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Mom had cooked chicken pot pie, which was one of my favorite dishes. I scarfed mine down as soon as I was served. By the time I looked up, Geoff was prodding his food with his fork and looking as if he’d found a dead rat baked inside the flaky crust.

“Jeanette, do you know how salty this is? Have you tasted it? Are you trying to kill me? Are you trying to send my blood pressure skyrocketing through the roof?”
He threw his bowl like a discus, skimming it across the tabletop. It clattered to the floor. I watched flecks of chicken and potato and cream hit the walls, like blood splatter in a horror film. Then Geoff stalked out of the room.

“I guess his blood pressure’s
already
through the roof,” I said.

“Oh, dear,” was all my mother said.

“Excuse
me
?” I said to Mom. “I thought it was delicious.”

But Mom only shrugged and got a sponge and started cleaning the walls and the floor.

After that, Geoff’s tantrums got worse. He was never violent or threatening. Nor was his fury always directed at us, exactly. Once, when he couldn’t find a piece of paper he needed to do his income taxes, he hit himself in the head so hard that the college honor society ring he always wore broke the skin and blood trickled down his forehead.

Once, when his tie came back from the cleaners with a stain still on it, he got a pair of scissors and cut out the dirty spot and told my mom to take it back to
the cleaners so they would know what he was talking about. Once, for some reason I can’t remember, he had to pick me up from school. A teacher had kept us a few minutes late, and when I finally ran out the door and got into Geoff’s car, he screeched away from the curb so fast that the whole school turned to look.

At moments like that, I was glad that no one in the school knew me. Otherwise, it might have bothered me that I hadn’t made one single friend. Nobody was mean to me, nor did they try to make me feel like a freak or an outsider. They just didn’t seem all that interested in me, in where I’d come from, or who I was. They all seemed to feel as if getting to know me would be too much work. They’d all known each other practically since birth. They had all the friends they needed already, so why should they bother making a new one? Or maybe they sensed something I didn’t know myself. I wasn’t going to stick around all that long, so why should they go to the trouble?

Also, I kept thinking that because I’d become friends with Kevin and Chris and Shakes so early and stayed friends with them for so long, I’d never learned—I’d
never had to learn—how to actually
make
friends. It was as if I’d missed school on the day they taught that lesson. Maybe there was some trick to it, something you could do to make other kids want to hang out with you. I didn’t get it, and I
totally
didn’t get how to make friends with other girls—which, I knew, was what I should have been doing. Half the time, I didn’t understand what the girls in my new school were talking about, or why they cared about the things—clothes and makeup and movie-star gossip—that seemed important to them. I didn’t know how to start a conversation with them, and after a while I stopped trying. I knew my mom was sort of worried about it, but she had enough to deal with, coping with Geoff’s temper tantrums.

I could handle the loneliness. But the bad news was, I had no one to tell about what a baby Geoff was. I emailed and texted Shakes and Kevin and Chris. But it wasn’t the same as being in the same town and seeing them every day. Sometimes it took them—even Shakes—a few days to answer, by which point I’d forgotten which one of Geoff’s fits I’d been complaining about. At least Geoff had no interest in acting like a father. He never said,
“Call me Dad.” I don’t think he had any desire for me to think of him as my dad.
He
was the baby that Mom had signed on to take care of. Which made
me
the ugly stepsister, the rival for Mom’s affections.

Geoff’s impersonation of a grown-up reminded me of Joan’s Brady Bunch Mom act, her
Doctor Joan Marbury, Therapist
miniseries. The difference was that Geoff occasionally stopped acting and let his true self creep out. So that was another thing that Mom and Dad had in common. Both of them seemed to have a weakness for bad actors.

Meanwhile, Dad and Joan seemed to have some kind of weird intuition for when Geoff had just had a major tantrum. That’s usually when the phone would ring, and it would be Dad or Joan, or both of them on separate extensions, calling to see how I was doing.

“Fine,” I’d say.

Then Joan would say she heard something in my voice that she didn’t like. If my dad wasn’t already on the phone, she’d put him on. He was supposed to tell me: If I wanted to come back and stay with them, I had only to say the word.

The
word
? What she really meant was
words
. I knew
which words Joan wanted to hear.
Joan, I mean Mom, I’ve finally come to my senses and realized you’re a better mother than my real mom ever was
. Joan was competing with my mother just like Dad was competing with Geoff. I couldn’t help wondering: What were they competing
for
?

Another thing I wondered was: What if I’d “said the word” right before Christmas, when they and Josh Darling went to the Bahamas for the holidays, and never told me, let alone asked if I wanted to come along? What word, exactly, would I have said.
Help
? Would that have done it? I guess I must not have said the right word, because I didn’t go back to Pennsylvania even once during that whole school year I lived in Wisconsin. Dad and Joan always had something important to do during my school vacations.

One night, after dinner, Mom had gone to a board meeting at the library, where she worked. I was watching
Top Chef
.

Geoff came home from teaching. He walked into the living room and sat down in the chair. He kept shooting me filthy looks because I guessed he thought I was supposed to jump up and offer him the couch. And I probably should have, but I didn’t want to.

Geoff said, “Hand me the remote, will you, Maisie?” I very politely asked Geoff if he’d mind waiting until the end of the show, so I could see who won. I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I’d learned my lesson from being around Joan. I’d never get satisfaction.

Geoff said, “Actually, I
do
mind.” Then he did a surprising thing, by which I mean a thing that surprised even me, and by then I was so used to Geoff, I was rarely surprised by the childish stuff he did.

Geoff stood up and came over to me and grabbed the remote from my hand. I was so shocked, I held on to it, so that for while we were sort of wrestling for the remote, like kids. Except that Geoff wasn’t a kid. He was stronger. He got it. He won.

I stood up and watched him victoriously—triumphantly!—switch from channel to channel. Click click. Are you getting this, Maisie?

He said, very fake-calm, as if we hadn’t just practically had a physical fight, “We pay a fortune for a hundred channels of cable, and there’s nothing to watch. We should probably cancel.”

When Mom came home, I followed her to her room and told her that I wanted to move back and live with
Dad. I was careful to say
Dad
and not
Dad and Joan
. The school year was just ending, so it was pretty convenient. Mom cried, and made a big show of being sad and hurt, and I guess she really was. But in the end, she did the same thing that Dad did. They both seemed relieved that I was giving them a break in which to try and make their repulsive, brainwashed second marriages work out.

That was how I moved back home in June, as soon as school in Wisconsin ended. Or maybe I should say: that was when I moved back to Pennsylvania, the place that I
thought
of as home—that is, when I’d been in Wisconsin.

The first thing I did after I said hello to Dad and Joan and Josh Darling was go to my room and call Shakes and arrange for him and me and Kevin and Chris to get together. It made me feel better to be talking to Shakes as I looked around my old room and saw how much Joan had “straightened up.” Shakes was so glad to hear from me, it took him a few moments to be able to say my name. I wondered if his physical problems had gotten worse in my absence.

It was already evening, and Joan and Dad were making a big production about how tired they were
from the travel and stress of picking me up at the airport. And how much I was supposed to appreciate the glorious reunion dinner and us all being together again.

Shakes and I arranged to meet the next day. He’d call Chris and Kevin. If the weather was good, we’d bike to the park. If not, we would meet at Shakes’s house and figure out what to do.

In my mind, I was already there. I was polite and pleasant and kept my elbows off the table. I heard, as if from a great distance, Joan yakking on and on about the success she was having with a woman who’d been bingeing and purging for years. I could tell myself that Joan talking about some puking woman while she expected us to eat was funny, because, in my mind, I’d already gone to a place where I would see my friends, and things
would
be funny, for real.

I couldn’t wait for the next day. I was so happy and eager to see them. The good feeling lasted for one night.

Because the next day was when I found out how different everything was and how quickly people can change.

I woke up to a chilly, drumming rain. No chance of that group bike ride to the park.

Joan dropped me off at Shakes’s house on her way to the office, where she was going to snoop around in the private souls of the poor, miserable losers who paid her to hear them spill out all their secrets.

Of course, this was before everyone decided that it would be good for me to see Doctor Atwood. This was
before I
became
one of those people, paying someone who didn’t want to listen to what I didn’t want to say.

My real mom had been a close friend of Marian, Shakes’s mom. My mother had no problem babysitting a kid with a mild disability. Later, Shakes told me that, all during that time, he was having seizures. But he never had them around us, so I never saw them. I guess his mom must have warned my mom, and my mom must have said she could handle it just so long as Marian told her what to do if something happened.

I could hardly imagine what Joan would do if a kid had a seizure. Probably scream and call 911 and flirt with the ambulance guys. Whereas Geoff would just wait and do nothing and then accuse the poor kid of faking a seizure just to divert attention from the person everyone should have been paying attention to—namely, Geoff.

Marian knew she could leave Shakes with Mom. So when we were little, Shakes and I got to hang out even more than we otherwise would have.

The only problem with Marian was that you had to stay on your toes, because you couldn’t call Shakes
Shakes
around her. She’d say, “His name is Edward.” Otherwise,
I’d always liked her. But I liked her even more when Joan dropped me off at her house, and Marian couldn’t have been chillier to her.

Marian said, “Doctor Marbury,” and barely opened the front door. I wondered if that was because she was still loyal to Mom, or if Shakes had told her what I’d said about Joan always saying things like, “This dress would look so pretty on you, Maisie, if you shed that extra poundage.”

Joan had never tried to make friends with Marian. Shakes’s house was my territory. It belonged to him and me, and Chris, and Kevin. Joan had never shadowed it with her evil presence.

Marian pulled me inside the house and shut the door even as Joan was blabbing on about what time she would pick me up. Then Marian squeezed me until I pretend-coughed, and we laughed.

She held me at arm’s length and said, “Oh, Maisie! We missed you so much! It feels like you’ve been gone for a hundred years. My God, look at you. Look how you’ve grown. You kids are getting so big. Pretty soon, you won’t be kids anymore.”

I wished she hadn’t said that.

“We’re really still kids,” I said.

“I don’t think so, honey.” Marian laughed and lightly kissed the top of my head, and my hands flew instinctively to the front of my T-shirt where they covered the breasts I’d grown since the last time I’d been here.

That was another thing—the main thing, really—that had happened in Wisconsin.

I’d gotten a whole new body during my year away. I’d grown breasts and a weird curvy ass. I’d gotten my period, too. I felt like a spectator watching my body do whatever it wanted, without my knowledge or permission. I felt like someone who’d been tricked into thinking she had one body, and now—surprise!—she had another.

I was glad that I was living with my mom when all these changes happened. It was almost as if my body had been thoughtful enough to wait until my real mother was around. Mom was cool. She kept telling me I looked great. She said, “Feel free to ask me anything, Maisie.” I knew she meant “anything about sex.” But if she couldn’t even say
sex
, how could I feel free to ask her about it?

Anyway, there was nothing I wanted to ask. It would have been hell with Joan, listening to her lecture me about the mystery and beauty of being a woman.

Since I didn’t have any friends or anyone I could talk to, I spent my time in Wisconsin secretly checking out other girls at school to see if the same thing was happening to them. Which it was—but not as much. They were growing these neat little buds up around their shoulders.

Me, on the other hand…I looked in the mirror and turned around, and by the time I turned back, I had these gigantic mega-boobs, the kind movie stars pay fortunes for. I’d gotten them practically overnight, for free. But I didn’t want them. Where had they come from, anyway? My mom was small-breasted, so it must have been some rogue gene from a busty great-great-grandmother, lost in the reaches of time.

That was why I’d sort of liked being invisible in my Wisconsin school. I was able to deal with the changes without it being public. No one knew what I’d looked like before, so no one paid attention to how different I looked now.

Marian noticed the moment I walked in her front
door. That was why she looked me up and down and laughed and said I wasn’t a kid anymore.

She said, “Maisie, you look lovely. You really do.” I don’t know why she sounded so sad. Maybe it made her sad to think about us all growing up so fast. Or maybe she saw herself in me. Grown-ups were always doing that.

“I wish your mom were here,” she said.

“I was just
at
my mom’s, remember? I left.”

“I miss her,” said Marian.

I said, “Believe me, you’d miss her less if you got to know Geoff.”

I was having the weirdest reaction: my own stab of sadness for all the time I’d been away, all the weeks and months I’d missed and that I would never get back. Nearly a whole year without my best friends, a year away from the only kids who cared about me.

Just at that moment, Shakes came up behind his mom.

“Shakes!” I said.

“Edward,” Marian said.

“Edward,” I said. It always felt strange to call him that, but I suddenly liked how strange it felt. It wasn’t
weirdly strange. It was familiar strange.

Just as I’d thought when we’d talked on the phone, his twitches, or spasms, or whatever they were, had gotten slightly worse. But maybe I was only paying closer attention because I hadn’t seen him in so long. I’d gotten used to the funny movements Shakes couldn’t help making, but now I was struck by them all over again. Maybe that was because he looked like a different person—taller, thicker around the middle—a slightly butterball, junior-sized grown-up.

“Shakes?” I said, as if I really had to make sure.

“Edward,” Marian said.

“Yo, Maisie.” Shakes’s voice cracked, and he grinned. “It’s…it’s great to see you.” He hadn’t gotten much taller, but his face was longer, and he had the faintest dark shadow on his upper lip. It made him seem sort of mysterious, dangerous, and exotic, like a messed-up old-school gangster. His left leg had always dragged slightly, and he did a kind of quick little hitch to propel himself forward. That jerky skip also seemed more pronounced than it had when I’d left.

Back in the day, I would have hugged him. My mom
and Marian both have snapshots of me and Shakes throwing our arms around each other like two babies in a bubble bath commercial. But I didn’t hug him now. I raised my arms, and then stopped.

Kevin and Chris were in the basement, watching TV. Kevin had the remote. As I walked downstairs, Chris and Kevin turned and saw me. Their faces lit up, they burst into these gigantic grins—and then Kevin changed the channel.

Just before he did, I saw a flash of two blue dots dancing on the chest of a half-naked blond girl. The guys were watching one of those programs about college kids getting drunk in Mexico or Florida or some other frat-boy vacation hot spot. We used to imitate the dumb beefy guys slurring their speech and yelling the same stupid things over and over.

Chris and Kevin looked at me as if I’d caught them doing something really wicked. As if I were their mom. And then something strange happened in their faces. It was almost as if they were looking at me from the opposite end of a telescope, and I was growing smaller. I felt as if I was being accused of some crime I didn’t
commit. For some reason, tears popped into my eyes, and I blinked them away.

Chris and Kevin had changed, too. They weren’t kids anymore, but they weren’t men, either. They weren’t even teenage boys. They seemed to have stalled at some bizarre in-between stage. They’d both gotten sort of plump—girlish, in a way. They reminded me of turtles separated from their shells. They looked as if they would squeal if I poked them.

I’d noticed something similar happening with the boys I’d gone to school with in Wisconsin. A lot of them went through a homely phase and got sort of soft and round, with those funny, cracking voices. They got these huge Adam’s apples that always made me think of babies whose teeth are too big for their mouths. Then suddenly—it often seemed like overnight—they’d shoot up and get taller, more muscular. Their voices were strange and deep. But somehow I never imagined it happening to the friends I’d left at home. I thought they’d always be little boys and, no matter how much I changed, they’d look exactly the same as they had on the day I’d left.

“Maisie,” said Chris. “You look really good.” Chris was always the nice one. Kevin looked at me and squinted, and said, “Holy shit, you grew up.” Chris nodded like a maniac.

I knew they were talking about my breasts, though they would never have admitted that. It was almost as if they didn’t recognize me, as if they’d never met me. Oh, I should never have gone away! I wouldn’t have, if I’d known that I could never come back and have things be the same as they were when I left.

I wanted to wave my arms and say,
Hey, look, it’s me, Maisie. We rubbed paste in each other’s hair in preschool. Remember me? I’m the same person.

But I wasn’t the same person. For one thing, I had breasts. And if I’d waved my arms, it would only have made my chest stick out more.

For the first time in my life, I almost wished that my best friends had been girls. Then the same things would be happening to us all. Breasts, hips, getting our period—it would bring us closer together instead of forcing us apart.

“How are you?” said Kevin. His voice was different,
too. Not only because three words were enough to make it break up like a weak phone signal, but because of his tone. He sounded stiff and sort of phony, as if he were talking to a
girl
.

“Fine,” I said.

“You
look
good,” said Chris.

“You already said that, doofus,” said Kevin.

Why were they talking about how I
looked
? They’d never done that before. No one thought about how anyone looked. We had just looked like ourselves. I wished they would relax so that we could just
be
ourselves.

“Leave her alone,” said Shakes, reading my mind. At least he could still do that. “She’s fine. She’s…Maisie.”

“How was living with your mom?” asked Chris. “Not that great, I guess, if you’re back here. So how come you came home?”

It made me happy that they called it
home
. But I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t know why I’d left Wisconsin. They knew everything about me. It took me a few minutes to remember that I’d stopped emailing
and calling them months ago, probably because they’d stopped emailing and calling me.

“Mom was cool,” I said. “But the guy she married makes Joan look like a cross between Mother Theresa and Albert Einstein.”

“Wow,” said Shakes. “How could your mom and dad both have made such messed-up choices?”

“Good question,” I said. “I asked myself that a hundred times a day. Geoff is a total freak.”

They were giving me strange looks, and I wondered if they were thinking that maybe I’d been molested or something. That was the story you heard every time you turned on the TV. I read a novel for kids about that: My pervert stepdad groped me. He threatened to kill me if I told.

“Not
that
kind of freak,” I said. “He didn’t hit on me or beat me or sneak into my room at night or anything like that. He was just like this…spoiled brat.” I couldn’t explain it. They would have had to have been there every time Geoff acted like a two-year-old.

“It’s good you came back,” said Shakes, and then they all fell silent.

“A lot happened since you went away,” Chris said.

“Like what?”

“Like nothing,” Kevin said. “I guess you must have forgotten that nothing ever happens in this town. Somebody’s cat got run over. When was that?”

“I don’t remember,” Chris said. “But it was totally sad.”

“Come on,” I said. “What did I miss?”

All three of them started giggling. I looked from one to the other. We never used to have private jokes that left one person out.

“Chris has a girlfriend,” said Kevin.

“She’s
not
my girlfriend,” said Chris.

“She is, actually,” said Kevin. “Your girlfriend.”

“Who is she?” I said.

“It’s Daria,” Shakes said. And he made a face, though maybe I just thought that, because with Shakes you sometimes can’t tell a face from a twitch.

“Daria Wells?” I said. “You’re kidding.” Daria was the world’s nerdiest math genius. Kids teased her, they called her Pocket Protector Girl. But they didn’t tease her that much, because she was so smart. Everyone used to say she was going to grow up to become the world’s richest investment banker.

“No, you should see her,” Chris said. “She’s, like, really pretty now.”

“Are you guys trying to tell me that Daria Wells is a
hottie
?”

Chris turned literally purple. “What’s on TV?” he said.

“See that?” said Kevin. “She
is
his girlfriend. Better be careful what you say.”

I felt suddenly tired from the effort of trying to figure out how exactly Daria would fit into our gang, the three of them and me. Meanwhile, they kept trying to look at my face, but their own faces were frozen from the strain of not checking out my breasts. I told myself, They’ll get used to the new me. That’ll just be who I am now. Maisie, their best friend from preschool. Only now their old pal has breasts.

“Chris and Daria are having sex,” said Kevin.

“No way,” said Chris. “It depends what you mean by sex.”

“You ask Daria that?” said Kevin.