ABOUT HER: a NOVEL by Mary Mattingly
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ABOUT HER: A NOVEL by Mary Mattingly A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL May 2019 Copyright 2019 by Mary Mattingly ii ABOUT HER: A NOVEL by Mary Mattingly This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Becka McKay, Department of English, and has been approved by all members of the supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITIEE: Eric Berlatsky, Ph.D. Chair, English Department Michael J. Hors , Ph.D. Dean, Dorothy . Sclunidt College of Arts and Letters Khaled Sobhan, Ph.D. Interim Dean, Graduate College 111 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to express her most fervent gratitude toward her chair, Dr. Becka McKay, for her support and guidance throughout the process of writing this thesis. She also extends her thanks to the members of her committee, Papatya Bucak and Jason Schwartz, for their time and dedication in reviewing this piece. She also thanks her peers and other mentors she met along the way, both from FAU and the Prague Summer Program for Writers. She is grateful to have been able to create in such stimulating and supportive environments. iv ABSTRACT Author: Mary Mattingly Title: About Her: A Novel Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Becka McKay, Ph.D. Degree: Master of Fine Arts Year: 2019 About Her is a story of grief, regret, and the lengths some of us will go to avoid confronting and healing from trauma. Charlotte Day is a twenty-year-old college student embarking on her senior year of college when her younger sister Abby dies in a botched fake suicide attempt. In the wake of said tragedy, Charlotte is left behind with her loving, well-intentioned father and sedated, increasingly distant mother. As Charlotte attempts to cling to normalcy, her efforts fail once she returns to school, seeking out a path of unhealthy relationships and partying, which culminates in the former honors student dropping out of her senior year. A coming-of-age story at its core, About Her explores the dysfunctional ways one young woman navigates grief and fractured relationships while learning to forgive herself along the way. v ABOUT HER: A NOVEL PICK UP YOUR PHONE - PART I .................................................................................. 1 DRESSING ....................................................................................................................... 11 IT’S NOT HER ................................................................................................................. 18 THE ROAST OF ABBY LEIGH DAY ............................................................................ 24 SCAMS ............................................................................................................................. 31 ONE NIGHT BEFORE..................................................................................................... 39 ONE MORE YEAR .......................................................................................................... 50 FOURTEEN TEXT MESSAGES..................................................................................... 56 PICK UP YOUR PHONE – PART II ............................................................................... 57 WELCOME BACK, FACULTY AND STAFF! .............................................................. 61 YOU’RE NOT YOU ANYMORE ................................................................................... 64 EMAIL EXCHANGE ....................................................................................................... 79 MOVING ON UP ............................................................................................................. 83 OBITUARIES ................................................................................................................... 88 THE DEATH OF CHARLOTTE DAY WILSON’S CAREER ....................................... 89 CHRISTMAS FUCKUP ................................................................................................... 99 ESCALATION ............................................................................................................... 119 SPIRALING .................................................................................................................... 126 WANTED ....................................................................................................................... 138 vi THE SEX SCENE........................................................................................................... 139 DEAR KRIS1.DOCX ..................................................................................................... 146 WALK............................................................................................................................. 149 ANSWER ........................................................................................................................ 161 THE CARE AND KEEPING OF CHARLOTTE .......................................................... 178 THERE WILL BE REST ................................................................................................ 180 A GUIDE TO MINDFULNESS ..................................................................................... 191 WHO YOU REALLY ARE............................................................................................ 193 SAVE ME ....................................................................................................................... 205 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, 2015/2016 ................................................................................... 211 GARAGE SALE ............................................................................................................. 224 ALMOST THERE .......................................................................................................... 225 DEAR ABBY.................................................................................................................. 232 DRIVE ............................................................................................................................ 234 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 238 vii PICK UP YOUR PHONE - PART I I woke up to twenty-three missed calls the morning After. I’d been dreaming I was lost in a hotel, tripping through all-white hallways searching for exits that weren’t there, all the while trying to escape a steadily building noise. I was on the hunt for silence, somewhere familiar that belonged to me and me alone. I had finally found a door, wrapped my fingers around the knob, when my eyelids fluttered open. I could still feel the cool brass of that doorknob, its slippery promise of independence. I blinked in irritation. I was awake, but I wasn’t free. My bedroom door, too small for its frame, shook with each insistent rap, those hollow thuds reverberating across the room and boring into my brain. I longed to disappear back into the hallways. I may have been lost there, but at least it had been quiet. And I had been alone. “Charlotte!” My mother. Locked out, she furiously yanked on the door handle I’d snicked shut the night before. No matter how hard I tried to keep my family out, they hammered and hollered until I was forced to let them in. I groaned and flipped over to the other side of my bed. Whenever I was home, it always seemed that I spent most mornings waking up when they wanted me to rather than when I wanted to. 1 I couldn’t fully make out what she was saying at first - the bleary fog of sleep still wrapped around my head. I was resentful of the fact that our house was a hornet's nest for women who had decided that whoever was loudest won whatever argument was being held. I looked forward to heading back to college in a month to get away from my mother and sister’s constant bickering, the neverending slamming of doors, and my father’s whiskery sighs as he ditched our estrogen-dominated household for the corner bar or to tinker with something in the garage. Things at home had become especially deafening once my younger sister Abby had finally been dumped once and for all by her boyfriend Kris one month prior. Fed up with her suffocating jealousy, her mood swings, and manipulative guilt trips, he’d unceremoniously ended their four-year relationship via text message. I knew this fact because immediately upon receiving that final text, Abby had rushed into my bedroom and desperately shoved the phone in my face, narrowly missing my nose. “What the fuck. Are you reading that? He couldn’t say it to my face?” she cried, tunneling into my unmade bed, shoes on and all. I sat at my desk and looked at her shuddering form, her phone clasped in my palm. “We’ve been together four years - he told me he loves me - and this is how he ends it with me?” “Can you at least take your shoes off if you’re gonna do that? This isn’t a barn,” I side-stepped her cries, annoyed. I was surfing the internet and didn’t feel like abandoning Reddit to attend to Abby’s latest crisis. “Charlotte.” Her voice was small. “Did you read it?” 2 I suppressed a sigh and briefly glanced at the blocks of blue bubbles floating on her iPhone screen. “Well,