Chapter 2 — Don’t Make a Scene

A few people laughed, nervously, the way people laugh when they can feel a cruelty coming and have not yet decided whether to be part of it.

My mother, Alice, lifted her champagne glass.

“Kristen,” she said, in the smooth, warning voice I knew better than my own heartbeat.

“Don’t make a scene.”

I looked at her, and I felt the old reflex rise in me, the reflex that sentence had installed over twelve years of patient repetition.

Because don’t make a scene was never really four words.