“I can’t help feeling that you only love me for my car,” he says when we meet up in the parking lot after he’s clean and ready to go.
“Not true!” I say. “I also love you for your big house and the nice meals you buy me.”
“Want to guess what I love you for?”
“My rapier wit?”
“Definitely not that,” he says, and I stick my tongue out at him. “Right,” he says, and leans over and catches my tongue between his lips.
I’m so glad I have a boyfriend who’s fun and happy and good-natured and successful. The way James floats through the world—?that’s how life should be. Easy. Painless. When I’m with him, it feels like maybe that could be my life too.
Sixteen
IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, and I’m studying my sister’s face from across the kitchen table.
I feel like I haven’t really looked at her in years. I think of her as being blond, but her hair has darkened over time and always hangs, lank and limp, in that eternal unflattering ponytail. Her face is so pale that you can see thin blue veins under her eyes. She almost never goes outside, hates the sun, hates exertion.
“Why are you staring at me?” she asks, looking up from her iPad. “Are you mad?”
“Why would I be mad at you?”
“I don’t know,” she says seriously. “Sometimes people just are.”
It breaks my heart how confused she can be about what people are thinking and how anxious that makes her. I shake my head. “I was just thinking we should have a girls’ beauty night—?paint our nails, highlight our hair, that kind of thing. What do you think?”
“No, thank you.”
“Come on! Don’t you want to know what you’d look like with lighter hair?”
“You mean like Diana’s hair?”
“Sure. Or like mine. It just takes a few minutes. I’ll do all the work, and if you don’t like it, you don’t ever have to do it again.”
“Okay,” she says, and stands up. “Let’s do it.”
“Hold on—?I have to run to the drugstore and buy the stuff first.”
She instantly plops back down on the chair. “Can you get some potato chips?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “Junk food is a necessary part of a girls’ beauty night.”
I have to ask Mom for the car keys again. I wish I had my own car. I really have to get a job. If I start working now and work all through the summer and save every dime, maybe I’ll be able to afford my own (old, used, beat-up, semidisgusting wreck of a) car by next fall.
That’s a lot of ifs and maybes. And until then, I’m stuck asking for Mom’s keys.
Mom and Ron are sitting close together on the family room sofa, drinking martinis and watching some reality show. We ate dinner earlier—?cheese pizza Mom had picked up on her way home from Ivy’s school and reheated unevenly so the edges were burned and the cheese was cold. She may be the worst cook ever—?I mean, who ruins pizza?
Ron’s slung his thick leg over her knees. It’s made his sweatpants ride up at the ankle, and I can see his brown leg hair. Ugh. Nauseating.
I say, “Can I borrow the car? I need to make a drugstore run.”
Ron looks up. “I could use a few things myself.”
“Text me a list.”
“You know what?” He lifts his leg off of Mom’s lap and climbs to his feet. “I’ll just go with you.”
Crap. Crap crap crap crap crap. “I don’t mind getting your stuff,” I say. “Really. It’s no problem.”
“It’ll give us a chance to talk.”
There’s no getting out of this.
He insists on driving, which freaks me out since his breath smells like alcohol. But he drives steadily enough.
A few minutes in, he clears his throat. “You’re quiet this evening, Chloe.”
“Long week.”
“Two words! I got two words out of her! Victory is mine!” He pumps his fist in the air, taking his eyes off the road long enough to admire his own biceps muscle. “Just teasing. So what made this week particularly long? Seemed like the usual Monday through Friday kind of thing to me.”
Bleah. Apparently we have to have a conversation.
“Oh, you know,” I say. “Junior year and all.” Please let that be enough.
It’s not. “I’ll bet,” he says. “Lots of pressure about college, right?”
I make a noncommittal sound.
“I will say I’m always impressed by your grades. You’re lucky you’re naturally smart. School was tough for me.”
“Yeah?” I stare out my window so I don’t have to look at the dyed wings of brown hair flying back from his widening temples.
“Today they’d diagnose me with a learning disorder, and I’d get help,” he says. “But back then they just said you were stupid if you couldn’t learn to read.”
“Sounds rough.”
“I survived. I’m a survivor, Chloe.”
Oh, great. Now the Destiny’s Child song is earworming in my head.
“I want you and Ivy to be survivors too. That’s why I push you both the way I do. For your sake. Your mom doesn’t like to make demands on you—?she loves you too much—?so it’s up to me to teach you the value of hard work and discipline and self-control.”
“Mom and Dad taught us plenty,” I say tightly.
“Of course they did! You’ve had great parents. The best. But I like to think that I bring something new to the table.”
I don’t say anything, and his words linger, wither, then die in the silence.
Ivy has replaced Ron at Mom’s side on the sofa. I drop bags of chips and M&M’s on the coffee table in front of them and hold up the highlighting kits I bought.
“Get ready for beauty, Ives! We are going to look so gorgeous that every guy will fall in love with us and every girl will hate our guts.”
“Why will they hate us?” Ivy asks, snatching up and ripping open the bag of chips.
Ron says from behind me, “Go easy on the junk food, Ivy.”
“Okay.” She crunches a chip in her mouth. “Why do girls hate girls who are beautiful?”