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for it.”
    Everyone looks at Prince Charming now.
    “This is just stupid,” he says, and takes the receipt out of my hand. Erik looks innocent, but there is a reason he wins on the track field. And it isn’t because he loves running. It’s because he loves to win. He has to.
    “Don’t you mean I’m stupid?” I say.
    The back room silence brings Howard charging in. He says, “Holy hell. We’ve got the whole town out there. You two get to work. Myra, don’t be a bitch about this just because he dumped you for what’s-her-boobs out there.”
    I look at Erik. He has what’s-her-boobs guilt written all over him.
    Erik says to Howard, “Myra’s just been under a lot of pressure lately. You know how she gets.”
    What a stroke of genius to make me look like a whack job while pretending to care what kind of pressure I’m under. Who finished Erik’s paper on morphology when he had a track meet all weekend? Who convinced Erik’s dad it was a recycling project when his dad found beer cans in his truck?
    Howard guffaws. “Yeah, I know the kind of pressure you give her, buddy. Those Morgan girls ... they’re all about pressure.”
    Yeah. That does it.
    I take off my apron, fold it, and hand it to Callie, who’s practically wetting her pants. I walk out of the Lucky Penny through the back door so I don’t have to see what’s-her-boobs.
    The crazy part is that when I’m driving home, instead of thinking about how I’ve lost my job and been called a slut from a family of sluts, I think of those dirty blades of ice cream. You never think about the clean-up when you’re eating those big chunks of Oreo, but you would if someone didn’t do it. And that’s the thing about cleaning things up—it sucks to do it and it sucks if you don’t.

9
     
    Mounted Specimen:
     
    A stuffed bird skin that people hang on their walls because it looks pretty but doesn’t make a mess.
     
     
    There are two kinds of jobs in Landon:
    (1) Rotten.
    (2) Less rotten, unless you’re a dentist like Erik’s dad, which actually I don’t think is all that great except the money, no matter what I told Erik.
     
    And there are two kinds of people in this town:
    (1) Losers: We work for the other kind of people.
    (2) Winners: There aren’t many of these types. They move.
     
    Of course there are variations. You can be a First Lieutenant Loser, like Howard, or an Assistant to the Winners, like my dad. He is an engineer for the copper mine. Or like my mom, who has a loser job cleaning offices until late at night, but thinks it’s okay because it makes it so she can be home in the daytime with Danny. But if you are a high school senior with no skills but baby busting, food flipping, and cleaning crew, you probably shouldn’t quit your job because your boss and your ex-boyfriend are jerks. That really limits where you can work around here.
    So when I go home early my parents are less than thrilled. I give them the overview minus the specifics of Howard calling my sister and me sluts. When I finish, my dad, the engineer, wants to hear the story again.
    “What do you mean?” he says when I get to the part where I walked to the front so I could get the receipt.
    “I didn’t do it.”
    “Erik deserves a swift kick in the butt, but you quit in the middle of a shift? What happened to everyone else when you left?”
    “What happens to you without a job?” says Mom. “How are you going to pay for dental assistant school?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Dad says, “Maybe you should have thought of that before you let your temper get the better of you. This is exactly what that little puke wanted you to do.”
    Maybe it was what I wanted me to do, is what I want to say. But what comes out is, “I know.”
    Sitting at the kitchen table with bills and a checkbook stacked in front of her, Mom looks as tired as I feel. In her jagged voice she says, “We just can’t do it all, Myra. Now that we have to pay for an uninsured baby there is no way we can