Lone Star by Paullina Simons Page B

replies, voices, tempers, tides. For some reason her father’s voice was muffled, unclear. Her mother’s alto rose through the rafters.
    Jimmy yelling suddenly and Lang yelling back. The walk down that long dirt road from the school bus is responsible for Barcelona, she says, and Jimmy yells, are you crazy, Mother?
    â€œBetter she go with the boys, Jimmy. Blake keeps everybody safe. He’ll keep her safe.”
    She can’t hear her father’s response. Only Lang’s voice is clearly heard.
    â€œI don’t want her to go, either, husband.”
    â€œYou know she’s leaving, Jimmy. You know that, right? In three months she’s leaving home. For good.”
    â€œDon’t be sick with worry, Jimmy. She’ll be fine. Disaster won’t fall on us twice.”
    Now Chloe hears her father’s voice. “Not on us, ” he says. “On her .”
    Chloe crept on her hands and knees to the railing to hear more, even though there was no more; how could there be after that? They didn’t want her to go. She expected nothing less. Her parents weren’t Terri Gramm. They were never going to say, oh, sure, honey, Barcelona with the Spanish boys and your two horny boyfriends and topless beaches and incorrigible Hannah. And you, our only child, who’s never been anywhere without us, not a problem, you go, girl.
    Her ear was wedged between the slats, listening for a possible sea change.
    What else could Chloe say to persuade them? Mom! she wanted to cry. I want to be the girl who later in life when she is old can say, yes, when I was young I traveled by myself on a train through Spain. I don’t want to be the girl who will tell her kid, no, I’ve never been anywhere, except North Dakota where I was born, and Maine where I married your father, and Kilkenny one time when somebody died, somebody who with his wanton recklessness ended up nearly wrecking my careful life.
    But Chloe couldn’t say that, just as she couldn’t say that maybe in Barcelona away from backseats and parental eyes she would finally have sex with her boyfriend. Or that she might sunbathe topless on the man-made beach, built just in time for her Olympian topless body.
    As she sat with her ear to the empty air below, she cupped her hands under her full breasts and bounced them up and down. She wanted to sunbathe topless in front of Hannah, so that in this one way, she could come out slightly ahead, because Hannah bested her in almost everything else. Not in academics, but nobody cared about that. In high school being beautiful was much more fly than being smart. Probably not just in high school, but Chloe didn’t want to think about that. Hannah was always playing a game of one-upmanship. Why couldn’t Chloe play her way just once? Hannah was passive-aggressive, not a smiler, aninveterate shopper who made Chloe spend more of her allowance than she ever wanted to, to try to keep up with blouses, skirts, dresses, the latest boots and gloves. The size-2 girl who was always dieting, who told everyone she was fat, the long-limbed girl, aristocratically mouthed, and small pointy breasted. What other city could offer Chloe this particular intangible? Bathing topless on the beach in front of their two boyfriends, in front of a city full of strangers, so she could win. How small. How stupid. And yet how completely essential. How could Chloe’s noblest desires fly side by side with her soaring pettiness?
    Look at Hannah. Everything on that girl was assembled as if handpicked. Tall, lithe, lean, eyes mouth hair nose all the right size, not too big, not too small, while Chloe spent her life hiding under minimizer bras and one-size-too-big shirts. She was afraid no one would take her seriously if they thought of her as a body instead of a person. Who’d ever listen to her explanations about the movements of the stars or migrations of mitochondria or beheadings in a revolution if they thought she