Free Vegan Virgin Valentine by Carolyn Mackler Page B

dinner, almost like a normal person. And she never once double-dipped her pita wedge into the hummus, as she’s been known to do. At one point, while she was telling a story to my mom, I studied her face. With her hair pinned off to the side, I realized for the first time that our eyes are exactly the same shape.
    On the ride home, my dad turned on some soft jazz. V leaned her head against the back seat. My mom put her hand on my dad’s knee. I looked out my window at the snowflakes swirling around the side of the road. I had this bittersweet sad–happy feeling in my throat as I thought about how for once in a long time things actually felt okay.

Chapter Nine
    Everything went to hell the last week in February.
    My family always goes away that week. My dad has a five-day dental convention in Tampa that coincides with my school break, so my mom and I join him. We hang out by the pool and take a shuttle to the mall and invent names for all the shades of gray hair that we see on old people, such as
more-salt-than-pepper white
and
I-bet-you-can-guess-I’m-legally-blind blue.
    But I couldn’t go this year. Even though high school was out for the week, I still had my college classes. Also, the yearbook pages were shipping to the printers in early March and I’d committed to proofreading all the text, an undertaking that was keeping me up past midnight every night. My parents had invited V to join them and it looked like she was going to go, especially since her SAT course was canceled over the school vacation. But then she got into the play and Ms. Green scheduled rehearsals for every day of break.
    At first, my mom was going to stay home with us, but then my dad said that since he’s probably retiring from dentistry in a few years, this may be one of their last chances to go. That’s when they floated the idea of flying in my cousin Baxter Valentine from Portland. Baxter is in his thirties, still single, and a freelance cartoonist. All those hours alone with pen and ink have made him Extremely Weird. He visited us a few years ago and was perfectly normal in front of my parents, but as soon as they walked into the other room, he would make this screwy face at me and then bark like a dog or squawk like a chicken.
    “No way!” I shouted when my parents called a Family Meeting and suggested inviting Baxter to Brockport. “Baxter is a freak!”
    “No, he’s not,” my mom said. “He’s a very successful—”
    “Freak,” V said. “When Aimee and I lived in Eugene, he drove down and stayed with us on the farm a few times. Maybe it was the Old MacDonald setting, but he was like quack-quack here, quack-quack there, here a quack—”
    “Oh my God!” I shrieked. “Baxter made animal noises at you, too?”
    V nodded. “Quacks, moos, barks…”
    “Animal noises?” my dad asked.
    My mom shook her head. “I can’t believe Baxter makes—”
    “Yes, he does!” V and I screamed at the same time. We could barely hold it together we were laughing so hard.
    My parents finally abandoned the Baxter idea after V and I assured them we’d be fine and would eat well and lock the doors and go to bed at a decent hour. And so, on Monday morning of February break, they hugged us goodbye, extracted promises that we’d leave our cell phones on at all times, and headed to the garage.
    “Parteeeee!” V shouted as their car backed down the driveway.
    I eyed her suspiciously. “You’re joking, right?”
    “Duh, Mara,” she said, and then headed up to her room.
    I stood in the kitchen, trying to figure out whether that meant
duh, no
or
duh, yes
.
    At first, it seemed like, duh, she
was
joking. V and I barely even saw each other on Monday or Tuesday. Some kids from the cast picked her up in the morning, and she didn’t come home from play practice until evening, around the time I was leaving for Common Grounds.
    I went over to the high school a few times to drop off pages of the yearbook and pick up the next section for