American Girls by Cecily Wolfe

Author:Cecily Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: women's fiction, flashbacks
Publisher: Cecily Wolfe
Published: 2020-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

Our birthday is strangely warm and clear for December, although our past few birthdays haven’t been all that snowy or cold either. There’s an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen in the freezer, and Thora and I wake up excited to tear it apart to get to the layers we each like best, much to the consternation of our mother.

I’ve also been thinking of how to spend my sixteenth birthday night with Matt, who has asked me time and again if I’d rather go to Red Lobster or even Santino’s, which is a fancy Italian place my parents like to go to for their wedding anniversary every year, for our dates, but even for tonight I want to return to our usual spot.

Dusty, the waitress who serves us every weekend now, is usually annoyed and pays attention to us only when she has to, but sometimes she surprises us by asking questions about how long we’ve been dating, or where we go to school. She’s promised us coconut cream pie for tonight, which I haven’t had for ages, but I’m thinking of what will happen after Country Kitchen, and of the sweetness of Matt’s lips after we have finished the whipped cream and coconut filling.

“It’s too bad we can’t all go out for dinner.”

Our mother has been whining about this for several days now, and while we suggested weeks ago we have our birthday dinner on another night, she’s insisted we do it for lunch instead on our actual birthday. Not like Thora and I care.

Our dad has been raking leaves in the backyard all morning, and to get away from our mom’s fussing over her disappointment in how we’re choosing to spend our birthday evenings, Thora and I both join him. Growing up in Ohio means raking leaves from October to March some winters, and this is shaping up to be one of them.

Thora hasn’t said much to me beyond happy birthday as I stumbled out of bed, finding her up and dressed, a glass of chocolate milk beside her textbooks on the desk as she wrote in a notebook in her lap. She didn’t look at any of the textbooks, though, as she wrote, so I wondered what she was working on.

It was only when she snapped it shut and slid it under the books that I realized I had asked my question out loud.

“Nothing.”

Her response was as clipped as her actions, and she offered me a quick smile before taking her chocolate milk and leaving the bedroom. The door remained open, so I could hear her talking to our mother while I dressed and avoided looking at the desk. She deserved some privacy, I told myself, fighting the temptation to peek at the notebook.

Angie kept a diary, which wasn’t very smart considering what she probably wrote in it. If her parents ever found it, she’d be grounded until we graduated.

I wondered if Thora was starting a diary, although we had never kept one before, and as

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