*
There are a handful of hills in Prescott, and Prescott High School student body president, straight-A+ student, pre-pre-med at (fingers crossed!) Stanford University, lives on top of the tallest one. At the moment she is driving last year’s Ford midlist floor model (her father owns the dealership—“Prescott Ford: Most Fords sold in the 541 area code!”) into her family’s three-car garage, after finishing her volunteer shift at the old people’s home (though of course she would never call it that out loud). “Retirement community” is less offensive, which is important; she doesn’t like offending anyone. She would never in a million years tell anyone how old people actually kind of gross her out, how she has to fight off the inclination to vomit through most of her shift, how afterward she sometimes cries with desperate relief as she steps into the hot shower and washes the smell of them off her, a combination of mothballs and soft food. She picked this particular volunteer opportunity because she knew it would be the most challenging, because she knows this is the key to success—embracing challenge.
In her head, she counts up her volunteer hours. She files this number away with her other favorite numbers: her GPA (4.2), her number of AP classes (ten so far, and counting), and the countdown of school days until graduation (one hundred eighty. Ugh.). She vowed long ago to not end up like her mother, a Prescott native who almost made it out, but who skipped college to marry her high school sweetheart. Sure, her mom ended up rich, but she had a chance at something more. She could have been someone besides the wife of a car salesman and the head of her neighborhood book club. She gave up the opportunity to be someone just as her fingers were about to brush against it, just a second before she could have grabbed it and run and never looked back.
*
Two miles west, a girl searches the Internet for easy ways to lose twenty pounds.
*
A quarter of a mile east, someone checks for the third time that the bathroom door is locked. They look at themselves in the mirror and try not to cringe, carefully apply the lipstick they stole from their mother’s purse, stuff toilet paper in the bra they shoplifted from Walmart, cross their eyes so the blur will turn them into somebody else. “I am a girl,” they whisper. “My name is not Adam.”
*
On the other side of the highway, a girl has sex with her boyfriend for the second time ever. This time it doesn’t hurt. This time she moves her hips. This time she starts to understand what all the fuss is about.
*
In the next town over, two best friends kiss. One says, “You have to promise to never tell.” The other thinks, I want to tell everyone.
*
One girl watches TV. Another plays video games. Others work part-time jobs or catch up on their summer reading lists. Some wander aimlessly around the mall in Eugene, hoping to get noticed.
*
One girl looks at the sky, imagines riding the clouds to somewhere new. One digs in the earth, imagines an underground tunnel like a freeway.
*
In another state, an invisible girl named Lucy Moynihan tries to forget a story that will define her for the rest of her life, a story no one claimed to believe.
GRACE.
The problem is, even when she ruins your life, it’s kind of hard to hate your mom when she’s perfect. And not “perfect” with flippy air fingers and an ironic teen accent. Perfect as in practically a saint, like almost literally. Except, technically, you have to be Catholic to become a saint, which Grace’s family is not. But what are they, exactly? Certainly not Baptists anymore. Are they Congregationalists now? Is that even a thing?
Grace’s father said Prescott, Oregon, would be more in line with their family’s values than Adeline, Kentucky. He has a special gift for putting a positive spin on things that suck. He’s in marketing, after all. For instance, seeing a benefit in having to move away from the only home Grace has ever known because their (former) church pretty much drove them out of town. This, Dad interpreted as an opportunity to show fortitude and resilience. It was also a great motivation to improve their skills of clipping coupons, minimizing toilet paper usage, and finding new variations of rice and beans while Mom looked for a new job and Grace tried to get through a day of school without crying in public. While her parents practiced their fortitude and resilience, Grace practiced pretending to not be too upset that every friend she had, most of them since preschool years, threw her to the curb because her mom fell off a horse and bumped her head and refound God to be a way more liberal guy than everyone in their church wanted Him to be.
Mom’s first mistake in the church was being a woman, which happened way before she bumped her head. Many of the old white folks (in a congregation that was mostly old white folks) crossed their arms in front of their chests and frowned during her guest sermons, waiting for the real pastor to take over and do the real preaching. Even before the head bump, she was a little too chipper for their tastes, a little too into the love business. So they were primed and ready for all hell to break loose when she went and married those two gay guys who owned the dog salon. In her last sermon before she got the boot, in addition to reminding the congregation of the annoying fact that Jesus loved and accepted everyone without judgment, she alluded to his being a brown-skinned socialist. There was even a rumor around town that someone overheard her exclaim, “Fuck Leviticus!” while she was pruning roses in her yard.