Summary

The story opens with Melody getting ready for her sixteenth birthday celebration. As music by Prince is playing, Melody and her mother get ready for the ceremony. Melody is wearing the white dress that was meant for her mother's, Iris, ceremony, but Iris was unable to wear the dress as she was pregnant with Melody at the time. As Melody gets ready, she talks to her mother, and it clear there are tensions between the two characters. Melody reflects on when she was a young child and idolized her mother and how this quickly shifted when her mother was absent for much of her childhood. Since then, she started calling her mother by her first name. This prompts her to remark how "strange" and "different" they were (6).

Melody tells her mother that if she was so unhappy about having Melody, she could have...