Chloe tried not to stammer. “We haven’t thought about it.”
“Haven’t you.” It was not a question.
“Probably a youth hostel or somewhere like that.”
“So in a dorm with fifty strangers all using the same bathroom facilities, if there are any?”
“We don’t care about that. We are young, Mom. We’re not like you. We don’t care about creature comforts. Where we sleep. What we eat. What we wear. It’s all fine. So it’s not the Four Seasons. So what? We’ll be in Europe. We’ll buy a student Eurail pass for a few hundred bucks, sleep on trains if we have to, to save money.”
“Why would you need to do that?” Lang’s already narrow dark eyes narrowed and darkened further. “You just said you were going to Barcelona. Why would you need to sleep on trains?”
“In case we wanted to see Madrid. Or maybe Paris.” That was Hannah’s idea. Hannah, the Toulouse-Lautrec artiste.
“Paris.”
“Yes, Paris. Isn’t France next to Spain?”
Her mother folded her hands together. “Chloe, I tell you what. Go away and think carefully about all the questions I’m going to ask you next time you sit down and say, Mom, I want to go to Barcelona. Everything I’m going to ask you, ask yourself, find an answer, and come prepared.”
“Like what?”
“Nope. That’s not how it works. You figure out the solutions to the problems. Oh, and by the way, one of those problems is telling your father. Let’s see how you surmount that.”
Chloe became deflated. “I thought maybe you could tell him.”
“That’s likely.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Mom.”
“I’m not being sarcastic. I’m being snide. You know I’m actually going to tell him as soon as he walks in the door.”
“Perhaps he’ll be more reasonable than you,” Chloe said. “Maybe Dad remembers what it’s like to be young. Oh, wait, I forgot, you can’t remember, because you were born old. Born knowing you’d have a kid someday whose dreams you’d spend your entire life harpooning.”
“I’m harpooning your dream of going to Barcelona?” said Lang. “The dream I didn’t know you had until five minutes ago?” She raised her hand before Chloe could protest, defend, explain, justify. “Where are you going to sleep, Chloe? Why don’t you first work on giving your father the answer to that pesky question. Because it’ll be the first thing he’ll ask. Then worry about everything else.”
Her parents didn’t yell, they didn’t punish. They were simply hyperaware of every single thing Chloe said and did. She got a new ribbon at the high school book fair? They knew. She once almost failed a biology test? They knew. She wore black eyeliner? Oh, they knew. She and Mason danced too close at one Friday night canteen? How they knew. They had no life except to live vicariously through hers. And the only thing that was expected of her, aside from not flunking out of school, was not to let down half a billion Chinese mothers by going to a Barcelona beach to have unfettered sex with her boyfriend.
“Going to Barcelona is also an education, Mom,” Chloe muttered. She really didn’t want to face her dad’s questions. What was she supposed to say? We’re going to get two rooms, and the girls will stay in one room, and the boys in the other? What kind of naïve fool for a parent would believe that?
“Yes, an education in boys,” said Lang. “What are you going to tell us, that you’ll get two rooms and you and Hannah will stay in one and the boys in the other?”
There you go. Didn’t even have to say a word.
“Your plan,” Lang continued, “is to rove around Europe for a month with your boyfriend on your hard-earned college savings. This is something you’re seriously proposing to your father and me?”
Dad is not here, Chloe wanted to say. She didn’t know of whom she was more afraid. Dad never really liked Mason, that gentle kid. She didn’t know why. Everyone loved him. “We could go to Belgium, too, if you want.”
“Are you weak in the head? Why would I want this?”
“You mentioned Belgium. I could bring you back some chocolates.”
“Your father gets me a Whitman’s Sampler every Valentine’s Day. That’s enough for me.”
“Belgium is safe.”
“Is Mason safe?”
“Hannah will be with me. She’s nearly a year older. She’ll protect me.”
“Chloe,” said her mother, “sometimes you say the funniest things. That girl couldn’t protect a squirrel. She can’t protect herself. I trust Mason more than I trust Hannah.”
“See?”
“More, which is to say nothing. How much is two times zero? Still zero, child.” She raised her hand before Chloe could come back with a wisecrack. “Enough. I have to slap these Linzers together and then get dinner on. Your father will be home soon. Go to the music room and practice.”
“I’m going to be eighteen, Mom,” Chloe repeated lamely.
“Yes, and I’m going to be forty-seven. And your father forty-nine. I’m glad we established how old we are. Now what?”
“I’m old enough to make my own choices,” said Chloe, hoping her mother wouldn’t laugh at her.
To Lang’s credit, she didn’t. “Can you choose right now to go play a musical instrument,” she said. “Piano or violin. Pick one. Practice thirty minutes.”
“Hannah wants to talk to me before dinner.”
“Well, then, you’d better jump to it,” said Lang, her back turned, an icing sugar shaker in her hands. “What Hannah wants, Hannah gets.”
The Perils of College Interviews
CHLOE SPRINTED FROM HER HOUSE ACROSS THE FLOWERBEDS and brush to Hannah’s next door.
Since the divorce five years ago, Hannah’s mother had been involved with revolving boyfriends, and consequently their yard never got cleaned up. “Why can’t she do it herself?” Lang would demand. Blake and Mason offered every month to help, but Terri didn’t want to pay them to do it. And she didn’t want them to do it for free because that was asking men for a favor. So she lived surrounded by unkempt backwoods, in wild contrast to Chloe’s parents’ approach to their house and their rural life. Lang allocated part of every day to weeding, mowing, cleaning, planting, raking, leafing, clearing, maintaining. The birches and pines were trimmed as if giraffes had gotten to them, and all the pine cones were swept up and placed in tall ornamental wicker baskets, and even the loose pebbles were picked up and arranged around the flowerbeds and bird houses and vegetable gardens. It was quite telling that Terri and Lang lived next door to each other for almost twenty years and yet didn’t know each other’s birthdays. Lang never said a thing, and kept Jimmy from saying anything, but Chloe could tell by her father’s critical expression when he spoke of “that family” that he looked forward to the day Hannah might become a friend of the past. There are two kinds of people in the world, Jimmy Devine said. Those who try to make everything they come in contact with more beautiful—and then there is Terri Gramm.
Before Chloe knocked, she stopped by the