I mean, here I was in the same house, about to attend the same over-the-top party, wearing a dress my mother might have picked out for me herself.
It was like she never left. I looked exactly like the flawless daughter she groomed me to be. Check. Check. Check.
Save for that crying fit, I was still playing the role perfectly.
So why were panic and dread clawing up my insides like a wildcat trying to get out?
Doesn’t matter, I reminded the girl in the mirror. Because it didn’t matter if I was on edge and scared to death for reasons I could not name.
I looked flawless. I looked perfect. That was all that mattered.
I gave the soon-to-be-woman in the mirror a reassuring smile before going down to my party.
My birth was big news from the start. And not just because my father was Antoine Perreault, a member of one of Louisiana’s oldest Black land-owning families and a successful lawyer, just like his father, and his father before him, who’d been one of the first Black men after Michael Stark was admitted to Tulane Law School (after Louisiana finally lifted their segregation laws in the ’60s and all the lawyers in his family stopped having to go north to get their degrees).
That was quite some legacy to be born into, for sure. But that wasn’t what sent a photographer rushing into my mother’s hospital room less than fifteen minutes following my birth.
I was born just a few moments after midnight on January 1, so a picture of me graced the front page of the next morning’s Baton Rouge Sentinel underneath the headline “First Baby of the Year!”
For fifteen years of my life, that was the first hit that came up when you googled my name. But then my mother signed us up for SuperRich Sixteen, that VMH show that always comes on before whatever iteration of Rap Star Wives they have going that season.
The episode was a huge ratings success. And the over-the-top party where I’d changed three times and was gifted a new car to match with each new dress was the talk of Baton Rouge for so many months afterward that by the time summer rolled around, Mom declared we just had to put on another one—minus the cars.
That touch had been too showy for her carefully refined Southern sensibilities. I think receiving way too many calls and requests for money from her estranged Ohio-based family had turned her off showy displays of wealth forever.
But other than that, it was game on. She began spending most of summer and all of fall planning my New Year’s Eve birthday galas.
Even her cancer diagnosis hadn’t stopped her. Nearly every last moment of our time together had been dedicated to her planning and explaining to me exactly what I would have to do for the fifth and most lavish of all my birthday galas.
“You’re a Perreault, but this is my legacy,” she’d warned me from her deathbed. Then she’d intoned with a severe look that would have put RuPaul to shame, “Don’t mess it up.”
Most Tulane kids let loose when they returned home for winter break from college. Not me. I’d spent almost all of my waking moments since I came back to Baton Rouge making sure everything was in place for this party.
Why? Because this was what my mom wanted.
I reminded myself of that as I descended the stairs of our antebellum mansion to a grand foyer stuffed with all of my mother’s closest friends, and even more of my father's business associates.
No, it didn’t matter that my mother had passed. This New Year’s Eve went the same as the four that came before it. Everyone clapped like a royal princess was gracing them with her presence.
My New Year’s Eve birthday galas had become so famous, my father’s associates clambered for an invitation every year. He often said these parties were the only reason he had friends.
He was joking. My father was a more-than-capable lawyer whose friends needed him more than he needed them.
But in my darkest moments, I suspected getting invited to my gala was the sole reason so many of my high school friends stayed in touch, even after I moved to New Orleans to attend Tulane.
Fake hair. Fake breasts. Fake friends. Sometimes it felt like my whole life was a game of pretend, and I was just playing along. The tears I’d dashed away with Southern resolution and makeup threatened to overwhelm me again.
But then I saw Luk standing at the bottom of the stairs, and the band around my heart loosened with relief.
Luk was my college boyfriend—everything my mother had groomed me to attract and more.
Tall, polite, and as rich as he was handsome. Good family? Oh, no, chile, his family wasn’t just good. They were the Brandts. Yes, that German-American family behind Weiss Fox Brewing Company. Luk’s many-greats-grandfather had been smart enough to immigrate to America around the turn of the 20th century—just in time to avoid both World Wars and ironically establish his family’s Bavarian hops recipe as Weiss Fox, America’s most well-known beer.
Luk and I had been too new last year for me to invite him to my twentieth birthday party. But my mother had given me a rare smile of approval when I visited the bedroom where she was gracefully dying to let her know he had not only asked me out but also agreed to sign Dad’s super-cringy virginity contract.
“You hold on to that one, just like I taught you, Stephanie. Use every weapon you’ve got,” she’d ordered, sounding much like a general, despite her severely weakened state. “Times are different now. He might be able to get away with marrying you—especially if you show him how you can be just as perfect a wife to him as one of those blonds with a German last name.”
I hadn’t been so sure. I knew I was beautiful—aggressively so. Just like my mother, I had at least one standing appointment to attend to some facet of my appearance every single week of the year. It was a secret job that I never talked about out loud. But I attended to it just as diligently as poor students who had to put in work-study hours to keep their scholarships.
