Free The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted by Elizabeth Berg

both greatly admire the way she can draw. Last time they wanted tanks and airplanes, in-fantrymen dead on the ground, bullets flying. This time she suspects they’ll want spaceships or beautiful women, amply endowed—this is what the boys in her art class ask her to draw. She can do either.
    Her parents will probably deliver Janey to her aunt and uncle late at night, they usually do, and Janey thinks how Aunt Peggy will show her to a bed made up in sweet-smelling linens from the sheets having hung on the line to dry in the wind and the sunshine. She thinks too of how Aunt Peggy—everyone, really—will comment on how much she’s grown. They haven’t seen her for two years—last August, Janey got her tonsils out and they couldn’t take their annual trip to North Dakota. Janey got all the ice cream she wanted in the hospital, but it didn’t make up for the burning pain. Everybody said it would, but it didn’t.
    Janey sits up and spreads her map across her lap. Every time her family drives to North Dakota, she follows along on a map, x-ing out the states as they pass through them.
    This time it will be Texas. Oklahoma. Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota. She already knows that South Dakota will seem the longest because it’s the one before you finally get there.
    She yawns, considers car bingo, with its insulting juve-nile pictures of cows and railroad crossings, rejects it in favor of watching the telephone poles whip past, birds on F u l l C o u n t
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    the wire occasionally rising up in a great flurry of flapping wings, a choreography of surprise and fear.
    At the restaurant where they stop for lunch on the second day, the silverware is in an envelope of waxed paper, and the waitress calls her father “honey.” She doesn’t know not to be so familiar; he’s not in uniform, and he is using his vacation manners: no orders, no yelling, no gruff inquiries as to where he left his burning cigarette. He winks at Janey’s mother, and her mother smiles back. They are always in their own club.
    Janey asks if she can have a hamburger, and her mother says of course. “Cheeseburger, I mean,” Janey says, “and can I have French fries, too?”
    Her mother ignores her, so she asks again for French fries. “If you want them, get them,” her mother says. Janey holds one hand with the other and squeezes it.
    “Get them,” her mother says, more softly now.
    Janey shrugs.

“We’ll share,” her mother says. “How about that?”
    “Okay.” Janey doesn’t like to share food. It makes her nervous, deciding how much she can take. She’ll let her mother have all the French fries.
    While they wait for their food, Janey looks around the room. Big fat guys dressed in bib overalls and plaid shirts, hats on the table beside them with sweat stains on them.
    Not many women; there’s one woman two tables over sitting with a little girl wearing a blue sundress and red shoes. The girl is cute: curly blond hair, pink cheeks, a hec-tic kind of energy that has her playing with the salt and pepper shakers, arranging and rearranging her silverware, changing her position from sitting to kneeling to sitting.
     
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    t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Janey waves at her, and the little girl stares. “Hi,” Janey says, but the girl says nothing back.
    “So,” Janey’s mother says, “are you excited?”
    About lunch? Janey wonders. The trip? She nods.
    “Me, too,” her mother says, and then turns to her father.
    “Hi,” Janey says to the little girl. “Hi, there.” No response. Janey looks out the big plate-glass window in the front. Across the street, a grocery. A dry cleaners. Dust rising up in the street from the occasional truck passing by; there are far more trucks than cars in this town.
    And then the cheeseburger comes, and the French fries are good ones, so Janey does have a few. Four. And then when they go back to the car her mother and father both want a slice of the pie, so it’s not so bad for Janey to