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won’t,” I said.
    She came to join me in the kitchen, loading the plates I rinsed into the dishwasher. “Now, more importantly, what are you going to wear for your first day tomorrow?”
    I’d already freaked her out enough, so I didn’t point out that it didn’t matter since I’d be back at West Palo Alto High as soon as T.K. returned. I just said, “I don’t have a lot to choose from until my boxes get here. Besides—it sounds like I have to wear a uniform.”
    “You can’t really think I’d let you go to Prescott?” said Charley, like Prescott was some sort of cult or polygamist compound. “I barely survived the place myself. No, Patty’s not theonly one who can pull strings. I asked around, and I heard about the most fabulous new school, with a revolutionary alternative curriculum. That’s where you’ll be going, Delia.”
    “What’s alternative about it?” I asked. “Or revolutionary?”
    “Everything. Conventional education can be so structured and limiting, but the Center for Academic and Spiritual Growth believes in nurturing a sense of self-direction in its students. I’ve heard Brad and Angelina are thinking about sending Maddox there when he’s old enough. But we’d better get going. We have an outfit to plan. Some of my things might work, though they might be a little long. Or wait—I have a better idea! Have you ever been to Scoop? Or Barney’s Co-Op?”
    “T.K. hates shopping,” I admitted. “Mostly we just order my clothes from catalogs.”
    Charley had been pretty calm during the entire T.K. discussion, but now she almost dropped the plate she was holding. “Catalogs?”
    “Catalogs,” I confirmed. “She likes them because they present a finite range of options.”
    “That is an absolute tragedy,” she said. “But one I’m uniquely qualified to remedy. I can be ready to go in four minutes. What about you?”

Five
    Palo Alto isn’t exactly a fashion-forward sort of town, but I’d always considered myself on the more stylish end of the spectrum. I mean, it was true that most of my clothes came from catalogs, but at least they came from different catalogs than the ones my mother uses to order her khakis and sweater sets.
    It turns out that the stylish end of the Palo Alto spectrum stops where the frumpy end of the New York spectrum begins. And while Charley might have been a little scattered about things like when her temporarily orphaned niece’s flight would be arriving from the West Coast, there was nothing scattered about her in a retail environment. She attacked each store like an invading army, plucking items from racks with military precision and marshaling salespeople like a drill sergeant.
    We shopped our way from TriBeCa to SoHo and from there to the Meatpacking District, with a stop in the middle at a restaurant called Balthazar for pommes frites and profiteroles because Charley said we needed to keep our strength up. Most of the places we went were completely unfamiliar to me—stores like Olive & Bette’s and Intermix—and the day flew byin a blur of dressing rooms and three-way mirrors. By the time we got back to the loft, I had a whole new wardrobe, and it had been me vetoing the things I thought were too edgy. At home, T.K. does all the vetoing.
    We picked up tacos for dinner and stayed up way too late figuring out what I should wear the next day. This was mostly because of Charley. I like clothes as much as the next person—in fact, I probably like them a lot more—but worrying about the impression I was going to make at a new school was pretty low on my list of priorities.
    Charley, on the other hand, was like a little girl with her first Barbie. She insisted that I try on every possible combination of the items we’d purchased, and it wasn’t just because she was trying to keep my mind off my mother, either. She was seriously intense when it came to planning outfits.
    We eventually settled on a Paul and Joe shirt in a reddish-pink color (“too