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boyfriend along the way. He dated a little, and in junior year, he kinda-sorta lived with a guy, though it hardly counted because they had already been roommates in a large communal house before they got together. When Vaughn moved back into his own room after three months it had hardly made a dent on either of them.
    "It's weird, you know," his sister Emily said. Every so often she liked to trot out her high school psychology class wisdom and analyze her big brother over the phone. "You're not the picture of a loner. You're cheerful and social, everybody likes you. But you don't like anybody—"
    "I like lots of people," Rob said. "I like most people, just—"
    "Not in that way ," Emily said. "It doesn't matter. You're graduating this year, finally, and when you go out into the world you'll meet that Mr. Right. Remember what Mom said—sooner or later, a lid for every pot . "
    "What if it was sooner, and I was too young to notice?" Rob said. "I might have missed my moment. It doesn't matter, though."
    "I don't think childhood friends count," Emily said. "Or I'd be getting ready to marry Junie Marquez by now, and that's just not something I want to think about."
    "I wouldn't expect you to be so horrified by the thought of marrying a girl, with me in the family," Rob said.
    "It's not marrying a girl that's horrifying, it's marrying Junie Marquez. She's squeezed in so many Thomas Kinkade knockoffs onto her walls you can't see out the windows."
    *~*~*
    Then it was Christmas, and he was home for the holiday, the house was full of his siblings, half and step, and there were a lot of family-intensifying activities going on, like making tamales and reminiscing.
    Serafina, Rob's mother, let out a big sigh right in the middle of the tamale making party. "I wish Constance could come over like in the old days, it was fun having you and Rab running all over. And Constance was always good for a laugh."
    "Who's Rab and Constance?" Rob's youngest half-brother Stanny asked.
    "Constance is my very best friend who you have met, and Rab is her son who was best friends with Rob in the old days. But they're never around for the holidays anymore because of her boyfriend. They go to his family in the mountains."
    Rob didn't remember ever having a friend named Rab, but he didn't remember a lot from his childhood. Emily, on the other hand, remembered everything that she had ever done, everything that had ever happened to her, and everything that she had said or had been said to her. It was obnoxious.
    Before Rob could ask about this unknown former best friend, the conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a cloud of stepfamily. Sera had remained on good terms with her former husbands and boyfriends, and they all came over for family celebrations. She said it was the effect of living in a small town, but there are smaller towns than San Luis Obispo, and not everybody gets along like that. Rob's opinion was that they all got along like that because his mother was just that friendly and laid-back, like himself.
    The name of Sera's best friend came up again during dinner. "Constance is finally going to marry that boyfriend of hers next summer," she said. "It's about time."
    Rob's most current stepfather had the nerve to smirk and say, "Persistence and endurance are all that matters in relationships anyway. Romantic emotions have nothing to do with it."
    "But people have to have some romantic feelings to get started, don't they?" Emily asked.
    "Or something," George said, smirking again.
    "Please don't," Rob said. "That's my mother you're making insinuating references to."
    "Don't worry," Sera said. "He won't go too far. He's afraid of what I can say about him if I feel like it."
    "So," Rob's first stepfather said, clearly in a hurry to change the topic from one that might be embarrassing to the elders to one that was embarrassing to the younger generation, "You going to graduate at last this year, Rob?"
    "Yeah," he said. "Next semester's my last. It