cross-legged on the couch, eating a bowl of Life cereal and flipping through a gossip magazine.
“It’s a chore wheel,” Laura said. “Well, more than a chore wheel, really. See, there’s a part here that also reminds us whose turn it is to buy toilet paper and toothpaste and dishwasher soap. So it’s fair.”
Fairness was something that Laura talked about often. When Cleo first started dating Max, Laura mentioned that she thought they should have a rule for how many times a boyfriend could sleep over in one week. “It’s not fair to the rest of us if there’s a stranger here all the time.”
“He’s not a stranger,” Cleo said. “He’s my boyfriend.”
“Still,” Laura said. “We have to be fair.”
And that was why Cleo ended up spending all of her time at Max’s, keeping clean underwear and pajamas in the Tupperware box that he had in his closet.
Now Laura stood in front of Cleo, clutching her cardboard wheel, and called Mary and Monica out of their rooms to show them her creation.
“See?” She pointed to the wheel. “For one week, it will be someone’s responsibility to clean the bathroom, and someone else will be responsible for the kitchen and so on. Then we’ll switch.”
“Fine,” Monica said. “Fine with me.” She sat on one of the futons in the room, hugging her knees to her chest and looking bored. She was pretty agreeable these days. “The bathroom’s disgusting anyway.”
Cleo tried to catch her eye, to look at her so that she could see that Monica really thought this was stupid too. She wanted them to roll their eyes at each other and then go into one of their rooms and laugh about how crazy and annoying Laura was being. But Monica kept her eyes down, picking imaginary fuzz and stray hairs off of her leggings.
“Wait,” Mary said. “What if, like, let’s just say it’s my week to clean the kitchen and then Cleo leaves her cereal bowl in the sink. Do I have to clean that?”
“I don’t leave my bowl in the sink,” Cleo said.
“Okay, sure,” Mary said. She snorted and shook her head.
“I don’t. I don’t leave my dishes in the sink.”
“Okay, guys,” Laura said. “I mean, the fair thing is for the kitchen person to just be there for the big stuff, like emptying the dishwasher and just making sure it’s clean. We’re all still responsible for our own mess.”
“Are we?” Mary asked. She looked at Cleo.
Cleo was still staring at Monica, willing her to look up and defend Cleo, or at least acknowledge that the girls were ganging up on her. But Monica only looked up to say, “So are we done?”
Cleo stood up and put her cereal bowl on the coffee table. Her hands were shaking and she knew she was about to cry. “Actually, I think a chore wheel sounds like a great idea,” she said. “Fantastic, actually.”
“Really?” Mary said.
“Yes, really. I’d also like to say that I won’t be living here next year. I’m moving out.”
“What?” Laura asked. “You’re just telling us now? What if we can’t find a new person? This is so unfair.”
“Everything’s unfair,” Cleo said. She knew she wasn’t making sense and she didn’t care.
When she told Max, he screamed, “Yes!” He hugged her around the waist and her feet came up off the ground. “This is going to be great,” he said. “You’ll see.”
THEY MOVED ALL OF CLEO’S STUFF into the apartment right away, and spent the summer working and going to barbecues. Cleo had gotten a marketing internship, working for the Little League World Series in Williamsport. Elizabeth had advised her to take an internship in New York, but Cleo remained firm.
“You don’t even want to go into marketing,” Elizabeth said. “And you don’t even like sports.”
“I like sports,” Cleo said. “And maybe I will want to go into marketing.”
“This is a mistake, Cleo. When you’re up against another candidate that did an internship at a well-known firm in New York, and then they look at you and see you wasted away your time as a ball girl in some stupid town, do you really think you’ll win?”
Cleo was determined to show Elizabeth that she was wrong. Also, she didn’t want to be away from Max, so an internship in New York was out of the question. She didn’t give Elizabeth too much information about her job. She wasn’t a ball girl, but she was mostly just typing out schedules and directions to send to the parents of the players, and