Page 1 of The Game Is Afoot

One

Pearl and I stare atour reflections in the smudged, toothpaste-splattered bathroom mirror that I really should clean one of these days.

“You’ve got this.”

“I’ve got this.”

“You are beautiful and wonderful and special.”

“I am beautiful and wonderful and special.”

“You can do hard things!”

“I can do hard things!”

“Or you can at least do, um…medium things. I’m pretty sure you can do those.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just being realistic, Mommy. No offense.”

My jaw drops and my eyes go wide. “Pearl!”

But she just smirks, arms crossed over her unicorn-printed sweatshirt, allI said what I said.I try to give her a look right back, because I’m the one who taught her everything she knows about looks, but it’s almost immediately undermined by a laughthat bubbles up all on its own. This isn’t the pep talkIwould have given myself, but maybe it’s the one I deserve.

“I can do medium things,” I repeat finally, and Pearl nods in approval. She leans closer to the mirror, her eyebrows furrowing into a fierce stare.

“You are going to get a raise.”

“I am going to get a raise.”

“And if that Rose lady doesn’t give you the raise, then you’re going to stomp on her foot and run out the door because she’s a meanie-head and you don’t work for meanie-heads!”

I shoot her a side-eye at that, and she smiles her sweet one-dimpled smile, like she said I should hold my boss Rose’s hand and go skipping under a rainbow in a field of flowers.

“I don’t know about all that, Pearl.”

She lets out a long, weary sigh that would be right at home at a Sunday service and gently pats my shoulder. “You just have to believe in yourself, Mommy.”

She says it with the confidence of analmost-eight-year-old—her birthday is in a little over a week. It’s the same confidence that gave her the audacity to clear her throat and correct the urgent care doctor last month when he called her seven andnotalmost eight. And then, after he prescribed her antibiotics for her ear infection and asked us if we had any more questions, her only one was whether or not he updated her chart with almost eight,notseven, so he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

That kinda confidence.

I wish I could bottle up that confidence and spray myself down, like a middle schooler who just discovered Axe body spray, before my annual performance review with Rose today. It’s not my first time around the performance review block. I started working at Project Window, a teen mentoring nonprofit, just a few months after Pearl was born, so my time there isalmosteight, too. And I’ve done this whole song and dance so many times that I could recite Rose’s long, gushing love bomb of a speech about how I’m indispensable to the organization and how they’re so lucky to have me. I could probably time it down to the millisecond when her eyes will start welling with tears, to emphasize that her gratitude issoauthentic,soreal, that it just overwhelms her with emotion. (Even though she must have those things on lease, with how quickly she trots them out and then puts them back away.) I could also call the exact moment when those same eyes, suddenly dry, will begin to drift to the door behind me as I’m making my case for a promotion, searching for any excuse to hit the emergency eject button and launch herself right on out of this conversation.

And I already know what Rose’s excuses will be, because I hear them in the middle of the night when I’m staring at the ceiling and questioning all my life choices. “I would pay you a million dollars if I could, but that’s the nonprofit life!” And: “Knowing you’re changing the world is its own kind of compensation, isn’t it?”

So, yeah. I shouldn’t be nervous, because I know exactly what’s coming for me today. But I’m hoping to switch it up this year—with bathroom mirror pep talks from my almost-eight-year-old and a sense of unending possibility that’s seeming more and more delusional as 9:00 a.m. approaches.

God, maybe Ishouldjust stomp on Rose’s foot and be done with it.

I can tell Pearl is thinking the same thing. She squints her dark brown eyes at the mirror, wiggly fingers pressed into a steeple. But before she can further tempt me into choosing violence, there’s a clatter of something falling down in the living room, and then the clicking of our puppy’s nails across the hardwood floor. That’s the most notice Polly, our Shar-Pei–pit bull mix,will give us when someone’s at the door. She’s the worst guard dog. She only barks at old people and babies. Well, except for one other time, which was themostinconvenient time…

“Mavis? Pearl? Y’all all right in there?” Yeah, definitely not an old person or a baby.

Pearl’s face quickly transforms from seeking vengeance to unbridled joy as she leaps off the step stool and sprints out of the bathroom.

“Daddy!”

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