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either. It isn’t who we used to be. We are those no-elbows people now. And I don’t recognize us.
    Anyway, it’s only my elbows that have to be off the table. Darling Josh can put his entire face in the plate, and Joan will say, Josh, darling, look at how much you’re enjoying your food!
    So I was also getting a little sick of Josh doing everything right and me doing everything wrong and my dad not sticking up for me.
    Every evening, there was an argument. Dinner became such a nightmare that, if I were Joan, I would have welcomed the noise and distraction of TV. Things got so tense that Darling Josh stopped eating, and then , let me tell you, everyone got worried. I felt a little guilty.Honestly, I had nothing against Darling Josh. The poor kid had had to live with Joan since—well, even before—he was born.
    I couldn’t help thinking that they wouldn’t notice if I never ate. They wouldn’t notice if I choked and fell off my chair and turned blue. It made me want to be even more unpleasant to Joan, so another fight would start. She’d ask me a simple question—How was school? Did I like my teachers?—and I’d say, “Why do you care? I don’t know why you’re asking since you don’t really care.”
    So I can’t pretend that every argument was Joan’s fault. But she couldn’t let anything go. She’d whine on and on about how she was trying to be loving and caring, and I was heartless and ungrateful and had no reason to treat her that way. Which I didn’t, I guess.
    Anyway, I kept thinking that she was only pretending to be hurt. I had the feeling that everything she said was something she’d learned in therapy school or that she’d scripted, in her mind, for her imaginary TV show. If she was as anti-television as she claimed, why did she act—and dress!—like a character on a soap opera?
    All this time, Mom was still calling, asking me to live with her. And so one night, after a particularly wicked Joan-fight, I said yes. Okay, fine. I’ll come out at the start of the school year.
    I guess I wasn’t really thinking about the consequences of my decision. To tell the truth, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just so angry at Joan.
    Dad pretended to be against my going to Wisconsin, but I think he was secretly relieved, and he agreed that “a little cooling-off time”—I knew he’d gotten the expression from Joan—might make family life go more smoothly when I came back. He didn’t seem to think that the move was permanent. So maybe he knew more about Mom and Geoff than I did.
    Only Kevin and Chris and Shakes were sad. They were so destroyed, they actually told me they were sad, even though it was completely uncool for boys to say how sad they were.
    I knew they were the only ones who would really miss me. They warned me not to go. But they also knew how obnoxious Joan was. They were the ones I called and emailed and texted after family fights when I wassupposedly “cooling off” in my room.
    I think they kind of respected me for finding a way—a pretty extreme way—to let Joan know what a monster I thought she was. They thought I was brave and cool to move halfway across the country just to show the world that I preferred my real mother to the Wicked Stepmom.
    Eventually, Kevin and Chris got used to the idea of my leaving. Shakes was the only one who kept telling me not to go. It was August, and I was about to leave so that I could start the school year in Wisconsin. He and I were sitting on big boulders right in the middle of a stream that ran through the state park, which we could bike to. The sunlight dappled the rocks and danced across the water. I’d had to give Shakes a helping hand as we walked from stone to stone. I was afraid he’d miss a step and fall into the stream, but he never did. He made it seem like an adventure. Like we were explorers, Lewis and Clark. Or Peter Pan and Wendy.
    I remember Shakes saying, “You’re shooting yourself in the foot, dude. Trust me. It’s going