to me with a hopeful smile. “You should come with me.”
I tap a thoughtful finger on my chin, “Let’s see, which would be a more excruciating way to spend the evening? A football game, a party at Willow Harper’s . . . or gouging out my eyes with a rusty safety pin? Sorry. Not gonna happen.”
Tori knows Willow Harper is not the kind of girl I would choose to hang out with and, in truth, it’s not like Willow would give up an afternoon of mani-pedis and making fun of freshmen with acne to spend time with me, either. But Tori doesn’t let up.
“Come on, George,” she says, then adds more softly with a glance at our mother, “you agreed last night that you needed to meet more people.”
“You do need to meet some people,” my mother insists as if this were the first time the idea had ever occurred to her—or that she had ever harassed me about it. “Why don’t you go with your big sister to this party? It’s a perfect opportunity. And you can go shopping before it if you want to pick out something new!”
Cassie drops her fork at the sound of a bribe more appropriate to her, but decides to take the moral high ground.
“I don’t care,” she announces with a swish of her ponytail. “I’m going over to Jenny’s to get ready for the game. So, Mom, my Minutemen socks have to be clean. The home-game ones.”
Mom nods, ready to do anything in the service of socially acceptable teen activities and attractive footwear.
“Do I have to go to Willow Harper’s on Friday?” I ask and I look over at Dad, but he is looking out the window and thinking about something else.
“I think you should,” Mom says. “We had an agreement.” I must have looked potentially suicidal at this because Mom instantly switches to a more gentle tactic. “You’ll have a good time, you’ll see. The Harpers’ house is lovely,” she says, as if the architecture of the party venue is my main concern and not the fact that Willow Harper slices and dices girls who dress like me with the efficiency and showmanship of a hibachi chef.
Cassie snickers. “And you should buy something new. If you show up in a shirt like that, they’ll think you’re with the cleaning service.”
I look down at my t-shirt, which I really love because Allison, my best friend from Colorado, hand painted a little purple fox on it for me. The fact that the Willow Harpers of the world can’t see its fabulousness only makes it more special to me.
“I don’t think Willow shops the Sears Hoochie Mama collection, either,” I say with a pointed look at her striped halter top that covers just enough to have kept her from getting sent home on her first day of high school.
She just sniffs and gives me a superior look with her grey goggle eyes because she knows I’m going to spend the next few days figuring out a way to survive the soiree at Willow Harper’s.
After dinner, it’s my turn to unload the dishwasher. Mom comes into the kitchen and watches me for a few seconds, then decides to help by scraping the plates into the garbage can since the disposal is broken again.
“You didn’t eat enough, again,” she says.
“I’m fine.”
Scrape, scrape.
“I wish you’d been nicer to the Endicott boy.”
I hold my breath for a second and resume stacking plates onto the bottom rack.
“I wish the Endicott boy had been nicer to me,” I say.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
I look at my mom bent over the metal trashcan. When I was a lot younger, she would joke that when people saw us out at the playground or going for a walk, no one would believe I was her daughter, especially if my sisters were there with us. Back then, she meant because they’re all blonde with such pale-colored eyes. But when she says it now, she’s talking about more than my appearance, even if Dad still jokes that I’m the only black (haired) sheep in the family now that he’s gone grey. It makes me kind of sad. I feel like we get stuck in our own labeled boxes at an early age and spend the rest of our lives trying to crawl out of them. Tori’s the sweet one, Leigh’s the serious one, Cassie’s the boy-magnet, and me . . .? I’m the funny one. The smartass.
The black sheep.
“Look, Mom . . . I know Michael Endicott is