Ten & Levan

12. Twelve

(Sky Ferreira - Werewolf)

TEN

"How's this one?" asks mom, lifting up a pink and white, striped summer dress. She dangles it in front of my face, I frown. Sundays are days from hell for poor, poor Ten, unlike other kids, who enjoy the comfort of their beds and brunches. It's because my mum finally has an off, and wants me to indulge in cliché mother-daughter things with her. Conclusion: she turns into hyperactive and high Heather, which gives me a desperate headache.

"Aren't you a little–I don't know–old for perky pink?" I tease her. She tilts her head to a side and narrows her eyes at me. I giggle.

She is definitely not too old for anything and she knows it damn well. We just pretend to go shopping on weekends. We dig through stores and stores of apparel and accessories but bring home only groceries. And it's our ritual; we try to shop, even though we suck at it.

"Maybe," she says, "but it's for you."

"Ugh..." I wince and shield my eyes, "stripes give me a head rush."

"I know," she looks at the dress as if she feels sad for it and puts it back, "I just thought it was cute."

I follow her from rack to rack and let her search for something she isn't going to buy. She picks out a satin skirt for me, then a pencil skirt for herself, a beanie for me and a scarf for herself. Then when we're about to reach the counter and get it billed, we change our minds and decide to put it all back. I have too many skirts, she has too many too; I don't wear beanies, she doesn't wear scarves like she used to.

There's no point in buying things we don't need now, and it's not like we would ever do.

Mom spent the first week after dad left roaming around the house lifeless, and crying silently into her pillow at nights. I slept right next to her so I knew, she cried in my dreams too. She'd wake up in the morning, put her face on and fill me up with smiles and laughter, and I'd store them in a box for later. And now, I have enough smiles to last a lifetime; and for tears, I have no room.

She spent her second week without dad cooking and baking everything she knew, and everything she didn't. Our kitchen was a mess, and the oven ready explode. The neighbors got sick of the zucchini breads we kept giving them. We had jars and jars of jams, jars and jars of cookies, and jars and jars of despair to consume.

When the third week wheeled in, she watched movies on a roll. Day through night, night through day. That week we watched it twelve times; Freaky Friday. We'd laugh and double over. We'd laugh more than the scene intended. We'd laugh like we couldn't stop. We laughed until it was all we knew.

It was the fourth week after dad left that mom picked up the car keys and we stepped out into the sunlight for the first time. We shuffled into the car and she turned the key in the ignition. We drove and drove until we'd left daddy behind. Until we'd forgotten about him but not quite. We didn't even give him a chance to say goodbye. She said she'd never look back. I promised I'd always be by her side.

Then in the fifth week, we hit the stores. We bought and bought until all the credit cards started to bleed. We bought everything that we'd never need. We stripped the house bare, threw freshly ex-daddy into the trash, and built a new home. We bought new everything; new couch, new curtains, new vases, new clothes, new sky, new clouds, new sun, new us.

So I track my way through the racks and put everything we picked back in place. I giggle inside my head over the fact that we might never need new clothes again. But right as I hang the scarf back, my eyes find something that I didn't know I needed so badly. It's a delicate necklace holding a teardrop-shaped, baby blue stone. When I look closely, the stone has minute silver veins, like roots of a tree. The blue matches my nails. The extraordinary pale blue that I'm growing to love. I pluck it out and take it back to mom. Her jaw drops and her eyes start to gleam.