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abruptly turned away.
This person will not come with this camera every day, capiche?

Four
    Back in Donnie’s Maverick, Kristy hit the steering wheel with the palms of her hands, smack smack smack.
Fuck!
she screeched. A long clump of hair was snagged in her glossy lower lip like a mouse in a glue trap. When she tugged it away it left a strawberry snail trail across her powdered cheek. From my view behind the camera, the gloss smear caught the setting sunlight coming in the windshield and made my sister’s face look glittered. I just couldn’t stop it with the camera. I understood part of Kristy’s obsession with it; I didn’t want to put it down either.
    This Is Great! I enthused. I Can’t Believe You Have This Now! I wasn’t taking her steering-wheel-smacking fuck-outburst too seriously. Watching someone through a camera sort of makes them look like they’re acting, and Idon’t take Kristy’s outbursts too seriously anyway.
    Fuck
, she repeated, this time a mutter, and jammed the key into the ignition. It was like me and the camera weren’t even there. I thought, Kristy is so good at ignoring the camera, she’ll really be perfect on
The Real World.
I hope that quality of obliviousness comes through for the producers.
I can’t believe I said that out loud
, she said darkly, steering us out of the parking lot. The neon bulbs of the MALL sign dazzled the rearview and then were gone.
That was so negative. I can correct it, though. Right now I can.
She took a deep breath. A fruity smell wafted through the car on her exhale. Kristy’s like a living, breathing air freshener.
I am going to get on
The Real World, she spoke in a controlled voice.
I am going to get on television. I am going to be chosen for
The Real World. Truly, this seemed to relax her. That’s the benefit of living in a dream world, I guess. You can just keep telling yourself all sorts of happy lies and cheer yourself up by believing them. I thought that Kristy and Ma had two halves of the same mental problem: Ma told herself bad things and believed them, and Kristy told herself really fabulous things until she was totally stoned with delusions of grandeur. But Ma’s anti-affirmations did seem to come true. Maybe Kristy was right.

Five
    Later that night I stared at myself on the pixilated screen of Kristy’s ripped-off video camera. There I was, on my bed with sheets twisted around my legs, the same blue flowered sheets I’ve had since I was a kid, so faded now that they looked gray on-screen, you couldn’t really make out the little blue petals unless you knew what they were. I’m wearing one of Ma’s old T-shirts, a Weight Watchers T-shirt she still had from after she was pregnant with Kristy and before she got knocked up with me, when our dad was around. The accidental arrival of Kristy inspired a self-improvement spurt. Our dad tried to stop shooting drugs and Ma went to Weight Watchers, which I always imagined as a long, pink room filled with those machines ladies used to strap around their asses to jiggle the fat away. The T-shirthas a faded cartoon of a woman with a very big, blond head and a very small body and it says, “I’m A Loser!” It’s sort of hilarious to imagine Ma working out. I think the most exerting thing she does is occasionally have a fight with Donnie, but the two of them get along pretty great considering what problematic personalities they both have. Life is peaceful in the parlor, the two of them lazing on the couch, all the action on the television.
    On the little screen that pulls out from the side of the video camera I observed myself, innocently sleeping, completely unaware that Kristy was recording me. I felt bad for the girl on the miniscreen, me. There’s something terrible about the idea that you can be lying in your own bed, your mom’s old T-shirt tugging up around your ribs so that a boob’s almost popping out, mouth ajar, so vulnerable really, just trusting in that basic way that it’s okay to be