In Every Way Read Free Page A

babysitting experience at all. It then occurs to her that the scene she has just conjured is set in the dorm room on the other side of the wall. But there are no family units available in Student Housing. Mariacannot even successfully imagine a space where holding her own child might seem possible.
    THURSDAY’S LIFE DRAWING is the self-portrait. Maria stands a full-length mirror beside her easel. A wig of curls borrowed from her mother tumbles onto her shoulders. She shakes the prosthetic hair and imagines herself as a musketeer. She cannot conceive of successfully creating what the others here call a self-portrait. Every drawing of herself she has made, and there are many, looks like someone definitively not her. Only in a costume does her identity ever harden. Musketeer, Hello Kitty. In place of what should be her own image, these she lets stand in for herself.
    Jack is working from a printout of a nude photo that Maria took of him in her dorm room. He is not ashamed. The photo is taped to his easel. Before class he smoked a joint that looked like a limp palm tree and swallowed another Talwin. He bobs his head to music no one can hear.
    â€œYour proportions,” her mother says. She spreads her fingers and places her hand on Jack’s drawing, measuring the distance between shoulders. She then twists her hand to compare the torso, placing her thumb on the drawing of Jack’s crotch.
    â€œWeird,” Maria says.
    â€œDon’t act like a child,” Maria’s mother says.
    â€œYou’re thumbing my boyfriend’s privates,” Maria says.
    â€œYou her boyfriend again?” Maria’s mother says.
    Jack drapes his arm around Maria and lightly cups her rear end. Maria nuzzles into the lightning bolt tattooed on his neck. His pulse taps insistent and fast against her cheek and she considers the fact thatboth he and her mother are on the same drugs. Since Tuesday, Jack has ingested more than a dozen Talwins. Maria feels confident that by now he has so much of the stuff coursing through his veins that his own blood would be enough to poison their unborn child.
    â€œShe used to call her teddy bear her boyfriend,” her mother says. “And she always put a diaper on him. I should have taken more pictures.”
    â€œPut diapers on me,” Jack says.
    Maria’s mother smiles. One of the pigtails on her wig has come undone. Graphite is smeared across her forehead. Maria does not remember putting diapers on her teddy bear. She does not remember calling him her boyfriend. Her mother’s brain is like a museum of Maria’s childhood, its archives unexplored and now rotting.
    THREE AM. MARIA is Hello Kitty. Jack is doing the twist. Sam Cooke is on the stereo. Jack says he’s the newest he’s ever been, everything is the coolest it has ever been. Maria’s phone rings.
    â€œSweetie,” her mother says over the line. She sounds panicked. “You there? You get my pills, sweetie?”
    Maria did not get the pills. She did not go to Whole Foods. She did not go to Rite Aid. She went back to her dorm room and lay naked in bed with Jack. Now Jack stands behind her and holds each of her protruding hipbones like handles. He twists her body with his as Sam Cooke sings we’re having a party .
    â€œIt’s this nerve thing,” her mother says. “Oh God. It’s my legs.”
    Maria swats at Jack and raises the Hello Kitty mask. “I got them,” she says. “I totally forgot to drop them off. I’m so sorry.”
    In the parking lot, Maria leans into a cold wind. Old leaves stick to damp corners of banked concrete. Panicking with guilt, she tells herself that she must remain focused. The Rite Aid stays open all night. The prescription is in her pocket. She tries to envision her mother’s imminent death, as if this meditation will calm her. But the scene is one she cannot conjure. Everything is inevitable, she tells herself. Everything will