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was never so.
    When the Brothers Pressley would go to the snack bar to get my popcorn and her Twizzlers, I would climb into the front seat,
     loose-limbed and giggly, and Kelly and I would watch the movie until they returned. The owner of the drive-in showed a lot
     of oldies; I guess he figured the kids weren’t paying attention at all and it was a good way to save money. But Kelly and
     I watched, and we loved Katharine and Bette and Lana and Ingrid. We watched them storming in and out of elegant rooms, crying
     and throwing martini glasses, taking the stand to testify, going beautifully mad, sobering up, checking their lipstick, and
     setting sail for Europe. We watched their flawless faces fading into the shadows of sex while their eyelids fluttered closed
     and the music swelled. The drive-in was where we first got our passion for Elizabeth Taylor, an obsession we share to this
     day.
    “Frank’s better-looking,” Kelly would say, poking me, and this always made us laugh harder.
    “He is not,” I’d say, “Kevin is the prince and Frank is the frog.”
    But Kelly would only shake her head, sighing in that mock-tragic way of hers. “Face it, baby. You got the better-looking twin.”
    W hat’d you think of the book?” Kelly asks, coming back into the kitchen. She hasn’t just changed her shirt but her pants as
     well, and she’s used a flatiron on her hair. She makes me look like shit.
    “Next month, I want to do
David Copperfield
,” I say. “We need to get back to the classics. He’s got this great line, he says, ‘There is only one question, whether or
     not a man is to be the hero of his own life.’ Isn’t that great?”
    “Huh,” says Kelly. “Is it in paperback?”
    “Yeah, it’s old, it’s Dickens. Charles Dickens. Of course it’s in paperback. You don’t think that’s a great line?”
    “It’s a great line.”
    “Because that’s what I want. I want to be the hero of my own life.”
    “Just exactly what happened in Phoenix?”
    At that moment there’s the pop of an opening door and Nancy and Belinda come in, Belinda already apologizing because she hasn’t
     read the whole book. “Good God, you look terrible, what happened to you?” says Kelly, who frequently greets Belinda this way,
     never seeming to notice how tactless she sounds. Belinda does give the impression of someone who has just rolled out of bed,
     no matter what time of day you see her, and she launches into a long story about how her youngest busted a tooth out on the
     coffee table just as she was leaving the house and Michael didn’t want to be left with a hurt and whimpering kid and she felt
     bad about it herself, but this was her one night out and she had read most of the book, or at least about a hundred pages.
    Nancy rolls her eyes at me and Kelly. Belinda is the youngest of us by nearly ten years and we’re all accustomed to the way
     she lurches from crisis to crisis.
    Belinda says all the time that she’s getting fat, and she pulls up her shirt as she says this, in case somebody doesn’t believe
     her. She says that she’s stupid, although she doesn’t bother showing any concrete proof of this, and—perhaps most telling
     of all—she refuses to do anything by herself. Her list of phobias is long and bizarre, ranging from cake batter to suspension
     bridges. She’s afraid to drive at night, which is one reason Nancy always picks her up and takes her places. And Belinda constantly
     points out, especially when she’s inside the guarded gates of Kelly’s neighborhood, that she doesn’t really fit in here.
    Which is true enough, but what Belinda doesn’t understand is that nobody fits in here. We’re all transplants in a way—come
     from up north or out west—and even me and Kelly, who grew up just a few miles from these very wrought-iron gates, are perhaps
     the most aware that this isn’t the world we came from. These suburbs didn’t exist twenty years ago but now the farmland where
     we used