The Secret Life of Prince Charming by Deb Caletti Read Free Book Online

She got promoted at REI. Now there’s a twist of fate for you. REI, Lizbeth, who can’t walk and bounce a ball at the same time, and who thinks a hike to the mailbox should be rewarded with a Ho Ho. You guys should stop by. Sydney’s home for the weekend.”
    Lizbeth was Mom’s friend since their days at the UW. They both ended up living in Nine Mile Falls, and Sydney, Lizbeth’s daughter (a student at Whitman), and Evan and Charles, her twins, were like cousins to me. The small white line by my left eye was from the stitches I got falling off the trampoline theyhad in their yard. “Next time?” I said. “Daniel really wants to go to Greenlake.”
    “Okay. I understand. Hey, I love you, daughter.”
    “I love you, too.”
    “I’ve got to go figure out what to wear,” Mom said.
    I followed her upstairs. Ivar tried to shove ahead of us like he always did. To him, the starting gun went off the moment someone’s hand touched the banister. Mom wore her old khaki shorts with all the pockets, a tank top dotted from spots of wayward bleach. Her hair was pulled back, making a too-small pony tail. There was a smudge of red on her forearm, from leaning on the paper a moment ago. I loved her. I did. But in that moment, right then, looking at that smudge, there was something about her that irritated me. Maybe it was her own ordinariness, the ways she came up lacking. The gray showing through her brown hair, her relentless insistence on wanting the best for us, her slightly bristly legs. But being irritated by her made me feel weirdly relieved; the hazy, hovering worry I’d had since seeing the objects lifted. I had a mean thought—it sat there in my head the way a crow does on a railing—cruel, entitled, mocking. That’s why he left.
     
    Daniel was definitely on uppers.
    “Let’s lie down,” he said. He spread out a blanket he’d brought from home, a blue quilt with a fabric image of a girl in a bonnet on it.
    “She can lie in the middle.” I pointed down at the girl.
    “Holly Hobbie,” Daniel said. “My mom’s had this blanket since she was a little.” Which explained the white rickrack at the blanket’s edges. Seventies-kid bedspread. He tested the fabricwith his palm, to make sure there was no dampness underneath. He sat down and looked up at me with a grin as shiny as a new appliance.
    “Why are you so happy?” I said. I sat beside him. He leaned back on his elbows, looked up into the lacy trees over us.
    “God, Quinn. Why not be? Why not be happy when this day is so beautiful?”
    I looked over at him, watched him for signs of dilating pupils or sudden tremors. Daniel talked about his math test, or how Evan McConnell was such an ass but how Coach Grayson never noticed. He didn’t talk about feelings or life or anything larger than a moment. We’d laugh about Señora Little, the new Spanish teacher, whom you’d feel sorry for if your capacity for pity hadn’t turned into frustrated contempt. Her lack of classroom control had turned every fifth period into a prison riot, which she attempted to fix with altered seating charts and “new rules” that lasted the day. Adam Seddell and Mitchell Hagen would move her cactus around when her back was turned, and Mitchell Hagen was a good guy who never got in trouble anywhere else. Sean Riley got expelled from the class after hitting the donkey piñata with snowballs, became an office T.A. instead, and now used his new position to excuse students from fifth period. The principal had sat in Mrs. Little’s class five times that semester alone, but still students would ring up the class phone as she taught, or set their own phone alarms to all go off to “La Bamba” at exactly one thirty. Daniel would tell me what happened in Mrs. Little’s third period, and I would tell him what happened in her fifth, but happiness and beauty were not things we discussed.
    I leaned down next to Daniel. I ran my fingers along his arm, the soft hairs there, and it seemed