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  Janie whirled around to face Rachel, her long, nearly black hair sticking to her flushed cheeks. A tiny silver stud glinted from the side of her nose. “Did you hear that? He said I have troll feet!”

  “Troll toes,” Dustin said. “There’s nothing wrong with troll feet. They’re kinda cute. It’s the troll toes on human feet that really scare the boys.”

  “Mom!”

  “Dustin,” Rachel said. “Your sister has long human toes, not troll toes.”

  “Mom!” Janie’s mouth dropped.

  “Sweetheart, long fingers and toes are quite elegant.” Rachel gathered up her reports. “If you tried, you’d probably play the piano beautifully.”

  “With your feet!” Laughing, Dustin raised his legs in the air and wiggled his toes.

  “Assface!” Janie dove on top of him and they rolled across the bed until the bedside lamp crashed to the floor.

  Rachel shot up. “That’s it! I’m warning you. You can get yourselves to Triage by bus!”

  Both kids broke into laughter and Janie pushed Dustin off the end of the bed with her feet. “I’ve been touched by the toes! I’m melting…” Janie leaped on top of him and they both shrieked as hair was yanked and skin was pinched. In the fury of flailing body parts, Janie’s knee whacked Dustin in the chin, causing him to bite his tongue.

  “Ugh. I’m totally bleeding!”

  Rachel inspected his tongue, which had nothing worse than a tiny scrape, and muttered, “Hm. Very superficial.” She glanced at Janie, who was standing over her brother and straightening her nightie. “Janie, get to your room and get ready for school. Now.”

  “You’re mad at me?” she squeaked. “He started it!”

  “Dustin, you go get ready too. Just rinse your mouth first so you don’t bleed on the carpet.”

  They both stood up and stomped into the hall, grumbling and elbowing each other.

  “And keep your hands to yourselves—” Both doors slammed. “Or you’ll both get weekend lockdown!”

  “Our whole lives are in lockdown! What’s another weekend?” Janie shouted from her room.

  Rachel picked up her coffee and blew. They’ll thank me when they live to see twenty-one, she thought. Prevention is always the way to go.

  Twenty minutes later, having showered, dressed for work, and combed through her wet hair, Rachel hurried along the hallway to check on Dustin. She found him squatting on his padded window seat, still in his pajamas, pale blond hair gelled into an artful mess. He was looking through binoculars at fourteen-year-old Tabitha Carlisle, who was getting dressed in her room next door.

  “That’ll be enough of that,” Rachel said, fighting a smile. She took the binoculars from his hand and tossed him a shirt. “We do not spy on the neighbors. Get dressed. The bus will be here in fifteen.” She marched out of the room. Leaning against his door, she exhaled. Dustin was right on track. Twelve years old and expressing a healthy sexual curiosity. She had written an article about this very topic for last month’s issue.

  With a polite knock on Janie’s door, Rachel waited before entering. Parenting a teenager required equal doses of respect and intrusion. She pressed her ear closer to the door panels to hear a series of muffled thumps before Janie called out, “Come in.” Rachel found her daughter standing in the middle of the room, dressed in a tank top, underwear, and army boots, her hands clasped behind her back, brimming with far too much purity for an adolescent girl. Innocence, Rachel always told her readers, should never be taken at face value during the pubescent years.

  “Hey,” Rachel smiled, scanning the room for clues. “What’s with all the thumping and bumping?”

  Janie shrugged. A chain of paperclips hung from her neck. “Just, you know, cleaning up.”

  Cleaning? Janie? At eye-level, with Janie’s pine sleigh bed snuggled under the window, the room might make a charming photo for a B&B. But the floor was a rumpled mosaic of fabric—Janie insisted that clothing was far simpler to manage when spread out across the rug—and the ceiling was covered, plastered, every inch of it, in posters from old punk bands—the Sex Pistols, Circle Jerks, the Misfits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Buzzcocks, the Ramones, Dead Kennedys. Some had song titles markered across them, such as “Too Drunk to F,” “Anarchy,” and “World Up My A.” Janie had blacked out the worst of the obscenities, at her mother’s insistence.

  The absolute dearth of punk bands from the present was no mistake. Janie considered herself a purist, refusing to listen to anything but classic punk from the ‘70s and ‘80s on the grounds that the further away from the Ramones one got, the weaker one’s devotion to true punk philosophy. Though, as far as Rachel could tell, Janie’s anarchistic tendencies surfaced primarily in her choice of clunky black footwear and her refusal—for a three-week period last winter—to accept her allowance. Apparently, making her bed and taking out the trash for fifteen dollars a week represented a gross affront to punk ideology—a true punk would never prosper from mainstream’s mindless quest for purity and order.

  “If this is about Dustin’s slimy tongue, he started it.” Janie pushed a limp strand of hair out of her eyes.

  Rachel forced a smile, noticing Janie’s desk drawer wasn’t fully shut. What was she hiding? A diary? A joint? E-mail from an Internet predator, God forbid? Of course…it could be nothing more than Janie sneaking a candy bar before breakfast. The important thing was to catch teen problems early. That’s what the experts advised. Stay involved in your children’s lives through constant communication.

  Rachel sat on the bed. “This has nothing to do with Dustin. Just wanted to tell my girl that I love her.”

  Janie narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, right.” Pushing her head through the neck of an oversized gray sweater, she tugged it over her heavy chest. Adolescent hormones, in the last couple of years, had transformed Janie from nimble tomboy into self-conscious woman-child bound up by a Herculean bra. The child went to bed some nights with red welts on her shoulders. Of course, with this physical change came unwanted attention—unwanted by Rachel, at least—from males, young and old. Although Janie could now outrun her mother, she’d never seemed more vulnerable.

  Rachel reached out and took her daughter’s hand, pulling her down onto the bed and laying an arm around her shoulders. “Is there anything you want to talk about? Because you know I’m always here for you.”

  “I need some new socks. Mine all have holes. It’s totally embarrassing changing into gym shoes.”

  Socks. Not quite what Rachel was aiming for. “No, I mean life stuff. Anything bothering you?”

  “I don’t even have one pair left that isn’t holey.”

  “We’ll get you some socks, Janie. That’s not what I’m—”

  “You know Lizzie Walken? She has socks that match every single outfit she owns. She has toe socks, socks with ruffles, knee socks. All I have are tube socks.”

  “That’s not true! I bought you the red pair, the pink pair…”

  “Uh, Mom? Have you ever seen me wear pink?”

  Rachel sighed. “I don’t want to argue about socks—again.” I want to make sure you’re not stashing Ecstasy in your desk. That some sexed-up eleventh-grader isn’t talking you into having intercourse with him. Unprotected. That some fifty-eight-year-old pervert isn’t posing as a skater boy on MSN and making plans to meet you at the mall. “I just want you to know I’m here for you. If you need anything. Advice. A friend…”

  “Oh God.” Janie rolled her eyes and slumped. “The bus is coming in, like, ten minutes.”

  Pulling her daughter closer, Rachel squeezed her arm. “If my daughter needs me, I’ll skip my morning meeting.”

  Picking at the palm of her hand, Janie said nothing. She looked up, her brown eyes huge, searching her mother’s face. This is it, thought Rachel. She trusts me. It was their mother-daughter moment. The kind that Perfect Parent magazine solicits from readers, then sets in lovely type surrounded by oversized quotation marks on page 12.

  Janie stood up and groaned
. “Don’t get all bent with your superparenting, Mom. I’m like the magician’s assistant. I know your tricks. All that empathy crap is lost on me.”

  No page 12 today.

  Janie waved toward her bare legs and widened her eyes. “A little privacy please?”

  Rachel let out a long breath. It looked so easy in the magazine.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, all was silent except the clinking of spoons against cereal bowls and the rattle of paper bags as Rachel scraped together lunches from a nearly bare refrigerator.

  Dustin half-yawned, half-roared before saying, “My friends all get Lucky Charms for breakfast.”

  “Lucky for them,” said Rachel.

  “How come you buy this cereal anyway?” asked Janie, drowning her Apple Cinnamon Cheerios in the milk one by one.

  Rachel sniffed a package of strawberries from the fridge, recoiled, and pitched it into the trash. “Good price, whole-grain oats,” she said.

  “This is the one Dad used to buy,” said Janie. “Only not anymore, since Babe-chick Cheryl doesn’t like the smell of cinnamon.”

  Hunched over his cereal bowl, Dustin said, “I still don’t know why he likes her. She has all these dark bits of hair before the frizzy blond starts. It’s freaky.” He shivered out loud.

  “Those are called roots,” said Rachel. “She’s just too busy managing Daddy to make it to her hair appointments, that’s all. And by ‘managing,’ I mean ‘taking care of.’” And by “taking care of,” Rachel meant “fucking.” She launched a moldy orange into the trash.

  She hadn’t been prepared for it. One morning David was stretched out in bed braiding her hair and telling her he loved her. The next morning he was scrawling his new address on the back of a bank statement and instructing Rachel to forward his mail to Cheryl’s apartment. Cheryl was one of her ex-husband’s inside sales reps. Now his chief operating officer at work and at home. In a wild departure from the traditional boss-leaves-wifeand-children-for-secretary scenario, David plucked Cheryl from beneath a hands-free headset. But then, he’d always been something of a maverick.

  What other husband would be willing to sneak out of his own son’s tonsillectomy to “solve a marketing crisis”? Or, as Rachel later found out from a neighbor, sneak the little telemarketer into his marital bed while his wife was busy choosing her father’s casket?

  By the time Dustin and Janie, then five and seven, came tumbling into the kitchen, David was long gone. The kids plunked themselves down at the table, still wearing their pajamas and drunk with sleep. In a daze, Rachel poured them each a bowl of cereal and herself a cup of lusty coffee. Absolute honesty had always been the keystone of her parenting beliefs, so she decided, after a few fortifying gulps, to answer Dustin’s casual inquiry—“Where’s Daddy?”—with the truth.

  “Your father doesn’t live here anymore.”

  Janie scrunched her nose. “Why?”

  Rachel drained her cup, scalding her throat. “Because he’s living with another woman, that’s why.”

  “Why?” asked Dustin.

  Be careful how you answer this, she warned herself. After all, he was and would always be their father. Rachel’s grandfather, the founder of Perfect Parent, was constantly quoted—posthumously— in the magazine as saying, “If it feels good coming out of your mouth, it’s probably wrong.”

  She drew in a deep breath and looked at Dustin and Janie, both poised, motionless, over their cereal bowls, waiting for an answer. Finally she spoke. “Because her tits are the size of medicine balls. Though from what I’ve seen of her hips, she’s got a vagina big enough to land a 747 inside.”

  Dustin’s spoon dropped into his Bunnikins bowl with a clatter. Of course it was wrong. But, damn it, it had felt great. Besides, it was true.

  Now, pulling a Magic Marker from the drawer, Rachel scrawled a J on one lunch bag and a D on the other. Janie stood up, peered inside the bag marked J, and pulled out a rotting banana. She groaned and tossed it into the trash before heading out the back door.

  Dustin grabbed his own lunch bag and followed his grumbling sister. Halfway outside, he stopped, looked back at Rachel. “Mom, can I go to skate camp at The Grid this summer? The place has a snake run and a bowl with real pool coping. Cooper’s parents said yes.”

  Cooper’s mother and father wore matching leather jackets and showed up stoned to parents’ night last year. Not only did they allow their twelve-year-old son to roam the neighborhood until midnight, they let him study in his bedroom with his girlfriend, door shut. Hearing they endorsed skate camp was not helping Dustin’s cause. Rachel ran her fingers through his shaggy hair. “You know how I feel about skate parks, sweetie. You can skateboard on the driveway, but tricks are too dangerous. Children have died from it.”

  “I can’t skate on our driveway. It’s not paved!”

  It was one of the things she loved most about the house she inherited from her parents—a weathered, ivy-covered Tudor perched high up on the bluffs of the Hudson River. The pea gravelcovered driveway, overgrown trees, and peeling brown shutters gave it the faraway and bucolic feel of the English countryside. Lately, however, her home had begun slipping out from underneath her. Recent riverside development had had a destabilizing effect on the land, and the resulting erosion meant Rachel was losing nearly two inches of waterfront property each year. Her once settled world was tumbling down a deep chasm forming between the old Tudor and the house next door.

  “Why don’t we look into basketball camp?” she asked. “Or what about archery?”

  He pulled away, stomped down the steps onto the gravel drive, his untied skate shoes kicking up dust. “My life sucks.”

  “We’ll find a camp we’re both happy with,” Rachel called, following him outside. She leaned on the peeling railing of the wraparound porch and waved. “Janie, keep an eye on your brother on the way to the bus stop. I’d like you two to arrive home in one piece later.”

  Janie looked back at her mother and rolled her eyes. “The stop’s practically next door,” she said. “I think you’ll see us again.”

  If only Rachel could be sure.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Dear Prudence”

  —SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

  Janie shuffled toward the bus stop, jangling the coins in her pocket. She’d be buying her lunch today. Not only did Dustin get the fresher banana, he also got the last fruit punch, which left her with the organic apple juice. And with only—she pulled out her change and counted—two dollars and eighty-three cents, she’d have just about enough money for fries. Burping and beating his chest like a baboon, Dustin was a good thirty paces behind her. That was good. Strangers driving by, she thought, do not need to know I share DNA with a primate.

  Janie hated when her mother tried to pull techniques over her eyes, and had ever since her mom dragged her to her big parenting show in Manhattan. Perfect Parent staff members were throwing free tote bags at every slob that passed by as Janie sat in the audience listening to her mother talk about how kids needed to know “where the walls are.” Her mother called it “linking” and it basically involved listening to your kid and answering like her best friend. So when darling Violet complains that Sara from ballet class said “You sweat too much,” instead of calling bony little Sara a perfect example of bulimia waiting to happen, the smart parent, the informed parent, should sit down beside Violet and say something like “Well that sucks! What kind of emaciated friend would say a thing like that? You must be furious.” Only Rachel would probably say to take out the “emaciated” part.

  The day Janie watched her mom speak—waiting in the audience for the day to end so they could stop at a McDonald’s for chocolate shakes—an angry guy with a red face sat behind her. The guy stood up and said: “I paid eighteen dollars to get into this parenting show, and twenty-one at the snack bar, all so I could hear the great Rachel Berman. Well, I’ve learned more about parenting from the back of a cereal box.”

  Janie spun to watch her mother. Rachel took a bi
g breath and said, “That’s terrible. You spent all that money and you got nothing out of the experience? I’d be upset, too.”

  Then the guy hiked up his pleated-pocket pants and said, “Well, it’s not like I got nothing out of it, the part about setting limits might help with our toddler.” He grinned at the audience and added, “Kid refuses to stay in bed.” Rachel shot some more empathy his way and the guy practically offered to drive them home.

  Anyway, Janie knew her mother’s tricks. And she knew when they were being used on her, like this morning.

  Three kids were already at the stop, each one moping under the budding trees, pretending the other two weren’t there. It was part of the code. Bus stop kids weren’t your friends. They were underdeveloped adults thrust together for the purpose of mass transportation. You were allowed a nod or a grunt as you approached the stop, but nothing more.

  Janie glanced at Lizzie Walken, also known as “the Walk-in Closet.” She had yet to repeat the same outfit since the year began. Lizzie had the perfect life, Janie was sure of it. No brother, beautiful parents, and beautiful grades.

  Then there was Arianna Gould, Lizzie’s polar opposite. Arianna wore the same black fleece sweatshirts every day. Presumably because of black’s slimming properties. Someone should tell her about fleece’s plumping properties. She could, however, touch her tongue to her nose, and this seemed to shut the boys up.

  Then—the reason she’d been late getting dressed—Tabitha Carlisle. Gazing at Tabitha from afar, Janie stumbled over a rock. Which pretty much summed things up. About three months ago, Janie tripped over Tabitha and had yet to stand up straight.

  It happened in gym class. Well, after gym class, in the locker room. Most of the girls were in the shower, but not Janie. She never showered at school. She didn’t want anyone to see her naked, but Tabitha and her friends had no such bodily hang-ups. They came back from the showers barely wrapped in towels, giggling and completely oblivious to who might be trying not to look at them. Tabitha’s clothes were in the cubby next to Janie’s.