Chapter Text
This is the whole story:
Diane Vause fell in love easily and often. She fell in love dozens of times, with dozens of boys, until her daughter was born and any other love she'd ever felt seemed to dim.
Her daughter only fell in love once.
Diane got to watch.
Eight days before Diane Vause gives birth, Death Maiden releases a new record.
She doesn't have enough money to buy it, but she still takes a bus downtown to find a record store. Lee's face sneers up at her from the album cover alongside his bandmates. She lets the bottom of the record sleeve rest against the swollen curve of her belly, and the baby gives a sharp, defiant kick. That makes her smile, a little.
Five minutes later, the employee at the register with black hair black eyes and black lipstick, catches Diane trying to leave the store with the album under her coat.
She ends up pulling a Polaroid photograph out of her wallet, her and Lee cuddled up on his tour bus maybe ten months ago, pointing back and forth between the picture and the album cover, going on a tirade about how she's carrying Lee Burley's baby and therefore shouldn't have to fucking pay for his fucking shitty record. The terrified employee had let her go, and let take the album with her.
(Ten years later, when she starts to tell that story, she makes it hilarious and triumphant, which means leaving out the part where she started bawling in the middle of the store, and how the salesgirl had looked both terrified and disgusted, practically demanding she leave before the store's Cool was further disturbed by a crying, pregnant eighteen year old.)
She goes back to the dingy motel room, packed full of the baby stuff she's been buying at yard sales and Goodwills for the past seven months, and turns on the record player.
Lee wrote two tracks on the album, but there's nothing of Diane in the lyrics. The money Lee gave her - or, rather, the money he left in an envelope before the band rolled out of town without her - is gone. Any day now, probably before her due date next week, the motel is going to realize the payments aren't going through anymore, and she'll be kicked out.
But the critics are trashing this latest album, saying Death Maiden have passed their peak, and Diane does hear that in the songs, so there's at least one small comfort.
Her water breaks in the diner, only an hour into her shift and her first instinctual thought is Thank God, a day off. Because her feet are swollen and her back hurts constantly and she feels huge and disgusting and tired, but she's kept dragging herself to work to make as much as she can before the baby comes.
Jodi, the motherly waitress who's always covered for Diane when she takes too long breaks to rest, offers to drive her to the hospital but their manager won't let both of them leave. So Jodi helps Diane to her car, presses all the cash from her tips into Diane's hand and sends her off with a worried eyed smile and a Good luck, honey.
She drives herself to a county hospital and walks alone into the Emergency Room; she doesn't have a regular doctor, hasn't had regular appointments during the pregnancy; she saw three different doctors three different times, at clinics; the first two visits had been two early to tell much about the baby, and the third time it wasn't in the right position at the right moment, so she doesn't even know what she's having. She doesn't even know if it's okay.
It hurts so fucking much more than she'd expected, even though everyone told her and told her and told her. She's still shocked fresh by the intensity of every contraction, never getting used to them even as they get closer and closer together.
Diane is scared and in pain, and for the first time in years she wants her mother
But she doesn't call her, doesn't call anyone, so it's just a nurse holding her hand, a nurse who stays unblinking and patient while Diane howls strings of curses, a nurse who cuts the cord and brings Diane her screaming, squirming baby girl.
The first time she looks at her daughter, Diane bursts into tears.
(Later, she always leaves that out of the story, because there were too many reasons for the crying.)
When they ask for a name, she hesitates over the last half. There is nothing stopping her from choosing Burley, from putting Lee down on the birth certificate, keep him tied to this against his wishes. She could give her daughter a famous last name, validation to a claim she can make later in life, a connection Lee will never actually offer.
Even absent, Lee could give her more than Diane will ever be able to.
But as her daughter fits against the hollow of her chest, a wave of possessiveness ripples through Diane, seeping out of her heart that feels too big for her chest. She looks down at the baby's scrunched, crimson face, perfect tiny fingers curling and uncurling, and Diane thinks: mine.
Her daughter. Her family, in its entirety. She's not even an hour old, and Diane can already tell this baby will be enough for her; she promises herself to try hard to be enough back.
So she chooses Vause like she's forming an alliance: the two of them against the world.
The first name Diane does not stumble over. She always knew it would be Alex.
Her father had big hands and a beard and he was almost always smiling. He loved The Beatles and he played their songs on an old acoustic guitar. He tickled and gave piggyback rides and always had Lifesavers in his pockets.
Diane gave her older sister Clara two Barbie dolls to switch their sides of the bedroom, so Diane could have the bed that pushed right against the window, just for the few nights when she could hear the comforting rumble of her dad's voice, floating over from the porch while he drank beers and laughed with his buddies. Sometimes he played his guitar, and Diane would fall asleep to his songs like a lullaby.
Most nights, though, he left the house after bedtime, after tucking them in and telling some meandering story he'd make up as he went; the lights would go off and within a half hour the girls' bedroom would flood with headlights as his car pulled away. As they understood it, he was off to play games for money.
Sometimes he'd wake them up at the crack of dawn, lit up with delight because he'd won big, and he'd drive the whole family away on a spontaneous trip, to the beach or the city or an amusement park, anywhere he could shower them with gifts. Even if the sun wasn't up yet. Even if it was a school day. Her mom and Clara always fell back asleep in the car, but Diane stayed awake, riding the energetic waves of her dad's excitement, letting him tell her about his wins, things she only half understood. I was magic last night, baby. That much she believed, wholeheartedly.
Her dad smelled like smoke and whistled better than anyone in the world and he seemed a hundred feet tall, tall enough to hang the moon and sun and personally arrange the stars. He was made of magic, and Diane adored him.
One day when she was in third grade, her dad wasn't home for breakfast. That wasn't unusual, and Diane thought nothing of it while the three of them ate cereal without him, or while she and her sister rode the bus to school, or all morning long until she was called to the principal's office in the middle of Silent Reading.
Her stomach twisted into knots, because she could have been in trouble for any number of things - copying on a multiplications test, tripping Ricky Connelly into the mud on purpose, drawing pictures on the bathroom stall doors. But when she got to the principal's office, she saw Clara walking there, too, and Clara never did anything to get in trouble. Then she saw her grandmother standing by the receptionist desk, and she realized something was really, really wrong.
Alexander Vause was killed in the early early morning when his car ran off the road. For his youngest daughter, his death knocked the sun right out of the sky.
Her mother got remarried less than a year later, to a man named Tim who was twelve years older than her. He was a professor, and they moved out of their small house and into his, which had two stories and a basement besides. Her dad's records were stored in the basement until Diane dragged them upstairs and hid them under her bed.
Tim was nice and good but he just didn't like Diane and that never changed. She didn't make herself likable, true, but she was nine years old and grieving and hating him for not being her father.
Her mom stopped being her mom and became his wife instead, and she loved Diane but she didn't like her either, not anymore.
Clara was the last to stop liking her. She held on for a few years, until Diane was maybe thirteen, and then Clara started hating her for something she couldn't even help: the way boys stared and flirted and flocked to her, the way girls invited her to every birthday party and sleepover. The fact that she was pretty and cool and could make everyone who didn't live in their house love her.
She fell in and out of love dozens of times, with boys who played instruments or rode motorcycles or filled sketchbooks with wild anger. She loved them all for how much they loved her, for how wanted they made her feel.
But more than anything, through it all, she loved music.
When Diane was sixteen, Clara got accepted to college on a partial academic scholarship, and Tim bought her a new car as a graduation gift, giving her old, used one to Diane.
Two weeks later she drove away, her father's record collection in the trunk of the car, and never came back.
She knew a boy from town, an ex-not-quite-boyfriend, who'd graduated three years before and now worked upstate at a stadium music venue. She stayed with him and slept with him for three weeks, seeing every concert that passed through.
Diane called her mom a week after she left, ready for a fight, to stubbornly insist she wouldn't come home. But her mom didn't even ask her to.
"We've tried with you, Diane. I can't do it anymore. You're hellbent on making mistake after mistake, and I've never known how to stop you. You're just like your father...wild. I just pray it doesn't kill you the way it did him."
"What?"
What what what?
Diane's relationship with her father was forever frozen; she had never see him with anything but hero worshipping, eight year old eyes.
She didn't want to know more. She didn't want to change the story of her dad. So when her mother didn't clarify, Diane didn't push. She hung up the phone, and she went back stage and smoked pot with some roadies until she stopped feeling nauseous.
At a Rolling Stones show she met a group of girls, mostly a few years older than her, traveling with the road crew, following the band. Diane left with them, on a crew members tour bus, leaving her car in her old boyfriend's garage and telling him he could use it in the meantime.
For the next year and a half, she lived like that, from concert to concert, city to city, following tours or sticking around venues until someone's crew offered to take them along. Life was sex and drugs and most of all the rock and roll, most of all the music, that pure concert euphoria that brought her back to life almost every night.
Then she met Lee Burley.
He was famous and he was sexy and he was talented and he chose her. She never ever has to change the story of how they started, because it was as simple as that: he saw her, and he wanted her. She was backstage with some of the other girls, they'd gotten in with some journalists, had watched the show from the wings. Lee walked right up to her - his eyes didn't even graze anyone else - and said hi.
She spent the night in his hotel suite.
And three months worth of nights after that.
She rode on the main tour bus, and the other girls rode with the crew. They were jealous, and Diane basked in it; her sister's jealousy had always made her feel guilty, but she was done with that. She was cool, she was chosen, she was loved.
Until the missed period and stomach bug she couldn't shake and the positive sign on a drugstore test.
Lee was high when she told him, blissfully chilled out on heroin, and she didn't realize until she'd already started. He declared it no big deal, told her it'd work out, and then reminded her of his girlfriend back home.
The next morning, he didn't wake her up in time to leave with the bus. There was an envelope of cash and no note; it made her feel dirty and used up and abandoned, and she knew before she even left the hotel room that everyone else was gone, too.
She called Clara and begged until she wired her the money for a bus ticket, back to the city with her ex-almost-boyfriend and her car still parked in his garage. She drove home from there and showed up at her mom and Tim's house, hoping to stay for awhile before the reason for her abrupt return was made obvious, but Clara already told them and her mother wouldn't even let her in house, just gave her pity eyes and said You wanted to be on your own.
Hence the cheap motel. Hence the diner job. Hence scouring Goodwill and garage sales for baby gear. Hence stealing the newest Death Maiden album, then breaking it into jagged vinyl pieces with her bare hands.
Hence the hospital kicking her out the same day Alex is born, because she doesn't have insurance and can't pay for a single night.
Alex Vause spends her first night alive at a homeless shelter.
Diane's been there the past three nights, since the motel kicked her out, but now she keeps having to take Alex outside when she cries, sitting in a car packed with everything they own to nurse.
Panic is starting to flip her insides over. She is not equipped for this. This was never what her life was supposed to look like.
Alex won't settle, so Diane reclines the front seat and holds her against her chest, rubbing her back and anxiously singing Hey Jude and Dear Prudence until the wishing her dad was here is making her cry harder than the baby, too hard to sing.
(Years later, she doesn't need to add those details to the story. Eighteen, alone and homeless with a newborn she's supposed to protect - it tells the story for her.)
Diane stops by the diner, just to visit and have somewhere to go, and Jodi looks immediately concerned and tells her she should be careful taking the baby out in public for the first six weeks. So Diane closes her mouth and doesn't mention where she's been staying, that all she has is public.
For the next few days, she's terrified to get out of the car.
When Alex is a week old, Diane drives the three hours to Clara's college town. She has to stop at a gas station halfway there and ask strangers for money; a middle aged woman with two kids peering out of her van's backseat looks back and forth between Diane and the baby, and when Diane earnestly tells her she's just trying to get home to her parents, the woman swipes her credit card and fill up the gas tank.
She goes to Clara's off campus apartment and Clara groans like she's been really hoping this wouldn't happen. She makes a face when she hears the baby's name, and she'll barely even look at her.
They talk in circles for awhile.
"You know I have roommates, right? Roommates with classes and exams and we can't have a newborn - "
"Clara. We've been living in a car."
"That's your own fault - "
"Right, if only Mom and Tim were paying for my apartment."
"If you'd have stayed at home and gone to college they would have!"
"I've been working, but I had to buy all this baby stuff and the diapers and the clothes...and now I can't get a job because I can't pay for daycare."
"Go on welfare, Di, that's what it's for."
"I don't know how."
"God, of course you don't, you're a high school drop out..."
"If you could just talk to Mom - "
"Trust me, Mom doesn't want anything to do with...this."
In the end, Clara can't quite bring herself to kick them out on the streets. She tells Diane she can stay for a week, only a week, and if the baby bothers her roommates they'll have to leave sooner.
So Diane sleeps on the couch and rushes into the hallway anytime Alex wakes up crying. Luckily, she's not prone to long, screaming crying jags, always quieting as soon as she gets what she needs. From what Diane can tell, she's an easy baby, like she's already learned to make herself adaptable.
Clara's roommates, two other college juniors, are the opposite of angry about the intrusion; they love cooing over the baby, and they pepper Diane with questions.
"And the father is really Lee Burley?"
"Oh, yeah. No question."
"Was it like...a one night stand?"
"Oh, no way, I was traveling with him for...fuck, I don't even know, about three months I guess. See?"
She proffers the Polaroid again, her forever proof. Across the apartment in the kitchen, Clara glowers, left out and jealous once again.
"Oh my God."
"How did that even happen?!"
And Diane learns that she can shape the story.
She tells them that he was famous and he wanted her and she was only having fun, living a wild, glamorous life these girls will never come close to.
"Does he know about the baby?"
"Nah, here's the thing...Lee's a total fucking junkie."
"Really?"
"No way."
"Full blown heroin addict. So, you know...not the best father."
So she makes herself sound desirable and exciting and, most importantly, in control. She remakes a past where she was noble and smart and brave, going it alone by choice.
Clara's college circle is full of upper middle class, bleeding heart liberal arts kids, and that ends up being helpful . One of her roommates is a sociology major who's logged volunteer hours at Human Services, and she sets Diane up with an employee who helps her apply for aid. Another one of Clara's friends gets her a part-time job, a few days a week swiping student meal cards as they enter the dining hall. She's just sitting in a chair in the entrance vestibule, and Clara's friend says it's okay for her to set a baby carrier in a chair beside her.
Clara still kicks her out after a week is up, sending her off with money that she insists won't be a regular thing.
"If Mom even found out I was giving it to you, she'd freak."
"It's fine, I'll have the checks coming soon..."
"And you know, I'm trying to save my own money now. They don't pay for everything."
"Fine, I already fucking said okay."
"And I'll do you a favor and not tell Mom what you named her."
"No, thanks. You should tell her."
"You really have no idea, do you? About Dad - "
"I don't care. Mom left me standing on the fucking porch when I came home. Wouldn't even let me in the house. And when I was living in my car with her grandkid, she didn't take my calls. Dad would never have done that to me." She looks down at Alex, settled into her secondhand carrier, sucking on her fingers. She feels her whole heart soften. "And I'd never do that to her. No matter what bad stuff she does." She looks back at Clara, eyes flashing and fierce. "You're the one who can't understand."
"I'm twenty-one," Clara snaps. "I'm not supposed to understand what it's like to be a mom yet. If you weren't such a - " She stops herself, black eyed and angry, but it doesn't matter. Diane hears it, anyway, not for the first time; the first time was a night she snuck in past curfew her freshmen year of high school, thinking her sister was asleep, until the murmured, bitter hiss of slut came slicing across the bedroom.
"Thanks for all your help," Diane says finally. "I won't bother you again."
(Sometimes, later, she leaves Clara out of the story. It depends on the day, whether or not she mentions her older sister's money or the week they stayed in her apartment. Even when she does tell it, Diane makes sure not to leave out how reluctant Clara was, how clearly she needed to be thanked and acknowledged. Diane's story isn't one of forgiveness.)
The job only lasts two months, because once Diane forgets to pump enough and has to abandon her post to feed Alex in a bathroom. Apparently letting five minutes worth of college students flow in without losing a prepaid meal is a fireable offense.
And the subsidized housing or long term women's shelters on the list Clara's roommate gave her have at least year long waiting lists to get in.
So it does not solve her problems. But it is a tiny starting point.
Sometimes Diane worries she isn't the best thing for Alex, but she has no doubt that Alex is the best thing for her. Her daughter is all big eyes and nonsense babbling and flailing fists, and every day Diane discovers new pockets inside her heart, holding more love than she'd have ever guessed could fit.
She lugs her dad's record player and tape deck into a few crappy motels and, finally, their new apartment. She dances around the rooms with Alex on her hip. Sometimes she sings The Beatles; sometimes she can't, so she sings songs that only belong to her, songs she's heard live, played by musicians she's met or even flirted with.
She goes around to daycare centers in town to ask for a job, thinking she's being so clever, but none of them are hiring. So she stretches her welfare checks are thin as they can go; sometimes she can't eat real meals for days because Alex is outgrowing her clothes too fast, and it takes hours of picking through Goodwills and church thrift stores to find things that fit.
The other mothers at the park think she's a babysitter, and she sees the way their faces pinch and sour when they realize she's not.
She's sitting alone, perched on an overturned plastic bucket just outside the sandbox, her legs, clad in ripped jeans, sprawled in front of her, hands deep in the pockets of her leather jacket. She's watching Alex, with a look of intense concentration, toddle across the sand. She's getting proficient at walking across the dingy thinning carpet of their apartment, but sand seems to be providing more of a challenge, and after four steps she goes down, hard.
Diane's muscles tense and she leans forward a little, ready to sweep over and comfort, but there's no need. Alex doesn't cry easily; she's a wiley, stubborn little thing, who's now staring darkly at the ground beneath her feet as though it's obviously to blame.
Alex seems to give up on mobility for the time being, staying safely on the ground, shifting her attention instead to the pile of toys Diane had put in front of her. She mumbles "Mama" around her pacifier.
"Right here, baby," Diane answers habitually; most of the time, Alex just likes to say the word.
There's a tiny blonde girl around Alex's age in the corner of the sandbox whose eyes are trained in Alex's general vicinity; Alex turns her head, seems to notice, and extends her fist, clutched around a tiny stuffed bear in her direction. Whether it's an offer or not, the blonde girl makes a delighted grab and yanks it away.
"Sweetheart, no..." There is a snapping of fingers and just like that the girl's mother is there, plucking the toy out of her daughter's hands and dropping it onto the sand before sweeping the kid up in her arms. "We don't touch that, we don't know where that's been."
Diane watches the mother hurry away, for some reason feeling the need to move her daughter out of the sandbox, and Diane feels heat fan out in her gut. Because yes, the toy, like any other toy, has probably been in the dirt and sand and on the floor and in a toddler's gummy mouth, but somehow she knows that isn't what the woman meant.
"Uppity bitch," Diane mutters just for Alex to hear, watching the woman return to the benches full of other older, suburban mothers, all glancing over at her with unconcealed suspicion.
Her daughter is her favorite person in the entire world, and Diane tells her that all the time, but sometimes she is so fucking lonely that it makes her feel crazy. She would almost be desperate enough to call her sister, but Clara graduated college (in a ceremony less than ten miles from Diane's apartment, which she wasn't invited to) and moved somewhere else.
So she talks to her not-even-two-year-old like she's expecting answers. Their days are constant, curse laden monologues, and Alex watches her with solemn eyes and full attention, like some silent therapist.
In a year and a half, she can send Alex to one of the public preschool programs she'd looked up at the library, and then Diane can get a job and make consistent money and interact with the world again.
But before that happens, she meets Beth.
(For the rest of her life, Diane always always always tells it so Beth is a hero in the story.)
She gets evicted from the apartment, and she sells her dad's acoustic guitar and one box of records and checks into a motel with the cash, sick to her stomach the whole day.
Beth works at the hotel, cleaning rooms, and she sees Diane walking Alex back and forth across the outdoor balcony on the second day. She seems to take one look at Diane and instantly understand the exact state of her entire life.
She gets Diane a job cleaning alongside her, and assures her the manager doesn't even have to know that her daughter is toddling around the rooms while they do it. Even though Beth is at least ten years older than Diane, she is also loud and irreverently funny and instantly comfortable with anyone. It makes Diane remember she used to be like that, too.
She sends Alex to preschool and gets a second job waiting tables, glad to have tips again. She's good at waitressing, good at knowing when to flirt or wink or just turn on a more wholesome brand of charm.
She is pretty. She is likable. That has always been true.
Her lunch break is spent picking Alex up from school, and then Diane brings her to the restaurant and settles her in a corner booth with crayons and paper and a stack of library books. The manager is a fifty year old man, and she always touches his arm for too long and laughs too much at his dumb jokes, so he never gives her shit for letting Alex take up a table all night long.
Every time Diane walks by that part of the dining area, she catches her daughter's eye and Alex lights all the way up, every single time, then giggles when Diane makes a silly face - crossed eyes, stuck out tongue, scrunched nose and pursed lips. She waves at other waitresses who walk by and wink at her, and she's hardly ever a problem. Barely four years old, Alex is already good at keeping herself still and quiet. She has spent her life in one room apartments or hotel rooms, and she has learned not to demand much.
But one night Diane's taking the order of some family, a mom and dad with two boys and a girl, all three of the kids occupied with some toy or book on top of the table, when suddenly Diane hears floating up at her, a familiar rising lilt to the question, "Mommy?"
Her cheeks flame and her pencil freezes, because Alex knows she's not supposed to do this, but Diane glances down to see her daughter craning her neck to look up at her. "Babe, go sit down, I'll be right there," she whispers as though they draws less attention.
"But I'm bored," Alex says, less of a whine than accusation.
Diane flicks an apologetic look back at her customers; the married couple are exchanging a look, probably wondering what kind of waitress has to bring her kid into work, what kind of mother does.
She sharpens her voice. "Alex. Go sit."
"But - "
"You cannot bother me while I'm working! Go sit down right now," Her voice comes out like someone else's, some middle aged disciplinarian, not a twenty-two year old at all. She sounds like her mother.
Alex's little face pinches in confusion, but she turns and runs back to her booth without a second look back. Diane's heart follows her a few paces, even as she turns back to the table with a smooth smile and an, "I'm so sorry about that." Then, for no reason at all, she lies, "Regular sitter cancelled on me last minute. You know how it is."
A few minutes later she slides into the space beside Alex in her booth. Alex cuts her eyes over, then returns her gaze to her library book without further acknowledgement. There's something so willful and adult about the gesture that Diane is briefly unsettled.
"Hey," Diane bends her head low and tucks a strand of hair that's come loose from Alex's ponytail behind her ear. "I'm sorry I yelled."
Alex doesn't answer. Finally, preemptively defensive, she asks, "Am I in trouble?"
"No, no, babe, of course not. I shouldn't have gotten mad. I was just worried I'd get in trouble."
Finally, Alex turns her head, face scrunched up, perplexed. "Why?"
Kids, she knows, are prone to why questions, but Alex's always have purpose. She's so damn smart; the teacher at the preschool program, which is run out of one of the elementary schools, even said Diane could put her in kindergarten a year early, since she knew how to read before she even got there. But Diane had flat out refused, not wanting to cut out even one year. Fourteen years until high school graduation still seems like a long way away; enough time for some miracle to occur to allow for college.
"Well..." Diane trails off, not sure how to answer the question. The truth is, she wouldn't have gotten in trouble. Maybe a shaved down tip, at most. That wasn't the problem. It's just that there's some part of her that's ashamed of this arrangement, embarrassed that she is this person, this mother, living this life.
"You're right. It was stupid," she says finally.
"Yup," Alex agrees blithely, which makes Diane smirk.
She pokes her in the side, tickling her ribs. "You and me, we don't care what judgey assholes think, do we?"
Alex squirms away, finally grinning. "Did you know Miss Talmon says not to say ass?"
"I didn't know that. But I'm not surprised." Diane pokes her again. "I told you that word's just for at home."
"I forgot. And also about damn."
"Whoops."
Alex makes her eyes bigger. "Can I have a milkshake?"
Wiley little kid. Knows just when to use guilt.
"Sure. Let me see...chocolate?"
"No."
"Vanilla?"
"No!"
"Peanut butter?"
"Mommy."
Diane winks, then kisses the top of Alex's head. "Strawberry milkshake coming right up."
When Alex is in first grade, her teacher sends a note home demanding a parent teacher conference; she's impatient with Diane before they even meet, having apparently tried to call four different times to schedule a meeting, except Diane's never home and they don't have an answering machine.
Someone covers for her at Wal-Mart, where she's been working during the day before the restaurant, so she can be at the elementary school when class lets out. Alex loves it, delighted at the novelty of seeing her mother right after school instead of riding the bus home and letting herself into the apartment, as she's been doing since starting kindergarten.
She sits in the hall outside her classroom with a book while Diane goes in to meet Mrs. Barrett. The older woman looks at her, and Diane can see her cataloguing details - the Wal Mart shirt and name tag, the fact that she's only twenty-four, maybe even her hair and makeup and jewelry - and this look of understanding flickers across her features, like now everything makes sense: Alex's patched up ill fitting clothes, her inability to entirely delete curse words from her school vocabulary, and, yes, the lack of answered phone calls.
Diane lifts her chin, already prickling with defenses, as she sits down across from the teachers desk. "So, is there a problem with Al, or is this just a regular thing?" She'd asked Alex if she'd gotten in trouble for something, but she'd insisted nothing's gone on.
"Well, Miss Vause...I do actually have some concerns with Alex's academic progress."
That's the last thing Diane's expecting.
"You're kidding me," she says, deadpan.
Mrs. Barrett raises her eyebrows, surprised. "Not at all..." She spreads a row of papers on the desk between them. "These are her weekly math assessments...we put a series of simple addition problems on the board, and the children have fifteen minutes to answer." There's a sea of red X's. The teacher spreads a fresh row on top of those; more red marks, this time over sentences. "And these are primarily for handwriting practice, copying down a sentence...but as you can see, there are real red flags here."
Diane scans one of the sentences; it's nonsense, a string of unrelated words and, a couple of times, just letters.
She shakes her head, dismissive. "This doesn't make any sense...she's been reading since she was three." Alex has always loved the library, loves getting to leave with a stack of books, anything new. It's always been an easy, free place to go and fill afternoons.
"We do notice that she does fine on homework problems..." Barrett hands a stack of that over for Diane's perusal. "And of course we understand your instinct to help your child, but - "
"I didn't help her with these," Diane snaps back, more defensive than she intended. "I didn't even know first graders had homework."
More understanding and accusations flash in the teacher's eyes, but she doesn't address that, just says, "She also does fine on her seat work, but it's obviously much easier for the kids to... get help from each other on that."
Diane bristles, picking through the bullshit politeness. "My daughter doesn't fuc- freakin' cheat."
"Well in any case..." Mrs. Barrett taps one of the nonsensical sentences. "With this caliber of work, we'd like to look into getting her tested for any learning difficulties...and she may benefit from hanging back in first grade an extra year."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" This time Diane can't stop herself, and the teacher pulls her lips in tight. "You know her preschool teacher wanted to put her in kindergarten a year early? And now you want her to be held back? Nuh-uh."
"Well, I can't speak for her preschool teacher, of course..."
Diane knows something's wrong here; Alex is smart, smarter than she ever was. "Hold on..."
She gets up and stalks to the door of the classroom, ignoring the teacher's placating voice behind her. She leans into the hallway; Alex looks up and grins at her. "Can we go home now?"
"Not yet, babe. Can you come in for a minute?"
Alex's face darkens at the prospect of entering her classroom after school hours. Long suffering, she rolls her eyes. "What'd I do?"
"Nothing. Everything's okay, just come on in. And bring your book."
Reluctantly, Alex trudges after her, walking up to Mrs. Barrett's desk. The teacher smiles warmly at her, and Alex lifts her eyes to Diane, awaiting instruction.
Diane flips one of the failed math assessments over to its blank side and grabs a random pencil from a tin cup on the desk, handing it to Alex and flipping through her book, pointing at a random sentence. "Al, can you let Mrs. Barrett watch you copy this down?"
Alex makes a face, quite obviously finding this extra school work entirely unfair, but she takes the pencil and quickly writes the sentence, correctly.
She knew it, she did, but relief spills over Diane's insides anyway. She starts to ask a math question, but realizes she has no idea what math first graders are supposed to know. "What's, um, two plus three?"
Alex looks at her mom like she may have gone slightly crazy. "Five. Duh."
"Alex, honey, can you go sit at your desk for a second?" Mrs. Barrett interrupts, a thoughtful frown on her face.
Alex sighs, swinging around to look her mom as though to say Do I have to? Diane nods her along, just as confused; she has no theories to explain this discrepancy. She's just glad for Alex's proof.
Alex takes her time shuffling down the aisle, then practically slumps down in her desk, completely and blatantly over this. Diane bites back a smirk. Patiently, Mrs. Barrett writes a quick line of letters on the board, then moves out of the way, turning back to Alex and pointing at a big W scrawled in chalk. "Can you see what letter this is?"
Alex squints, leaning forward on the desk. Finally, a question in her voice, she says, "U?"
Mrs. Barrett keeps pointing. Alex gets only one right, and even then she doesn't seem sure.
The teacher, though, is beaming, happy to have found a solution. "She needs glasses, that's all it is." She seems entirely guilt free, like she wasn't practically calling Alex dumb or a cheater ten minutes before. Then, frowning, she asks, "She didn't have her eyes checked in kindergarten? Our nurse usually does it."
"Well, she changed schools part way through the year so..." Diane trails off uncomfortably; they'd changed after a move, after a cheaper apartment in a different district. She doesn't want to get into that, or the lack of consistent pediatric visits. She's already thinking about the cost of an optometrist, of prescription glasses, and wishing she didn't have to.
To distract herself, she walks over to Alex, touching the top of her head and tilting her neck back gently so she's looking up at her. "Why didn't you say you couldn't see the board?"
Alex shrugs. "I thought that's just what it looked like."
Diane snorts out a laugh and pulls Alex to her feet, wrapping an arm around her and drawing her protectively against her side, giving Mrs. Barrett a look, several shades of defiant. "I assume we're good here?"
The teacher has the grace to look apologetic. "Of course. I'd like to pull Alex aside tomorrow and do a quick assessment, so I know how she's really doing, but none of this will count against her. And we can move her to the front row for the next few days, until you can get her in for an appointment."
Diane nods and thanks her, groaning internally. Alex gives a very relieved goodbye and practically drags Diane out of the classroom.
Alex is quiet in the car on the way home; Diane catches a glimpse of her broody expression in the rearview mirror. "Hey, what's wrong?"
"Nothing." Then, immediately, "Do I really have to wear glasses? Like...all the time, forever?"
"That's usually how it works, babe," she teases.
Alex groans.
"What, you don't want to see?"
"I mean, yeah. But I don't want glasses."
"How come?"
"It's like, a nerdy thing, right?" She scowls down at her balled up fists. "I'll get made fun of even more."
Diane's heart twists at the even more; Alex never whines about it, but Diane knows anyway. She never talks about school friends. She winces dishearteningly every time Diane has to tape together a fresh hole in her jacket, add another patch of random fabric to her jeans. And she has hardened, somehow, in ways that are hard to pinpoint, as though Alex is developing armor that's hard to shed even at home.
The armor's on now; Alex's face is knotted up with anger, eyes flared in a sort of don't dare feel sorry for me expression. So Diane just puffs out a skeptical noise, like her daughter's said something silly. "Fuck anyone who makes fun of you for wearing glasses. You hear how dumb that sounds? You're a nerd just because your eyes are bad?"
"My eyes are bad?"
"Oh, yeah. They're kind of horrible, babe. I don't know how the hell you didn't notice." Alex laughs a little at that. Diane looks back to smile at her. "Don't even worry about it. Your glasses are gonna be cool just because you're wearing them, Al."
Her smile drops. "No one else thinks I'm cool."
"Well, of course they don't," Diane flings back dismissively, ignoring the drop kicks going on in her chest. "Because if you're cool, that means they aren't. They don't wanna admit that."
"Why does it mean that?"
"Oh, c'mon, Al, you know this...are you anything like those little brats at school?"
"No," she answers vehemently.
"Well there ya go. If you're the cool one, and they're nothing at all like you, then obviously they aren't cool, right?"
A smile spreads slowly across Alex's face as she turns this logic over, accepting it. She nods as though assuring herself. "Right."
But Diane worries.
Especially when Alex hits third grade and it still hasn't gotten better, when she still isn't including even small friendships in her daily recaps of her days at school.
Diane knows it's all her fault.
A lot of it is the money, the lack of it, Diane knows that, knows Alex gets made fun of and avoided for her clothes and her free lunches and maybe even the fact that her mom serves food to some of her classmates' families. But it can't just be that. Her own family hadn't had much, at least not until her mom remarried, and she had gone to school in Clara's hand me downs that didn't quite fit, but Diane still always had friends around. She'd been a kid who took the Best Friend title very seriously, as early as kindergarten.
She wanted that for Alex, but she worries she's screwed her up: they'd spent too much time with just to two of them, or she'd made Alex spend too much time all on her own, entertaining herself in a booth at Friendly's or a hotel room or an empty apartment. She'd failed to facilitate any playdates when Alex was in preschool or kindergarten.
And now Alex is eight years old and she spends every afternoon and a lot of evenings alone in the apartment, which maybe wouldn't be so bad if she was hanging out with friends at school. She is living quiet, lonely days.
Diane remembers when Alex was born, promising herself she'd be enough for her.
But she knows now it doesn't actually work like that.
She gets behind on rent and they get evicted again only a month and a half into Alex's fourth grade year. They stay at Beth's place for a few weeks, Alex on the couch and Diane sleeping on Beth's ancient floral recliner. Those two years of traveling on tour buses that drove through the night serve her well, now; Diane can always sleep anywhere.
She finds a new place that will take them and sweet talks an old sort of boyfriend (if letting him take her to dinner once a month and fucking him in his apartment while Alex slept over at Beth's counted as a boyfriend...it was the closest she'd come in the last nine years, with a handful of men) into moving her smattering of Goodwill and thrift store furniture in his pickup truck.
The bedroom is a little bigger than the last place, and once again she lets Alex have it, though they both share the closet; she wants her to be able to say she has her own room.
It's in a new school district, and after the first day Diane tries to sound casual when she asks if Alex made any new friends. In answer, she mentions the name of one girl who was nice to her, and Diane's heart cartwheels in relief. That's more than Alex has ever said about anyone at school, but in the following weeks she doesn't mention this Piper girl again.
Especially not the day Diane picks her up from school between shifts, which she rarely gets to do, and Alex ends up hurling her tennis shoes out the window, spitting out the word Bobo's like it tastes bad.
This is the first time she's ever so much as complained about anything Diane's given her; Alex sits there in her patched jeans and secondhand jacket with duct tape on the sleeve over a sweater with safety pins holding the shoulder together, and yet her shoes with the wrong name brand are declared the worst offender.
Diane nearly breaks into an impatient admonishment about how just hard and how much she has to work to even pay for those shoes, but she bites it back because it's not Alex's fault at all that this is her life. And because if Alex is finally crossing this line of complaining, someone else must have shoved her over.
Sure enough: "Jessica Wedge says they're lame."
"So fuck Jessica Wedge." This is always Diane's advice, just fuck 'em. Forget the conflict resolution teachers spout about; there is no changing the assholes of this world. She doesn't want to teach Alex to get along with them, she wants to teach her not to care. To know she's better than anyone who makes her feel like she's not.
"They all make fun of me," Alex bursts out. "They call me Pigsty."
For a second, Diane feels beaten down by her own hurt and helplessness, because nothing she can give Alex can combat the insults of mean spirited kids. She will never be able to offer her daughter a point of pride. She can tell Alex she's cool every day of her life but she cannot make her feel it with cheap clothes and a tiny apartment and a mom who's just a waitress or a cashier.
All she can give her is a story.
"Did you tell them who your father is?"
She never wanted a big moment where Alex finally asked the question, dreaded having some momentous reveal, so she's let Alex grow up knowing the basic facts about who her father is. She'd stick a a Death Maiden song on mixtapes and point out when "your father" started some drum solo. She dropped in casual stories about when the two of them were together, some concert she'd watch before meeting him a dressing room.
Lee Burley didn't give his daughter anything at all. So Diane takes from him, takes his name and his music and his cool and gives it to Alex to add to her armor. Daughter Of A Rock God means so much more than Daughter Of A Waitress.
It's Diane's story to tell, so she gives Alex the one she needs in that moment.
(Years and years later, she'll wish that she hadn't.)
"What are you looking at over there?"
"Nothing," Alex mutters, but not like she really heard the question.
"Well, get over here, let's play some cards."
Diane's working her Saturday gig at Ben and Jerry's, which predictably is a dead zone in the middle of winter, even in the fairly busy strip mall. She'd brought Alex for company, but she seems more interested in whatever's going on outside.
Because there are literally no customers, Diane walks from behind the counter and walks quietly up behind her daughter, following her gaze.
There's a little blonde girl about Alex's age sitting on a bench outside the nearby movie theater. "She in your class?"
Alex nearly jumps out of her skin, almost dropping her ice cream cone. "Geez, Mom, you scared the shit out of me."
"Sorry," Diane ruffles her hair then sits her chin on top of Alex's head, still watching. "Do you know her?"
"Kind of." Then, hesitant, "That's Piper."
"Oh, yeah?" The girl she'd said was nice her first day of school. "Go say hi."
Alex pulls away to look up at her, uncharacteristically uncertain. "You think I should?"
"Sure you should. But maybe finish the ice cream first, it's fucking freezing out."
"No." Alex leans away from the window, looking suddenly purposeful. "I'll go now, she might be about to leave."
"At least put on your gloves."
A few minutes later, Diane backs up a few feet from the window and angles herself so she can see outside but the kids won't be able to see her. She watches them talk, their nine year old expressions almost comically serious. It goes on for awhile, so finally Diane makes herself back away and return to the counter, grinning in relieved delight.
When Alex comes back in, ice cream apparently discarded, her eyes are practically bursting with the smile she's trying really hard to bite back. Diane figures out the don't make a big deal vibe pretty quickly, so she turned her back and starts wiping down the counters to hide her own smile.
(Diane doesn't know yet, but this will be the beginning of a whole new story.)