Lone Star by Paullina Simons Page A

adult. And yet my mother and father are still treating me like I’m eleven years old!”
    â€œCan you act like an adult,” Lang said, “and stop being so melodramatic?”
    â€œWhy, adults aren’t melodramatic?”
    â€œChloe!”
    No one spoke for a moment. Then her father did.
    â€œYou can’t go,” he said, turning toward the sink. “AllI know about Barcelona is that in Spain, the drivers are considered the worst in the world.” His back was to his wife and daughter. He didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t face them as he spoke. “It’s a well-known, established fact. The worst drivers in the world.”
    Chloe opened her hands. “I won’t be driving, Daddy. I’ll be so careful. You know me. I’ll be good. I promise.” Her voice oozed with pity and penitence. The fight had gone out of her.
    â€œYou’ll be walking, though, won’t you?” Jimmy said. “While others are driving, poorly.” He lowered his head.
    â€œNot even, Jimmy,” said Lang, caressing her husband’s squared back and glaring at Chloe. “Didn’t you hear her? She’ll be lying on a brand-new beach. Admiring the architecture.”

6
Moody’s Mottos
    E VERYONE HAD A MOTTO. H ER GRANDMOTHER M OODY’S WAS, “How I envy the handicapped who can push themselves around in their wheelchairs. They don’t know how lucky they are.”
    Chloe’s mother’s was, “Cast your bread upon the water.”
    And Chloe’s? Once, to go miniature golfing, Courtney and Crystal arrived at Chloe’s green cabin wearing slinky hot pink dresses and clangy bangles. Lang took one squinted glimpse at the two and stage-whispered to Chloe, “Where are they going to, a parade at a bordello?”
    That became Chloe’s motto for a while: to avoid at all costs such an assessment being made of her by, God forbid, a boy. A lifetime of meds wouldn’t be able to erase the trauma for Chloe if she thought boys talked about her that way.
    Okay, no, that wasn’t Chloe’s motto. That was her wish. You know what Chloe’s motto was?
    On the blank canvas of your life with bold colors paint.
    Maybe not so much a motto as an unattainable goal.
    Chloe just wanted to know who she was. Not who she wanted to be. Who she actually was.
    Was she her mother’s daughter, half-Chinese, her father’s daughter, half-police, Mason’s girl, Hannah’s friend, straight-A student, studious, kempt, tutor of others, herself always in hand. Was she all these things or none of them? Who was she?
    Up in the loft attic open to the living room, Chloe lay on herbed with the ballerina-pink fluffy down quilt and soft pillows, clutching a tattered 1998 National Geographic to her chest, the one with the precious Barcelona article in it. When Polly, the old wizened woman who owned the Shell gas station in Fryeburg, decided to go into the used book–selling business, running it out of her garage, Blake, out with his dad one afternoon, picked up a worn copy of the magazine. He paid two dollars of his allowance to buy it for Chloe when she was eleven and he was twelve. Reading about Barcelona burst her heart into a flame.
    She’d read the article so many times since then, she had it practically committed to memory. Redeeming touch of madness. Millionaires on motorbikes, witches caked in charcoal dust, pimps and uncrowned kings. Miro, Picasso, Dali, firebombed girls in whorehouses. Just think about that. Firebombed girls in whorehouses. Barcelona has been inventing herself for a thousand years. With her parents talking below her in their tiny bedroom next to the front door, Chloe caressed the cover of the magazine pressed to her breasts, kneaded it like a rosary, prayed to God, please, please, please, and strained to hear the snippets of their parenting. From up here, it was just rising and falling pitch, up-down, questions, quiet