Some girls do

Chapter 9: Chaewon

My mother spends all day Saturday crying.

I sit in the dark with her and apologize over and over for missing the pageant. I promise to get the money to cover both the registration fee and the electric bill until she finally falls into a fitful sleep. Tonight is her night off from work. She only allows herself one a week, and now I've gone and screwed up her sleep schedule with all my drama.

At least Junhyung isn't here. He told Mom he was going on some hunting trip with buddies. She believed him, even though I don't think it's hunting season for anything in this state. Whatever. Not my problem.

I tuck her in and go to my room, too embarrassed to call Karina and tell her the electricity's out again, and not wanting to risk wasting my phone battery anyway. It's too dark to read now, and there's nothing else to do and nowhere to go, so I lie down in my bed drowning in my thoughts as the moonlight glints off all the trophies I won when I was little.

Mom keeps them on display on a shelf in my room. She won't let me take them down, despite the fact that the last one I earned was nearly six years ago. I don't know why she likes them so much. Maybe because it's proof we were happy once. We were good. We were winners. Or maybe she just likes to look at shiny things.

The biggest trophy looms over all of them, tall and imposing in a way that's supposed to invoke pride but really strikes fear. Except I don't hate it the way I hate the others. Because that one . . . that one was from when it was still fun to put on tap shoes and smile for the judges. I was only eight, and when Mom told me I was going to be Miss America someday, I still believed it. I still wanted it.

When they put that crown on my head and handed me that trophy, all I cared about was how big my mom grinned and how rare of a sight that was. But it didn't stop there. There were ribbon cuttings and fundraisers, and once I even threw the first pitch at a minor league game. I was so proud. Mom was so proud.

It didn't matter that we lived on ramen and pancakes. I hadn't yet caught on that some people always had hot water and phones that worked and TVs with too many channels to count. I hadn't yet figured out that we were less than, not equal to.

But then things changed.

Not right away, or all at once, but in quiet, subtle ways that were somehow just as jarring. It was like my winning Little Miss Holloran set something on fire in my mother. At first, it was extra pageants at the malls, the meaningless ones—

"Only for practice, my sweet girl," she would say. And then came the pageant coaches and dance instructors who thought tough love was the only love.

And then I grew taller and older, and makeup wasn't enough. It was tanning and bleaching and waxing. It was fake eyelashes and hair extensions and shoes that pinched and hurt. It was dance lessons until my legs burned, and interview prep until I memorized the answer to every question from "What sets you apart from the other contestants?" to "What's the biggest issue facing our education system in this country?"

And all the time the fire raged inside my mom until it burned both of us down. Gone was Sweet girl and in its place were Stop complaining and Do you know how much that cost me?

Even when the trophies stopped, the pageants kept coming. And now I'm eighteen, older than my mom was when she had me, and I'm still trying to make it up to her. Deep down, I'm scared I never will. That every breath I take for the rest of my life will belong to her. That I'll never be anything more than a brain stuck inside a body more my mother's than my own. Forced to live out the life I stole from her forever.

* * *

I wake up early and go to Hyojong's. He isn't in yet, so I sit on the stoop and wait. I'm not even supposed to be here today. I'm due at the studio soon to help my pageant coach with her classes—a futile attempt to work off my own ever-accruing bill—so he knows something's wrong when he sees me. And even though I try to get around it, asking for extra hours or to pawn some parts from my car, he figures me out, sending me home with the breakfast sandwich he picked up on his way in and enough cash to cover all the expenses.

He calls it an advance on future pay, but we both know it isn't.

I drive real slow the whole way home, looking both ways, going under the speed limit. I come to the same stop sign where I collided with Kazuha and can't help but think of the way her lips curved up when I handed her a drink. The way she squeezed my hand back when I was scared.

But then when I pull into my driveway, I hear my mom and Junhyung arguing, and I remember all ten thousand reasons why I shouldn't ever talk to her again.