Love at 11 - By Mari Mancusi Page 0,10

begged silently. Or, if you don’t, please don’t call me on it.

“Oh. Sorry.” He smiled sheepishly. “My fiancée Jennifer always tells me I’m perpetually unhip.”

Ew, there he went, spouting the F-word like it was no big deal. I couldn’t stand it.

“Listen,” he added, rising from his chair. “Why don’t you research the lipstick thing and in the meantime, I’ll go around the station and get some people to let me videotape them putting on makeup. That way you’ll have some video for the piece in case it pans out.”

I wanted to hug him. Or fall over in shock. I’d never, ever had a photographer volunteer to do something without me having to beg and plead and listen to him whine. This guy was unbelievable.

And during the eight hours of the workday, he was all mine!

I arrived at my parents’ house at about quarter to seven. They lived in an adorable Craftsman-type house in Normal Heights, one of the older neighborhoods in San Diego. The houses there were small and quaint. And now, with the backlash against the extravagant monster houses with no yards being thrown up in urban sprawl subdivisions all over the county, the old-school houses were extremely desirable and super pricey. My parents’ house had tripled in value since they bought it when I was a kid.

The door opened at my knock and my little sister Lulu answered it with typical Lulu exuberance. At sixteen years old, she was a bundle of unrepressed energy and while I loved her, sometimes she was a bit on the exhausting side. A total wild child, every time I saw her she had different-colored hair. It was currently bleach blond and shorn to a boyish cut. She wore baggy raver pants and a tiny, belly-baring pink tank top that declared one could evidently get “Lucky in Kentucky.”

“Hi, Maddy!” she cried, throwing her arms around me and almost knocking me over with a huge hug. “How are you? What are you doing here?”

“Um, Dad instant messaged me. Said he needed to see me.”

“He did?” Lulu raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know he knew how to IM.”

“Yeah. Neither did I.” I shrugged.

“Well, come on in.” Lulu gestured widely. “We’ve just finished dinner.”

Uh, that was weird, since the whole reason I was supposed to be coming here was for dinner. What the hell was going on?

We walked into the foyer and then headed for the living room. My parents were seated in the same seats they always sat in after dinner since I was a toddler. Dad in his ultra-comfy, well-worn leather armchair and my mom knitting on the far end of the couch.

Except, my mother wasn’t knitting. And as I sat down next to her, I realized she looked like she’d been crying. A swelling of fear fluttered through my stomach. I thought this wasn’t supposed to be bad news.

“Hi, Maddy,” my father said with a wide smile. He didn’t seem upset at all. “Thanks for coming over. How was work?”

“So, what’s your news?” I wanted to cut to the chase at this point; the suspense was killing me.

Please be that you won the lottery, I begged silently, suddenly realizing the chances of that being the news was slim to none. I sat down on the sofa and held my breath, waiting for the inevitable bomb to drop.

“Lulu, sit down,” my father reprimanded the bouncy sixteen-year-old. With a huff, Lulu complied, squashing herself between Mom and me.

“Your mother and I have some news,” my father said, leaning forward in his armchair. Even in his fifties, he was a good-looking man with a sprinkling of distinguished salt-and-pepper hair and a trim waistline. “We’ve decided to live apart.”

“What? What?” Lulu screeched, jumping up from the couch, hands on her low-rise hips. “You can’t get a divorce! That’s, like, so not fair!”

My heart fell into my stomach. For a moment I thought I would be physically ill. My parents were splitting up. It seemed so wrong somehow. I mean, I knew almost everyone’s parents got divorced. But usually it was when they were kids. No one’s parents lived happily ever after for thirty years and then decided one day it wasn’t working out and they were moving on. It just didn’t happen like that. There was a point where you were safe. You could relax and know that your family was one of the rare ones that beat the odds.

And now they were going along with the rest of the crazy world and getting divorced.

“Why are you