American Girls(12)

“Well, if you want to keep the phone, I suggest you answer.”

“Do you know something I don’t know?”

“Of course I do. Now pick it up before it goes to voice mail.”

It’s terrible having an actress for a sister: traitor. Mental note made and filed.

When I answered the phone, it wasn’t my mother’s voice that I heard, but Lynette’s. I hadn’t talked to Lynette since I landed in LA, but it was her credit card that I used. I was guessing she took that personally. I would have.

“Hi, Anna,” she said. Awkward.

“Hey, Lynette.”

“I’ve gotta get the zombie off,” my sister said, popping a black cap off her front tooth, and before I could figure out a way to make her stay, she was in the other room.

“Well,” she said, “I can tell by talking to your mother that you have no idea what you’ve put us through on this end.” Then she stopped, inhaled (long and loud), exhaled (longer and louder), and started again. “Sorry, that’s not how I wanted to start this conversation. I’m glad that nothing happened to you. We both are. I want to say first, before we get into anything else, that I don’t think the way your mother handled things, changing your school and all, was the best idea.” She paused again, and I put the phone on speaker.

“When all of this happened,” she said, “I tried to put myself in your shoes. Your mother said that it didn’t go well when she and your father talked to you, and I realized that I never got to say anything myself, and most of the time, we’re so busy with Birch or work that we don’t hear what you have to say. I think you know what questions I might have, so I won’t patronize you.”

Then she stopped. It was my turn, but I didn’t want to talk. It didn’t have anything to do with her, and I knew that she was being nice. If I’d had any sense I would have Googled “How to sound sincere when apologizing,” but I hadn’t, and it was too late.

“Okay then,” she said. “I considered just letting the money go, but since you’re almost sixteen I think that it’s important that we take this seriously. I’m not going to lecture you about what you should and shouldn’t have done, but the money needs to be repaid. With slight interest.”

I wondered what she was doing on the other end of the line. Smiling? Waiting for me to tell her what an awesome person she was for wanting to turn me into a financially responsible adult? She could wait forever.

“Here is what we decided. You’re ahead on your studies, and it’s almost summer, so we’re going to let you stay with your sister until you’ve earned the money to pay me back and for a return ticket. You need to be back by the end of the summer. This isn’t a joke and it’s not a vacation. We checked and saw that there are jobs you can do if you have a permit, and your sister has been kind enough to say that she’ll help as much as she can with finding a job and transportation.”

I was going to get to stay in LA! I bit my cheek so that I wouldn’t sound as happy as I felt.

“Was this Mom’s idea?” I asked.

“It was mine,” Lynette said. “But that’s not all. You can test out of your science and math classes, but your history teacher wants you to do a final project. He’s going to be sending you an e-mail with details. Your teachers were all quite understanding. I hope you realize that you’ll be missing all the end-of-year activities, the chance to say good-bye to your friends.”

I was already thinking of the places that I would apply for jobs, maybe the candy store near the lot where my sister was filming. Or one of the ice cream stores with the trendy names and all the girls in line who looked like they kept that ice cream down for about 2.5 seconds. If Mom and Lynette thought missing some picnic at the aquarium was a punishment, they had read the wrong piece of Internet wisdom.

“And you can decide how you want to communicate with Birch.”

You wouldn’t think it was possible, but I’d really forgotten about not seeing Birch for three months. He was just learning to pull himself up on furniture when I left, and he could make baby sign language for “finished” and “more.” He even called me “Na Na” when he really wanted my keys or to go through my wallet. He would probably start walking this summer.

“Do you think he’ll remember me?”

Lynette let out a long sigh, like I was beyond hopeless, and I felt for a minute like I really was going to cry.

“Why didn’t Mom call today?”

“Your mom has her own struggles,” she said, but I didn’t see my mom struggling. Instead, I saw her walking down the frozen food aisle with Birch and Lynette, having a grand old time and trying to forget that she even had a daughter. All the while, Lynette was blathering on about how much my mother loved me, and how she wasn’t very good at expressing it, and how worried she had been. But I knew what Doon had seen—three people who did just fine on their own.

“It’s a complicated thing,” Lynette finally said, “the way mothers love their daughters. You don’t understand it now, and I know it’s not helpful when an adult says something like that, but one day you’ll see. The way you feel about Birch is the way your mother feels about you, only she’s had thirteen more years to know you and hope for you and love you.”