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the more the merrier.” She wouldn’t take my no for an answer, though it was the only answer she kept getting. Except once. A year ago June she invited me out to a club with her new boyfriend Eddie. “Come out with us, please? I really want you to meet him. I want him to meet all my best friends. You’ll love him. He is so funny.”
    “What about Agnes?” I said glumly.
    “She’s not as funny.” Agnes apparently was grounded. I couldn’t believe I agreed to go as Agnes’s pathetic mid-day Friday, afterthought replacement. But I went.
    Eddie was pretty funny.
    Then Agnes wasn’t grounded anymore, and Gina cold-turkey stopped asking me to go places with her. Nearly the entire senior year had cruised by and we had barely spoken till the afternoon in the locker room.
    Gina and I weren’t such strangers once, but there is something so personal about traveling in a car with someone. So intimate. Sharing the minutes of your day, your every minute for days, maybe weeks, with another human being. I couldn’t understand why in the world she’d want to come with me. But the thought of traveling alone was not entirely pleasant. Tension was inherent in both scenarios. On the one hand, Gina, but on the other, terror and alone! It was like that Valentine’s Day Hallmark card for fools: “B EING WITH YOU IS ALMOST LIKE BEING WITH SOMEONE .” Now that was sentiment I responded to. What was better: Gina or violent dread?
    “I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” I told her when she accosted me again in the hall.
    “Well, I have to know soon.”
    “Why?”
    “What do you mean why? I have to pack, no? I have to tell my mother. I have to get ready, too.”
    “Look, if I agree to do this, you have to agree to take a bus the last leg of your trip. I’m not driving to Bakersfield.”
    “You sure about that?” Gina said, and before I could respond, quickly added, “How close is Bakersfield to Mendocino?” a wide smile on her not really Italian face.

    About me. First, all the things I’m not. I am not objectively beautiful. I have found very few people who are; is that fair to say? On the bell curve, I fall somewhere near the top of the downward creep toward homeliness, though perhaps more like a drop than a creep first thing in the morning when I don’t wear mascara or lipgloss, but I bet not even Christy Worsoe, the homecoming queen, looks good then. I can be thought of as plain in my unadorned state, but Emma, who has no obligation to make me feel better about myself, says I look cute when I crawl out for Saturday morning French toast with ricotta cheese before track, all sleepy and punk-haired, and because she says this, I don’t feel as homely as I might. There is nothing wrong with my face, but there is nothing extra right with it, either.
    Other things about me. I don’t function well at night. I’m a morning person. I deeply believe that in that two-word, sea-like panoply of “morning person” are veiled a thousand tributaries, big and small, which comprise the essence of a human being. I have tested this divide on my friends Marc and Debbie and Tracy, on Emma too, and found it to be true. I get up and function best early in the day. I clean my room, get my work and schoolbooks together, make sure my sneakers are dry and my clothes ready for track. I take a shower, I eat breakfast. I have a list of things to do before the bus comes, and I do them all. My brain works. I get things out of the freezer for dinner, I make coffee for Emma, I check the boiler to make sure the pilot light is on so that the Lambiels have hot water. We once had a big problem with that, and it became my responsibility to check,and I never forget. I go to school. My library books are returned on time, I don’t indulge in compulsive behavior when I have things to do. I don’t leave my schoolwork until the last minute. I don’t put down my library books and then forget where I put them. I don’t squander the little money I have. I help