THAT MOMENT MUST have been so fun for Parker.
She broke me. She really did.
All that effort I’d made to be there and withstand it all and stay until the end?
Annihilated.
I charged past my still-motionless dad, through the still-gaping crowd, and pushed my way toward the exit, feeling weirdly like I was underwater and hoping desperately that there might be more air outside than in.
But nope.
Outside was just as airless.
I felt woozy. I stopped just past the entrance and pressed my palms and forehead against the brick wall, trying to pull it together.
Easier imagined than done.
Before I’d stabilized, I heard a voice. And sure, I wasn’t great at voices, but it didn’t take me long to figure out who it was.
“There you are! It’s not over is it? I was just parking, but your dad should already be in there. Did he find you? I’m so glad I double-checked after we got Parker’s email,” she was saying. “We almost missed this entire thing!”
I lifted my head away from the brick wall and turned around.
I looked straight at Lucinda’s scrambled face, still breathing hard. “What,” I asked, “did you double-check?”
Lucinda took a step closer. “The show tonight,” she said. “Parker thought it was canceled.”
In that moment, my dad showed up behind Lucinda. And Parker behind him.
I took in the scene. Lucinda, very slow on the uptake about what was going down; my dad, looking crushed, upside-down bouquet still forgotten in his good hand; and Parker, standing behind them both, her face the very definition of smug.
“Parker emailed you,” I said then, “to say that the art show was canceled?”
Lucinda nodded. “We almost didn’t come. Good thing I—” “The show was never canceled,” I said.
“We know that now,” Lucinda said. “Thank goodness I thought to call the gallery.”
But she was missing my point. “Parker lied to you.” “No, no,” Lucinda said. “I’m sure she—”
“She lied to you,” I said, “because she wanted you to stand me up.”
Lucinda’s utter incomprehension at this idea made me want to light myself on fire. She shook her head. “I think she just—”
But I couldn’t bear to listen to her try to explain.
I cut her off. “She lied to you because she always lies to you. She lied to you because she wants us to hate each other. She lied to you because it’s fun for her! Because she delights in messing with people! Because you let her! You never question her. You never challenge her. You never use any kind of critical thinking. Even when her facts don’t add up! Even when nothing makes any sense! She’s making up a story of this family—and it’s not even a good one! But you just believe it—every damn time.”
“I know you’re upset,” Lucinda said. “But let’s not slander Parker. She really thought it was canceled. If I hadn’t texted her to set her straight, she’d have missed it, too.”
“You always believe her—no questions asked! And you never, ever believe me. Even when—as always—I’m telling you the truth.”
Lucinda and my dad looked at each other, like, Here we go again.
Sure. Had I said this to them a thousand times? Yes.
I had yelled it to them as an angry teenager. I had sobbed it to them in a school parking lot. I had written it to them in countless careful, logical, please-believe-me letters.
Had it ever worked? Never. Not once.
Talk about confirmation bias! They had decided decades ago who Parker and I both were—and those decisions had hardened into stone by now. But I didn’t care.
Here we went again. “If Parker said I stole your grandmother’s ruby hat pin out of your jewelry box, you believed her. Even though it was Parker who stole it and took it to a pawnshop downtown and used the money to buy tickets to a concert she wasn’t even allowed to go to! She had to sneak out! But she told you it was me, so it was me. I got grounded for stealing, and she took my boyfriend to a concert!”
Lucinda tried to make her voice soothing, like you would with a dog. “Sweetheart, that was all so long ago—”
“Was it? Is it? It’s still going on! Right now! This, right here, is Parker telling you I crashed your car—and you believing her. This is Parker telling you the stolen math exam answers in our room were mine—and you believing her. This is Parker—bullying the hell out of poor, kindhearted Augusta Ross so viciously and so toxically that the girl ate a whole bottle of Tylenol and then telling the school administrators that it was me—and you, all of you, believing her!”
I could hear my voice go off the rails. Starting to sound like Janis Joplin. Louder and screechier—as if volume or desperation or hysteria could get through to them.
Though it certainly never had before.
A new crowd of people was starting to gather around us. Lucinda glanced around at them uncomfortably. She lowered her voice. “Sadie, let’s all just try to move on.”
Which made me want to bang my head against that brick wall. What did any of them think I was trying to do?
“When did you text her?” I demanded of Lucinda then. “What?”
“When did you text Parker to let her know that the show was happening after all?”
Lucinda looked over at Parker, like Parker might hint at how to answer. “When!” I shouted.
“About ten minutes ago,” Lucinda said.
I nodded. “Guess when Parker got here? An hour ago. She’s been taunting me at my own art exhibition for over an hour. And guess what she
said right as she walked in? She said, ‘Guess they stood you up.’” Lucinda stared at me, taking that in.
“She engineered this. She created it. She saw you trying to be nice to me, and she torpedoed us all. Again.”
But Lucinda was shaking her head. “Sweetheart, I—” “You never believe me,” I said. “But it’s the truth.”
Just as I said it, a woman stepped out of the crowd and walked up to us all, standing there. “Hello,” she said, in a chipper voice.
It was so odd that she would approach us right then, mid-fight. I mean,
Come on, lady. Read the room.
But she clearly wasn’t put off by the family squabble. She just plowed right on ahead.
She stuck out her hand to shake Lucinda’s and then did the same thing to my dad, and then she said, “Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery, you probably don’t remember me…”
My dad and Lucinda shook their heads to confirm. “But my name,” the lady went on, “is Augusta Ross.”
Okay, we may not have remembered the person—but absolutely no one in our family could ever have forgotten that name.
Lucinda dropped her purse at the sound of it, and Augusta politely picked it up for her.
“Augusta Ross?” Lucinda confirmed.
“It’s so lucky I ran into you,” Augusta went on with determined brightness. “I’ve been wanting to reach out.”
“Why,” Lucinda asked, “would you want to do that?”
“And it’s so lucky that I arrived just when I did, don’t you think? Here I was, coming to see the art show of my dear old friend Sadie, and what should I hear as I walk up to the building but Sadie herself, shouting my name.”
Nobody knew what to say to that. Not even me.
I was still wrapping my head around it. Augusta Ross was here? The
Augusta Ross?
“Just to bring you up to speed,” Augusta said, her voice still aggressively bright. “After my suicide attempt all those years ago, my parents moved us across the country. As you can imagine, they cut off all contact with people we’d known back here. Life was hard enough for a
while, and I just did my best to put it all behind me. Blah-blah-blah—I grew up, went to Stanford for art history, got offered a fantastic job with Rice University, and wound up moving back here last summer. Over my parents’ objections, of course.”
Safe to say, nobody in my sad little family had any idea where all this was heading.
“Anyway,” Augusta went on, all chatty, “after I moved back, I started bumping into old classmates and hearing the craziest stories about that whole me-getting-bullied-to-the-brink-of-suicide thing. The craziest of all was—and I just keep feeling like this can’t be true—that Sadie was the one who got blamed for the bullying. That’s not right, is it?”
I glanced at Parker. The smugness had most definitely faded from her vibe.
“Well…” Lucinda said, glancing at my dad. “The school takes a zero- tolerance stance on bullying…”
“As they should,” Augusta said. “But Sadie, as I believe she was just telling you, is not the person who bullied me.”
We all just stared at Augusta in mute astonishment.
“The person who bullied me,” Augusta went on, “was Parker.”
“Parker!” Lucinda said, as if Augusta had just said “Taylor Swift.”
“Oh, yeah,” Augusta went on. “That whole year. She left notes in my locker. She picked on my clothes. She told me I was ugly, and no one would ever love me, and I should just give up. Daily. Hourly, sometimes. Hooooo- boy—she was vicious.”
Lucinda took a stunned step back.
“Sadie was always super nice,” Augusta said, nodding at me approvingly. “In fact, she’s still nice.”
Then Augusta walked closer to me and handed over a little bundle. “Here’s your dress back,” she said.
I looked down. “My dress?”
“Your ruffle dress,” she said, just as I saw the polka-dot fabric. I put it together. “You’re the coffee girl? That was you?”
“You didn’t recognize me that day,” Augusta said. “I’ve changed a lot.” Hadn’t we all?
“But I recognized you,” she went on. “I was just coming over to say hi when Parker knocked me down. And then you were helping me up and
giving me your dress. Sweet as ever. I thought about saying something then, but I was so late. I googled you later to find a way to bring your dress back, and I saw the notice about the art show.”
“Did you make it to the airport?” I asked.
Augusta nodded and held up a sparkly engagement ring. “I did.” Then she turned back to my dad and Lucinda. “I was going to write you a letter to set things straight. And I really just came here tonight to say hi to Sadie and support her show. But then I wound up eavesdropping … and I couldn’t resist jumping in.”
Augusta turned back to me. “Parker framed you for it, huh?” I nodded. “They kicked me out of school.”
“I’m so sorry,” Augusta said. “I had no idea. After we left, my parents shielded me from every single thing related to this place.”
“Understandably,” I said.
“Anyway,” Augusta said, turning back with false brightness to the slack-jawed pair of my father and Lucinda. “I couldn’t help but overhear Sadie saying that you never believe her. But here’s a little pro tip from somebody who knows both of your daughters pretty well. If you have a choice between Parker and Sadie? Pick Sadie—every time.”
