theaters—but even though Emma was with us, she wasn’t really with us. Even when we were in first grade and Emma was in fourth, she seemed to be orbiting around her family instead of living inside of it.
Did she have friends when she was younger? I try to think of who Emma sat on the bus with when we all went to Sewall Elementary, but every picture my mind calls up is of Emma with her nose in a book—on the bus, on the playground, and walking down the hall. It wasn’t until she was in middle school that Emma started to be known for her interesting friendships, always with older kids, the kind your parents start warning you away from as early as third grade.
Sometimes when Emma was out doing who knows what with who knows who, Sarah and I would sneak into her room. It was surprisingly neat, with four tall bookshelves filled with books, and a desk free of clutter. “It’s how she gets away with so much,” Sarah told me once. “In our house, neatness counts for a lot.”
In middle school Emma kept a journal, which we found shoved underneath her pillow and of course read. We were in fifth grade and Emma was in eighth, and we figured Emma’s journal would be full of good stuff—stuff about boys and bras and periods (our obsessions at the time). Instead she’d written page after page about God. Did God exist? If God didn’t exist, what set the universe in motion? If God was good, why was there so much suffering? If only one religion was the right religion, wouldn’t God have done a better job of making that clear to everyone?
In other words, Emma’s diary was a huge disappointment. But later, when she stopped just being Emma, Sarah’s big sister, and became Emma Lyman, Famous Wild Child, I thought about all that stuff she’d written about when she was thirteen. Did she give up on God, or just the opposite? The minute Emma got her own car, she’d put a bumper sticker on it that read live large, and it occurred to me that if there is a God, that’s something He might want us to do.
So Emma lives large, but she lives in Emma World. Now, finally, maybe she’s going to take a step into Sarah and Janie World. It actually makes me sort of nervous, but I don’t mention this to Sarah, who has finally wound down about the project and has started on our new friendship with Monster Monroe.
“He’s cute, don’t you think? Not my type, but I could see how he could be somebody else’s type. I can’t believe he’s going to teach me how to play bass. I wonder what his house is like.”
Next Monday, after school, Monster is taking us to what he referred to as his “digs,” which are on the other side of Manneville, where he’s going to lend Sarah an old bass of his and teach her how to play. No matter how hard I try, I can’t envision the house that Monster Monroe might live in. He’s just too big for a house. An airplane hangar seems more the right size.
Avery appears at my doorway. “Are you done with my shirt?” she whispers, leaning into my room, but not actually crossing the threshold.
“Almost,” I whisper back, and Avery gives me a thumbs-up and scoots back down the hallway. I wonder if she looks up to me the way Sarah looks up to Emma. I don’t think so, at least not yet, and definitely not with my new bad attitude. Right now my mom is the big star in Avery’s world.
My glance falls on the pink T-shirt on my desk, its various scraps held together by pins. Yeah, my mom’s the center attraction now, but one more T-shirt disaster like this one, and her big-star days might be over.
Chapter Eleven
A Night in the Suburbs
I sneak a glance at my mom’s expression as she steers the car onto Victoria Lane. Is there any sign of regret? A flicker of nostalgia for our days in suburbia, where mowing the lawn only takes twenty minutes? Does she miss her old neighbors, not just the Lymans, but the Bowermans and the Lees, the Pauls and the Grahams? Now her only neighbors are chickens and goats, and I can vouch for the fact that they never throw block parties.
But my mom seems lost in thought, which probably means she’s mentally composing her next