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Act One, XVI: i bit my tongue last night
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"Maureen, c'mere for a moment."
Moe looks around the hallway, eyebrows furrowed as she tries to figure out where her mom's voice is coming from. Not the kitchen, or her bedroom, or the couch, or any of the places she would usually be. Moe looks last at the back deck— a place Ainsley rarely goes— and sees her anyway, lounging in one of the chairs with a book open in her lap.
"Oh, sure."
The sun illuminates Ainsley's red hair, making it look like liquid fire in the gentle breeze. Her honey-brown eyes, just like Moe's own, are impossibly bright, almost gold. She looks entirely unlike the Ainsley that Moe has tucked away in her brain. She is so used to seeing her mother in the darkness of their home, her skin pale, her hair muted, her eyes stormy and undercut by dark trenches. Or seeing her not at all, filling in the blanks with the most prominent memories, of all the times her mother ignored her or shouted or scowled.
"What's up?" Moe asks, pushing the sliding door open and trying not to let those memories bob back up to the surface.
Not looking at her, Ainsley juts a hand out and gestures for Moe to sit down across from her. And because Moe is trying so hard to be a good person, she ignores the way anger flares in her stomach and she sits. She watches for a long moment as Ainsley finishes up her page and sets the paperback aside— as if Moe is at her beck and call, as if Moe couldn't possibly be in the middle of anything important.
"So, I heard some news recently," she says, her tone carefully measured like she's trying not to give any kind of emotion away.
Moe frowns, frustrated more than anything else that she has to be baited into this instead of her mom just spitting it out like a normal person, "Uh, like what?"
"I heard," Ainsley says slowly, "That your friend got arrested the other day."
"Oh," Moe deflates, her shoulders dropping in earnest at the reminder of the thing she's been trying to forget, "Yes. How did you hear that?"
