Free Everything You Want by Barbara Shoup Page A

of Thanksgiving weekend. You’ll come won’t you? Please? Everyone’s dying to see you.”
    Stupidly, I said okay.
    What I think now is, Ha! If it’s true they’re dying to see me it’s because they want the scoop on me suddenly being a millionaire. Probably, they’re wishing they’d been a lot nicer to me when Josh was being such a jerk last year—this little satisfaction somewhat balances my dread about seeing Josh tonight, and makes me remember what Mom used to say when they were being so awful to me about him: “You’ll see, Emma. They’ll be punished! They’ll grow up and have to spend the rest of their lives being themselves !”
    But if their terrible suffering has begun, it’s not apparent to me.
    Stepping into Lisa’s rec room is like stepping right back into high school. Barenaked Ladies blasting on the stereo. The girls cloistered on the sofas, gossiping. The boys playing pool.
    Josh isn’t among them, I notice with relief.
    Lisa jumps up from the couch to give me a big hug, and the other girls follow. They actually do seem glad to see me, which makes me feel guilty about hoping they were unhappy. Because the truth is—yeah—they were bitchy and mean when I got sideways with Josh last year, but I was, still am , my own worst enemy. Like my favorite English teacher Mrs. Blue used to say, wryly quoting Mark Twain when someone did something truly idiotic, “‘Be yourself is the worst advice you can give to some people.’” Trouble is, I’ve never been able to figure out how to be anything else.
    Even now, I can’t resist doing a comedy routine about winning the lottery. I tell about Jules flying in from New York to go shopping at the mall. About Dad calling in rich, Mom’s meltdowns and epiphanies, Gramps’ intention to hit the road in a new Winnebago.
    When I tell about my new Jeep, Ryan Farber says, “Your old man says you can have any car you want and you get a Jeep? Man, you should have hit him up for a Ferrari.”
    “You would want one of those dick cars,” I say.
    There’s a moment of shocked silence, the kind I’ve been expert at creating all my life. Then Ryan laughs, gives me a bear hug. “I love you, Emma. No shit, I do.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” I say. “Everybody loves me now I’m rich!”
    I try to sound nonchalant, but I’m embarrassed by what I’ve said. And as if that weren’t bad enough, there’s Josh standing at the foot of the basement stairs, watching me with a look on his face that makes me wish I could just vaporize myself to a whole other dimension. It’s not pity, not quite. But it’s close enough to make me avoid talking to him, to get the hell out of there as soon as I can, claiming I have another party to go to.
    A bald-faced lie.
    I’m home, feigning sleep, by the time Mom and Dad get back from dinner with some friends. And thinking about something else Mrs. Blue once said: Everything’s a story. “Your life is one story,” she told us. “You’re the main character in it. But you’re a character, major or minor, in the stories of dozens of other people, too: parents, siblings, relatives, friends, enemies. You may even play some part in the stories of people you don’t know, people who notice you or know of you for some reason.”
    It blew my mind at the time. I’d walk past some poor bag lady downtown and try to imagine her imagining me, hours later, while she lay sleepless in some awful shelter. I’d spend whole evenings wondering whether I was a major or minor character in whatever scene my friends and I were living, whether I was a major or minor character in each one of their lives.
    I think about a book I read, Wide Sargasso Sea , which tells the story of Jane Eyre from the point of view of Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife. Weird, the way what happens seems so completely different through someone else’s eyes. It makes me wonder how Josh would tell the story of what happened between us. But I don’t really want to know.

Nine
    “Well, how was