Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross
My stepmother Judy calls herself my “bonus mom,” as in now in the movie-theater bathroom when she says, “Help your bonus mom find her lost earring.”
The bathroom is crowded. The line is seven-people deep even with over a dozen stalls. Every woman in that line is looking-but-pretending-not-to-look at my stepmother when she calls herself “bonus mom.”
Then she says to a very pretty woman coming out of a stall, “Did you see an earring on the floor?”
The woman blinks. If I were to draw a cartoon version of her, I’d make her eyelashes half the length of her face. She says, “No.”
I wonder if the trailers are almost over now. I envy Dad and Rory, comfortable in their reclining seats in the dark auditorium. “Let’s go see a movie together, the four of us,” Dad said this morning, and my brother, Rory, and I locked eyes. When we were younger, we used to do that dumb thing kids do in which you ask someone if they know the solution to a simple math problem, like say two plus two, and then when they answer, you say, “no, it’s ______” (insert something nonsensical like “a dead fish”). We concur that when Dad refers to himself and Judy and us as “the four of us,” it’s equally asinine.
Judy says to the woman with the long eyelashes, “Are you sure?” and I stare at the floor, trying to look like I’m not with her, don’t know her. Judy’s cartoon version is all teeth. Her lips stretch out so big when she smiles, she looks like a horse. When I doodle her, I include lines radiating from her teeth to indicate how dazzling her smile is, which isn’t about how white her teeth are (they aren’t), but the compulsive force of her smile. Judy reminds me of this girl Kaylin in my class: every muscle in her face insists Like me! Like me!
Eyelashes woman resists. She shakes her head in a way that is both emphatic and disgusted, like who is this weird woman trying to get me to look at the floor of the bathroom, who won’t take no for an answer? And that combination of long-ass eyelashes and sniffy disgust reminds me of another girl in my grade, Olive, who has perfected the art of radiating contempt. The way she leans against her locker and gleams, Olive could be in a French movie.
I look everywhere but at Judy, but then she says “Matilda,” in a way that pretty much forces me to concede that I do in fact know Bonus Mom, that Bonus Mom belongs to me. And I’m horrified to see that her eyes are watering. “Matilda, they’re the earrings Rory gave me for Mother’s Day.” Rory, the passive aggressive charmer. “The jellybean earrings, remember?”
The not-lost member of the duo dangles from her left earlobe.
“Bonus” means something extra, something received over what is due—a bag of chips promising twenty-five percent more chips than before. Judy is extra in all kinds of ways—those teeth, for instance—but her extraness in my life is more like a tax than a bonus. I do not now have more mom. Five days every other week I have Judy in lieu of my mom. I grant that Judy is not so bad—she does make excellent lasagna and no matter how messy my bedroom at her and Dad’s house is, she never says a word about it because her home office is a mess, too—but that word “bonus” used as an adjective to modify the noun “mom” irks me.
At the same time, I feel bad for her, like I do for Kaylin. When Kaylin asked me to be her partner for an engineering project we did in class, building a bridge out of craft sticks and rubber bands, I wanted desperately to say no, but I couldn’t. So I was stuck working with Kaylin for two days on that bridge, which meant having to deftly dodge invitations to go to the mall with her and sleep over at her house.
Being enlisted to help Judy find the lost member of the pair of earrings Rory gave her for Mother’s Day is a lot like that bridge project. Here I am partnered up with the person I least want to be partnered up with, the person who makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable with their desperation.
I say to her, “Retrace your steps. Which stall did you use?”
If Dad was a toy that said things when you pulled his string, “Retrace your steps” would be on the rotation. Although “Retrace your steps” can certainly sound patronizing, when Dad says it, it’s reassuring, a hand stroking my cheek. He has the strangest faith that the simple act of going backwards will resolve and cure—his marriage to Mom being the main exception.
Judy turns and says, “That one, I think?” Although not in line, she steps towards the stall in question. The stall is currently occupied, but that doesn’t stop the woman who is first in line from glaring at Judy, who stands right outside the stall door waiting. I picture the woman in the stall staring at Judy’s blue suede boots, her Elvis shoes, with contempt.
When the stall door opens, a woman with braided hair scrunches her eyes at Judy on her way to wash her hands.
Then, horrifyingly, Judy gets down on all fours. She’s crawling on the floor, patting around the base of the toilet. The women waiting for stalls look aghast; the woman with the braids turns from blow-drying her rinsed hands to stare.
“Not there,” says Judy. Getting clumsily to her feet, she announces to the room, “My stepson got them for me. Jellybean earrings. They’re white, so they might be hard to see against the tile.”
There’s a choral “Oh.” Everyone’s faces rearrange, everyone looks sorry for her, though I suspect some of them are looking at her more with pity than empathy.
I remember how pleased my brother was when he found those earrings. The whole point was that they were ugly. White with a tinge of yellow, they look like buttered-popcorn flavored jellybeans. They look urine-stained. Rory hates buttered popcorn, as do I. Our parents, when they were still together, used to tease us about being the only kids on the planet who don’t want popcorn at the movies. At sixteen, my brother is the expert of barbed gifts. My Christmas present from him was concealer. In the instance of Judy, though, it was a private joke, decipherable only to us, though only when I see how distraught Judy is do I realize the extent to which she has misread him.
Watching Judy look frantically around the bathroom, I imagine relaying this scene to Rory. He’s the best audience for stories of this genre, stories of other people’s weirdo, embarrassing behavior. Rory’s laughter is infectious, the way he laughs with his entire body. Often laughter brings tears to his eyes. Being the one to make him laugh like that is crazy satisfying.
But the idea of him laughing at this in particular—Judy’s humiliation for the sake of the ugly earrings he gave her—makes me feel a little queasy. Guilty for even contemplating it.
“Tell me another Judy story,” Mom will sometimes say to us, and then, specifically to me, “Tildy, rub my feet.” Mom will laugh while Rory performs, and I knead the tendons of her warm soles, Mom’s monkeyish toes. We’re a trio then, a club of spite. Making fun of Judy is the tax I pay to make my real family smile.
Judy turns to me, her hands on the sides of her face like Kevin in the Home Alone poster, like Munch’s The Scream, but with teeth. That’s when I see it, camouflaged by Judy’s pilly white sweater: caught by its hook, just above her left nipple, the mottled jellybean. I think of that sad Christmas tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special—its impossible transformation from nearly-bare stick to lush green canopy when the kids add ornaments and strings of lights. I signal to Judy to follow me to the back wall of the restroom, where the baby changing station hangs unused, where I can discretely indicate to her the location of the missing earring without subjecting her to any further humiliation. I decide that I will keep this story to myself.
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches at Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection The Last Day (2026), published by Moon City Press; Don’t Take This the Wrong Way (2025), co-authored with Michelle Ross, published by EastOver Press, and chosen as one of LitHub’s 100 Most Notable Books of 2025; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel.
Michelle Ross‘s fifth book, Squash, is forthcoming from Moon City Press as part of the Editor’s Choice Series. Her fiction has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, and other awards. Her work has been anthologized in the North anthology Flash Fiction America, Best Small Fictions (in which it was one of ten spotlighted stories), Best Microfiction, and the Wigleaf Top 50. She is the current Series Editor for the Best Small Fictions anthology and an editor at 100 Word Story.