“Did it work?” he asked her. “Did you drive them nuts?”
“No,” she said with a bitter laugh. “They drove each other nuts. Me, they just kind of ignored.” Divorce did that to kids, no matter how hard people worked to make it bearable. The truth was, when a married couple was doing all the emotional work of breaking up, the kids got pushed aside.
They stopped in the city park, which was a study in black and white—the wrought-iron fence, benches and tables against the snow. The steel tubes of the swing set. The black granite of the statue of Avalon’s founder. Daisy took out her camera. Zach took back the cigarette and lit it.
She acted unimpressed, although she couldn’t help it—he looked sexy in a kind of bad-boy way. “Lean against that tree,” she said. “I’ll take your picture.”
He shrugged, and then complied. He was getting used to her habit of taking pictures, and by now was relaxed in front of the camera.
She took a few more shots. Zach had an interesting face—bony angles counterbalanced with full lips, and that shock of straight, white-blond hair. Wreathed by a thread of cigarette smoke, he looked intense and for some reason, sad.
“Very Rebel Without a Cause,” she said, capturing him in profile, his gaze looking into some distance she couldn’t see, a helix of smoke rising from the tip of the cigarette.
“What’s that?”
All right, this was something she needed to get used to. Kids at her old school got all references to classic films and books. Here in Avalon, she found herself explaining things. “It’s an old movie about a middle-class teenager pointlessly rebelling.” Which, on reflection, sounded far too familiar for comfort. “A chain-smoking teenager,” she added.
“So what got you to quit?” he asked.
“Someone I met last summer.” She ducked her head, suddenly filled with an urge to smile. “Julian Gastineaux.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Nothing like that.” She gave in to the urge. Julian was certainly good-looking enough to be boyfriend material. But like Daisy, he wasn’t looking for that when they met.
“We had jobs together at Camp Kioga,” she explained to Zach. “He went back to California, though.” Like Sonnet, Julian was biracial. He was absolutely gorgeous, too, but he had an incredibly sad life. He and Daisy kept in touch by e-mail every day. Sometimes twice a day. Sometimes six times a day. But…boyfriend?
“And all he wanted,” she told Zach, “was to go to college and learn to be a pilot. Anyway, he’s the one who made me see how stupid it was, the smoking. We had this ritual burning of my last pack of cigarettes. Because I realized the only one I was hurting was myself.”
“If you’re expecting me to be all, ‘Okay, I’m motivated, I’m going to quit,’ you’re wrong.”
“I don’t expect you to do anything.” It would be nice, Daisy thought, if getting rid of the cigarettes and pot had been the pivotal moment for her. Nice and neat. Her teenage rebellion concluded with a positive act. It didn’t work that way, because the things that made her crazy didn’t end. She knew it was no coincidence that she started having careless sex with Logan O’Donnell the same day her mom announced she’d be working overseas for a year.
“My dad used to work up at Camp Kioga,” Zach said.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yep. Back in the day.”
Daisy put away her camera and shivered. When Sonnet’s mother, Nina Romano, had asked her if she’d seen a doctor, she had been like a deer in headlights. And of course, her stunned reaction had totally given her away.
Oh, she had tried to cover. She’d said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Nina—God, Mayor Romano—had not pressed the issue. Instead, she had scribbled a name and number on a Post-It note and said, “I figure, being new in town, you’d want to find a good doctor.”
So far, Daisy had dialed the number so many times, she had it memorized. But then, as soon as a voice said, “Dr. Benson’s office,” she hung up. She was being totally stupid about it. Every day she put off making a decision, her options were narrowing.
“You all right?” Zach asked. “You look all pale.”
“Do I?”
“Is anything wrong?”
For some reason, that did it. For far too long, Daisy had been keeping a tight rein on herself. Anyone looking at her would see a regular high-school girl, but just beneath her clean-cut, all-American surface was a hysterical girl barely hanging on to sanity. She felt herself unraveling, and she laughed as it happened, and the more Zach stared at her, the funnier it seemed.
Food for Thought
BY JENNY MAJESKY
The Scent of Ginger
Baking cookies is good for the soul on so many levels. The most basic virtue is simply the smell of a batch of cookies in the oven. The scent of ginger and butter floats through the house, lingering for a few hours afterward. The addition of a pinch of cayenne in gingerbread might seem unorthodox, but it’s subtle and gives it a little extra bite.
GINGERBREAD BARS
WITH ORANGE CREAM CHEESE FILLING
¾ cup butter, softened
¾ cup sugar
1 egg
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 ¼ cups flour
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup molasses + 3 tablespoons hot water
ORANGE CREAM CHEESE FILLING
½ package (4 ounces) cream cheese, softened
⅓ cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 tablespoon Cointreau, Grand Marnier or Triple Sec (optional)
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a 13 x 9 x 2-inch baking pan with wax paper. Spray with no-stick cooking spray and dust with flour. Beat butter until smooth. Beat in sugar and egg. Gradually mix in dry ingredients, alternating with the molasses/water mixture. Spread in prepared pan.
Beat cream cheese until smooth. Stir in sugar, orange juice and Cointreau. Spoon by teaspoons over batter in pan. With a knife, swirl through batter with long strokes in each direction to create marbled effect.
Bake for 30 minutes or until gingerbread begins to pull away from
