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If there’s one thing Kate Wallis knows wholeheartedly, deep in her bones where her mother’s been forcing it in for the entirety of her life, it’s that image matters. The Wallises are supposed to be good people, the right kind of people, and that means Kate knows how to plaster on a smile sooner than she can walk and hold up her end of an obligatory-small-talk session at a party or in the grocery store or anywhere else she might run into someone (read: who her mom has deemed matters) by first grade.
She has one job in the world, to be exactly who her family asks, to smile at the right moments and laugh when an adult nods at her and collect the perfect posse of friends and hobbies, all arranged neatly to be called up at a moment’s notice, look how sweet our little girl is.
It’s impossibly difficult and the easiest thing in the world all at once. Kate’s whole life stretches out in front of her, unspooling from her mother’s hands, each day a new series of steps with the same old rules leading her forward into the future, like perfection and happiness are a guarantee as long as she listens to the instructions carefully enough. The first day of kindergarten Joy sends her in with a set of pigtails, a meticulously packed lunch, and the names of four other kids she should try and get to know. The next day her mother offers tips on how to make friends more easily and kisses her on the head before sending her into the building. This is the way it goes.
By third grade Kate can braid her own hair with precision, has regular sleepovers with Renee and Tennille even though sleeping at other people’s houses scares her (but Joy says this is what Kate needs to do, so she does) and raises her hand just the right amount in class. She’s learning how to lie about what she feels, to sugarcoat and gloss over anything uncomfortable, to tuck every feeling that isn’t sunshine and glitter deep into her chest and open it back up in the middle of the night to ache into the darkness. In fourth grade, Renee says that she’s better friends with Tennille then she is with Kate and tears start to prick behind her eyes, but instead she digs her fingernails into her palm and swallows down the hurt, smiles up at Renee in a way she hopes makes her look soft and like a good friend. When she tells her mom, Joy says that she’s better than the other girls, she’s a Wallis, that all her life people are going to say stuff like that and as long as she ignores it no one can hurt her.
Kate nods and promises to remember, but secretly she decides two things. 1) Her mom’s way of reacting doesn’t always make sense and 2) Kate needs to make herself a little more pliable, a little more likeable, because that’s the golden rule. Other people treat strangers how they wish to be treated but Kate just tries to be perfect, to learn every trick and understand the way each person she knows wants her to be and bend herself into exactly that shape. She imagines herself like Silly Putty, strong and self-contained under the right circumstances, but always ready to fill whatever mold she’s given next.
By the time high school rolls around Kate thinks she’s beginning to have it all figured out, except for the occasional time she smiles at someone who her mom deems unworthy, as if she raised a daughter who just tosses around sweetness instead of hoarding it, weaponizing her status and bright hair the way Joy does. Renee and Tennille still spend more time with each other than they do with her, but they all pretend that no one notices and anyway Kate has Jamie now, which only makes sense because last summer her mother mentioned that Jamie was growing into an awfully nice young man and strongly suggested that he would be a good person to get to know.
Kate walks into school every day with Jamie’s arm around her shoulders, best friends trailing at their heels (talking about something that Kate doesn’t have all the context for which is fine, she knows you don’t need to know what’s being discussed to be interested in it) so every day the doors swing open and Jamie’s arm pushes down her posture just a little and Tennille giggles at something Renee mutters and Kate smiles as big and bright as possible. Feelings don’t actually matter, just how other people think you feel.
She curls her hair every morning (Joy’s hair has waves but Kate’s has always been stick-straight so they’ve been braiding and fluffing and spraying and rollering in volume since Kate could sit still long enough for Joy to get it done.) and the soft ringlets around her fingers make her feel a little more in control, like someday she’ll finally get the texture just right and the sky will crack open with approval and everything will actually feel comfortable so she won’t have to fake these smiles as often. She listens to music while she applies her makeup and scrambles to shut it off when she hears footsteps coming up the stairs (Joy says that a good face requires focus and music is not conducive to Kate’s skin looking its best).
The blush is her favorite part, even though she knows the line between just enough and way too much is thin, but that honestly feels like Kate’s entire life, if there’s one thing she knows how to do it’s a balancing act, so she still enjoys the smell of soft pink powder as it floats across her cheeks, making everything look brighter.
The lip gloss comes last, sticky and shiny with a taste that lingers in her mouth all day and then voila, she becomes Kate Wallis instead of the girl who sleeps with the bathroom door open for light and drools a little most nights. She likes herself this way, likes this person and her mother always calls up from the bottom of the stairs, Katie-Kat! Let’s scoot! before she can think too deeply about how the bright-cheeked, soft-lipped, eager-eyed girl in the mirror doesn’t feel exactly good. She and her mom chat in the car, Joy filling her in on gossip and what she should try to accomplish that day and Kate twists her fingers together in the passenger seat, skin soft from the lotion she applies each night before falling asleep, while parsing out the subtext underneath her mother’s instructions.
She steps out of the car and her transformation is complete, she is nothing but layers of sweet smiles and buttery-goodness in a skirt that swishes as she walks and the thrill whispers through her veins like it does most mornings. Sure, she’s all smiles and good old fashioned manners and a welcoming head-tilt that she spent a month of Saturday mornings practicing in the mirror, but Kate thinks she’s pretty good at this, good at being a canvas for everyone else to paint intentions and desires over without ever pausing to ask how she actually feels.
It’s something, it’s what she’s supposed to do, and even if Jamie doesn’t really understand what she’s thinking or if Tennille invites Renee over just out of her earshot, this is a good thing. After all, is there anything better than someone fulfilling their purpose?
The problem is, of course, that Kate isn’t actually a remarkably sturdy paper doll. She’s a person. And she wants to be Kate Wallis, wants it so badly that the soles of her feet itch and her eyes burn, but sometimes she’s just Kate.
Kate, who wishes her best friends liked her as much as they do each other and wishes Jamie still make her stomach explode into butterflies, who sort of wants to learn to play the drums or play soccer or spend a weekend in her room reading weird books from the back corners of the library instead of out at her mother’s functions and the mall. It’s not that she doesn’t like the mall, or those parties, but it feels like more is lurking just under her skin, pressing up against her lungs with the force of so many other things she could be. She goes to sleep at 10am every night, like clockwork, but every so often her mind won’t shut down and she’ll spend two hours staring at the ceiling, wondering about the future and what else it might be if she didn’t follow every step on her mother’s unending list.
By the morning breaking the rules never seems like a good idea though, so instead she paints on a new face and dots perfume by her collarbone and tries as hard as she can to put the ache away.
Kate Wallis is safe and loved and perfect, just-Kate wouldn’t be much of anyone. So she trusts the pattern. Weekday afternoons are for cheer practice and evenings are for family dinners, for pretending she isn’t sore and that her eyes aren’t tired from the force of tearing them off of Stacy Peter’s legs during warmups. That’s her actual secret, like world-ending-life-ruining level secret, that she is a thousand different things and none of them are straight. The secret drummer fantasy won’t implode anything and if she starts reading sci-fi her mother might ask why a few too many times, but ultimately none of those things are that big a deal. The fact that Tennille’s eyes had made just-Kate’s stomach flip for half of seventh grade and that Stacy’s high kicks make her hands tingle is more of a problem and Kate’s increasingly sure that it’s probably not going away.
But also, like what’s she going to do?
Kate Wallis doesn’t have any different options and just-Kate sure as hell doesn’t either. She has Jamie, Jamie who is a boy and shaping up to be an important part of her mom’s future instructions and is perfectly nice to her. Everything is fine.
Maybe she’ll stop doing cheer next year, swap it out for model UN or more debate or start up with horse riding lessons again. Her mom will understand, especially if she brings up college apps, and once Stacy’s high kicks and backflips are far away from Kate everything will calm down. Kate Wallis doesn’t make mistakes, never says an unkind thing, oozes sweetness at every opportunity, and this is what she’s good at. Nothing needs to change.
A few months later it all falls apart. Just-Kate isn’t as good at any of this as she thought, isn’t as good at being Kate Wallis, except that’s literally the only thing she’s ever been really good at. And everything gets completely fucked.
When she gets back, when she gets out, nothing is the same. She isn’t the same, she’s a scattered, shattered, traumatized mess and everyone else moved on without her.
Being Kate Wallis doesn’t feel like a calling anymore, or a thing she’s particularly good at. Instead it feels like a trap, like a cage, and if there’s one thing just-Kate is absolutely done with it’s captivity. She feels out of place for the first time ever, like really out of place, not just left out in her own head. At first it makes her feel sick, like the whole world is spinning and nothing’s ever going to be better, maybe this is just it for her. But she goes to therapy, and goes to more therapy, and watches as her world frays more and more at the edges.
The fraying makes her miss the bright clean lines of how things used to be, back when she understood exactly how the world worked and exactly who she was supposed to be and where she fit into everything, but at least if everything else is falling apart she finally fits. And she meets Mal. Mal, who isn’t really anything like her but doesn’t fit particularly well into their hometown either, who can see the fraying and isn’t scared of it, who likes Kate the most and picks her every time and doesn’t ask her to be anything different than just-Kate, whoever that is. Mal teaches her how to wear a chipped shoulder with pride and how to not smile when someone else asks and how to scream at the world’s polite indifference.
She’s never been valued like this before, not as a status symbol or a doll but a person, a person who wants to watch weird movies all night and can’t bring herself to laugh much and loses herself in impulsive choices and loud songs on empty roads in the dark. Sometimes Mal looks over at her and Kate feels weird, because Mal isn’t picking her apart like Joy or only seeing what she’s expecting like Jamie, instead she’s just looking, exploring Kate’s face like it’s the last frontier and she wants to understand it.
Kate never looks away.
And maybe because Kate’s feeling less and less like following the rules and more and more like she’ll never be good enough anyway, that something about her is broken and she won’t ever get it back, so why not add to the list of just-Kate’s sins. Or, maybe, it’s just that everything sucks and somehow Mal never does, that Mallory Higgins is strong and brave and stalwart and exciting and fun and Kate wants to cling to her like a lifeboat, to learn how Mal has built her armor and shut both their eyes so tightly that the rest of the world doesn’t matter.
Kate feels stuck in the past, in the basement or in her old shell almost all the time, but Mal feels like the future. Not the future in the way it’s always been before, an unremarkable, peaceful, parentally-planned trudge through her life, but something with more potential, like she could go somewhere else and be someone she’s never had the chance to be before. Mal always smells surprisingly sweet, like vanilla and floral shampoo, and to Kate it’s the smell of tomorrow being better than today.
In this brave, terrible new world where Kate Wallis doesn’t exist and Kate doesn’t know what’s going on, for some reason none of her old fear matters, like it belonged to someone who doesn’t exist anymore.
Kate feels new and sharper and more fragile and Mal spends so much time trying to make her smile, trying to listen to what she actually needs and never, ever leaving. Pretending that she doesn’t know what’s going on suddenly doesn’t make sense. So she decides it’s time to stop. Decides if she can go against legal and parental advice on national TV and basically every day since, if she can outright fight with her mom and not smile when the neighbors drop by, if she can live in a basement and survive someone taking advantage of all her biggest weaknesses to trap her and hold her captive, if she can get past that and talk about it in therapy and start to feel like someone new again, then kissing a girl is like, so not the worst of her problems.
She has bigger fish to fry.
Besides, Mal is familiar and soft and fucking beautiful and maybe Kate’s favorite person in the entire world. She rubs Kate’s back when she cries and lets Kate wrap her arms around her waist in the middle of the night and holds her hand when no one else is looking and spends so much time trying to make her happy. She makes Kate feel like maybe being this new version of herself isn’t the worst thing to be, like just-Kate isn’t a step down but a whole new person who deserves to be here, even if she doesn’t curl her hair and smile on command these days. Mal is the only simply good thing in Kate’s life and one day she wakes up and the sun is bright and her dad is baking cookies in the kitchen and complicating this doesn’t make sense. Not anymore.
When she settles her palms against Mal’s face in the middle of the street, music blaring from the car in a broad-daylight dance break that’s probably much weirder than when they do this at night her whole body goes quiet. When her lips meet Mal’s she feels it ripple out across her skin, like she’s shedding, like all of Kate Wallis’s old fears will be left here on the pavement and she’ll only be herself when she gets back in the car. Mal tastes as sweet as she smells and Kate is so overwhelmed with light, with hope and possibility and better things that she has to laugh, has to keep dancing, so she does. And Mal dances with her. And everything is ok.