Chapter 4

FALLON MARTIN: did you vom?

My phone pings with a text, and I lift it off the stone step. I’ve made my way down to the very bottom of the ocean staircase, my feet buried in the sand. I snuck outside when I heard Camilla start to stir; it’s chilly out here, the morning whipping with storm wind, but still preferable to being near her and that copy of her book. Fallon’s sent me an article, too: Camilla St. Vrain Tour Off to a Shaky Start as Daughter Audrey Suffers Food Poisoning.

Food poisoning. I have to hand it to Magnolia; it’s a smart story. Why else would national darling Camilla St. Vrain’s historically self-composed daughter flee the stage in the middle of a sold-out event? Why would anyone?

Curdled carbonara’s easier to grasp than the truth of the matter: that seeing all those photos, the person Camilla’s made me out to be for her six million social media followers, felt intolerable. Not difficult to tolerate—intolerable. Full, simultaneous rejection from my body and my brain. So, in a way...

Yeah, I reply. Spiritually.

Fallon responds immediately. explain

If I were to explain, it would sound like this: That photo of me, seven years old, holding a turtle on this exact beach, was taken by my dad. I’d never have held out a baby turtle to my mother, because she’d never have touched something like that.

The one of me on my first day at the Summit School was taken without my knowledge; I was eleven and walking into my new dorm building and she called my name so I turned around. In the photo I look focused and serious, the perfect face for the caption she posted—a gushing rush of emotion about her pride, her big-brained daughter, her mini-me so self-actualized at just eleven that she was ready to live in Colorado, live at school, make academia her entire life. I didn’t feel that way then. I felt terrified. I felt alone and unwanted. But she told me how excited I was, how brave I was, how much I wanted this—told the whole world, too. And eventually I did feel those things, though I don’t know who chose them for me to feel: my own mind, or Camilla’s voice that lives inside it.

Then the last photo: Ethan and me at graduation. Ethan, the embodiment of a life I’d made without her, still somehow there on her social feeds like he was hers, too. Nothing was mine to hold sacred; nothing belonged to me fully enough that she couldn’t abscond with it and turn it into a layer of her brand.

And now, the very worst of it: this summer. The biggest thing she’s ever ripped out from underneath me and taken for her own.

She stole my summer on a Thursday morning while wearing a matching lilac workout set. Scallop-edged sports bra, high-rise leggings. She’d sent me a set of my own; mine was seafoam green but, critically, had the same Saint logo emblazoned across the boobs. It was still in the flat-rate shipping box Magnolia mailed it in; I wore pajama shorts and an oversized T-shirt I’d stolen from Dad in middle school.

“Find your sit bones, honey.” My mother pulled her feet together in front of her, legs bowed wide, extending her spine. “And close your eyes. Thumbs to third eye center.”

I crossed my legs and watched her breathe, ribs expanding over the lip of her yoga pants. We did this every Thursday: Weekly Flow. A name that sounded decidedly menstrual to me, but was actually an hour of one-on-one yoga over video chat. Exactly as torturous as you’d imagine.

“Namaste,” my mother murmured, her eyes fluttering open. She always smiled at me dreamily through the screen before adding, “The light in me honors the light in you.”

Great. Weekly Flow was the only way we kept in touch while I was at school, sixty minutes per week of Camilla bossing my body into various contortions that required zero conversation. But the light in her always honored the light in me, so. There was that.

“I’m going to go,” I said, reaching to shut the computer. “Have an exam tomorrow.” It was early May, the heat of finals season, and I resented the loss of the last sixty minutes.

“Just a moment.” She sat up taller, and I let my hand drop from its grip on my laptop. She had that look—the I need to tell you something one. The This school across the country will be perfect for you one. The Maybe spending Christmas with your father makes more sense one. I bit the inside of my cheek.

“Letters is turning twenty-five this year,” she said, like her book was a human being. “And they want to do a national tour for the anniversary edition.”

The door to my dorm room swung open, and Fallon walked in with an armful of textbooks. Sorry, she mouthed, waving a hand at Camilla on-screen. She crept over to her desk, out of sight of the camera, and shot me a what is it this time look.

“Congratulations,” I said, because it had always been my mother’s favorite thing to hear. “I’m sure that’ll be great.”

“Yes, well.” She cleared her throat, smiling in a way that would almost seem nervous if I didn’t know her so well. “I’d like for you to come with me.”

Over the top of my computer screen, Fallon made a choking noise. Our eyes met across the room, and she screwed up her entire face in a caricature of shock. Because, truly, excuse me? I hate surprises. Hate surprises from my mother.

“What?” I pulled my legs out of their careful fold. “I’m going to UPenn this summer.”

“Well,” my mother said, “I wonder if that could wait.”

I snorted, laughter licking up my throat like fire. She was the most ridiculous person. The most unreasonable, unthinkably privileged person. Nothing existed outside of her own expectations, and there was nothing the world could do but fall in line.

“No,” I said, so sharply that Fallon hunched into herself. “It can’t wait, Mom. It’s a program for rising freshmen. It has a seven percent acceptance rate. I’m going with Ethan.”

“Honey, you’re already in at Johns Hopkins.”

“And that precludes me from having any other goals?”

“No, but you certainly don’t need to spend your whole summer studying. That’s what the next four years are for.”

I tipped forward, elbow buried between my thighs, to pinch the bridge of my nose. I needed the Penn program—not just to be with Ethan, but to set myself up for the fall. Johns Hopkins Hospital takes one incoming freshman for its fall ICU shadowing position, the most coveted premed placement on campus. I needed Penn on my résumé to land it, but my mother would never understand that, or care. The only way to get her to listen was to frame things through the viewfinder of her own desires.

“Why do you need me there?” I asked flatly, not looking up.

“You’re the most important part, honey.” I lifted my head, met her pixelated gaze. “On the anniversary of Letters to My Someday Daughter, touring live for the first time with my someday daughter.”

Fallon mimicked vomiting, and for a minute we stared at each other over the computer screen. Being a pawn in my mother’s speaking career was nothing new; Camilla had built an entire empire on her someday daughter—me. The world thinks we have some idyllic, beatific bond, when the truth is all Camilla actually has time for is running her Saint wellness retreats and curating healing gemstone product lines.

“It’ll be wonderful,” she continued. “Eight weeks, ten cities, plenty of room to breathe and explore between each one. Like a summerlong vacation.”

This pitch was a case in point of how very little she knew me. The last thing I wanted was a summerlong vacation, and the thing I wanted even less than that was a summerlong vacation with her.

“If you’re worried about running off course before college begins, I’ll hire someone.” Her evergreen, tried-and-true solution: just hire someone. “I’ll find a professor to tour with us, take you to local hospitals so you can keep learning about medicine.”

I was still looking at Fallon, who shook her head in sheer disbelief. Find a professor? What did that even mean? People had jobs; they couldn’t just pick up everything because she wanted them to.

“And besides.” Camilla’s voice softened to something almost vulnerable, and I finally looked back at her. “This summer is our last chance, Audrey.” She said this like someone was dying, like there was something sinister at stake. “You’ll only get busier from here.”

I’ve been busy, I thought. So have you. But then—

“Please,” she said. Didn’t look away from me. “I want to share this with you.”

I felt something shift in me, reluctant and squishy and too shameful to name. She wanted me with her, and I didn’t want to need that.

I really didn’t want to.

But now, here I am. Alone at the beach, over a month later, and about a million miles away from Fallon.

I’d thought I could do this summer. Thought maybe Camilla had meant it, that flickering moment over video chat: I want to share this with you. But it came through last night with full-sun clarity: she only needs me to share with her. And she only needs me to do it so this tour succeeds.

But I don’t explain that to Fallon, because these aren’t things I can ever say out loud. Not even to my closest friend, my roommate since the sixth grade. These feelings, at least, get to be mine, and mine alone.

I’m cutting out, I tell her instead. First class at Penn isn’t until Wednesday, so I should be able to make it. You packed?

really???she replies. how did camilla take that?

Then a selfie: Fallon’s blunt blonde bob and dreamy expression, flanked on both sides by an airport gate.

packed, she sends. airported. melatonin and benadryl on tap so I can sleep through this interminable flight instead of thinking about how my one precious life is suspended in midair above the atlantic ocean!!!

I smirk, glancing up as a seagull screams overhead. The beach is empty, like it always is, but full of motion: wind shifting loose sand higher up the shore, waves licking at the waterline, tiny mole crabs peeking their domed heads above the dunes. I’ve spent the last seven years in Colorado, and the whole earth has a different rhythm on the coast.

Commercial planes never crash, I tell her. 1 in 1.2 million chance.

Fallon’s going to Uganda for the summer to dig wells and repair critical infrastructure. She’ll study civil engineering at Colorado School of Mines in the fall, farther from me than I care to think about. The Colorado bug bit me, she said, the day we submitted our applications side by side in the library’s cavernous reading room. No going back to ’Bama now. Her whole family is in Montgomery: happily married parents, ten-year-old sister, older brother playing football at Auburn.

Fallon replies, 1 chance too many!! and then my phone starts buzzing in earnest. Dad-o, the screen says. But I know he’ll only try to talk me out of what I’m about to do—so I send him to voicemail, take one last breath of salt air, and stand to face the imposing edifice of Casa Camilla.