Page 79 of Saint Céline
I leaned back in my chair, still half-dizzy from music and perfume and being wanted all night. “You’re mean when you’re tired.”
“You’re stupid when you’re lazy.”
My mother looked up from the sink. “Katherine.”
Katherine’s face changed instantly.
“I didn’t mean stupid,” she said quickly.
I waved it off before my mother could make it bigger.
“She means academically hopeless. It’s fine.”
“It isn’t fine,” my mother said quietly.
Katherine looked stricken.
The guilt. The apology. The reminder that even inside the cottage, where Katherine sat in socked feet at our kitchen table eating my mother’s toast, there were still words she could say that landed differently because of who she was and who we were.
My mother dried her hands slowly on a dish towel.
“You help each other,” she said, voice gentle but firm. “So speak to each other kindly.”
Katherine lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mira.”
My mother softened at once because Katherine always sounded so young when she apologized sincerely.
“It’s all right.”
But it wasn’t, not entirely.
After my mother went upstairs, Katherine stayed quiet for a long time.
Then she pushed the corrected worksheet back toward me.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I know.”
“You’re not stupid.”
“I know that too.”
Her eyes lifted to mine.
“Do you?”
The question unsettled me more than the insult had because the truth was complicated.
I knew I was not stupid when I walked into a room and understood immediately who wanted attention, who wanted comfort, who wanted to be envied, and who wanted to disappear. I knew I was not stupid when I helped Katherine survive lunch tables and parties and girls who smiled like knives. I knew I was not stupid when strangers leaned toward me within minutes of a conversation.
But then Katherine placed a biology worksheet in front of me, and I became twelve again, staring at a world written in a language I could imitate but not truly speak.
“I know,” I said again.
Katherine did not look convinced.
Maybe that was why she kept helping.
