Free The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumacher Page B

on the stick-figure icon next to my name. Under personal I was listed as widowed; and under goals it said, I need to dye my hair and get a tattoo . Wallis’s section was under construction—please check back later . And under CeeCee’s name (she was still identified as our Motivational Speaker) there was a picture of ten perfectly pedicured red toenails in front of the pool.
    Jill’s house was thick with rugs and curtains, every room wallpapered, as if in homage to the book we’d discussed the week before. There were fuzzy yellow bamboo shoots in the hallway, pink and blue roses in the living room, and,in the kitchen, golden faceless men and women pushing wheelbarrows and carrying sheaves of wheat. “What’s that about?” CeeCee asked. She took a picture of the kitchen wallpaper with her phone.
    The house was air-conditioned to about sixty-five degrees. Jill’s father was partially disabled from multiple sclerosis, and he hated the heat.
    Eventually Jill’s mother called us to order, and we clustered around two flowered couches in the living room, where the pink and blue upholstery matched the ruffled drapes. There were seven of us again, instead of eight. CeeCee raised her eyebrows in my direction when Wallis told us her mother couldn’t come.
    As a contribution, Wallis had brought three bananas with her, each dotted with bruises. Jill’s mother had set them on a plate. She peeled one and ate it, exclaiming as if it were a marvelous and exotic hors d’oeuvre.
    For a while we ate button mushrooms and yogurt-covered pretzels and talked about monster books in general: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , Twilight , Interview with the Vampire , Dracula , and Lives of the Monster Dogs . CeeCee summarized a few of the slasher films she’d seen, at which point we learned that Wallis didn’t own a TV.
    “Why not?” Jill asked. She wanted to know if Wallis was Amish.
    “Show us your butter churn,” CeeCee said.
    The collective motherhood in the room seemed to think the lack of a TV qualified Wallis for a Nobel Prize.
    “You’ve probably read more books than the rest of us,”my mother said. She had apparently forgotten that I was spending my summer reading.
    “I read one book a week,” Wallis said in her animal’s voice. “I made a rule. One book a week, times roughly fifty books per year, over a reading lifetime of sixty years: that’s three thousand books.” She paused. “I call it the Rule of Three Thousand.”
    “Three thousand books,” my mother said. “But that’s so few, for an entire lifetime.”
    Apparently thrilled with this encouragement, Wallis went on to explain that people who read two books a week, with a few weeks off for travel or sickness, would be abiding by the Rule of Six Thousand.
    No one said anything, probably because—mathematically speaking—three of us were humbled and three were annoyed.
    CeeCee took out her phone to snap a picture of Wallis, but Wallis immediately turned away.
    “I don’t want my picture taken,” she said.
    “Can we talk about the book for a while?” I asked.
    Jill tucked her feet under one of the flowered cushions on the couch and started us off. She said she didn’t understand why Victor Frankenstein insisted on keeping his creation a secret. “Why didn’t he just bring his family together and sit them down and say, ‘Hey. Guess what? I made a dead guy, and now he’s roaming around killing people’?”
    “He was probably ashamed,” her mother said. “He must have realized that creating the monster was wrong.”
    “Maybe,” CeeCee said. “But wasn’t it worse for him to run away after he brought it to life?” She put her cell phoneback in her purse. “He’s like a parent who takes one look at his newborn baby and then abandons it.”
    Jill’s mother stared at the two remaining bananas.
    “I hope I’m not touching on a difficult subject.” CeeCee balanced a plate of stuffed mushrooms on the palm of her hand. “But it does