In Your Room (2 page)

He slowly opened the door into the house to avoid making any noise. He had gone for a ride after school and discovered a new trail, which meant he was now almost an hour late for dinner. He could hear voices in the kitchen but needed to run up to change before anyone realized he was home. There would be even more hell to pay if he showed up at the table with mud splattered all over him.

“Charlie? Is that you?” a woman’s voice called out.

He winced. Busted. “I’ll be right in,” he yelled back from halfway up the stairs. “Just need to wash my hands.”

“Do it in here.”

He did an about-face and sheepishly entered the kitchen. “Sorry I’m late.”

His eleven-year-old twin sisters, Mia and Heather, and his two moms, Sally and Lisa, were sitting around the table, already on dessert. Lisa was Charlie’s biological mother, but those kinds of technical distinctions were frowned upon in their household. To enforce that point, everyone’s legal last name was Richards, which, technically speaking, was Sally’s name to begin with. Charlie was happy with that decision if for no other reason than he didn’t have to go through life as Charlie Babcock—Babcock being Lisa’s maiden name.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lisa said, removing a plate from the oven and putting it on the table. “I kept this warm for you.”

“What’s going on?” Charlie asked, suspicious that neither of his moms, particularly Sally, seemed remotely annoyed that he was so late. They were used to it since he was prone to losing track of time on the trails, but that didn’t mean they liked it.

“It’s a family meeting,” Mia, the blonder and slightly smaller of the sisters, said.

“Everything’s okay,” Sally said, reading the look on Charlie’s face. “We just wanted everyone here so that we could let you know our summer plans.”

“Yay!” the twins said in unison.

“We have a fantastic surprise. We’ve decided that we’re all going to Los Angeles for the summer,” Lisa announced.

“L.A.? What do you mean?” Charlie asked over his sisters’ high-pitched squeals of delight. He turned to Sally. “I thought just you were going for a month.” Sally was a pediatric oncologist and had a teaching fellowship at the Children’s Hospital there.

“That was the plan,” Lisa started to explain, “but I got a call from one
of my grad school colleagues this morning who asked if I was interested in taking over his summer courses at UCLA. When he told me that he was coming out here with his family for the summer, we realized we could just swap homes.”

“A house swap?” Charlie asked with a hint of disdain.

“It’s when you trade your house with someone else’s,” Heather chimed in.

“Yeah, I get the concept,” he snapped. “Can’t I just stay here with Dan or someone?”

“Nooo!” Mia howled in protest.

“You can’t do that,” Heather added. “You have to stay with us.”

“We’re sorry, honey,” Lisa said. “We don’t want to split up the family for that long.”

“But what about my company?” Charlie knew that was a losing argument. He didn’t have a company so much as a strategy to make money over the summer leading mountain bike tours. “I’ve already started posting fliers.”

“I’m sure your customers will understand,” Sally said. “You can pick it up again when we get back in August.”

He could have sat there and drawn out the conversation for another hour, but there was no point. As much as his parents told him he was free to explore who he was and to express his opinions, at seventeen he still had no real say, and the decision had clearly already been made. They were going to Los Angeles. But why,
why
did it have to be there? He could handle a city like Portland or Seattle and would probably not have cared all that much if that were the plan. But L.A. stood for everything he hated: freeways, SUV traffic jams, the worst air quality in the country, to say nothing of the rampant materialism, and, of course,
Hollywood.
It was a city that had nothing to offer, and the next two months were going to be a big waste of time.

“What about Park City?” he asked. “Do I have to give that up too?” His best friend, Dan, was spending the summer at his rich uncle’s lodge in the mountains and had invited Charlie up for a weekend in August.

“I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t still go,” Sally said, looking over at Lisa.

“Fine with me too,” Lisa said.

Charlie rose from the table. There was nothing more to be said. He didn’t feel the need to thank them for not ruining his entire summer.

He left the room, headed back through the garage, and took one of the bikes off the rack on his way out.

“Hey there, Cheesy,” Molly said to the meowing gray cat on her windowsill. “Are you going to come in and keep me company?”

She was sitting on the white shag rug in the middle of her room, surrounded by mounds of clothes and the open drawers of the flower-painted dresser she had just emptied to make room for the arriving guests. She was usually very organized, especially when it came to travel, and would normally have all her clothes stacked in neat piles days before departure. But that was when she was looking forward to something—a vacation or a visit with relatives. This was something else entirely. Something she preferred to pretend wasn’t happening. But now that they were leaving in the morning, she had to acknowledge the reality of the months ahead and finally pack.

“That’s my little guy.” The cat sauntered up and planted himself in her lap as she sorted through the mess around her. “You think this house swap is the dumbest thing ever, don’t you?” she said, scratching the folds of loose
fur beneath his chin. The cat let out a steady stream of purring. “Yeah, that’s right. I do too.”

A few remnants of Molly’s childhood dotted the room: a once-abundant stuffed animal collection lined the top of the bookcase and was only visible if she was lying in bed; a now-dilapidated dollhouse Laura had commissioned for Molly after her father died jutted out from a nook in the back of the room. In its heyday, it boasted pristine yellow paint on the exterior and every luxury within, from intricate china-patterned dishware to Jacuzzi tub bathrooms and a giant playroom with every toy imaginable. Most of these items had long since been lost or destroyed, but Molly couldn’t bring herself to get rid of the house or even remove it from her room.

But more than anything, the room resembled the studio of a budding designer. The bookshelves were lined with four years of
Vogue
and
Teen Vogue
back issues, as well as various books on fashion, photography, and art. A bare canvas dress form stood in the corner by the back window with multicolored pins protruding from it at every angle. It stood next to Molly’s prized possession, a 1978 Singer sewing machine she’d inherited from her grandmother. It stood on a table of its own in the corner of the room near the far left window so that Molly could see the street below while she worked. Sketches, both rough and complete, of dresses, skirts, shirts, and pants were posted on a bulletin board propped against the wall behind it, some with corresponding Polaroids of the finished products tacked below.

Her grandmother’s vanity, aligned against the right wall, displayed her perfumes and makeup, what little she had, and what Molly liked to call her “snapshot of life”—a giant corkboard collage of her friends, mainly of Rina and Celeste, and inspirational magazine cutouts—covered half of the back wall by the door so that every day Molly went to sleep and woke up looking at it.

“It’s not like the Arctic, you know,” Celeste announced, barging into the room. She had grown up across the street but had probably spent more time in Molly’s bedroom than her own.

Molly continued sorting through her winter sweaters, deciding which ones to take. “Well, there’s snow there all year long. I’ve seen it on the Weather Channel.”

Celeste rolled her eyes and made a beeline for the closet. “That’s only at the top of the mountains at, like, fifty thousand feet or whatever. And we both know you won’t be making any treks up there.”

Celeste’s supermodel-thin body, long, wavy blond hair, and perma-tan made her a Cali girl through and through. Molly had long accepted the fact that when she was with Celeste, boys would never pay her any notice, or if they did, it would be as a result of an ill-conceived plan that Molly could get Celeste to like them. Molly had also tacitly accepted the fact that her shoulder-length black hair, almost-as-black eyes, and pale skin were not the prototype for female beauty, especially in Los Angeles.

A few minutes later Rina arrived. “I’ve been trying to get here forever but my mom made me sit through dinner with the Singhs, which makes absolutely no sense since we’re about to spend the next six weeks in India with them, starting with a very long plane ride in two days.” She plunked herself down on the floor next to Molly and began sorting through her discarded piles. “Ugh. Don’t even ask how I’m going to survive.”

Molly had been friends with Rina since freshman year when they were partners in biology. Rina was the definition of an old soul and understood Molly’s thoughts without needing much explanation. Celeste, on the other hand, was only interested in talking about one thing: boys.

Celeste emerged from the closet wearing a red summer dress. She adjusted
the mirror hanging on the back of the closet door to get a better view of her backside. “Can I borrow this for the summer?”

“No way,” Molly said, transferring a neat stack of notebooks on the floor next to her bed to a box labeled
JUNIOR YEAR
.

“Oh, come on! You’re clearly leaving all your best stuff behind for a reason.”

“I’m all too aware of what happens to clothes you borrow.”

“And what’s that?” Celeste asked innocently.

“They disappear forever.”

Celeste smirked. “Okay. A proposition. I only borrow one item at a time and return it to your closet before taking something else. Like Netflix.”

“It’s not like I have any way of knowing if you’re lying all the way from Boulder.”

“You have my word. And besides, I can be your spy to make sure nothing is out of place or stolen with the aliens living here.”

“Okay, fine. One item at a time, including belts,” Molly conceded. Half her wardrobe would likely be missing or ruined by the time she came back. “But you can’t use your key. Even if they are aliens, they still deserve a little privacy.”

“Aren’t you bringing this?” Rina asked, holding up a purple folder. In it was the application for a coveted fall internship with Cynthia Vincent, Molly’s favorite designer.

“I changed my mind,” Molly said, putting the folder back on the desk. She had been working on her application for the last month and had been planning on spending the summer finalizing her sketches, shopping for fabric, and making one of the dresses in her portfolio before the August first deadline. She had also been planning on accomplishing all this in the place
where she was most creative—her room. It seemed stupid, but she didn’t feel like she could pull it off in some strange house, in a strange city, with none of her usual materials or resources at her disposal. “I need my own things around me to be able to focus.”

“You never know how you’ll feel when you get there,” Rina suggested, slipping the folder into Molly’s laptop bag. “Take it. Just in case.”

“Well, if you’re not working, it will at least give you more time to get to know some Boulder boys,” Celeste said.

“Right. I’m so glad my social calendar is wide open,” Molly snorted.

Celeste
tske
d. “You’ll never get a bearded mountain man with that attitude.”

Molly shook her head. Celeste could never last for more than a month without being lavished with attention by at least one suitor. For Molly, it wasn’t that simple. “You’re not exactly one to talk. This is the longest you’ve been single since the fifth grade.”

“Precisely!” Celeste said. “Which is why I’m going to seduce some unsuspecting hottie after you guys both abandon me for the summer.”

Rina laughed. “And we have no doubt you’ll succeed. Multiple times.”

Molly envied Celeste’s ability to not only fall in love but to fall out of it just as quickly. She was immune to the perils of heartache and turned any breakup into an opportunity to meet someone else. Celeste believed that the key to happiness was to never look back. Molly didn’t have all that much to look back on except for a hopeless yearlong crush on Jacob Miller that had culminated in a single date at the end of freshman year, right before he went away to summer camp. He had kissed her on the cheek and told her he’d see her in August. Molly spent the next six weeks reliving that kiss—her first—and imagining all the
real
kissing they’d be doing when he got back.

Only Jacob had never called or responded to her e-mails, and she’d had to wait until the first day of school to find out that he was already dating someone else.

She hadn’t liked anyone since. If love hurt so much before she even got a chance to experience it, she couldn’t imagine how bad it would feel to get her heart broken for real.

“Well, I say you’re going to be a famous designer with or without the internship. And going to Boulder’s your chance to stir things up,” Celeste said, parading in front of the mirror in her newly borrowed red dress. “You’ll see. This summer is going to be great. Now finish packing.”

• • •

“You almost packed?” Lisa called out from down the hall. She was in Charlie’s sisters’ room, getting things organized for the trip.

People often asked if it was confusing having two moms, as in, did he ever get them mixed up, which he thought was a really dumb question. In fact, he got asked that more about his moms than he did about his sisters, who were actually twins, and he certainly didn’t have any trouble telling Mia and Heather apart.

“Getting there,” he yelled back. He was lying on top of his unmade bed, tossing a baseball and watching it arc up and barely graze the ceiling before spinning back down and landing in his glove. He’d gotten both the ball and glove as a birthday present from his paranoid great-uncle whom he’d never met, but who always sent Charlie sports-related gifts to make sure he was exposed to enough “guy things.”