The Mosts (4 page)

Chapter 4

I
hadn’t told anyone about my big plan, the one I couldn’t stop thinking about. The one that felt more right by the minute.

How could I?
Um, Mom, when you’re done with the afternoon milking, I need to let you know I’m thinking of moving in with Dad. Permanently
.

I loved my mom, and Mac was a really nice guy. He was one of those perfect stepfathers, the kind who never tried to tell you what to do, but always had really good advice. Plus he was nuts about my mom, and my mom was kind of nuts, a cross between a hippie and a farm girl. She was really into the earth and recycling and being green. Mac was the same. I had seen him cry at least ten times over losing a calf or selling some livestock. They both got really attached to the animals.

But I wasn’t meant for farm life. I hated everything about it, from the sight of tractors to the smell of poop to the mind-numbing roosters crowing at daybreak.

I
belonged
in California. I knew that for a fact. And if I lived with my dad, we could get back how things used to be between us. When he and my mom were still married, we were really close. Not that he was around much, which was one of the reasons my parents divorced. But when he was, he’d make these huge messy meals for me and Sabrina, like sloppy joes and french fries and banana splits, and when Sabrina would go off to study, I’d stay and talk to my dad about stuff, like feeling invisible, and not understanding algebra, and being incredibly annoyed by Sabrina. He’d listen and give funny advice and make me feel heard. But ever since he’d moved to California and found Tiffany, his soon-to-be third wife, it was like he focused on her and forgot about me and Sabrina (not that he and Sabrina were ever very close).

With my mom and Mac, it was different. They listened—and I totally gave them credit for it—but they didn’t understand me at all. After I came home from visiting my aunt in Rome, I heard them talking in their bedroom late at night, and my mom was saying something like “I think it’s so cute that Madeline is such a sophisticate. She’s really her own person and marches to her own drummer.” In other words, I was normal.

I didn’t really fit into my family.
They
were the weirdos, with their thigh-high forest green rubber boots and dinner-length discussions about how cows had four stomachs. To them,
I
was the freak in the three-inch-high sandals who preferred to read
Lucky
magazine instead of
Livestock Daily
.

My dad? Totally normal. A California architect with a BMW, an iPhone, and a gym membership. Living with him, enrolling in Thom’s school, living the life I wanted seemed so doable. Except for the part about my mom and Mac and even Sabrina being three thousand miles away.

I wished I could talk to my sister about this, but I couldn’t. Sabrina would call me a traitor.
Stop idolizing Dad
, she always snapped at me.
Look where it got Mom and Deirdre
. Deirdre was his second wife, and though the word “homewrecker” was thrown around a lot right after my dad moved into her condo when we lived in the suburbs of New York City, she was really nice. It had been mostly Sabrina who’d used the word “homewrecker.”

When I got home from school, Sabrina was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a fish taco and reading a book on animal husbandry. You’d think living on the farm would be enough, but no, Sabrina liked to read up on the care and feeding of livestock in her nonworking hours. She was sporting her trademark look: a bandana around her head (and not in a retro way), baggy overalls (she had them in four different washes), and brown clogs. No makeup. She didn’t even use gel or mousse in her short hair. She just got out of the shower and put on the farmer outfit, and she was ready. She could be cute, if she tried. But she honestly didn’t seem to care.

The way she dressed wasn’t the main reason she made the Not list every year; it was that combined with the handmade signs she liked to wear around her neck or write on her T-shirts with marker, such as
Cows are people too
. There were a lot of things wrong with that, but the biggest one was that cows weren’t people.

She also had a nervous habit of saying weird things when she was uncomfortable. If a popular girl said, “Excuse me,” because, say, Sabrina was blocking the path to the water fountain, Sabrina would get all flustered and blurt out something like “Did you know that cows have four stomachs?”

So people looked at her like she was a total weirdo, then walked away. Except for the people just like her, and believe it or not, there were a few. Sabrina had a best friend and two other girls she hung around with.

A dollop of salsa landed on the page of her book, but she didn’t seem to notice, because she was staring out the bay window at the bare-chested hotness of Sam. Crushes on cute guys were definitely something that all girls had in common. But then I saw she wasn’t staring at Sam, but at Joe, a junior farm intern who was so gawky it was a wonder the hay bale he was carrying didn’t send him flying over backward. I’d never heard Joe speak, but then again, I didn’t spend much time on the farm.

Like Sabrina, Sam wanted to be a vet. For horses and cows and goats, not house pets. This was why he preferred to rake manure and lead the cows out to pasture in his free time. Anyone at the high school could earn three science credits by working at my parents’ small dairy farm in an internship program for an entire school year, including the dead of winter, which in Maine was pretty brutal. My mom and Mac had four interns this year—in addition to two full-time farmhands. They mostly cleaned up cow poop (which meant raking it into the gutters in front of the cow pens), made sure the cows and calves had fresh water, fed the calves from their bottles, put out the feed for the cows, and did some light grooming and cleaning. Sam was the only hot intern. The rest looked like … well, like farmers.

“Where is it?” I asked Sabrina, dumping my messenger bag on a chair.

“Where’s what?” she asked, taking a bite of her taco.

I rolled my eyes. “The invitation!”

She shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

Grr!
She infuriated me. Could we be any more different?
Don’t care in the slightest
was her response to making the Not list again last year.
Like I care what some shallow, vapid airheads in fancy clothes think of me. Why
would
I?

Sometimes I thought her attitude was a good thing, mostly because, like my aunt Darcy said, people were who they were and should be celebrated for their uniqueness, not ridiculed. Sabrina, according to Aunt Darcy, was her own person and could one day be president. I wasn’t sure about that. Maybe president of the Future Farmers of America Club.

I glanced around the kitchen, in the usual spots that our mother left things for us, like notes and ten-dollar bills, but I didn’t see anything resembling a fancy envelope.

“Well, do you know where Mom is?” I asked.

“In the calves’ barn.”

I exchanged my silver sandals—you couldn’t
not
step in something gross at the farm, especially in the barns—for my Crocs and headed out to the calves’ barn. It was around fifty feet from the house. It wasn’t one of those old-fashioned red barns like in children’s picture books. It was just an ugly weathered shingled structure, somewhere between brown and gray, with corrals and pens, lots of hay, and rakes. You had to hold your nose when you entered. Well, I did.

I didn’t see my mother, but I did see Elinor at the far end. She was sitting on an upside-down metal bucket and feeding a calf, but she was also staring at Sam as he raked out a stall. She didn’t seem to notice that Weasley was sucking on air, and even I knew that that wasn’t good for a calf.

I heard Sam say to her, “Did you know the bottle’s empty? Boy, Weasley sucks fast.”

Instead of answering him, Elinor froze; she looked like she had in Latin 1 the day before when she’d stood up to present her Greek myth. She’d had to sit back down and try again later. Elinor dropped the bottle and ran past me toward the house, presumably to ask Mac for more milk, but I knew she was probably standing outside the barn, breaking into hives.

“Oh, Madeline, there you are,” my mother said, coming around the side of the barn. She tightened the ponytail holder on her long braid, then pulled a large envelope from the sling she always wore across her chest.

Yes! California, here I come!

“Someone’s excited,” my mom said with a smile, but then one of the farmhands called her for help; she was having trouble moving a cow. “Show me later,” she called over her shoulder as she hurried off.

In the middle of the stinky barn, two ever-present giant ducks waddled past me as I tore open the envelope. There was no point in opening it with Sabrina, since she hated our dad’s guts at the moment. It had been a long moment—since he’d moved to California three years earlier.

I pulled out the invitation, a cream-colored card with fancy calligraphy.

Tiffany Alison Bluthwell and Timothy Lee Echols cordially invite you to share in the celebration of their wedding … 
.

I flipped through the layers of see-through tissue paper. But there were only two little cards, one with directions to the wedding and one a reply card. No note about having booked the airline tickets?

I rushed inside. “Look, the invitation to Dad’s wedding,” I said to Sabrina. “I guess he’ll book our plane tickets when we know exactly when we want to leave and return, right?”

She glanced at the address on the outer envelope. “Sabrina and Madeline Echols? He couldn’t even send us each our own invitation,” she grumbled over a mouthful of food. She shook her head. “Nice, Dad. So fatherly.”

“We live in the
same
house, Sabrina,” I pointed out. She was such a downer. “We’re going to L.A.! Sabrina, we’ll see A-list celebrities in line at Starbucks!”
And Thom
, I added to myself.

“No we won’t,” she said. “Because
we’re
not going. I wouldn’t go if he
sent
us tickets, which I assume he won’t. And
you
won’t go because you can’t afford a ticket from Maine to L.A. And you’re
not
asking Mom and Mac. They can’t afford it either. So don’t be a total brat and ask, Maddie.”

I hated, hated, hated being called Maddie. And Sabrina knew it. I was Maddie before freshman year, before my European transformation. Maddie was a different girl.

I searched the envelope again for a personal note from our dad saying that he’d book e-tickets, that we could, of course, stay in their gorgeous condo (which I got a glimpse of in their last Christmas card photo, with my dad and Tiffany and her little white dog in front of a white Christmas tree), which wasn’t on the beach, but close. But there was nothing. “I’m sending this back with a ‘Miss Madeline Echols
will
attend.’”

“I’d change my outfit if I were you,” Sabrina said, eyeing my white capris. “You’ll be working the farm every minute until the wedding. Not that you’ll earn enough to pay your way. Just forget it. He doesn’t even care if we come, Madeline.”

“I think he does,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt.

And I was confident about something else, too: I
was
going to that wedding.

“I wish I could, sweetie,” my father said on the phone. It was four o’clock in Maine but one o’clock in California. I imagined him at his desk, eating lunch. My dad built food courts in airports. He used to build cafeterias in schools. When I was the new kid in middle school and sitting alone pretty much all the time for lunch, I would imagine that he’d made the cafeteria, and I’d feel comforted. “But every cent is going to pay for the wedding. I mean, the cake alone cost a fortune—it has, like, ten layers or something. You know I’d love for you and Sabrina to come, Mads, but I just can’t swing the fare. A one-way ticket is over three hundred, honey. I checked. It’s just going to be a small ceremony, anyway. You can see it all on video.”

How personal.

I wouldn’t tell Sabrina this. It would only fuel her hatred.

“But I haven’t even met Tiffany,” I reminded him, dropping onto the edge of my bed. “You’re marrying someone I haven’t even met. And you’ve been together over a year.” I’d been so focused on going to California to be with Thom that I hadn’t even realized until now how much I wanted to go for my dad, to spend some time with him on his turf, to feel a part of his life. To get back what we’d had before the divorce.

“I know, hon,” he said. “Once we’re back from the honeymoon, maybe we can plan a trip to Maine. Tiff’s never been to Maine. She wasn’t even sure if Maine was part of Canada or the U.S. Isn’t that amazing?”

Amazingly stupid. I’d never been to California and I knew it wasn’t part of Mexico.

My father would marry Tiffany, who I’d never met, and she would never want to come to Maine, because she already lived on a gorgeous coast. I got the point of traveling from Maine to California: for L.A., Hollywood, movie stars, palm trees. But in Maine, there was only good lobster. And according to my father, Tiff was not only a vegetarian, but a vegan, which meant she didn’t eat anything that came from a cow or a chicken or a goat, like milk or cheese or eggs. I could forget her ever setting foot on a dairy farm.

I could also forget about moving to California. I could forget about Thom.

We talked for a few minutes and then he had to go. I lay down and covered my face with a pillow, then bolted up.
No way
. My aunt Darcy always said that when life handed you a box of chocolates with the gross pink cream stuff inside that you hated, you could either throw out the whole box and be depressed or you could bite around the pink cream and be in chocolate heaven. According to Aunt Darcy, there was a way around
every
hurdle.

I sat down at my desk and turned on my laptop. A quick check of e-mail—two short but very sweet messages from Thom. He’d gotten lost on the way to Western civ, but he’d already been befriended by some of the popular people.