Not My Type Read Online Free PDF Page A

crisper drawer. “I did this right after work. I didn’t have time to shower,” I said. I had endured another night of thankless sandwich making, plus a minidrama over who had let the avocados go bad, by mentally composing my résumé for the Advocate . The worse the night got, the greater the urge to work on my résumé grew until I could barely wait to draft it when I got home.
    “We’ve been learning how to do résumés in my English class,” Ginger said. “Let me look at it. I bet I can fix it.”
    “You don’t even know if it needs fixing,” I said but cut off the rest of my complaint when my mom shot me a warning look. A couple of adamant jerks of her head in Ginger’s direction were enough to communicate that she wanted me to humor my sister’s offer of “help.” I rolled my eyes and nodded that I had gotten the message.
    “All right, Ginger. Do your worst.” I snatched the résumé back from my mom and thrust it at Ginger. “But you’re going to have to quit stuffing your face if you want to see it.” Ginger, like all the Spicer kids, eats nonstop because we inherited my skinny parents’ super-high metabolisms. We burn calories as fast as we consume them, and we’re always hungry. My mom says that’s half the reason she had to start substitute teaching, to pay the grocery bill. I think it probably has more to do with my brother being out on a mission, but I don’t know. I looked at the heaping bowl of edamame Ginger had grabbed for herself and considered that maybe my mom wasn’t joking about the food budget.
    “I’ll look this over in my room while you take a shower. Because you stink,” she added, in case I’d forgotten. Nice. A double dig.
    I didn’t bother answering, instead heading for the stairs. A shower sounded great. Thirty minutes later, I walked back into Ginger’s room to find her curled up in an overstuffed beanbag in the corner where I used to keep my desk. I flopped onto her bed and stared at the ceiling where she had pinned up a poster of the Glee cast. “It doesn’t bother you that these people stare at you while you sleep?”
    “It’s not your room anymore, so mind your own business,” she muttered, absorbed in my résumé.
    “I thought you were going to look that over while I showered,” I said.
    She didn’t look up. “I had to do my nails first.”
    I amused myself while I waited by judging all the choices she had made in decorating “the room that used to be mine.” A mirror sat atop my old pine dresser, now painted a soft pink. Ticket stubs and wallet-sized pictures of her friends were tucked into the mirror’s frame, and a souvenir pompom in NVHS blue and white hung off the corner. A pleasant pastel jumble of nail polishes in light pink, medium pink, and every shade in between covered one edge of the dresser top, and the rest was covered with bottles of body sprays, hair products, half-used lipsticks, and several folded notes.
    “I thought texting destroyed the art of passing notes,” I said.
    “It depends on whether your teacher will confiscate your cell phone if they catch you. Or if you have friends whose lame parents won’t let them have cell phones.” She didn’t look up from my résumé.
    “Ah.” The wall the bed rested against used to host a collage of my snapshots from happier days, pre-breakup. Now it held two shelves of Ginger’s dance trophies, plus a pair of battered, bedazzled jazz shoes.
    I shook my head, wondering how we could be so different. I owned exactly three bottles of nail polish, all from the OPI Rocker Chick line. I figured a bar of Dove soap and a ninety-two-cent tube of Wet-n-Wild Cinnamon Spice lipstick, with a little mascara thrown on for special occasions, constituted a reasonable beauty routine. My guilty pleasure is funky jewelry. It used to clutter the space now full of Ginger’s hair products. I can’t resist handmade pieces, and the Circus Cookie box that holds mine runneth over on the much smaller dresser in