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  Maybe I could have gotten away with a strapless sheath once …for like one day in 1989, but that day is long gone.

  <> Ten years gone.

  <> Thanks for that. Oh, and did I tell you that the wedding might have a theme? Kiley’s fiancé wants to do something with the New Millennium.

  <> What does that even mean?

  <> Damned if I know. I wish it meant that I could wear a silver jumpsuit.

  <> Maybe your sister would let you wear a wrap or a sweater or something so that you won’t feel so exposed.

  <> That’s a good idea. Maybe I could talk Gwen into wearing one, too, so that I’m not the only one.

  <> Your sister Gwen is in the wedding? She’s not a teeny-tiny Tri-Delt. You won’t be the only life-size bridesmaid.

  <> No, you’re right. You’re right. I’m not sure why I’m getting so upset about this. This dress, this wedding. I really am happy for Kiley. And for you and every other happily married lady.

  Except for that I’m not happy for you. I kind of want you all to drop dead. When Kiley showed me her ring—platinum, 1.4 carats—I really wanted to say something mean about it. Who really needs a ring that big? I ask you. It was rings that big that made our grandmothers think Elizabeth Taylor was a whore.

  And then I actually did say something mean, quite a few some-things mean.

  We were at the bridal shop for our first fitting (yes, already), and I said that sage green is the color of dirty aquarium water. And that polyester crepe smells like B.O. even before you put it on.

  And when she told us her wedding song—of course, they’ve already picked their wedding song, and of course, it’s “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong—I said that choosing that song is the sonic equivalent of buying picture frames and never replacing the photos of the models.

  <> Ouch. Are you still in the wedding?

  <> I’m still the maid of honor.

  Nobody was listening to me snipe. Kiley was trying on veils, and the other bridesmaids were too busy counting each other’s ribs to pay attention.

  I felt like such a lousy human being when I left that bridal shop. I felt bad for making a scene. I felt mad that no one had noticed. I felt like the sort of person who would set something on fire just to get attention. Which suddenly seemed like a really good idea …

  Setting something on fire. Something made of polyester crepe.

  I couldn’t torch Kiley’s dress—not yet, I won’t even get it for 10 to 12 weeks—but I have a whole closet full of dead dresses. Prom dresses. Bridesmaid dresses. I was all prepared to scoop them up in big fluffy armfuls and throw them into the Dumpster outside my building. I was going to light a cigarette in their flames, like I was the cool girl in Heathers …

  But I couldn’t. Because I’m not that girl. I’m not the Winona Ryder character in any movie. Jo from Little Women, just for example, never would have started laying all those dresses out on her bed and trying them on, one by one …

  Including the off-the-shoulder number I wore to my brother’s wedding 12 years ago. It’s teal (that was 1987’s sage green) with puffy sleeves and peach rosettes at the waist. Of course it was too tight, and of course it wouldn’t zip—because I’m not 16 anymore. That’s when it hit me—I’m not 16 anymore.

  And I don’t mean that in an offhand “well, obviously” way. I mean it like “Jack and Diane.” Like, “Oh, yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”

  I’m not even the same person who could zip up that dress. That person thought that wearing an ugly dress on the happiest day of someone else’s life was just the beginning—the line you have to stand in to get to your own happiest day.

  There is no such line. There’s just the waiting room scene from Beetlejuice. (Another movie where I’m not Winona.)

  I had dresses spread all over the spare bedroom when Chris came home. I tried to come up with some normal reason to be wearing a dusty bridesmaid dress and crying. But he reeked of cigarette smoke and went straight in to take a shower, so I didn’t have to explain—which was even more upsetting because what I really wanted was for someone else to feel sorry for me.

  <> I feel sorry for you.

  <> Really?

  <> Really. I think you’re pathetic. It’s almost painfully embarrassing to read your messages when you’re like this.

  <> You know just what to say to a girl. Next you’ll be telling me that I’ll make a beautiful bride someday …

  <> You will. Of course you will. And by the time Chris gets around to asking you, I’ll bet everyone will get married in silver jumpsuits.

  CHAPTER 8

  “WHAT DO YOU care if they pay you to sit there?” Lincoln’s sister asked.

  He’d called Eve because he was bored. Because he’d already read everything in the WebFence folder. He’d read some of it twice …

  Beth and Jennifer again. He didn’t send them a warning. Again. He was starting to feel like he knew them, like they were his work friends. Weird. Yet another reason to quit this job.

  “I don’t care,” he said to Eve.

  “You must. You called me to whine about it.”

  “I’m not whining,” Lincoln said, a little too forcefully.

  “This was supposed to be your nothing job. You told me you wanted a job that wouldn’t take too much brainpower, so that you could devote all your energy to deciding what to do next.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So, what do you care if they’re paying you to do nothing? That sounds ideal. Use that time to read What Color Is Your Parachute? Start working on your five-year plan.” She was practically shouting to be heard over some mechanical noise.

  “Are you vacuuming?”

  “I’m DustBust-ing,” she said.

  “Stop. It makes you sound strident.”

  “I am strident.”

  “Well, it makes you sound excessively strident,” he said. “Now I don’t remember what I was saying.”

  “You were whining about getting paid to do nothing.” Eve turned off the DustBuster.

  “It’s just that getting paid to do nothing is a constant reminder that I’m doing nothing,” Lincoln said. “And doing nothing takes more energy than you’d think. I’m tired all the time.”

  “How could you possibly be tired all the time? Every time I call, you’re asleep.”

  “Eve, I don’t get off work until one in the morning.”

  “You should still be awake by noon.”

  “I get home at one thirty. I’m wired. I mess around on the computer for another hour or two. I fall asleep at, like, four. I get up at one, one thirty. And then I spend the next three hours thinking about how there’s not enough time to do anything before I go to work. I watch Quantum Leap reruns and mess around on the computer some more. I go to work. Rinse. Repeat. ‘Second verse same as the first.’”

  “That sounds awful, Lincoln.”

  “It is awful.”

  “You should quit that job.”

  “I should quit this job … ,” he said, “but if I keep it, I can move out of Mom’s house.”

  “How soon?”

  “As soon as I want. The money’s good.”

  “Don’t quit,” Eve said firmly. “Move out. Find a new job. Then quit.”

  He knew she would say that. In Eve’s mind, all of Lincoln’s problems would go away if he moved out of their mother’s house. “You’ll never have your own life as long as you live there,” Eve told him whenever she had the chance. She’d tell him to keep a job at a meatpacking plant if it meant getting his own apartment.

  But Lincoln wasn’t sure he even wanted to move out. He liked his mom’s house. He liked the way everything about it was already broken in. Lincoln had the whole upstairs to himself; he e
ven had his own bathroom. And he usually didn’t mind being around his mom. He wished she would give him a little more space sometimes. Headspace.

  “Don’t you hate telling people that you still live at home?” Eve would ask.

  “Who asks me where I live?”

  “New people.”

  “I don’t meet any new people.”

  “You won’t ever meet any new people as long as you’re living at home.”

  “Who am I going to meet if I get my own apartment? Do you see me hanging out at the pool? Starting conversations in the community weight room?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Why not? You know how to swim.”

  “I don’t like apartment complexes. I don’t like the carpet and the little concrete balconies and the cabinets.”

  “What’s wrong with the cabinets?”

  “They’re made of fiberboard, and they smell like mice.”

  “Gross, Lincoln. Whose apartments have you even been in?”

  “I have friends who live in apartments.”

  “Gross apartments, apparently.”

  “Single-guy apartments. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  Eve had moved out when she was nineteen. She’d married Jake, a guy she’d met at community college. He was ten years older and in the air force. He bought her a ranch-style house in the suburbs, and Eve painted every room a different shade of cream.

  Lincoln used to sleep over at their house on weekends. He was eleven, and Eve let him have his own bedroom. “You’re always welcome here,” she told him. “Always. For as long as you want. This is your home, too.”

  He liked staying at Eve and Jake’s house, but he never felt like he needed to escape to it. He’d never felt like he needed to escape from their mother, not like Eve had. He didn’t understand the anger between them. He didn’t even recognize his mother in the stories Eve told.

  “Mom never had a bong,” he’d protest.

  “Oh yes, she did. It was made out of a Dr Pepper bottle, and she kept it on the coffee table.”

  “Now I know you’re lying. Mom would never drink Dr Pepper.”

  WHEN LINCOLN GOT to work the next afternoon, Greg was arguing with someone on the phone. He’d hired an outside consultant to take care of the newspaper’s Y2K issues, and now the consultant was saying he wouldn’t be able to get to The Courier until early February. Greg called the guy a charlatan and a one-eyed gypsy, and hung up on him.

  “I can help with the Y2K stuff,” Lincoln said. “I’ve done some programming.”

  “Yeah,” Greg said, “we’ll have you, me …a couple of eighth-grade magnet students …I’m sure it’ll be fine …” He turned off his computer by yanking the power cord from the surge strip. Lincoln cringed. “‘Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage,’” Greg said, gathering up his papers and jacket. “See you tomorrow, Senator.”

  Huh. Programming. Debugging. It wasn’t Lincoln’s favorite, but it beat archiving and compressing. At least it was a problem to solve. And it would only be for a few months, maybe less.

  He checked the WebFence folder. There were only two red flags. Which meant Lincoln had anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes of actual work to get him through the night. He’d already decided to save it for after dinner.

  Tonight, he had a plan.

  Well …a plan to make a plan. He’d gotten up early that day, at noon, and gone to the library to check out that parachute book Eve had mentioned. It was in his backpack right now with a copy of today’s want ads, a yellow highlighter, a ten-year-old Mead notebook, an Entertainment Weekly, and a turkey sandwich that smelled so good he was having a hard time thinking about anything else.

  He was done with the sandwich and the magazine by seven.

  He thought about looking at the want ads next or cracking What Color Is Your Parachute?—but reached for the notebook instead. He laid it on the desk and carefully leafed through the pages, through notes on the Revolutionary War and the rough draft of an essay on Brave New World.

  Lincoln knew what he was looking for; somewhere near the middle, there it was …Sam’s handwriting. Purple ink. Too many capital letters.

  “THINGS LINCOLN IS GOOD AT.”

  SHE’D MADE THIS list for him senior year when he was trying to choose his major. Lincoln had already known where he was going to college—wherever Sam was going.

  His mother had wanted him to stay close to home. He’d been offered a regent’s scholarship at the state university just forty-five minutes away. But Sam would never go there. Sam wanted to go somewhere big and important and FAR AWAY. And Lincoln wanted to go with her. Whenever his mom brought up the scholarship, how nice the state campus was, how he could come home to do his laundry …Lincoln would think of Sam loading her things into her dad’s minivan and heading west like the last sunset. He could do his own laundry.

  So he let Sam do all the school shopping. She sent away for brochures and went on weekend trips to see campuses. “I want to be near the ocean, Lincoln, the ocean! I want to feel the tides. I want to look like one of those girls who live by the ocean, with the windblown hair and the color in their cheeks. And I want mountains, too, at least one mountain. Is that too much to ask? And trees. Not a whole forest, necessarily. I’d settle for a thicket. Scenery. I want scenery!” Something to chew on, Lincoln thought.

  Sam picked a college in California—not too far from the ocean, not too far from the mountains—with a tree-lined campus and a robust theater program. Lincoln was accepted, too, and offered half a dozen scholarships.

  Technically, he said to his mother, it’s the same amount of scholarship money the state school is offering. “Yes,” she said, “but the tuition is four times as much.”

  “You’re not paying for it,” he said.

  “What a mean thing to say.”

  “I didn’t mean it to be mean.” He didn’t.

  He knew she felt bad that she couldn’t pay for college. Well, he knew that she felt bad sometimes. College was his thing. She expected him to pay for it the same way she had expected him to pay for his own Nintendo. “You can have it if you want it, if you’re willing to pay for it. Save your money.”

  “I don’t have any money,” he’d said in the ninth grade.

  “Be thankful, Lincoln. Money is a cruel thing. It’s the thing that stands between you and the things you want and the people you love.”

  “How does money come between you and the people you love?”

  “It’s coming between us right now.”

  It wasn’t really the tuition that bothered his mother about California. She didn’t want him to go to California because she didn’t want him to go. She didn’t want him to go so far. And she didn’t want him to go so far with Sam.

  His mother didn’t like Sam.

  She thought Sam was self-centered and manipulative. (“Pot. Kettle. Black,” Eve said.) His mother thought Sam was loud. And pushy. And too full of opinions. She complained when Lincoln spent too much time at Sam’s house. But when he brought Sam home, that was worse. Sam would do something—rearrange the spice cabinet, turn on too many lights, say that she couldn’t stand green peppers or anything with walnuts or Susan Sarandon—that irritated his mother. “Is she always like that, Lincoln?”

  “Like what?”

  “Is she always so much?”

  “Yes,” he’d said, trying not to sound as happy as he felt. “Always.”

  His mother tolerated the Sam situation, mostly quietly, for about a year. Then she started talking to Lincoln about how young he was, too young to be so serious about one person. She asked him to slow down, to think about seeing other girls. She said to him, “It’s like buying shirts, Lincoln. When you go shopping for shirts, you don’t buy the first shirt you try on. Even if you like it. You keep looking, you keep trying things on. You make sure you find the shirt that fits you best.”

  “But Mom, what if the first shirt is the best shirt? And what if it’s gone by the time I’m done shopping? Wh
at if I never find a shirt like that again?”

  She wasn’t used to him arguing with her. “This isn’t about shirts, Lincoln.”

  She always used his name when she talked to him. No one else said his name unless they were trying to get his attention. It was like she was patting herself on the back for thinking of such a great name—or maybe trying to remind him that it was she who had named him. That he was her doing. Once, during those mildly turbulent teenage years, the Sam years, he had yelled at his mother, “You don’t understand me!”

  “Of course I understand you, Lincoln,” she replied. “I’m your mother. No one will ever know you like I do. No one will ever love you like I do.”

  Sam had proved his mother wrong.

  And then had proved her right.

  But before all that, Sam had sat on his bed with a green Mead notebook and said, “Come on, Lincoln, you have to pick a major.”

  “You pick my major,” he’d said. He’d laid his head on her lap and kept reading a paperback, something with swords and goblin queens.

  “Lincoln. Seriously. You have to declare a major. It’s required. Let’s focus here. What do you want to do with your life?”

  He set down his paperback and smiled at her until she smiled back at him. “You,” he said, touching his thumb to her chin.

  “You can’t major in me.”

  He turned back to his book. “Then I’ll figure it out later.”

  She snatched the book from his hands. “Can we please just talk about this? Seriously?”

  He sighed and sat up next to her. “Okay. We’re talking.”

  “Okay.” She smiled, she was getting her way. “Now, think about it, what do you want to do for a living?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think you might want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you good at? And don’t say you don’t know.”

  He didn’t say anything at all. She stopped smiling. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll make a list.” She opened the notebook and wrote THINGS LINCOLN IS GOOD AT at the top of the page.