Free Hope and Other Luxuries by Clare B. Dunkle

landed on the floor.
    â€œGotta finish packing!” Elena cried, darting up from the table as dinner drew to a close.
    â€œCooks don’t have to clean up!” Valerie reminded us joyfully as she followed her sister up the stairs.
    Joe and I stayed behind to face the kitchen, which looked as if it had never been clean before in the history of the world. Towers of pans andbowls created their own skyline on the counter, and red splotches accented the tile on the walls. Not for nothing do they call that tile a backsplash.
    â€œDid those two make another dinner that we don’t know about?” Joe wondered mournfully.
    The next day, we drove Valerie and Elena back to school. The whole trip was one long, animated gossip session. It would have been easier for Joe and me to follow if half the girls hadn’t had overlapping names.
    â€œWait!” I said. “Is that the Gabrielle who slipped on the grass last year and dislocated her thumb?”
    â€œNo, no!” Elena replied. “You’re talking about Gabrielle Theiss. This is Gabrielle Hermann, whose brother Timo is the sailing instructor.”
    â€œOkay . . .”
    â€œYou remember,” Valerie prompted. “You know about Gabrielle. She’s the one with the baby brother who hit his head on the—”
    â€œFrau Hermann is hilarious!” interrupted Elena. “Gabrielle told me she sat the kids down one day and told them she’d read an article that teenage boys think about sex every seven seconds. And she says, ‘I want to talk to you all about this,’ and the girls, you know, they’re giggling, but the boys are just
bright
red, just staring a hole through the wall like they’re getting tortured. And Frau Hermann waits, but they don’t say a word, so she says, ‘Timo? Matthias? Well, what do you think?’ And Matthias jumps up and says, ‘I am
not
having this conversation,’ and he bolts out the door!”
    That made me laugh. But then I registered something unusual. Both girls had actually stopped talking. I glanced at the backseat and found that they were looking at me expectantly.
    â€œWell?” Elena prodded.
    â€œWell what?”
    â€œWell?
Do
boys think about sex every seven seconds?”
    Joe flicked a glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but I knew he wasn’t about to field this one. I thought for a minute. It was my policy to try to give a good answer to every question, if only so that the girls would keep asking me things.
    â€œThink about Matthias’s reaction,” I suggested. “Think about what the boys did.”
    There was a pause. Elena said, “I don’t get it.”
    â€œWell,” I said, “did they deny it?”
    â€œCriminy! You’re right!” Valerie said. “If it was wrong, they would have just
said
it was wrong. They would have said, ‘Hey, Mom, that’s stupid.’”
    â€œSo it’s true?” Elena said. And she and Valerie burst out laughing. “Oh, I can’t
wait
,” Elena said, “I can’t
wait
to tell Gabrielle!”
    We drove through massive Cologne, over the wide gray Rhine River, and took the turn off the highway onto curving country roads. Once again, we threaded our way along the steep little street—more of a driveway, really—up to the top of the hill.
    â€œOnce, Mona and I sneaked outside after lights-out,” Elena told us as we were walking up to the dormitory, “and we surprised a hedgehog on the side of this steep part here. It rolled up into a ball, and the next thing we knew, it rolled out of sight! We could hear the poor thing squeaking all the way down the hill. Hey! Hallo, Andrea!” And Elena went racing off to give one of her friends a hug.
    As Joe and I lugged suitcases and boxes from the car to the new dorm rooms, throngs and knots of girls swept by and robbed us of one or the other daughter. Then, a few minutes