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Now that I have him here, with me, I am not sure what I want to say.

  “So,” I finally fumble, “you and, um, Ricky have gotten pretty tight, huh?”

  Instead of answering my question, Danny slams his hand against the brick wall right next to my head. It’s so close, so sudden, I can’t help myself: I jump.

  “Your hand!” I yell, reaching without even thinking about it for the hand that hit the wall. The first thing I think of is those beautiful hands. In less than two months basketball season will start. And even if I do not care if Danny plays or not, he cares. He loves basketball, and I know he needs his hands to play.

  But he ignores me, shakes my hand off.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, Angel?” he says, and it’s almost a shout.

  “What?” I say. “What are you talking about?”

  “Tim O’Mara,” he says. “That’s what I’m talking about. What were you thinking of?”

  But of course I can’t tell him what I was thinking of that night. I can’t tell him that I was so upset at the sight of him with Ricky D’Amico, I wanted so much for it to be me with him instead, that I stopped thinking at all.

  “What’s the big deal?” I say, getting angry myself. “It’s not like you and I ever had any kind of promise between us. It’s not like you don’t go out with any girl you want to every chance you get.”

  And it’s true. In addition to the so-called cool girls, like Ricky D’Amico, Danny has gone out with some real skanks over the years. And did I ever give him a hard time about any of that? Sometimes I see the double standards between guys and girls that my mom is always talking about, and it bugs the hell out of me.

  “That’s not the point,” Danny says.

  “Then what is?” I say.

  “Tim O’Mara.” He gets up close in my face, emphasizes each word. “Do you have any idea what kind of a jerk that guy is? I mean, come on, Angel. Go off with some guy at a party, fine. But Tim O’Mara? Do you have any idea the things that guy’s been saying about you?”

  I stand my ground. This time, I get right in his face. And all the while I’m thinking of him and Ricky D’Amico. “And why should you care?” I say. “Huh? Why should you care?”

  “You know something, Angel?” He takes a step back, puts his hands up in the air. “You’re right. Maybe I don’t care at all.”

  And then he turns and walks away from me.

  Week of September 17/Week 3

  “Your father and I have been worried about you,” my mother says.

  We have just been seated at a table at The Big Enchilada, which my parents know is my very favorite restaurant in the whole world.

  My father asks if I want the grande nachos with beef or with chicken for an appetizer. Even though the very idea of any kind of nachos makes me feel sick to my stomach right now, I say beef. I know my dad likes the beef nachos better.

  “It’s just that you don’t seem like yourself lately, honey,” my mother says.

  My mother, Helena Hansen, is still a very pretty woman. In pictures I’ve seen of her when she was younger, she was drop-dead gorgeous, with all of the long darkness of my hair but none of the frizz, a sparkle in her eye that marks her as the kind of girl anyone would want to know. My dad sometimes calls her “Hel on Wheels.”

  And my dad, Steve Hansen, is her match, even though he looks completely different from her. He is very tall, making both my mom and me look tiny when he walks between us, with hair that is still a sandy blond even though he is in his midforties, and blue eyes that are like chips from the sky. He still plays racquet-ball on his lunch hour twice a week, and my girlfriends, for as long as I can remember, have been known to develop crushes on him.

  It used to bother me, my parents looking the way they do—like a supercouple who took a wrong turn at Hollywood and wound up living here—because I felt sort of guilty, as though nature had played some kind of cruel trick on them. When you look at their wedding pictures, they look so perfect, you imagine they would have produced an equally perfect child. And while there is nothing incredibly awful about the way I look—I don’t have a second nose growing out of my forehead or hair coming out of my ears—I am so average by comparison. Still, they have never made me feel anything less than totally loved, have never shown any real disappointment in me in any way, and over the years I have grown to accept the differences between us. I think, If they do not mind the differences between us, then why should I?

  “What are you talking about, Mom?” I ask now. “Who do I seem like?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, her pretty brow furrowed in a frown. “Just not yourself.”

  “Ease up on her, Hel,” my dad says. “She’s under a lot of stress.” He studies the menu. “Do I want the shrimp fajitas or the chimichanga? Hmm …”

  “Stress?” my mom says. “What kind of stress? She’s only seventeen.” My mom turns to me. “Angel, are you under any stress?”

  “Well,” I say, twisting my napkin a bit, “I guess maybe I am under a bit of stress. You know, the SATs are coming up next month, and my meeting with my guidance counselor is next week …”

  “You’ll do fine,” my dad says. “Whatever you want to be in life, you’ll be.” He nods, as if saying yes to himself as he closes the menu. “Definitely the shrimp fajitas.”

  When our main courses arrive, I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. I lock the stall door behind myself just in time, lean over the toilet bowl just in time to puke my guts out, even though I haven’t really eaten anything yet. Afterward I rinse my mouth out with water from the sink and splash cold water on my face, which has started to sweat. This is the second time I’ve thrown up this week, and I’ve also started to pee more frequently. It’s as though every time I take two sips of something, I have to go.

  Back at the table my mother studies me closely.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “Fine now,” I say. “I think I just got a bad piece of meat.”

  Her dark eyes narrow.

  “You’re not bulimic, are you?” she asks.

  “Mom!”

  “Sorry.” She colors slightly. “Well,” she says, “a mother has to ask.”

  “She just had a bad piece of beef.” My dad gestures with his fork. “Happens all the time.”

  “We’re just worried,” my mom says, “because you never seem to go out anymore. Not that you ever went out every night, but you never seem to go out anymore. And I can’t remember the last time we saw Karin at the house. …”

  “It’s just stress, Mom,” I say, hoping to reassure her. “Everyone’s just worried about getting into the right colleges. I’m sure Karin’s just worried too.”

  When we get home, my father goes into the family room to turn on the TV. I know he will turn on Joe Scarborough and that soon he will be yelling at Joe Scarborough. My dad likes to yell at Joe Scarborough.

  My mother stands in the kitchen, making out a shopping list for the next day.

  “Eggs, whole wheat bread, ice cream.” She keeps writing, not looking up. “Angel,” she says, “do you need me to pick up some more tampons for you?”

  I read an article once in a girls’ magazine, about how girls who live in the same place—sisters, or roommates in college—find that they start getting their periods around the same time. It’s like the moon lumps them together in one slot. And this has proved true of me and my mother. She always knows that if she has just gotten her period, I will soon be getting mine as well.

  In the top drawer of the desk in my bedroom, I keep a small notebook that I have kept since my mother gave it to me when I was eleven years old, the first time I got my period. In the left-hand column there are dates listed under the heading “Arrived”; in the right-hand column there are dates under the heading “Due.” I have yet to write a new date down in the left-hand column, even though the last date in the “Due” column is some days passed now.

  “Sure,” I tell my mom. “I could use some more.”

  I figure that
if my period doesn’t come in the next day or two, I will still take tampons every few hours from the box under the bathroom sink, I will wrap those tampons in toilet paper, so that my mom won’t worry that something is wrong, and I will drop them in the trash as if nothing has changed.

  Even though, as I think that, I realize that everything has changed. My period hasn’t arrived yet, my breasts have felt tender lately, my body is changing—there is a mild aching, a fullness in my lower abdomen, sort of as though my period is about to come, except it hasn’t.

  Whenever I think of those changes, my mind starts to scream in panic. So I don’t let myself think of them.

  Instead I tell myself these changes don’t necessarily mean anything. I tell myself these changes, not to mention my missed period, must all be due to stress.

  Week of September 24/Week 4

  And of course I am living under a lot of stress. I am a high school senior trying to get into the college of my choice, trying to make the right decisions about what I want to do with the rest of my life.

  “It’ll be fine,” Karin whispers as we stand in the hallway outside the open door of Robin Keating, my guidance counselor.

  Karin knows everything about me, so she knows that I always get nervous about talking to authority figures, even if I’m not going to see them because I’m in trouble about something.

  “You’ll do great,” Karin whispers. “Knock him dead.”

  Knocking him dead seems like it would be overkill, so instead I simply knock softly on the open door on which there is a poster that makes no sense to me: WASTE IS A TERRIBLE THING TO MIND.

  “Enter!” booms the voice of Robin Keating.

  Robin Keating is one of those breeds of schoolteachers or administrators who always wears an old tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and insists students call him by his first name. He is also kind of cute, in an older-guy sort of way, with thick brown hair that could use the services of a comb, and greenish brown eyes twinkling behind steel-rimmed glasses. There have been rumors for years that there is something more than counseling going on between Robin and Megha Parks, the most stunning girl in our class, but I don’t buy it. I think sometimes people just like to make up nasty stories where none exist. Robin is too smart to get caught up in the kind of thing that could cost him his job, although I don’t suppose I’d be surprised if they got together after we graduate.

  “Ms. Hansen,” he says, indicating the grey metal-backed chair beside his desk.

  Even though Robin insists the students call him by his first name, he always addresses us as Mr. or Ms. It is a peculiar quirk that sets people off balance, as though he wants you to treat him like an equal, while at the same time he will show you the respect you deserve—if not now, then the respect you will hopefully deserve someday.

  I sit in the chair, books clasped close against my chest.

  “So,” he says, taking off his glasses and chewing on the arm, “it’s finally that time, huh?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Time to plot out your future, of course. Have you given any thought to where you want to go to college?”

  I take a big breath. “Yale,” I say.

  He eyes my transcripts, which he has out in an open folder in front of him.

  “I see,” he says. “But are you sure that’s … practical?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s not like your grades are bad. They’re very good, in fact. But they’re not exactly what you’d call stellar. Where else are you going to apply?”

  In the instant he asks that question, I make a decision that I didn’t know I was going to make.

  “Nowhere else,” I say. “Just Yale.”

  He laughs softly. But if there’s a joke here, I don’t see it. “Not Harvard?” he says. “Not Princeton, too?”

  “Just Yale,” I say again.

  “How come not the others?” he asks. “If you’re going to shoot for the moon …”

  I shrug. “I like Connecticut,” I say.

  “Fine,” he says. “So. Connecticut. How about applying to some of the other schools in Connecticut? Maybe some of the other ones that won’t be quite so … difficult to get into?”

  “I don’t want to do that,” I say. “I want to go to Yale.”

  “Just Yale?”

  “Just Yale.”

  “And what do you plan on studying at just Yale? That is, if you were lucky enough to get in there?”

  I feel the nerves starting in my stomach again, because I am about to admit something out loud that I have never admitted to anybody, not even Karin. Even my parents don’t know yet: If they did, they would probably try to talk me out of it, because it isn’t practical and they both have very practical jobs, my father working as a lawyer, while my mother runs an accounting practice from our home. Just like with how different I look from them, this makes me wonder at times if I am really their daughter at all, or if I were left with them by gypsies, the choices we make are so different.

  “I want to be a writer,” I say. “I want to write novels.”

  “An admirable ambition,” he concedes. “You do realize, though, that it’s not like wanting to do other things, like being an accountant or a doctor, say. It’s not the kind of thing where you can just say, ‘I want to do this,’ and then, if you get good grades in school, there’s a definite job waiting for you.”

  I haven’t really thought about it this way before, but of course what he says makes total sense, is about as true as anything anyone in authority has ever said to me. Still …

  “It’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do,” I say, and that’s true too.

  “And it has to be at Yale?” he says.

  I won’t answer that question again. Instead I ask, “What do you think I’d need to do to get in?”

  He glances at my transcripts again, laughs softly again.

  “Well,” he says, “a twenty-four hundred on your SATs would help, although I can’t imagine anyone getting a perfect score. But I still think you should apply to other places too, just in case.”

  I do not tell him what I know to be true: Every time I have truly wanted something in life—with the exception of Danny Stanton, of course—I have always been able to get it somehow. In fact, there have been times when I’ve wondered if I must really want Danny so much. After all, if I did, surely with enough determination I would be able to get him. I think this because of my history of getting what I really want. I wanted Karin to be my best friend more than anything, and I got her. And here is why I don’t say any of this aloud to Robin Keating: It is because, with no other reason for it available, I have attributed my luck at getting what I really want to my name. I think my name is somehow lucky. It is the only explanation I see.

  I suck it up. “No fallback position,” I say. “Looks like I’ll just have to get that twenty-four hundred on the SATs.”

  october

  Week of October 1 /Week 5

  IT IS THE NIGHT OF THE ANNUAL SADIE HAWKINS DANCE.

  Each year girls in our school ask guys to be their dates. Some ask guys they are already going out with, knowing they’ll say yes. Some ask guys they would like to be going out with, hoping they’ll say yes. Sometimes they get lucky, sometimes they don’t. Each year Karin and I go as each other’s dates. I prefer to go with her because the only guy I have ever wanted to ask is Danny Stanton, and he always seems to be going out with someone else around the time of the dance, some other girl who asks him first. Karin always prefers to go with me, because for as long as I have been nursing my feelings for Danny, she has been nursing a lesser crush on Danny’s best friend, Todd Ferris, but she thinks it’s dorky for girls to ask guys out. Todd is not quite as tall as Danny, not quite as athletic-looking, but most girls find his shaggy blond hair and hazel eyes cute.

  “What would I do if someone said no?” she always says. So we have always gone together, wearing the hickiest clothes we can find to fit in with the Sadie Hawkins theme—cutoff
jeans shorts, rope belts, button-down checked shirts tied at the waist, straw hats.

  And this year is no different.

  Only maybe it is a little different, because this year it is a good thing that my checked shirt is so loose, since my breasts, still tender and now swollen too, have started to not quite fit in my bras. It is also different because as soon as we walk into the darkened cafeteria—where a band of our schoolmates who call themselves The Wrong Equation are playing a lousy version of an Eminem song, loud—Karin bumps right into Todd. He is hanging out at the ticket table, waiting on Danny, who is waiting on Ricky D’Amico, who is taking tickets and stamping hands. Ricky, who has managed to edge out Sherry Bixby as head cheerleader of the varsity squad, is on all the dance committees, and she will be taking tickets at that table for at least an hour, until her shift ends. Then she will be free to do whatever she likes with Danny.

  “Nice outfits,” Ricky says to us as she stamps our hands, her words as close as a person can come to a verbal sneer. “Who are you two supposed to be, Paris and Nicole on a bad day?”

  When Danny sees I’m one of the two people she says this to, he looks embarrassed, looks away from me right away. I am not sure if he’s embarrassed about what she said or embarrassed to know me.

  And this is hard, because whatever else we have ever been, Danny Stanton and I have always been friends. Sometimes it has seemed as though we were best friends, a thing I would never tell Karin, of course.

  But then Karin does a thing that surprises me, maybe surprising herself most of all. Even though she said she’d never ask Todd to be her date at the dance, she now does one of the boldest things I’ve ever seen her do: She asks him to dance.

  “I know the band kind of sucks,” she says, gesturing toward the dance floor, where the usual lunch tables and benches have been pushed out of the way, propped up against the walls, “but do you want to?”

  And Todd surprises everyone, maybe himself most of all, by saying yes.

  “Nice outfit,” he says to her, taking her hand, only he says it in a way that is totally different from the way Ricky said it. When Todd says it, it sounds like he really means it, and as he looks at Karin, it looks as if he is seeing her for the first time.