Page 36 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
She ducks her head a little, so I can’t see her face. “In my car,” she says in a very small voice.
I inhale so sharply that my ribs hurt; something like rage and fear and a... a vast protectiveness fills me, swells me, unravels my neatly tied edges.
“You’ve been sleeping in your car?” I ask, and even I can hear how grim I sound, how dangerous.
Maddie shifts, like she’s trying to scoot off my lap, and I seize her and drag her back. She’s not going anywhere.
“Where have you been parking at night?” I demand. I’m shaking now, my hands, my thighs. My chest. I feel like an entire earthquake. “While you’ve been alone in the dark, unconscious and completely exposed?”
“I had the doors locked,” Maddie protests, but the protest is thin, faint, like she knows it’s not good enough.Which it isn’t.
“Where, Maddie?” I demand.
“A Walmart parking lot,” she admits. “And, um, this rest stop—”
I want to roar in pure animal outrage. I want to go to the rest stop right now and tear it down with my bare hands. I want to start pacing around her like a guard dog, snapping and rumbling warnings at anyone who dares to get too close.
She seems to sense this, because she’s gone very still in my lap.
“And why are you sleeping in your car at arest stop? Why, when you have two jobs, do you not have a place to stay?”
“Twobullshitjobs,” she corrects, the words all the more corrosive for how accurate they are. “I make ninety-five hundred dollars a semester teaching—less than ten thousand dollars before taxes, and I’m not complaining about what you pay me, but I only work for you three hours a day and the agency takes their cut out of that too. And before I came here, I was a full-time student for the lastthree years, because my entire raison d’être after I met Gentry was to become the perfect politician’s wife, and so I spent those years volunteering at the Wade Foundation and serving on stupid student boards and spending every spare second schmoozing with him at horrible, schmoozy events instead of clerking or doing paralegal work to earn cash. I lived with Gentry, I used student loans for tuition and clothes and my cell phone bill because he told me that his family would pay them off for me, and so when he had his campaign adviser dump me with no warning, I had nothing to call my own but my degree and my car. I had a little money squirreled away from the work-study programs I did, and that was enough to get me out here and feed me until my first paycheck. I couldn’t afford to stay in California without asking for my brother’s help, and now it turns out I can’t afford to live in Kansas either. At least until next month, when I’ll finally have enough for a security deposit, and even then, I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do in December when that first student loan bill comes due.”
She’s breathing hard now, fast, the coffee threatening to slosh over the sides of her mug as she trembles with emotion.
“But I’m doingfine. I don’t need anyone’s help, and I don’t need anything to change, and I am not letting that cheating asshole turn me into a charity case when he’s already taken so much from me. He’s taken my goals and my pride and my favorite lipstick color and even my—stupid—hair because he needed me to look the part and that meant not looking like myself.”
She’s crying again. I carefully take the coffee mug from her and set it down on the floor.
“Your arms are so long,” she complains tearfully. “You’re too big.”
“That’s what Leo says. He’s irritated he can’t bully me anymore.”
More sniffles. “He used to bully you?”
“Mercilessly. Then I had a growth spurt in eleventh grade and gave him a black eye, which for some reason he interpreted as an overture of friendship.*Now I can’t get rid of him.”
She’s still crying but there’s a half laugh among the sniffles now.
I find her chin and tilt her face so she has to look at me. “You live here. Starting today.”
She stiffens. “What? No!”
“A live-in childcare provider would be easier anyway.”
“Bram, no. Did you not hear the part about how I don’t want help? About how I’mfine?”
I press on. “It’ll make our schedules more convenient, and I have the extra room, actually two extra rooms, if you count the finished part of the attic.”
“Bram.I can’t live with you.” I can feel a defensive pride roiling in her; she tries to move her head so she doesn’t have to look up at me anymore. I don’t let her.
“Why not?” I ask, searching her face. “I have the space, and we’ll make boundaries around your time helping with the kids. And it’s not forever, only until you have what you need to get into an apartment.”
“Just... no.” Her full mouth is set in a stubborn sulk. “I don’t need any help.”
“You’re sleeping in parking lots and at rest stops. It’s getting cold at night, and today has proven that you’re one obscure parking rule away from spending money you don’t have on a hotel that will certainly have bedbugs. What was your plan for tonight? If you couldn’t afford to get a hotel?”
Her eyes drop. Tears are caught on her long eyelashes—dark lashes, matching the near-black roots of her hair. “I was going to try to sleep in the adjunct office,” she mumbles. “Or hide in the library.”
