Free One Pink Line by Dina Silver Page A

despite a few flirtatious evenings with drunken fraternity boys, I was really looking forward to seeing him back at home.
    One morning, Jenna rushed into my room. “You’re not going to believe this!” she screamed.
    “What’s up?”
    “My parents are taking me to New York for October break, and they said I could bring a friend,” she looked at me waiting for my equally enthusiastic reaction, but I didn’t have one. “I’m inviting you, you moron!”
    I made a weird face that was part excited, part apologetic. “You know I’m going home to see Ethan,” I said, trying hard not to be a buzz kill. “He would kill me if I went to New York instead.”
    She was vibrating with energy as she sat down on the edge of my bed, and started talking really fast. “Listen, you’ve never been to New York, right?” she confirmed and I nodded. “Okay, so Ethan would not want you to miss out on an all expense-paid weekend there would he?”
    I acted as though I was considering what he’d want. “No, I’m pretty sure he could give a shit about me going to New York over break. He and I have been obsessing about seeing each other for the past two weeks…and my sister is going to be home too,” I said. “I’m sorry, trust me, it sounds amazing, but there’s no way I can change my plans.”
    Jenna must have known there was no way I’d go with her. She probably knew it before she asked, but thought she’d give it a try anyway.
    “I understand,” she rolled her eyes. “We’re staying at the Plaza,” she dangled one last carrot.
    “You suck, that’s awesome, but I can’t.”
    She jumped off my bed and buzzed towards the door. “I gotta pack!”
    Louise weighed in quietly from her desk. “You made the right decision.”
    The last day of classes, Jenna flew to LaGuardia, and I put my name on a carpool board and got dropped off at the Carson Pirie Scott just off the expressway at Edens Plaza in Wilmette. My sister was there waiting for me with a bag of fried chicken from Little Red Hen in Glencoe. My favorite.
    Seeing her face almost made me cry. “Hi, Ken,” I said as we hugged. “I missed you…and fried chicken,” I said and inhaled the aroma seeping out of the greasy brown paper bag in her backseat. When Kendra turned sixteen, my parents bought her a red, convertible Volkswagen Cabriolet. When I turned sixteen, I was allowed to invite three friends to dinner at Ron of Japan, where they cook the shrimp at your table.
    “Hello, gorgeous, you look tired.”
    “Do I look tired or gorgeous?”
    She drove me home, and we endured an afternoon with my parents, then dinner at the mall. My mother was actually quite tolerable that first night, and made only two negative comments in regard to my appearance. The first was that my oversized hooded sweatshirt wasn’t appropriate attire for dining out, and the second was that I needed a haircut. Both equally mild on a scale of one-to-offensive.
    Kendra was in her senior year at the University of Illinois, and that weekend wasn’t an official school break for her, but she’d come home to be there for me.
    “So how much time do I have with you?” she asked.
    “Ethan’s not getting in until noon tomorrow.”
    “Good, we can go for breakfast together!”
    I rubbed my belly, everything revolved around food, and the free soft serve machine in the school cafeteria wasn’t helping my waistline. “Can’t we just go for coffee or something?”
    “No, we cannot, you love that Walker Brothers Pancake House; we’ll go there for apple pancake fritters, or whatever.”
    “Fine,” it really wasn’t hard to convince me.
    After breakfast the next morning, Ethan called and said he was having lunch with his mom, and he’d come over once they were through. I couldn’t wait.
    My being home from college didn’t seem to make an impression on my mother’s schedule at all, which turned out nicely for me. She had two tennis matches on Saturday, and a friend’s birthday lunch on