Every Last One Read Online Free PDF Page A

underestimate little kids.” Ruby found a dramatic version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” to do instead. Kiernan sulked through the rehearsals. Ben’s brother Aidan was Jack.
    “Is he your boyfriend?” Aidan asked Ruby accusingly one day staring at Kiernan.
    “What do you think?”
    “I think he is.” Aidan didn’t sound at all happy about it.
    “I think you’re right,” Ruby said with a small smile.
    My boys both like Kiernan, but I should have been paying closer attention lately when they talked about him. This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver’s seat and keeping quiet. Behind the wheel I am invisible, a chauffeur. A month or so ago the boys were in the car, their backpacks between them, and my reverie on whether wehad lettuce and which day lilies would have a second bloom had slowly given way to the muttered discussion behind me.
    “All I mean is that he can be weird,” Alex said.
    “You think everybody’s weird,” Max replied in his low, almost inaudible voice.
    “Remember that time he was listening to that same band over and over for, like, months? He would take off his headphones and you’d hear the same song. They weren’t even a good band.”
    “They were an okay band.”
    “Okay they weren’t a popular band. Nobody knew about them but Kiernan.”
    Ruby will not discuss Kiernan with me. She is sorry she said anything at Molly’s Closet. “You make such a big deal out of things,” she says. When I refer to Kiernan as her prom date while she is foraging for food with her friends, she slices fiercely through the sandwich she is making. She is not a vegetarian this year. The sandwich is turkey. Sarah is having turkey, too, and Rachel is picking at ham and cheese. Rachel has had a manicure, and her bitten nails are sad little stubs of magenta. She keeps raising her fingers to her mouth, then putting them down again.
    Sarah says, “We don’t really date the way you guys did when you were young.” She makes our youth sound like something Glen might have seen on the History Channel. Sarah’s sport reflects her character; she spends her afternoons swimming a straight line, her stroke unvarying, her body shaped like a garden spade, her hair a neat bob of silky brown that dries cleanly in place. She is Ruby’s reality check. “Am I overreacting?” Ruby will sometimes say to Sarah, and Sarah will smile and say, “Yes.” As in most triangular friendships, both of them feel deeply protective of Rachel because she is not the best friend of either.
    “I get that about dating,” I say to Sarah. “But each of you is going to the prom with a specific boy, even if you’re all going together.”Sarah is going with Eric, the boy she has been seeing since ninth grade. It would not surprise me a bit if I could fast-forward the film of all their lives and find Sarah and Eric married and moving into a house a block or two away from both their families. Sarah wants to be a nurse. When Nancy said, “You could be a doctor, sweetie,” Sarah looked at her mother and said, “And you could be a dean, not a professor. They’re two entirely different jobs.”
    “Well,” Nancy said to me as she recounted it. “I guess I got told.”
    I don’t know what I would see for Ruby on that film of the future. I fear that what I would see for Rachel would be unhappiness or discontent. Ruby has specific aims and desires. Rachel just seems to have a big yearning for something unnamed, perhaps never to be named.
    “Kiernan is obsessed with prom,” says Rachel, opening the fridge to get the mustard. “Just obsessed.”
    “He needs to grow up,” says Ruby. “It’s just a dance. Big deal.”
    Sarah’s mouth is full. The swimming coach once figured out that Sarah needs five thousand calories a day just to stay at her current weight. Around a mouthful of bread she says, “Eric only cares about prom so he can get to breakfast, and the lake. French toast