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calls, when she was a little kid, she’d cry and cry in her mother’s lap; it felt like she would never stop crying. When her mother was there, even if Kate couldn’t hear her father’s side of the conversation, Chelsea felt better, as if her life were a solid place, predictable and safe. When she hung up, if her mother was nearby, she didn’t feel like the whole world was built on quicksand, a place where even the adults didn’t know what was true. That was why they’d made the agreement.
    But her father was different now; he was remarried, sort of. Heclaimed he was spiritually married, though apparently, he eschewed legal documentation. He was sober. He wasn’t angry anymore, not in the ranting, raging way he used to be. Recently, he’d found success again as a writer. So he was happier.
    A couple of years ago, he’d formally apologized to Chelsea and to her mother for all the pain he’d caused them while he was drinking. It was part of his twelve-step program. Or part of his publicity tour , her mother had offered. Because his first successful book in ten years was about how drinking had laid waste to his life and his career: The Bottom of the Glass . His marriage to Chelsea’s mother was apparently cataloged in grisly, Technicolor detail. Kate had asked her not to read it until she was older, and Chelsea had agreed. She’d happily kept her promise. Frankly, she didn’t want to know any more about her parents’ train wreck of a marriage than she already did.
    Since the apology, whatever his reasons had been for making it, her mother no longer visibly stiffened at the mention of Chelsea’s father. In the last year, Chelsea had been allowed two weekends with Sebastian and Jessica, his second “wife” and also his literary agent (who was fine , really—even Kate said so). He’d been asking for another weekend. But Chelsea kept coming up with excuses, and her mother certainly wasn’t forcing the issue.
    Chelsea couldn’t say why she didn’t want to go. Her father and Jessica bent over backward to please her, showered her with gifts—an iPhone, clothes, a flat-screen television in her room at their house. They indulged her every whim. But there was something about the way her father looked at her, as though he wanted and expected something that she thought she should feel but didn’t. It was something she knew he hadn’t earned and couldn’t buy. She felt bad about it. She loved him; she did. But it didn’t feel like enough. The truth was that she would never be “home” when she was with her father. And they both knew it.
    “You should be milking that action for all it’s worth,” Lulu said. “Make him buy you a car next year.”
    They had started talking about Sebastian in Forever 21. Chelsea didn’t think Lulu had seen the call come in. But maybe she had. Or maybe she was just reading Chelsea’s mind, like she always did.
    “Yeah,” Chelsea said. “Sweet idea.”
    She had no intention of asking her father for a car or anything else. Even the iPhone he’d given her had seemed to cause some pain at home. She thought maybe Sean had been planning to get her one for her birthday. Of course, nothing was ever said. Sean, her stepfather (though she didn’t think of him that way), was the man she called Dad. And he would never dream of making her feel bad about her relationship with her real father or anything related to it.
    “Seriously,” said Lulu, as though she sensed that she hadn’t made her point. “He’s, like, loaded now. And he owes you.”
    “Why are we talking about this?”
    Lulu shrugged. She held up a tiny tie-dyed tank. “What do you think of this?”
    “It’s cute,” said Chelsea.
    Chelsea wondered what it would be like to look perfect in absolutely anything. And to have no one telling you what you could and couldn’t wear. Lulu looked at the top again and then put it back. Chelsea wouldn’t have been surprised to see Lulu stick the shirt in her bag, even though