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baked inside the flaky crust.
    “Jeanette, do you know how salty this is? Have you tasted it? Are you trying to kill me? Are you trying to send my blood pressure skyrocketing through the roof?”He threw his bowl like a discus, skimming it across the tabletop. It clattered to the floor. I watched flecks of chicken and potato and cream hit the walls, like blood splatter in a horror film. Then Geoff stalked out of the room.
    “I guess his blood pressure’s already through the roof,” I said.
    “Oh, dear,” was all my mother said.
    “Excuse me ?” I said to Mom. “I thought it was delicious.”
    But Mom only shrugged and got a sponge and started cleaning the walls and the floor.
    After that, Geoff’s tantrums got worse. He was never violent or threatening. Nor was his fury always directed at us, exactly. Once, when he couldn’t find a piece of paper he needed to do his income taxes, he hit himself in the head so hard that the college honor society ring he always wore broke the skin and blood trickled down his forehead.
    Once, when his tie came back from the cleaners with a stain still on it, he got a pair of scissors and cut out the dirty spot and told my mom to take it back tothe cleaners so they would know what he was talking about. Once, for some reason I can’t remember, he had to pick me up from school. A teacher had kept us a few minutes late, and when I finally ran out the door and got into Geoff’s car, he screeched away from the curb so fast that the whole school turned to look.
    At moments like that, I was glad that no one in the school knew me. Otherwise, it might have bothered me that I hadn’t made one single friend. Nobody was mean to me, nor did they try to make me feel like a freak or an outsider. They just didn’t seem all that interested in me, in where I’d come from, or who I was. They all seemed to feel as if getting to know me would be too much work. They’d all known each other practically since birth. They had all the friends they needed already, so why should they bother making a new one? Or maybe they sensed something I didn’t know myself. I wasn’t going to stick around all that long, so why should they go to the trouble?
    Also, I kept thinking that because I’d become friends with Kevin and Chris and Shakes so early and stayed friends with them for so long, I’d never learned—I’dnever had to learn—how to actually make friends. It was as if I’d missed school on the day they taught that lesson. Maybe there was some trick to it, something you could do to make other kids want to hang out with you. I didn’t get it, and I totally didn’t get how to make friends with other girls—which, I knew, was what I should have been doing. Half the time, I didn’t understand what the girls in my new school were talking about, or why they cared about the things—clothes and makeup and movie-star gossip—that seemed important to them. I didn’t know how to start a conversation with them, and after a while I stopped trying. I knew my mom was sort of worried about it, but she had enough to deal with, coping with Geoff’s temper tantrums.
    I could handle the loneliness. But the bad news was, I had no one to tell about what a baby Geoff was. I emailed and texted Shakes and Kevin and Chris. But it wasn’t the same as being in the same town and seeing them every day. Sometimes it took them—even Shakes—a few days to answer, by which point I’d forgotten which one of Geoff’s fits I’d been complaining about. At least Geoff had no interest in acting like a father. He never said,“Call me Dad.” I don’t think he had any desire for me to think of him as my dad. He was the baby that Mom had signed on to take care of. Which made me the ugly stepsister, the rival for Mom’s affections.
    Geoff’s impersonation of a grown-up reminded me of Joan’s Brady Bunch Mom act, her Doctor Joan Marbury, Therapist miniseries. The difference was that Geoff occasionally stopped acting and let his