May Cause Love by Kassi Underwood

Author:Kassi Underwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

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HOW TO TAKE UP SPACE

SIX YEARS, TWO MONTHS, AND ONE WEEK AFTERWARD—I wrapped my hands around the steering wheel, speeding north to Santa Barbara, where my evening with Terra Wise, the Midwife for the Soul, would begin at nightfall. Mom sat quietly in the passenger’s seat. The windows were down, the car hummed, and the air smelled like cocoa butter, fish, rubber, and salt. As the lane narrowed and wound along the edge of the sand, I started feeling like a fraud, moving on to the next expert before I’d even tried thirty seconds of grief. But Mom beat me to it. When I turned up the radio, a Motown station, breaking the silence, she reached for the knob and turned it back down.

“You know, Kass, we’ve lived miles apart for so long,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know you.”

“We talk on the phone every day,” I reminded her, aware that it was a tepid consolation.

“You don’t know it yet, but nobody else will ever listen to you like your mother listens to you. I could call my mom saying I broke a nail, and five minutes later, she’d be sitting on my couch. She’d frame a napkin that I sneezed in.” Her voice went wobbly. “Damn,” she said, lying back in the seat. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing is,” I said. I told her I missed her mother, too. She turned toward the window, away from me, to dab the corners of her eyes. She tugged a crumpled tissue out of her purse—it was smudged with buff powder and lord knows what else.

“Well, anyway, I just wish we’d see more of each other.”

I suggested we video chat.

“You bond with someone through shared experience,” she said.

“Isn’t this a shared experience?”

She laughed. “Touché,” she said, dabbing her eye again.

“Remember Orlando?” she asked.

Orlando. When I was fifteen years old, I decided to get serious about becoming a runway model. This dream was unlikely to come true, given my five-foot-five stature and the inbreeding that could be seen in my eyes. My great-grandparents were first cousins.

The path that led from Kentucky to the runway began at a local modeling agency called Vogue to which the modeling hopeful would pay an absurdly high fee to be groomed for an absurdly expensive conference wherein she may or may not get scouted by a career-level agency. My mother cobbled together the money to send me to Vogue.

It was there in a strip mall office wallpapered in headshots that I learned how to eat half a banana for lunch and create a “signature” runway walk.

At the end of the summer, our group of Kentucky models headed down to Orlando to be scouted. I had spent the summer smoking marijuana and eating entire bananas and worse: sandwiches. I stood in the foyer of the conference center with my mother, feeling like we were two dogs at a horse show. Leggy models zipped by, gaps between their thighs that would drop a softball.

“Don’t compare yourself,” my mother said, sensing my apprehension.

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