Next Time Will Be Our Turn

There are over a hundred guests here tonight, each of them dressed to the nines, and if this isn’t hell, I don’t know what is.

the color of “crushed burgundy,” whatever that means. I’d said, “I don’t think you can crush burgundy

We pride ourselves on being the premier family-oriented mental health facility in the country, and all the stuff Mama is saying to me is very much not sanctioned by the company’s philosophy. Not that she gives a crap.

It’s not an uncommon occurrence for my voice to go unheard in my family. Everyone else is so loud, and I am so mousy that, more often than not, I could mutter some nonsensical answer and they’d nod, their gazes somewhere over my shoulder, and go, “Uh-huh, okay, great talk,” before brushing past me.

she exudes the confidence of every mediocre white male who has managed to fail upward in life.

“Oh, they’re besties!” Straight girls must have it so easy.

No, you listen to Mama. You use that time and find yourself a man with potential. Someone with a real future. That’s the only reason college is worth going to in the first place.”

The other thing I didn’t know about sex was who I was actually attracted to. Because up until I met Ellery that very morning, I’d chugged along through life thinking I was straight. It was the kind of thing I never questioned, like breathing. Why do you breathe air? Who the hell cares? Everyone breathes the same air. Why was I straight? I was straight because I assumed I was, because I never knew anything different.

Girls are safe. Girls are no threat to my purity.

Ellery kissing a girl. I was so confused. On the one hand, I was really disappointed. On the other hand, I didn’t know why I would be disappointed, because I was straight.

I’d never, up to that point, been in love with someone who was so close and yet so incredibly out of reach. And to make matters more complicated, I still hadn’t figured out by then that I was in love with Ellery, because she was a girl, and I was a girl, and I was into boys, and that was that. I attributed the yawping pain to sheer loneliness, to wanting what Ellery had with Trish instead of wanting Ellery herself.

Is it the idea that your grandmother experiences lust? Deal with it, kid.

“Oh yeah, great train of thought, Mags. Blame it on the girl. She can’t possibly dislike a guy because he’s an actual ass. Nooo, it’s gotta be because she secretly has a crush on him.”

She’d missed so much of my childhood. I didn’t hold it against her, and I still don’t. She was grappling with a lot, including her own identity as a woman, as a doctor, and as a wife. But just because you don’t hold something against someone doesn’t mean it stops hurting you.

“It took years for me to consider what is even the point of being ‘normal.’ The only reason to be ‘normal’ is to make everyone else around you comfortable. Putting everyone else, even strangers, before yourself. As Fry from Futurama said: ‘What’s the point of being normal when you can be abnormal?’ ”

I know that you, being American, probably won’t understand this, but they’re not wrong. I have often heard relatives whispering about some “poor woman” with a PhD turning into a spinster because she’s “too smart for her own good.”

Mama, who had sensed that this would be the night, squeezed my hand when I came down the stairs. She smiled at me, her eyes shining. I thought she might tell me she loved me, or some other form of motherly affection, but what she actually said was “You have fulfilled our expectations.”

“It makes me look bad too, Maggie. It’s emasculating, can’t you see that?”

Then Papa said, “Iris.” And from the tone of his voice, my entire body tensed. So did Iris’s. I put my hand over hers. “This is why we kept trying to teach you, time and again, to give in. Not to be so hotheaded.”

“Yes, I was, you dumbass. I was so in love with you that I broke up with my girlfriend because of it.”

I couldn’t dwell on it for long because I had Hazel to look after. Hazel didn’t understand the concept of death. She would say things like “When Mommy stop dying? When Mommy come back?”