Free Plastic by Sarah N. Harvey Page B

that I care—she’s my best friend, after all, not my girlfriend—but I can’t help noticing. Being analytical is a curse sometimes.

Chapter Two
    When I get home after school, Mom is sitting at the kitchen table marking essays and eating Zesty Ranch Doritos straight from the bag.
    â€œGood day?” she says, offering me some chips.
    â€œYup,” I reply. “Leah’s coming over later, okay?”
    â€œSure,” she says. “Don’t forget, this is your dad’s weekend home.”
    My dad is a marine biologist. He worked for the government for a while when my brother Mike and I were in elementary school, but office work drove him crazy. Now he’s a fisheries consultant. He’s worked in Japan and Brazil and China. Today he’s flying back from the Philippines. Twice a year, Mom flies out to wherever he’s working. It’s a weird arrangement, but it works for them. They met at some student protest at university. At least that’s the party line. I suspect they met at a kegger—they both love their brewskies. But they cling to the story that activism is what brought them together. Our basement is a protestsign graveyard. It says a lot about my mother’s politics and my father’s knack with power tools.
    Save the [Insert endangered species here: Whales—Seals—Marmots— Eagles—Wolves]
    End [Insert social evil here: Racism— Poverty—Homelessness—Hunger— Violence Against Women]
    Stop [Insert global issue here: Pollution—Capitalism—Crime— Climate Change—War]
    All worthy causes, no doubt. One of my earliest memories is of a pro-choice rally outside an abortion clinic. Man, that was scary. Mom went to support the women’s collective that ran the clinic. People spit on us and yelled “Baby killer” at her, even though she was pushing me in a stroller. Mike was riding his tricycle beside us. I guess her T-shirt might have set them off. It said Pro-Sex Pro-Child Pro-Choice . Her sign read Every child wanted, every mother willing . I don’t remember if my dad was there too. All I remember is the hatred on the faces of the pro-life crowd. When I was eleven, I almost drowned when I fell out of a Zodiac during a Greenpeace demonstration. After that, I refused to go. Mom still attends rallies, and she still tries to get me involved. We’re both kinda stubborn.
    â€œAnd there’s an email from Mike too,” she says, licking salt and grease off her fingers. “He sent pictures this time.”
    â€œCool,” I say as I grab a soda from the fridge and head to my room.
    â€œI’m leaving at six for the airport,” Mom calls after me. “There’s pizza in the freezer—and ice cream.” Cooking’s not one of Mom’s passions. It’s always a bit of a relief when Dad’s around to fire up the barbecue.
    â€œCool,” I say again as I sit down and open up my laptop. Mike’s email doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know. He’s alive, Hawaii is awesome and he’s making pretty decent cash teaching tourists to surf. The pictures tell a little more, but not much. He’s shaved his head. He has a new tattoo on his left arm, from wrist to elbow. His sixpack is even more defined than it was when he emailed from Australia. In a couple of the photos he has his arm around the same bikini-clad girl. Her breasts are perfect—on the small side but shapely—as are her teeth, and pretty much everything else about her.
    You’d never guess that Mike has a genius-level iq. He graduated from Warren with the highest gpa in the history of the school. The summer after he graduated, he turned down scholarship offers from four universities. Then he went tree planting for the summer and bought himself a one-way ticket to Australia. That was two years ago. Mom and Dad say they’re not worried— Mike is apparently