In flagrante delicto were the words the headmaster used. The headmaster told her Justin and I were caught fooling around in a room loaded with Jack Daniels and prescription bottles. Nancy only met Justin once, at the expulsion hearing. His real wife probably makes fresh gingerbread every day and writes Things To Do lists and does her own grocery shopping instead of having a housekeeper and a driver do everything for her, like Nancy does. I'm fairly sure that my real dad's wife would not mind that I make scissors cuts on my arms and then pick the scabs.

My real dad was on his way back to New York, to his real wife and family. Nancy and I were on our way to San Francisco to become Sid's family. My real dad gave the cashier a one-hundred-dollar bill and told her to keep the change. She said she had kept the doll hidden under her cash register waiting for just the right little girl. He bought me a brown rag doll at the airport gift shop. I did not like my hamburger so my real dad opened his briefcase and offered me a piece of homemade gingerbread he had wrapped in tinfoil. We ate lunch in a smoky pub at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. He was tall and skinny and had ink black hair, like me. I met him at an airport once when I was five. You could say I hardly know my real father. Sid, my father, calls me a 'recovering hellion.' Sid's actually my stepfather.

I have done my parents the favor of becoming more or less invisible. And no parent could deny that hanging out with Shrimp is an improvement over Justin, my ex, from my old prep school. They take one look at his five-foot-five, surfer-shirt-wearin', baggy-jeans-slouchin', Pop Tart-eatin', spiked-hair-head self and you can just see confusion firebombs exploding in their heads, like they are thinking, Oh no, Cyd Charisse, that young man is not your homes.Īt least Shrimp always remembers to call my mother 'Mrs.' instead of just grunting in her direction, like most guys my age do. I'm not sure they even believe he is my boyfriend. My so-called parents hate my boyfriend, Shrimp.

Gingerbread by Rachel Cohn