Page 103 of The Deepest Lake

She starts to laugh. “You’re making this sound like you’re a fraternity guy, pinning his girlfriend.”

“Or a daughter pinning her mother.” I watch her face for signs I’ve gone too far. “Or the person she wishes were her mother.”

She looks down at her shirt, clasping the ball end of the post I’ve affixed and removing the piece of jewelry, which she slides into her pocket.

“It didn’t look right,” she says. “But I will treasure your gift, Jules. I promise.”

PART

IV

——————————

———————

———

31

ROSE

——————————

———————

———

“You’re sitting way in the back, Scarlett,” Eva says after the hurried lunch break in the classroom, when it’s the cyclist’s turn for her workshop. “I can barely see you. Take a seat up front.”

Rose exchanges looks with Lindsay and Isobel from the back row, just behind Scarlett. Rose wasn’t the only one who noticed Eva’s changing mood today, her apparently frantic need to move things along, to reprimand writers for speaking up when they haven’t been called on. They’re all being watched, but Rose feels like the central target of that anxious sweeping beam of attention. There’s a feeling, in the aula, of a tightening noose, as if everyone, and not only Rose, is being corralled more tightly together.

Rose wishes she weren’t here, but since the incident in the plaza, seeing Hans and Chief Molina, nowhere feels entirely safe. Rose has redialed Mauricio’s number covertly, hand manipulating the phone from within her bag. If he picks up, she’ll pretend it’s an emergency call from home. She’ll duck out and run to the edge of the bluff, where no one can hear. She has that right. Eva can tap her foot or stand with her hands on her hips, the way she’s standing now, still waiting for Scarlett to move to the front. So what?

Scarlett, with shawl, laptop and several notebooks finally tucked under her arm, trades one last dread-filled look with the other women in her row. Rising, she drops a pen.

Rose scoops it off the ground, and at the same moment, notices something small and silver glinting on the rock-paved floor, next to a leg of the chair, easy to miss. She picks it up, recognizing it as the kind of small metal bar used in an eyebrow piercing.

“Did you lose this?” Rose asks.

“What? Oh.” Scarlett touches two fingers to her eyebrow, confused. “No, it’s not mine.”

“That’s odd,” Rose says.

She studies the metal piece—a steel bar, with a tiny ball at each end—so much like jewelry she remembers Jules wearing. She can even picture herself a year ago, dabbing at Jules’s brow, where the piercing got infected. If Jules had pulled the jewelry out, perhaps because it got infected once again and she decided to let the piercing close, she might have dropped the bar from a pocket or purse. But would no one have noticed it for three months?

Now that Rose is staring, she sees all sorts of things trapped in the floor’s cracks: twigs and gravel and bits of grass, a paper clip, and across the room, an elastic hair tie. She’d never looked down before. People rarely did.

At the front of the room, Eva taps her foot. “I’m waiting.”

Scarlett hurries forward, dragging all of her belongings. When she’s finally resituated, face flushed, Eva says, “You remind me of my daughter. The last time I saw her, I told her the same thing I’m going to tell you. You have a beautiful face. You have a beautiful body. You don’t need to wear all that makeup. You certainly don’t need to wear skintight clothing.”

Heads crane to check what Scarlett’s wearing to have merited this second lecture. She has big, dark lashes, but she’s not wearing more makeup than anyone else. Scarlett has a big chest, but she is wearing a loose sweatshirt. Eva’s the only one with a bit of cleavage visible above the line of her white tank.

“Has anyone ever told you that?” Eva asks.

“Yes,” Scarlett says, keeping her voice level. “Since the seventh grade. Not about the makeup. About my body.”

“Was it your mother?”

---