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Slowly.
    Forget it , I thought. You are going to California in three and a half weeks! And maybe , I let myself think, maybe you’re not coming back .
    My cell vibrated with another text from Thom. Wish you were here. XXXX T
    I wished I were there too. And maybe I could be there.
    I could live with my dad.
    Twenty minutes from Thom’s new house. And Thom was going to a private school that I could enroll in.
    I’d been thinking about it for the past two weeks. At first, it had just been a little daydream, a fantasy. But the more I thought about being without Thom, and the weirder things between me and Caro grew, the more moving in with my dad and his new wife-to-be sounded … perfect.
    Right. Leave my mom and sister. Leave Mac, my stepdad, who was more a father to me than my own father.
    Leave Caro and Fergie and Annie and Selena. Lately? In a heartbeat.

Chapter 4
    I hadn’t told anyone about my big plan, the one I couldn’t stop thinking about. The one that felt more right by the minute.
    How could I? Um, Mom, when you’re done with the afternoon milking, I need to let you know I’m thinking of moving in with Dad. Permanently .
    I loved my mom, and Mac was a really nice guy. He was one of those perfect stepfathers, the kind who never tried to tell you what to do, but always had really good advice. Plus he was nuts about my mom, and my mom was kind of nuts, a cross between a hippie and a farm girl. She was really into the earth and recycling and being green. Mac was the same. I had seen him cry at least ten times over losing a calf or selling some livestock. They both got really attached to the animals.
    But I wasn’t meant for farm life. I hated everything about it, from the sight of tractors to the smell of poop to the mind-numbing roosters crowing at daybreak.
    I belonged in California. I knew that for a fact. And if I lived with my dad, we could get back how things used to be between us. When he and my mom were still married, we were really close. Not that he was around much, which was one of the reasons my parents divorced. But when he was, he’d make these huge messy meals for me and Sabrina, like sloppy joes and french fries and banana splits, and when Sabrina would go off to study, I’d stay and talk to my dad about stuff, like feeling invisible, and not understanding algebra, and being incredibly annoyed by Sabrina. He’d listen and give funny advice and make me feel heard. But ever since he’d moved to California and found Tiffany, his soon-to-be third wife, it was like he focused on her and forgot about me and Sabrina (not that he and Sabrina were ever very close).
    With my mom and Mac, it was different. They listened—and I totally gave them credit for it—but they didn’t understand me at all. After I came home from visiting my aunt in Rome, I heard them talking in their bedroom late at night, and my mom was saying something like “I think it’s so cute that Madeline is such a sophisticate. She’s really her own person and marches to her own drummer.” In other words, I was normal.
    I didn’t really fit into my family. They were the weirdos, with their thigh-high forest green rubber boots and dinner-length discussions about how cows had four stomachs. To them, I was the freak in the three-inch-high sandals who preferred to read Lucky magazine instead of Livestock Daily .
    My dad? Totally normal. A California architect with a BMW, an iPhone, and a gym membership. Living with him, enrolling in Thom’s school, living the life I wanted seemed so doable. Except for the part about my mom and Mac and even Sabrina being three thousand miles away.
    I wished I could talk to my sister about this, but I couldn’t. Sabrina would call me a traitor. Stop idolizing Dad , she always snapped at me. Look where it got Mom and Deirdre . Deirdre was his second wife, and though the word “homewrecker” was thrown around a lot right after my dad moved into her condo when we lived in the suburbs of New York