Read 100 Days for Free Online Page B

any given time, and we’re all scattered across the globe. Still, I have bonded with some of the other kids, and I like to stay in touch. The hardest thing is logging in only to see that someone isn’t doing well, or worse, that someone I talked to only a month or so ago has died. For some reason, it’s their parents I always worry about most.
    Sometimes, like today, when people the world over are celebrating rebirth, I catch Mom watching me when she thinks I don’t notice. Her eyes take in my gnarled hands with their oversize joints and brittle, misshapen fingernails. My bird bones and loose skin. I wonder if Mom is thinking that this is how she might look at eighty, at ninety.
    A mother shouldn’t be able to see her own future in her child. Then again, since she grew up not knowing her real mother, my mom doesn’t have anyone to watch for these kinds of clues. I guess that makes me a sort of oracle. That can’t be all bad, right?

 
    12
    MOIRA
    DAY 89: MARCH 28
    Agnes goes straight to her room after school on Monday to finish homework and edit photos on her computer. I don’t feel like doing my homework yet. I’m a straight-A student who manages to make procrastination work for me, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to break my streak by getting stuff done early for a change.
    Since I don’t feel like going home yet, either, it’s a relief when Agnes’s mom, Deb, summons me out to their little backyard patio. Once we’ve settled into a couple of plastic chairs, Deb snags a partially smoked cigarette from an ashtray sitting on the little table between us. “I need to quit,” she mutters, shooting a guilty glance at the back door. “Agnes hates it.” She lights and inhales in one quick motion. I still like hanging out with her, though. Deb’s one of the few adults who don’t seem at all fazed by my clothes or my makeup. Probably it’s because she’s pretty much seen it all. Agnes told me a long time ago that her mom grew up as a foster kid who was shuttled from house to house and never really had any family to speak of until she met Agnes’s dad.
    Not that I have anything against spending time with my own parents. Sometimes, though, it just seems like they’re too stuck in their own … worldview … to really relate to me. While I, for example, feel most at peace lost in thoughts of hard-core thrash music and general urban destruction, my parents are ardent worshippers of nature. While I can’t get enough of distorted guitar licks and screaming vocals, they’re late-blooming flower children who still listen to Wavy Gravy and Frank Zappa. In the nineties, when all the other twentysomethings were climbing the dot-com ladder and flipping houses, my parents were camping naked somewhere along the Pacific Crest Trail, or gifting at Burning Man, or mourning Jerry Garcia.
    The second my older brother, Grant, was born, they put him in a hemp baby sling and just sort of incorporated him into their lifestyle. It was only after I came along that they reluctantly settled down and got jobs with a couple of local nonprofits that focus on environmental education and the arts. My mom bought copies of the Moosewood Cookbook and Tales from a Vegan Table . She became the ultimate hippie homemaker, baking dairy-free carob chip cookies and tie-dyeing all of my T-shirts.
    This was all well and good until that horrendous sixth-grade year, when kids decided that the only acceptable clothes and home lives were those patterned directly after the latest top-twenty pop videos and Disney sitcoms. It didn’t seem to matter that nobody actually had a life like that. You just had to look and act like you did to be considered acceptable. It’s probably the reason I find Agnes’s interest in shiny, sparkly, bubble-gum pop star stuff so distasteful. I deal with it, of course, just like Agnes deals with my reaper-like taste in