Beth stood in her room, gently jamming her clean clothes back into the hamper that she'd used to bring them home in. It was a normal amount of laundry, but it was puffing out of the top because she hadn't folded it. Her mother watched her from the red bean bag chair that Beth had inexplicably left at home when she moved to the dorm one and a half semesters ago. Maria was annoyed at first, seeing her daughter's exodus to college as a great opportunity to get rid of things, but she'd come up to Beth's room two weeks after the girl's first class away and sat in it. There was no duct tape on it but there would have to be and fairly soon- Maria had sat and picked at a seam, missing Beth, until the threads had decided to just stop holding the canvas panels together, unsewing themselves as she watched. The bean bag chair was much more comfortable than it had a right to be. Maria had grown attached to it.
"Well I haven't made any final decisions about it, but I'm going to. Monkey lied about taking my stuff, so Monkey's got to go." Beth was still calling her dorm mate and recently deposed best friend Monkey instead of her given Christie, so that was a good sign, thought Maria.
"You can just finish the semester out." Maria was worried about this in a way that Beth wasn't, which worried her. the girls had been friends since they'd both joined the Math Olympiad team as part of the extra-curricular program, decreed as necessary to receive a college prep designation in the high school. They both hated this, and continued to hate it for their remaining two years there, despite the obvious benefit that came from joining. Maria usually described said benefits as academic ones rather than social ones; the few times she'd pointed out to the girls that they had met in the Math Olympiad team, one of them (Beth) said "Besides that, Mom" while the other (Monkey) made a dismissing wave gesture with one hand, not bothering to use both. Maria's observations rarely deserved a two-handed dismissal. This was true for pretty much everything: that they should shower more, or less, depending on how their skins looked that week; that objects of one's affection could be counted on to be slippery and intimidated when confronted with unanswered love notes; that they would freeze their skinny adolescent asses off if they left the house like that. Maria had riled with each denied proclamation for most of their sophomore year, and still did, but less often and now with a sense of place every time she encountered a smart rebuttal and rolled eye. Monkey had slightly protuberant eyes, and could do a spectacular eye roll.
"I need to drive Candy to the doctor tomorrow, so I can have the truck?" Beth was driving a family friend who'd been ill to the doctor's every day she was home since she'd noticed Candy coughing and not recovering well at a holiday party they were hosting. The day after, Maria had assumed that Beth meant to drive their neighbor once. Beth made a point of calling Candy before she came home to arrange it, which effectively meant that she just radiated Yes to Candy and didn't ask until the night before, as if Maria didn't have her own chauffers' obligations (she didn't, since her changing eyesight made her feel insecure behind any steering wheel.) Maria never protested the imposition or the total apathy regarding the gas tank- she would just be getting a diminished amount of the money she'd already given to Beth for necessities: it was as if her daughter was a very inefficient money laundering scheme- because she was too proud of her to bring it up. She knew she'd become teary if she tried to look in her daughter's eyes and tell her that she was doing a good, a wonderful thing.
"Of course." Maria smiled and held it until Beth turned in her direction and saw it. She scowled back.
"I can't believe she would do that. I couldn't believe it, I guess, but now I have to, so..." Beth's eyes were red from the crying Maria knew Beth had cried in the car and in the bathroom, doors locked. "She knows I love that jacket, she knows it. And she takes it, and I don't know- she said she didn't. I'm attached to it, I can't help it." Maria had no idea what jacket she was talking about, but she tsk'd in the appropriate pauses. Beth looked directly at her mother. Maria was just a little shocked when she saw these new, shared tears. She fought the urge to heave herself upward onto her feet so that she could rush Beth and just hold her for a short while.
"Did she call you back last night-" Maria started, working hard to be casual, but it backfired and Beth couldn't hold herself still. Maria did hoist herself up then, went to the bed, and stupidly picked up some laundry and put it back down again.
"She didn't! She never called me back, Mom! What the hell did I do?" And sob, and sob again. Maria put down the handful of panties she was not-folding. "I guess I have to find another roommate, which is going to be hell right before the mid-terms. Fuck."
It was the cursing that decided it. She knew that Beth was rich in cuss words, because she and Beth were Facebook friends, which meant that about once a month or so she got to read Beth's foul exclamations about the party she and her girlfriends had been to the night before. The cursing was the same no matter what kind of time they'd had. Once the Saturday night party had been boring, and that elicited the same amount of garbage-mouthed chatter from her and her friends as had a truly terrible party the previous weekend. However, she was considerate and smart enough to not curse in front of neighbors or visiting relatives or her mother. So: the tears were bad enough, they were horrible- but the slipped obscenity was what tore it. Maria was certain of her words. She was confident that this was the right time. She recognized this as the parenting moment she'd been grimly but resolutely waiting for- and she took that moment and made it stand still for some mug shots.
"Elizabeth. My honey." She walked over to her girl and touched her shoulder. "Monkey was in the wrong, she definitely was. I think you should basically hunt her down and sit on her until she tells you why she would take it, and I think you should stay there until she explained why the lying about it. That's the hardest bit, I think." Maria paused, checking her words to correct any overly passionate tone. "I think you should keep yourself open, though. Friends are hard things to lose. Remember when Linda and I fought and then I wrote her that break-up letter? I still think about her. So losing her didn't solve my- feelings about it. If you know what I mean. Ok, ah, you don't know what I mean." Maria drew a deep breath through her nose and slowly blew it out of her mouth, tongue pressed firmly upward like she'd learned in her meditation classes.
"I think that's horrible..." Beth couldn't continue. She was clearly tired of crying but her body wasn't done yet, so her mother stood with her arm around Beth until she could continue talking.
"It seems like things would be fixed if you could throw her out, right? But they aren't fixed by things like that, and people are human and fuck up. We fuck up a lot. We do, she does, everybody does, woo hoo. Just leave it open. No matter what you try your friends are going to disappoint you, and then you're going to disappoint them, because that's how it works. If you leave your head open to letting her get back in with you, you'll be happier. Seems weird, but that's how it works." Maria resisted another urge: she wanted to bow. She tried the breathing, but Beth had grown silent and still and all her mother could do was wait.
Finally she looked up. She looked calm and miserable. Maria suddenly thought that she looked somewhat like her father. "I'm going to go downstairs and bake now." It was a good sign, maybe a good sign, Maria thought. "Do we have vanilla? Last time I wanted to bake we were out."
Maria nodded, and they left the undone packing where it lay.
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