That night at dinner, while I was just sitting there minding my own business and trying to decide

if I should take my dad up on his wager that the Rockets were going to lose by ten, one of my

twelve-year-old twin stepsisters looked over at me and pursed her lips, as if I were something

she'd eaten and didn't like the taste of. I should have taken her look as a warning, but I was too

busy calculating the game's odds. Which is why a minute later, when she addressed me, I was

caught totally off guard.

"You should wear a padded bra, Lucy," said Princess One, still eyeing me. "Your boobs are

really small."

Unfortunately she hadn't cleared this tip with her sister, who was so eager to offer counter

advice, she

7

nearly choked on her veggie burger. "It's too late for that now" said Princess Two. "She should have started back in September."

"That's a good point," acknowledged Princess One.

Neither one of my stepsisters seemed at all bothered by the fact that compared to them, I'm

Pamela Anderson.

"Actually," I said, "you know how last week you said I should get blond highlights because of how my hair's too red?"

The Princesses nodded eagerly.

"Well, I was thinking I'd dye my boobs blond and get a padded skull."

"Ha ha, Lucy," said Princess One. "News flash: Maybe if you took this kind of thing a little more seriously, you would have been invited to the homecoming dance."

"News flash," I echoed. "Not everyone's life goal is to get the word juicy tattooed on her ass."

"Lucy," Mara said, emerging from the coma she enters whenever her daughters start criticizing

me, "please don't use that kind of language at the table."

After dinner I headed down to my "room," known in most houses as "the basement."

For the first few months after my dad and I moved into my stepmother's house, I was actually a

little worked up about the fact that I live in a furnitureless

8

dungeon where my "bed" is an air mattress; and my clothing--which was initially in cardboard

"dressers"-- has slowly ended up in piles all over the floor, as first one and then another and then yet another of the "drawers" fell apart. Each time I had the temerity to complain, to point out that the only reason I didn't bring my old furniture from San Francisco to New York was because of

all the beautiful new stuff Mara was "so excited" to buy, I was reminded by my stepmother, the

amateur interior decorator, that finding the "perfect piece" takes time. Nations have fallen and risen, revolutions have come and gone, celebrity couples have wed and divorced, and still the

right headboard eludes my stepmother.

The one cool thing about being down here is I put up posters of my two favorite paintings;

except for them the walls are completely bare, so it's kind of like being in a museum--you know,

vast empty space punctuated by spectacular works of art. Lying on my "bed" I can either look at

the wall across from me, where Matisse's The Dancer hangs, or up at the ceiling, where I've

tacked a ginormous poster of Autumn Rhythm (Number 30).

My mom was a really great artist. Her paintings hang in museums all over Europe, and MOMA

and the Metropolitan Museum of Art each own one. The walls of our house in San Francisco

were covered with her work, but when we moved we put it all in storage. My dad said Mara's

feelings might be hurt if we asked to hang Mom's paintings here. That's pretty much the

9

major theme in my life now--Mara's feelings. Basically, they're always being hurt or in danger of

being hurt.

Which means I'm always in trouble or in danger of being in trouble.

Before I went to sleep, I flipped through a book of Cezanne reproductions I'd gotten out of the

library. But even staring at his perfect pears, each one so sculpted and weighty, I couldn't get my

mind off the list I'd been making in math, the proof that something had gone very, very wrong

with my life.

Because if I have a wicked stepmother and two evil stepsisters, aren't I supposed to get a prince?

10

Chapter Two

Once upon a time I actually tried to make a friend at Glen Lake.

This was back in January, at the start of second semester, when I was foolishly convinced my life

was about to turn around. I'd signed up for this art class, and from the first day I could tell it was

going to be great. Unlike the rest of the Glen Lake faculty, Ms. Daniels, the art teacher, A) really

knows her stuff, B) is not deaf, dumb, blind and/or clinically insane, and C) does not dress as if

we were still living under President Washington. Plus, she's not afraid to give serious

assignments (still lifes, nudes) and to grade them hard.

The other kids in the class aren't especially talented, except for one, Sam Wolff, a junior who's

without a doubt the best artist in the whole school. His paintings hang all over the building, and

when Ms. Daniels took

11

attendance on the first day of class and I realized he was the guy whose art I'd been admiring all

first semester, I was totally psyched. Finally, someone I could talk to about something I loved.

The second week of class, when I got to the studio early and found him alone, sitting and

sketching on the old couch in the corner, I figured, Now's my chance. I tried to start up a

conversation, telling him how much I liked a still life he did that was on display in the lobby. It's

a painting of one of those small green tables they have at Starbucks, and on the table there's a

coffee cup, a crumpled napkin, some change, and a half-eaten doughnut. Even though he played

with proportions and perspective, somehow everything seems incredibly real. You can feel the

grains of sugar spilled on the table's surface and the sticky icing on the doughnut.

I told Sam I thought the painting was really cool and I'd spent a long time looking at it. I told him

how it seemed like you could just take a bite of the doughnut. For the first seven eighths of my

monologue, he just squinted up at me, not saying anything. Then, after I'd been going on and on

for, like, two hours, he put on his glasses (he wears these glasses with thick, black rims), stopped

squinting, and said, "Thanks." But he didn't say it like, Thanks, it's really cool of you to take time out from your busy schedule to appreciate the art I have labored to create. Just knowing my

work is appreciated is all the gratitude I need from this cruel, cruel world.

12

Instead, he said it like, Could you possibly crawl back into whatever hole you crawled out of and

stop bothering me?

Needless to say, I have stopped pursuing friendship within the Glen Lake artistic community.

On Wednesday, I spent all of art finishing up a charcoal still life of a glass of water, a lemon, and

a notebook on a shelf by an open window. When the bell rang I headed to my drawer to put my

stuff away, and Ms. Daniels gestured at me to come over to where she was culling the most

ancient tubes of paint from a cupboard and chucking them in the trash. She flipped open a tube,

tested the paint on the back of her hand, then returned it to the shelf before taking my drawing

from me.

"This is looking good, Lucy," she said, tracing her finger along the edge of the page. "I love how diaphanous the curtains are."