How I Came to Sparkle Again Read Online Free Page A

it all the time. It wasn’t just that she wanted the freedom to pull the cord when it got bad without having to go through an expensive divorce and possibly losing her house. She never wanted to be that dependent in the first place. And if she had to wait for marriage to have sex with integrity, she would never have sex again. That wasn’t going to work, either. There had to be a way to have a healthy sex life, integrity, and maybe even love, and remain a sovereign person.
    Lisa returned to her bed and contemplated her musky sheets but decided it was too big a task to change them in the middle of the night. Instead, she put on flannel pajamas to protect her clean body. But before she crawled back in, she sat for a moment on the edge of her bed and peeked out the window at the trailer next door, hoping to verify that all of her buddies had been asleep and hadn’t seen Cody leave.
    The Kennel was their name for this trailer and all its crazy additions built on. It got its name from its one-to-one human-to-dog ratio. Hans had a candle lit in his window. So did Tom, which was how they let one another and any other potential visitors know that they were “entertaining.”
    When she was in seventh grade and Tom was in eighth, his friend had approached her between classes and said, “Tom wants to know if you want to go with him.”
    “Go with him where?” she’d asked.
    “You know, just go with him. Be his girlfriend,” his friend had explained.
    Lisa had shrugged. “I guess that would be all right,” she’d said, somewhat indifferent.
    But later that night, she imagined him holding her hand, imagined slow dancing with him at the next school dance, and even kissed her pillow, imagining it was him. By the next morning, she was downright mad for him. She took extra time doing her hair. She picked out her clothes carefully. And, pleased with the fruits of her efforts, she went to school feeling excited. She had attracted an older boyfriend—a really cool older boyfriend.
    She casually walked to her locker, keeping her eye out for him, a little disappointed that he hadn’t waited for her somewhere nearby. She thought he would hold her hand as he walked her to homeroom. That, near as she could figure, was what going together involved. Finally she gave up, took her books for her first two classes and her folder out of her locker, and started walking. When she had almost reached her class, she saw Tom holding Deanna Smith’s hand. He even gave her a little peck on the lips before they parted. Deanna went into the classroom next to Lisa’s. Tom looked up and for a split second noticed Lisa. She saw fear and shame wash over him as he quickly walked in the other direction, avoiding her.
    He avoided her for the next three years, until he was a junior and she was a sophomore. He asked her to watch him in the basketball game and then go to the dance with him afterward. And she told him to suck it. Of course that, not what happened in junior high, was what Tom told people when asked how long he and Lisa had been friends. When Tom told the story, it was funny, and he always ended it by saying, “And that was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship, my only real friendship with a woman, because it was the only one I was powerless to screw up.” Lisa, however, didn’t tell either story. She pretended she didn’t remember.
    On Lisa’s nightstand sat two photographs in frames, facedown. One was of her parents, and the other was of her grandparents. She always turned them over when she had a guy over. Now she reached over and carefully set them back up. As she looked into her mother’s eyes, she wondered whether being a wife had been worth it overall. She wondered what her mother might have given up to take that path, what other dreams she might have had, wondered how she reconciled staying with a man who had been unfaithful, wondered whether he still was. And then she wondered how her mother might have fared from a life