Page 88 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
“Less right. Like...”
“Like how public libraries are meant to make an educated voting populace, which is kind of soulless and abstract when you think about it, that education is only for civic duty and not for individual enrichment or opportunity—but then libraries also act as free warming and cooling centers and safe places for kids after school or for unhoused people. Or like how we went into space to keep up militarily with the Soviets, but ever since, it’s been wildly important for all kinds of science things, maybe even more than for the military things. Maybe the words we use to get important stuff done are all just—” She waves a hand. “Marketing.”
“My experience with marketing is that it gets very tempting to change the product to suit the pitch, rather than the other way around.”
“Or we don’t do that, we sayjobsa lot in the legislation, and then have a toast after when we’ve managed to make the world a better place without having a bunch of pointless fights with the oil shills. Also, you look so hot doing that. I could watch this all day.”
I look up from the pan I’ve started scrubbing, not feeling particularly sexy in my old T-shirt with a dish towel slung over my shoulder. But Maddie is watching me with predatory eyes.
“Sara trained you well,” she says with a nod to herself before she lifts her latte to her mouth.
I laugh. “And she bemoans every day that no one is putting me to good use.”
“You two really do have a good thing.” She sounds admiring—and jealous. Not of any potential unresolved feelings between Sara and me, I think, but jealous that we ended things as friends.
“There were painful parts,” I tell Maddie as I finish with the pan and move on to the breakfast dishes. “I don’t want you to think that it was all easy. But it wasn’t a catastrophe. Have you ever heard people say that you shouldn’t marry someone you wouldn’t also want to get divorced from?”
Her eyebrows pinch together. “Uh. No. I have not heard that.”
“It sounds stupid, I know—because why would you marry someone if you were already considering divorce? But the idea is that you wouldn’t want to marry someone who you couldn’t trust to—on the worst day of their life, on the very, very worst day—still treat you with respect and kindness. Sara and I did that, accidentally. We were too young to do it on purpose, but somehow it happened anyway.”
I start putting the rinsed dishes in the dishwasher, feeling some tenderness for those babies who got married in a panic, trying to figure out how to have a baby with no money and only partially ripened frontal lobes. For those adults five years ago trying to figure out how to make a fresh start without fucking the other person over. “I remember when we first dragged it into the open, the feeling that the marriage was fading for the other. And we decided that we wanted our ending to feel like autumn. Like fall. Not a struggle or a fight, not a death, but something organic and necessary. And there was grief and friction too, but we held strong to our autumn plan because we believed in a new spring and summer for ourselves, and for each other. It worked.”
I close the dishwasher, start a cycle, and then wash my hands. When I turn to face Maddie, she’s looking at the latte cradled in her hands. Her eyelashes are so long they nearly rest against her cheeks as she does. “Everything about being with Gentry felt like a struggle. Like I had to struggle with myself to be the kind of girl whohedidn’t have to struggle with, if that makes sense. A smart but quiet blonde who was content to stand in the background and prove his good taste.”
She shakes her head and looks up at me, a rueful smile on her face. With her dark, dark hair, dramatic brows, and wicked mouth, she is the furthest thing from the girl she just described. “Sometimes I think... I think that it doesn’t matter as much as it should? The years I wasted on Gentry, my childhood worrying about Medicaid and bills and groceries—if I were writing a memoir before I launched a campaign, all that low-key trauma would be my spider bite story, the explanation for why I’m the way that I am. But maybe I would have always been like this?”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Sharp,” she replies. “Hungry. Too fucking stubborn. I see a problem like a dare, and I look for problems that aren’t even problems yet. I want to win, but I want to win in a way that no one has ever thought of before. I want to make the impossible real, and then I want to keep going. I want to be harder and meaner than every hard, mean thing in this world, and cleverer too, and I’d rather be called bold than brave, and I’d rather be trying and fucking up than doing nothing at all. I don’t want to settle for what they tell me to settle for; I want to make the world better and I won’t accept less than more and I won’t accept it slower than right now.”
Her lips part as she inhales and then looks away.
“Not very good girl of me,” she finishes, with a self-deprecating laugh.
I set the dish towel on the counter and walk toward her, planting my hands on either side of her knees.
“That’s okay.” I lean in, touch my forehead to hers but don’t give her the kiss she starts seeking. “I only want you to be a good girlfor me.”
Her exhale brushes against my lips. “Oh?”
“I think,” I murmur, dipping my lips to her jaw and then her neck, “that you should be as ferocious as you want to be. As cunning as you want to be. And that’s how you’ll be my good girl. By being the sharp, hungry Maddie you need to be everywhere else.”
“Oh,” she says, not a question this time, because I’m kissing her neck and she’s shivering and shivering.
“You want to practice?” I ask against her neck, and then pull back a little to watch her face. “You want to be Sharp Maddie right now?”
“How?”
I straighten up and take her latte from her hand, set it on the counter of the kitchen island. “Tell me what to do.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Here in the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
