Free Everything You Want by Barbara Shoup

ask in the car. “You know, about the money.”
    “Mom’s always weird,” she says.
    “Has she shared any of her … epiphanies with you?”
    “’The cosmos doesn’t change, people do?’” Jules asks.
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, she’s right,” Jules says. “You know how Mom is like a dog with a bone trying to figure out how to think about certain things. Then she gets them worked out. Like, when I decided I wanted to be a cheerleader and she freaked out until she realized I’d probably hate it and quit. Which I did. Problem solved. She’ll figure out how to deal with the money, don’t you think?”
    “I guess.” I consider telling her about my eavesdropping on Mom and Dad the night before, but why worry her? Anyway she’s probably right. Mom will freak out, then figure out how to think about it, what to do.
    We ride a while in silence, and I wait for Jules to grill me about my social life, like she usually does. To advise me in her big-sister voice to get out more, meet people. To suggest the theater department again . Not acting. Certainly not singing or dancing. I could be a stagehand, or a props person, she always says. In Jules’ view, the theater is a perfect world in which there’s a place for everyone, no matter how geeky or weird. Theater people would embrace me; they embrace everyone. I’d find one friend, then another. But theater doesn’t really interest me. Books are what I love, the problem with them being that they’re the perfect escape from the real world in which I’m supposed to be finding my place.
    But Jules doesn’t try to tell me what to do. She just leans back, her eyes closed, breathing in the music on the radio. She gives me a quick hug when we get to the airport.
    “Love you. Buck up,” she says.
    Then she hops out of the Jeep and strides away from me, back into her life—and even while she’s still in sight, I’m sucker-punched by how much I miss her.
    God. I thought I was over that. It’s been ten years since Jules left me behind for high school—a totally normal, reasonable transition, I remind myself. She discovered theater and dance. Who wouldn’t rather be in that world than hang out with her little sister? It wasn’t her fault I was so dependent on her—or that I screwed up in high school so much I don’t have a life now.
    I beat myself up mentally about that for a while, high school, worrying every little moment of the Josh fiasco like you’d worry a broken tooth, moving from there right into a litany of fresh embarrassments about college that take me to the coffee “date” with Gabe Parker and the potential for a variety of humiliations in the near future.
    I am in no mood to go to the party Lisa Cochrun is having tonight, that’s for sure. In fact, just thinking about it makes me feel like I’ve got a light case of the flu. Josh will be there, I know. Plus all the others in the group I used to hang around with—until I screwed things up with Josh and made everyone so uncomfortable they started avoiding me like the plague.
    It’s tempting to call with some excuse, or just not show up. But I don’t want to hurt Lisa’s feelings. She was the only one who stuck by me, even when the things were at their worst with Josh. Over time, she actually managed to create an uneasy peace among us so that, by commencement, we were all at least speaking again—Josh and me included, though barely.
    Ever the peacemaker, she babbled on over the phone last week when she called to congratulate me for being rich, filling me in on everyone she’d seen Homecoming weekend. Meredith was in heaven at Purdue, where there were about ten boys for every girl; one semester at Antioch had turned Heather into a hippie. Cara loved Smith. Lauren wished she’d gone farther away than DePauw, because her parents kept coming down to visit her. Sara was in love with a grad student. Ryan Farber actually had a girlfriend.
    “We missed you,” she said. “I’m having this party the Friday