a weed, after all.
FRIDAY COMES, ANDwith it, a feeling like an inhale. Not quite relief, not yet, but the certainty that for better or for worse, everything will be over soon.
I’m checking over my test materials one more time before I close my laptop—just for Bio 1, Plant Ecology will have presentations instead—when I hear a knock on the door. I look up to see Sloane in a red wool coat, her platinum hair gleaming with caught diamonds. It must be misting outside, but when I look out the window, it’s too dark to tell.
“You have to follow me,” announces Sloane, in the kind of voice you use after someone in the room taps a champagne glass with a fork.
“Uh,” I say. “Follow you where? Because if Sara or Joey put you up to this, tell them I can relax at home alone with the frog, and I don’t need to be cajoled out to someplace noisy and hostile to contemplative thought.”
