“Nothing is ever my mom’s fault. She doesn’t have the life she wanted because people are unfair to her, because they’re out to get her, because she had me and missed her opportunities. She’s always embroiled in some friend group or romantic drama where she’s the victim. She’s always the victim. It’s…” Carys waved the smoke away from her face like she could wave her mother away. “It fucked me up for a long time. Before I realized she’s the one who’s fucked up. Now I try to stay away from her as much as I can.”

“Fucked you up how?” Greta asked, putting a careful hand on Carys’ ankle.

“It was just us for a long time. So if something was messed up and it was never her fault, then—”

“It had to be yours.”

“Yeah. If she didn’t show up to a parent-teacher conference, then it was like ‘you set me up to fail and look like a bad parent because you didn’t tell me about it.’ And if I reminded her that I had told her about it, she’d say, ‘you know how prejudiced and ignorant people are about single moms and teenaged moms. You’re supposed to be on my side and make me look good. Or do you want people to think I’m trash? Yeah, you must want that, because then it looks like you really overcame some hardships.’ Et cetera.”

Something squirmy settled in the pit of Greta’s stomach. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah. I left for college, even though I love New Orleans, because I needed to get away from her. Now I’ll be paying off student loans for an immortal lifetime, yay, but it felt worth it at the time to get away.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Atlanta. And amazingly, in Atlanta, when things went wrong, they weren’t all magically my fault. I met people who apologized when they messed up. I realized that when everyone you meet has had drama with the same person, maybe it’s that person who’s the problem, not everyone else.”

Carys said this all lightly, but her gaze was fixed intently on the ceiling.

“After college, I wanted to come back to New Orleans, and I had all this shit planned that I wanted to say to my mom. I confronted her and laid it all out. Her eyes got bigger and bigger, and at a certain point, she just started talking in a low voice. She was saying ‘You’re a liar’ over and over underneath me talking, like she was chanting a spell to ward off my words. And I realized she just wasn’t able to see herself the way I saw her. She’d crumble to dust. If she thought of herself as the problem or as doing anything wrong, it would, like, smash the image she had of herself as a good person.”