Read Girls Don't Fly for Free Online Page B

pay for your dental hygiene class. What are you going to do without that job?”
    No matter how bad I feel, my parents can always make me feel worse. “I’ll start looking tomorrow after school.”
    “I guess you heard Melyssa is moving home?”
    “Yeah, I know,” I say with more frustration than I mean to.
    My mom leans backward, away from her pile of bills, and sticks her pen in her gray-streaked ponytail. “Well, I guess you know everything then,” she says.
    Dad looks at me and Mom and sighs. I bet he wishes he could stay at work. Where everything is logical, and there are a lot less women. If only everything could be as beautiful and tidy as a smelter the height of the Empire State Building.
    “I don’t think you will have trouble getting another job, actually,” says Dad.
    I didn’t see that coming.
    “No, I don’t,” he says. “You’re capable. You take care of a lot around here. I’ve seen you hustle around that ice-cream parlor. You’re a hard worker. You work a lot harder than plenty of people I pay union wage.”
    I say, “Thanks, Dad.” Maybe there are some things I don’t know.
    “But,” he says, putting his finger to his nose like he does when he’s measuring something, “you have to get that money for school. So you’ll just have to go out there and find a new job tomorrow. Or your mom will make you pour the cement with us.”
    “I still need you here after school until your dad gets home,” she says.
    “I’ll work it out,” I say.
    I guess this isn’t the time to tell them that I want the money to go as far away from this place as I can imagine.

10
     
    Homing:
     
    When a bird comes home after getting lost.
     
     
    Up until Melyssa graduated a year and a half ago we shared a room, sort of. She’s a night-person-talks-in-her-sleep slob and I’m a crack-of-dawn neatness freak. We survived because she was never home once she hit ninth grade. Now that she’s back, pregnant and miserable with nothing to do but be high maintenance, it’s likely we are going to kill each other.
    It’s Friday afternoon, I’ve had the week from Hades, and Mel’s junk is everywhere.
    Mel says, “So you told Old Howie to stick it, huh?”
    “I didn’t say anything. I just quit.”
    “I’ll bet you folded up your apron and walked out politely.”
    I really hate it when she pegs me.
    She says, “At least you quit, right? That’s good.”
    “It would be good—if I had a job.”
    “Oh, you can get one of those. You’re like a poster girl for all those waitress-nanny jobs. I mean look at you. You’re like Domestic Goddess Barbie.”
    I sit down on the floor to put my things in stacks so I can figure out a way to put them away in half as much space. I want to very neatly die of sadness. Normally I would let Mel say whatever, but everything hurts too much right now already. “I do other things besides mop the floor and babysit.”
    Melyssa rolls around on her bed like a pill bug. She’s not even big yet, but she acts like she weighs four hundred pounds. She sighs. “I’m not knocking it. Martha Stewart is totally smart.”
    “I’m not Martha Stewart.”
    “You iron your money and put it in order in your wallet.”
    Carson runs into the room. He still thinks it’s like Christmas because Melyssa’s home. “Mel, come see what Myra made under my bed. It has a lake made out of a milk jug and mountains out of egg cartons with little wire plants and everything.”
    Melyssa raises her eyebrows. “Little wire plants? Good job, Martha.”
    I don’t answer. Thankfully they both leave so I can shove my underwear into storage baggies without being psychoanalyzed. When Melyssa comes back she says, “Maybe you could get a job making little wire plants. That’s a unique skill.”
    I say, “Are you going to go back to school after you have the baby?”
    She lies back down on the bed and pats her bulging stomach. “Don’t worry. I’m not staying in this room for the rest of my life. What are