The Wangs vs. the World Read Online Free Page A

. . . we’re poor now.”
    Grace’s roommate stared at her.
    “It’s true, Rachel. We don’t have any money left. Nothing. I have to drop out of school, and my dad and stepmom are coming to pick me up, and we have to drive all the way to my sister’s house in some weird little country town in New York. Drive! I don’t know if we even have any stuff left. Don’t they take all of that when you’re bankrupt?”
    “You’re bankrupt? Like, completely?”
    “Well, my dad said he was, so I guess that means that I am, too.”
    “Um, are you okay?”
    “Do I seem okay?”
    “I guess so . . . I mean, no one’s dead, right?”
    “Except for my house. I was practically born in that house, and I didn’t even get to live there for long—I had to come live here. And now I’ll never even see it again.”
    Rachel had heard about Grace’s family’s house even though she’d never once been invited over for break. There were secret passageways, and modern art, and once Johnny Delahari had taken a weird combo of E and H (everyone at school called it the Canadian Special, but no one else was crazy enough to actually do it) and passed out in Grace’s stepmother’s walk-in closet for hours with a silk camisole wrapped around his face.
    “It smelled like lady pussy,” he’d told Rachel.
    “But you said it was a camisole,” she’d said. “That’s like a tank top.”
    “Okay, it smelled like lady boobs, ” he’d replied, grinning, and then tried to reach up her shirt.
    Now she wished that she had let him, because with Grace gone, he’d probably never come around to her room again.
    Grace wheeled a desk chair over to the closet and balanced on it, pulling her luggage down from the top shelf. She jumped off the chair, launching it backwards towards Rachel, who stopped it with her purple ballet flat.
    “Maybe you’ll get to have your own room,” said Grace.
    “I think your roommate has to kill herself before they let you room alone.”
    “Do you think it counts if it happens after they transfer?”
    “Shut up, Grace. You’re not going to kill yourself.”
    “You never know,” said Grace, pulling all her jeans off their hangers. Maybe they’d all commit suicide together. Or maybe her dad would drive them off a cliff. God, maybe she should just leave everything. If they were going to be poor, or dead, what was the point of having the same exact deconstructed rabbit-fur vest that Kate Moss was wearing in last month’s Elle ? On the other hand, maybe being poor could be kind of glamorous, with holey old T-shirts and guys who had to work as bartenders and whole meals of just french fries, in which case, maybe it would also be kind of glamorous to have her clothes. She’d be like a Romanov or something, deposed and in hiding from all the worlds that mattered.
    Her father had said, “Just the important things.” What was that supposed to mean? Grace looked at the pile of denim on the floor, then kicked it towards Rachel.
    “Here,” she said. “Take it. I’m sick of them all anyways.”
    “Seriously?”
    Grace didn’t answer, just kicked the pile again as she turned to pull down the cork bulletin board, layered with clippings, over her desk. She laid it across her bed and started picking out the tacks, cupping them in her left hand. As she worked, she thought about Parents’ Weekend last year, when she’d walked up to their room and seen Rachel lying on the bed, her head in her mother’s lap. The door to their room had been ajar, and Grace had stood there for a long moment, watching as Rachel’s mother smoothed her daughter’s hair away from her face and gazed down at her, half smiling, full of love. She’d never felt jealous of Rachel for even a second until that day.
    “Are you really bringing everything on that board? All those pictures and things?” asked Rachel.
    “Of course.”
    “Isn’t it kind of . . . kind of morbid ?”
    “What’s morbid about it?”
    “Well, they’re all