Free The Lifeboat Clique by Kathy Parks Page A

named Ranger Todd.
    â€œNo use fighting,” he said. “We’re stuck with each other unless we all die.”
    He began to drum.

OCHO
    I FIRST MET ABIGAIL WHEN I KICKED HER IN THE FACE .
    I didn’t mean to do it. I wasn’t born with face-kicker tendencies like Bruce Lee or a kangaroo. It was a total accident. And there was more to the story than you’d think. But there was always more to the story when it came to Abigail.
    My family had just moved from Wisconsin to West LA when I was about to enter the seventh grade, suddenly friendless and angry. The new city filled me with contempt, those countless nail salons and fancy convertibles and shiny round sunglasses. And sushi. How that city loved to cut up fish. And there was no slowness, no realness. Inever saw a kid roll a tire down the street. I never saw an American flag in a front yard or heard the clanking sound its pulley chain makes when the wind blows. I never saw neighbors gathered on a porch. I never even saw an ice cream truck. All the ice cream truck drivers had probably become movie stars or written songs that were used in commercials, and now they were too rich to drive ice cream trucks.
    It was a totally different world. In my little protected neighborhood in the Midwest, kids could ride their bikes to one another’s houses. Here you had to get a parent to drive you, because LA was spread out and choked with traffic, and no one walked anywhere. Everyone drank weird brands of coffee, and was skinny and perfect. I didn’t even trust the flowers. Their colors seemed fake and showy. They paid no attention to the blooming seasons of the Midwest, just bloomed whenever the hell they wanted to. I wanted to slap those flowers.
    I missed my friends from Wisconsin terribly, and Skyped and texted them every night, complaining about my terrible luck in moving to this place just because my father lost his teaching job in Oshkosh and now taught at UCLA.
    â€œYou’ll make new friends,” said Jessica Altvine. She was my most positive friend and therefore my least favorite.
    â€œI don’t WANT new friends,” I hotly replied, leaning in to the light of my computer. Jessica’s skin had a pink, unflattering tone to it over Skype. “I want my old friends. The ones I grew up with. Not these dopes in this town.”
    â€œDon’t worry. You’ll make a ton of new friends, and before you know it, you’ll be glad you moved there.”
    I decided that should I ever return to Wisconsin, I was going to replace Jessica with a more cynical and less pink-toned friend.
    â€œCome on,” my mother said. “Give the West Coast a try. I am.” Indeed, she was trying. And it was hard for her to make friends with a bunch of women who went to Spinning class and talked about cultured goat’s milk. My mother totally didn’t fit in here, but it was her nature to be a good sport about everything.
    â€œYou know your father needed a job,” she said, “so let’s make the best of it.”
    I didn’t want to make the best of it. LA was full of people hungry for something. They didn’t grow up with this town wrapped around them. Most of them came here to make something of themselves, and that failure was written all over their faces.
    They wanted to be famous. They wanted to be stars. They wanted paparazzi to follow them around, and they wanted to sing or dance or act or just be important. It wasa strange feeling. Like a bunch of shipwrecked sailors competing over one bottle of water.
    A prize example was my new gym teacher, Ms. Hanson. She had blindingly white teeth and a fake smile, and her forehead didn’t move when she got mad, and she didn’t wear a bra, so when she led us in jumping jacks, her breasts would fly around and it was weird and gross. And she was always talking about her “auditions.” About how she had been an extra in the movie Titanic when she was twelve years old,