Story of a Girl Read Online Free

some laundry while you’re at the doctor,” I said. April’s whining turned to crying and she squirmed around in my arms.
    Stacy took April and sat down to nurse. “I don’t know why I even bother getting dressed. I always look like hell anyway.” She winced and looked down at April feeding. “God, kid. You don’t have to suck
that
hard.”
    The funny thing about babies is that you know they’re harmless and innocent, but sometimes they seem to be purposely making things difficult. Like April; she could be so sweet, but when she wasn’t and all she did was fuss and cry, you wished you could ask her why and get her to stop. If
I
felt like that with April sometimes, it must have been a hundred times worse for Stacy. Or maybe not. Maybe if you were the mom it all seemed okay. But there were days I would look at Stacy and see how tired she was and wonder if she could really do it. Which was another reason for my plan to save up and move us all in together in our own place. Stacy and Darren and April, they needed me. I’d be like Stacy’s right arm, Aunt Deanna, always there to take over when things got too hard, even for tough Stacy.
    But first, I needed money. “I’ll be around later if you need any help,” I said, squeezing April’s fat little leg before I headed out.
    Lee sat on the wooden bench outside the donut shop, wearing Jason’s black Metallica hoodie, leaning with her chin in her hands the way she always did. That feeling came again, like when I’d see them in the hall together at school. The hoodie meant there had been a moment: Lee and Jason alone, the sweatshirt changing hands. Did he give it to her? Did she ask him for it? Did she pretend to be cold, wrapping her arms around herself, so that he’d offer it?
    She stood up and gave me a hug and I felt like crap for thinking that stuff, for being anything other than happy that they were happy. Lee is a hugger, and you can’t really stay mad at a hugger. I’d never had a friend like that before. Jason isn’t the type to hug anyone he isn’t dating; neither is Darren. My mom is hardly ever home because of working so much and I don’t think Dad has touched me since puberty, even before Tommy. Lee’s mom, who I see, like, twice a month, hugs me more than anyone in my own family.
    I pulled my jacket tighter around me. “I bet you at least saw the sun in Santa Barbara,” I said. “It’s like fifty degrees out here.”
    “Ah, summer in Pathetica!”
    You’d think the fact that Pacifica is only about twenty miles away from San Francisco would make it cool or at least interesting, but all it is is foggy and lame and ten years behind the city in clothes and music. If you didn’t get out after Terra Nova, you’d probably be stuck here your whole life, pumping gas or working at the video store or bagging at Safeway, until you’d forget there was this whole other world just fifteen minutes away.
    We went in and got hit with that wave of bakery warmth and sugar and vanilla that’s so incredibly good for about twenty seconds, after which point it starts to make you sick. The place was always empty except for one table in the middle, surrounded by old men in canvas hats and pastel jackets, complaining about everything, and I mean
everything,
from how no one knew how to talk about politics anymore without starting a war, to how women didn’t know how to act like women anymore, to how no one knew how to make a decent donut anymore. Apparently the world was perfect in 1958.
    We ate on the bench outside so the old guys wouldn’t hear every word we said and start complaining about how young people today don’t know how to use the English language.
    “That donut was, like, two cents in the good old days,” I said in a cranky old man voice.
    “I have no complaint with my twenty-first–century donut,” Lee said.
    Caitlin Spinelli pulled into the mall parking lot and drove by us in her new Jetta, with the window down. “Must be nice,” I said,