LINE 2

Julia was in her room, staring into the mirror above her dresser, moving her head this way and that while studying her face critically. With a pleased smile she turned around and grabbed the phone from the side table next to her bed. Sliding it on, she quickly speed-dialed the number she would have remembered in a coma. She sat down on her bed, one foot tapping impatiently on the floor.

"Finally! What took you so long? I miss half my life waiting for you to pick up the phone." She listened intently to the voice of her friend on the other end of the line - her tapping foot picking up speed.

"Ok, ok. I see. Just why you think we have those scientist geeks inventing all this micro stuff if you don't take it with you everywhere?" The impatiently tapping foot seemed to have infected her free hand. "Listen, all I wanted to tell you is, the stuff we bought at the mall yesterday is fan-absolutely-tastic! I put it on before I went to bed and it wiped this pimple completely!"

Phone pressed against her ear, Julia got off the bed and started dancing around the room.

"Yesss! Another victory in the battles of adolescence! My life is totally changed! Now I'm so ready to go to camp and face Miss I'm-so-Wonderful and her homies."

She stopped her spinning in front of the door and put her free ear against it.

"Sorry Kellie, gotta go. I hear mom coming up the stairs. Probably because I didn't respond when she called. Keeps her in shape," Julia giggled. "Twenty stairs less on the stair-stepper at the gym tonight. Talk to you later. Sure. Bye."

With her usual display of excess energy, which she tried to work off in the daily gym routine her daughter had hinted at, Julia's mother knocked at the door, and by the time Julia had a chance to answer, she was already sitting on the bed. She wore a dark two-piece suit and pumps of the same color. Her auburn pageboy hair, beautiful enough for shampoo commercials, bobbed around her made up face. No doubt, she was all geared up to go to work.

"Wow mom," Julia exclaimed, closing the door behind her mother, "sometimes I think you'll be the first one to break the faster-than-light-speed-barrier."

Under normal circumstances, Julia did not allow her mother to violate the fragile structure of their mother-daughter-boundaries by rushing into her room without being properly invited in. But this morning, she still carried that glorious sense of well-being, originating in her triumph over that nasty pimple and consequently, she felt rather generous towards the world. As a sign of just how deep this generosity reached, she surprised herself by extending it to include her mother.

"Julia I have to talk to you," said Elizabeth, dropping her shoes on the floor and pulling her legs under. "Why don't you sit with me for a minute."

"Sorry but that sounds way too serious for the space I'm in right now. Whenever you start without saying any of those nice things mothers are supposed to say - you end up saying something I don't want to hear."

Julia walked towards the mirror, scanning her smooth, unblemished skin in an attempt to hold on to the blissful feeling, which now was fading fast. "I'm in such a great mood and I won't let you spoil it with your mother-daughter-intimacy stuff."

"Oh come on, darling," her mother sighed, fighting for composure as she recognized the dreaded if familiar feeling of tears pushing behind her eyes, her usual emotional response to harsh words. Julia's in particular. "It's never the right time for you. You're either depressed about something or too busy talking on the phone or off solving mysteries with your nose in a book and we hardly talk at all anymore."

"See, now you've done it. Thank you very much. This is exactly the reason why I don't want to talk to you. It's all about you and your needs."

Julia turned around, the golden specks in her eyes shooting phasers in the general direction of her mother.

"First you come busting into my room with no regard for my privacy whatsoever, then you lay that speech on me, guiltying me for the failure of our relationship, when the truth is that you're jealous because I have a life and you don't."

She tried to read her mother's expression and decided to top her speech with some authority. "Doctor Kline told me I have a right to my space."

"I'm glad your therapy is working," Elizabeth stressed every word. She was torn between sympathy for her daughter's plight, resentment for her daughter's behavior and self-pity for being a single-mom stuck in a disintegrating situation, "but if you think I pay a thousand a month to support a conspiracy between you and your therapist to abuse me, you are mistaken."

"Great! Now it's a conspiracy. What's it gonna be tomorrow? Voodoo? I think you're paranoid. No wonder dad couldn't stand living with you any longer."

Horrified, Julia listened to the words as they tumbled out of her mouth.

Mothers do have a way of driving innocent young adults crazy with their stuff, claimed a furious voice inside her head. Yet, underneath the soothing warmth of her anger, she felt the notorious, spindly finger of the guilt-monster reaching for her conscience, causing a throbbing sensation somewhere in the back of her head. You've gone too far this time, it suggested, hooking her, trying to reel her in.

Ultimately, this time her anger won. She stomped her foot on the floor in an effort to scare the guilt-monster away as much as giving emphasis to her next words, and in the hidden landscape of her mind, she transformed into Stepmother telling Cinderella that she couldn't go to the ball. Throwing her head back while at the same time rolling her eyes towards the ceiling, she managed to give her voice a haughty pitch. "I'll be so glad to be rid of you for a while when I'm at camp."

There was a moment of silence that could not have stretched more than a second yet seemed to last way beyond the tick of a clock.

Finally Elizabeth's sigh broke the spell. "I'm glad you mention it - because you're not going."

The way it frequently happens in situations that extend normal perception into slow motion, Elizabeth noticed that, in spite of her feelings of frustration, she was able to speak in a fairly calm voice. She attributed that fact partially to shock at Julia's hateful words and partially to relief that at last she was able to inform her daughter of the changed situation. Some of it anyhow.

"Grandmother called yesterday. She wants us to visit and the only time I can get off work with that big project and all is during the time you'd be at camp." Elizabeth spoke fast now, eager to get it over with. "I informed Ms Vabersky already and she promised to make the necessary arrangements. She said she'll even try to get us a refund for the retainer."

She watched Julia with some trepidation. Waiting for her daughter to respond, she started picking the cuticle of her thumb with the nail of her index finger, something she did whenever she needed to keep it together in situations beyond her control.

Julia tried to absorb what her mother had told her. It didn't make any sense. Her mouth fell open as if to take the information in that way - it was no use. All of her senses screamed that what she had heard was bad, yet the meaning eluded her, as though the synapses in her brain had stopped firing before she was able to interpret the message. She stood paralyzed. With her anger spent in the quarrel preceding this fatal blow to her summer plans, she began to cry.

"Oh no Mom," she sobbed, "you can't do that to me! You tell me all the time I don't take enough interest in my school friends, now I do and I really want to go. I worked so hard to get on the all-star team to make this happen. Please, can we talk about it? I didn't mean what I said about you and Dad!"

In an attempt to turn the situation around, she moved towards her mother and threw herself on the bed next to Elizabeth.

"But of course we can honey," Elizabeth answered, gently stroking her daughter's back. "We'll talk about it tonight. I gotta run. I'm late as it is and I have this important presentation today."

The second she heard herself talk about the presentation, she remembered that she would take her clients out to dinner and would not be home until late. Unable to deal with more of Julia's disappointment at the moment and afraid that Julia would notice her annoyance, she added quickly: "Why don't you call Grandma and tell her how excited you are to spend some time with her?"

She got up and kissed Julia lightly on the back of her head.

In a balancing act, Elizabeth put on her shoes, as she advanced towards the door. She always struggled to cram as many things as possible into a single moment. She called that managing time. One hand on the doorknob, she looked at Julia and announced in a voice a touch too chirpy to reflect her true feelings: "I'll leave you some money on the counter. You can go to the mall and do something fun."

Julia listened to the sound of her mother's footsteps disappearing towards the garage. As soon as she heard the door bang shut, she reached for her phone to call Kellie.

"Something terrible has happened, can I come over? Thanks. See you in a minute."

For a brief moment, she considered just slipping into her sneakers and rush over to Kellie's without bothering to wash her face or brush her teeth - then decided against it. No matter how big a crisis she was in right now, her getting another pimple or, god forbid a cavity, surely wouldn't help the situation. She trotted into the bathroom and took care of her morning routine.

Back in her room, she pulled on her favorite jeans and T-shirt to band-aid her bruised self-esteem, slipped into her shoes and went downstairs. In passing, she snatched the money off the kitchen counter, stuffed it into her jeans pocket without even counting it, grabbed her keys off the hook by the garage door and left the house.

A big gray cat with a fluffy fur coat got up from his sunny place on the front lawn to greet her. Yawning, he gracefully stretched each of his limbs separately - the way only cats know how to do - then walked right in between Julia's legs. In a major effort to stay on her feet without stepping on the cat, Julia bent down to scratch him behind his ears.

"Hey Twinkle Toes," she purred, "something terrible has happened this morning. I'll fill you in as soon as I'm back. Gotta run now. Kellie is waiting."

She opened the gate carefully as to not let Twinkle Toes out - a bit in denial about the fact that a waist-high fence is no real obstacle for a cat.