"Everything I do is for you!"
"Nothing is for me. Everything is for the child you imagine you had, the one that doesn't exist, the perfect, happy child that was bound to result from your being the exact opposite of your mother in every way. Well, I'm not that child. And in your mother's house, the electricity is on!"
"Then go live there!"
"She won't let me!"
"You would hate it. Never able to touch anything. Always having to do things her way."
"Like going off on a colony ship?"
"I signed up for the colony ship for you."
"Which is like buying me a supersized bra. Why don't you look at who I am before you decide what I need?"
"I'll tell you what you are. You're a girl who's too young and inexperienced to know what a woman needs. I'm ten kilomete
rs ahead of you on that road, I know what's coming, I'm trying to get you what you'll need to make that road easy and smooth, and you know what? In spite of you, I've done it. You've fought me every step of the way, but I've done a great job with you. You don't even know how good a job I've done because you don't know what you could have been."
"What could I have been, Mother? You?"
"You were never going to be me," said Mother.
"What are you saying? That I would have been her?"
"We'll never know what you would have been, will we? Because you already are what I made you."
"Wrong. I look like whatever I have to look like in order to stay alive in your home. Down inside, what I really am is a complete stranger to you. A stranger that you intend to drag off into space without even asking me if I wanted to go. They used to have a word for people you treated like that. They called them slaves."
Alessandra wanted more than ever before in her life to run to her bedroom and slam the door. But she didn't have a bedroom. She slept on the sofa in the same room with the kitchen and the kitchen table.
"I understand," said Mother. "I'll go into my bedroom and you can slam the door on me."
The fact that Mother really did know what she was thinking was the most infuriating thing of all. But Alessandra did not scream and did not scratch at her mother and did not fall on the floor and throw a tantrum and did not even dive onto the sofa and bury her face in the pillow. Instead she sat down at the table directly across from her mother and said, "What's for dinner?"
"So. Just like that, the discussion is over?"
"Discuss while we cook. I'm hungry."
"There's nothing to eat, because I haven't turned in our final acceptance because I haven't decided yet whether we should sleep or stay awake through the voyage, and so we haven't got the signing bonus, and so there's no money to buy food."
"So what are we going to do about dinner?"
Mother just looked away from her.
"I know," said Alessandra excitedly. "Let's go over to Grandma's!"
Mother turned back and glared at her.
"Mother," said Alessandra, "how can we run out of money when we're living on the dole? Other people on the dole manage to buy enough food and pay their electric bills."
"What do you think?" said Mother. "Look around you. What have I spent all the government's money on? Where's all the extravagance? Look in my closet, count the outfits I own."
Alessandra thought for a moment. "I never thought about that. Do you owe money to the mafia? Did Father, before he died?"
"No," said Mother contemptuously. "You now have all the information you need to understand completely, and yet you still haven't figured it out, smart and grown up as you are."
Alessandra couldn't imagine what Mother was talking about. Alessandra didn't have any new information. She also didn't have anything to eat.