Revealed by Amanda Valentino Read Free Book Online Page B

reminds me of a time I decided to do something and did it.
    After dinner, the phone rang, but neither Cornelia nor I went for it. Sure enough, it was for my mom—some friend who wanted to know if my mom was free for lunch Friday. Within half a second, it was clear they were going to be on the phone for the next twenty minutes, which is a short conversation for my mother.
    Cornelia and I may look like our mom, but sometimes I worry that in every other way, we resemble our dad. My mom is someone who’s totally engaged in the world at all times. When I was a kid, she worked full-time and she was president of the PTA and she did all this volunteer community organizing and she found the time to help me and Cornelia do things like make dioramas for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . In between doing all of that, she had literally dozens of friends—work friends, college friends, friends who were the moms and dads of kids we went to school with, friends from her book group.
    I remember my parents having all these conversations before we moved to Orion about whether my mom would be isolated if we came here, which in retrospect was nothing short of hilarious. We moved to Orion because of my dad’s work (also hilarious—he travels so much it’s hard to see how he actually works here ), but within about a week (okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea) my mom had a big job in the admissions office at the local college and before you knew it, the phone was ringing a thousand times a second with her friends inviting her and my dad to people’s houses for dinner every weekend and it was like we’d lived in Orion for years, not months.
    But even though they have all these friends and they’re constantly doing things with other couples, if you ever looked around the living room at one of their dinner parties, you’d notice that everyone present was there because one person in the couple is friends with my mom, not my dad. In fact, my dad doesn’t really seem to have any friends—not even old friends from college or high school who he loves but only sees every few years. When people are over, he’s usually somewhere just on the outside of things. Not in any crazy way—he’s not, you know, standing in the corner staring at a wall. He’s just . . . on the edge. Alone, even in a crowd.
    I’d always thought he was just shy, but now I found myself wondering if there was more to the story than his personality.
    Why were we on the list?
    x0x0callicatx0x0: This box is incredible.
    When we left Play It Again, Sam, we’d had to decide who was going to take the box. I said it probably wasn’t a good idea for me to have it at my house. My mom’s not a snoop, exactly, but she’s in and out of my room, drawers, and closet with clean laundry and sheets and stuff just enough that I wouldn’t want to promise she wouldn’t find something I’d hidden and start demanding to know where I’d gotten it.
    According to Nia, her mother is a snoop. So we gave the box to Callie because even though her dad’s trying to stay sober and provide for them and stuff now, he’s still a little more . . . distracted than Nia’s and my parents.
    artislifeisart94: can u describe it? i cant tell much from the picture u emailed.
    NAR1010: yeah the flash kinda makes everything look washed out.
    x0x0callicatx0x0: theres a pattern, for sure. & these little buttons or something.
    NAR1010: you try pushing them?
    x0x0callicatx0x0: ya think?
    Nobody typed anything for a minute, and I stared at the photo, trying to make out the buttons Callie had described. When my phone rang, I was still staring at the washed-out picture on my screen.
    It was Callie. “I’ve got Nia on the line, too. We think we should post a picture of the box on the website.”
    â€œI don’t know.” I thought about Louise’s warning. “What if the people who Louise