“Yeah,” she says, shaking her head. “His dad’s something else.”
“What about you? Is Daddy Dearest in the picture?”
“Of course,” she says, glancing at me from the corner of her eye. “He just stayed back in Georgia to wrap up some business before he joins us, but he’ll be here as soon as he’s done.”
“Didn’t you move here, like, over a year ago?”
“You can’t rush perfection,” she says lightly. “Now, should we shop and then eat, or eat and then shop?”
I know when a conversation is over, so I vote for shopping first. If there’s one thing I recognize, it’s when someone is saving their dignity through avoidance. Hell, I’m a pro at it. It’s why I don’t have close friends. Too many secrets. And Gloria is just one more friend like Blue, someone who won’t share her secrets and with whom I won’t share mine. Even if I wanted to let down my guard and be besties with a Walton, how could I? After all, my secret is that I’m a snitch, spilling the secrets of her best friend to a man who wants to destroy him.
So we shop and eat and laugh, and on the surface, anyone would think we’re two basic bitches raiding the sale racks and leaving messes in the dressing rooms on a Saturday afternoon. For a few hours, even I can almost believe it, can feel normal, have fun and pretend that because we both carry a Dolce Girl label, we’re equals. But I know it’s all an act, that under the surface, we’re nothing alike. Under the surface, she’s a rich girl who worries what people will think when they know her parents are getting a divorce. And I’m a skank from the trailer park who shares lurid details of her sex life online for money.
The only thing we have in common is that we’re both doing what we have to do to survive, even if survival means something completely different for each of us. Maybe that’s why she gets Royal’s secrets, gets in close where I can never go. Because I only walk in his world when he opens the door and indulges me for a moment, making sure I know I’m being allowed the privilege and that there is a price, the way he did when he took me to Cliff’s. Gloria doesn’t need an invitation. She already lives in his world.
A world where you worry about your parents’ marital problems and your dad being an ass instead of not having a dad and worrying about whether you’ll have to turn tricks to pay rent. People in their world always have a way out of town. Doors swing open when they approach. People in my world spend their lives carving doors from their prison walls with teaspoons and paying the guards to look the other way with whatever currency we have, whether it’s lurid sex details or other people’s secrets. That’s why we almost never get out, and why I’m going to be one who does.