She gave him a weak smile, and he let go.
“It’s just…” She sighed. “You get told often enough that you’re a disgrace and eventually kindness feels like the lie.”
Reece’s eyes went round. Someone else might have rushed to tell her how great she was, but he lay in the silence with her.
“Your mom,” he finally said, knitting the last pieces together.
She felt like she had gravel caught in her throat. “Yeah.”
The secondhand anger on Reece’s face was a little too much to take. She pressed her face against his neck and cuddled close. His arms closed around her automatically.
After a while, Reece combed his fingers through her tangled hair. “I’m having trouble picturing her,” he mused quietly. “I don’t think I saw her at graduation.”
The old, dark wound in Charlotte’s chest throbbed painfully. She assumed that Jackie had filled him in on the missing details of graduation, but obviously not. He still didn’t know. She never told him.
“She wasn’t there.”
Reece’s hand stilled. She could practically see the gears grinding in his brain as he processed this new information.
“What?” Reece blurted out.
Charlotte caught the collar of his shirt between her fingers, thin from so many washes. He really did use a lovely fabric softener.
Words, Charlotte Thorne. Use them.
“She was supposed to be there. I invited her as a sort of olive branch, and she agreed to come.”
Charlotte planned her graduation outfit in advance. She found a Lilly Pulitzer dress made from white eyelet lace at Goodwill. Charlotte never wore Lilly Pulitzer, or lace, but it felt like fate when she saw it on the formal-wear rack. This was a dress Olivia Harrington Thorne would choose for her daughter to wear to her graduation. Pretty and feminine and preppy as hell.
She planned to wear the dress with electric blue cowboy boots borrowed from Nina, and her hair was still that hydrogen-peroxide-white bob. She would always be Charlotte Thorne, the bisexual dirtbag, but she intended for the dress to be a gesture toward compromise.
She closed her fist around Reece’s shirt. “I thought if she saw me here, somewhere I belong, that I’d make more sense to her. That she would understand me better.”
It was a fantasy, of course. The emotional whirlwind of the end of term made her think that anything was possible: an internship at an It Media Company, finally leaving her terrible boyfriend, reconciling with her mother. Their relationship had been fractious since her breakup with Ben, but Charlotte had so much to be proud of. She was moving to New York City and maybe she finally had her shit together, maybe she had it all figured out.
In reality, she had no reason to think her mother would change her mind. People didn’t snap out of a decade of homophobia and a lifetime of neglect. Nothing in the world would close the gulf between them, no stack of cartoons published in the school paper or prestigious internship offers. No secondhand cocktail dress or picturesque New England campus.
“But she just didn’t show up.”
Graduation day was a brutal reminder that life didn’t offer happily-ever-afters. Not for people like her.
Reece was still processing. “Did she ever explain why?”
Charlotte bit the inside of her cheek. “Yeah, she emailed me after the ceremony.” And what an email it was, confusing and harsh. Charlotte remembered squinting at her phone in the bright sunlight on the quad, wondering what on earth her mother was talking about in her stilted, formal language. But when she figured it out…
As she remembered her mother’s words, bloody anger wrapped itself around charcoal gray shame. She drew strength from the former as she continued.
“Remember when I told you that Ben spread a rumor about me? That I’d cheated on him with Jackie?” Reece nodded, not seeing the connection. “My mom was one of the people he talked to. I think he found out that you and I were hooking up, and he called her to stir up shit.”
Reece’s face whitened with horror. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be, his psycho behavior is not your fault. He didn’t like me moving on, and he lashed out through her. He knew that would hurt me the most. And my mother always adored him; she never understood why we broke up.” A mirthless smile stretched across Charlotte’s mouth, tight and hollow. “I guess it was easier for her to believe I was an unfaithful slut than that he was a controlling monster.”
She clung to her self-righteous anger as Reece winced, praying her instincts were right and that he wouldn’t judge her.
“Olivia said in her email that I was a disgrace to the family and no longer her daughter. I replied that she should go fuck herself.”
Stunned, Reece blinked at her. “Damn,” he whistled. “Good for you. Fuck her.”
“Thanks,” Charlotte said. “We haven’t spoken since.”
Over time it would hurt less. It already did hurt less. She never doubted her decision, even during the hardest moments of the last five years. It had taken twenty-two years for Charlotte to reach her limit with her mother, and she knew she had done everything possible to avoid that breaking point. She would choose being broke and alone over Olivia Harrington Thorne’s emotional abuse any day of the week.
Reece exhaled in a huff. “I can’t believe she fell for that guy’s act.”
“Honestly, I don’t even care that she believed Ben. What if it had been true, you know?” Charlotte wiggled up into a sitting position, Reece’s arm still looped behind her hips. “What if I was seeing Jackie? So what? Olivia didn’t care that I supposedly cheated, she cared that it was with a woman.” Her fury blended with pearly white certainty. “But I love being queer. It’s one of my favorite parts of myself.”
Charlotte meant it. No one ever took that away from her, not her parents, not even Ben. Her bisexuality wasn’t a rebellious phase or a party trick, and it wasn’t an inconvenience or an embarrassment to the people who loved her. Queerness meant joy and community and endless potential to fall in lust and love and understanding. Even if Charlotte had lost sight of that in the last few years.
“I’d rather not have my mother in my life than apologize for who I am,” she said. “And I will never subject anyone I care about to her judgment.”
Reece sat up beside her in the narrow bed. He had an odd look on his face, intense but soft. His smile was missing, but his eyes burned with something better: respect. She settled against his side as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. A moment later she felt her curls stir as he pressed a kiss to her hair.
Now, wrapped up in Reece’s embrace, it didn’t hurt to remember that awful day. Her perspective shifted. Maybe it wasn’t the day her mother had rejected her for good. Maybe it was the day she finally cut out her first abuser.
If only the decision hadn’t come with collateral damage.
“I really did want to meet your family,” Charlotte added. “I’m so sorry I didn’t show up at the picnic. I should have at least answered your texts when you asked me where I was, or called you to explain.” She licked her dry lips. “I was not my best self that day.”
