Another Piece of My Heart Read Free Page B

increasing preference for alcohol, or drugs, when she goes out. The only kids Andi knew in high school who were potheads dropped out, then went on to … nothing.
    Other than Gary Marks, who became an Internet bazillionaire.
    But Emily is still a child. She is seventeen, young for her grade, and has decided not to go to college this year, but to take a year off instead, a year in which to mature.
    Thus far, she hasn’t applied anywhere; the more time that passes, the more Andi realizes that Emily’s throwing her life away is a very clear, and terrifying, possibility, increasingly becoming a probability.
    Emily is clever. And funny. She is the sort of girl whom everyone thought would always be at the head of the class, but the teenage years derailed her, and the rebellions seem to be more than the classic teenage kind.
    The friends Emily had when Andi first met them have long since disappeared. Samantha, and Becky, and Charlotte are still the golden popular girls, the girls Emily once whispered with and went to dance class with. The same girls Emily now hates.
    Emily’s crowd is now what Andi would call goth, but what she thinks might today be called emo . They dye their hair jet-black, and have piercings. Emily came home with a pierced nose last month. It could have been worse, Andi thought. It could have been a pierced eyebrow, or lip, or, like so many of Emily’s male friends, giant holes in their earlobes that they stretch every few weeks by inserting bigger discs in their ears.
    She tried to ask them about it. Just last week, Andi came home to find Emily in the kitchen making scrambled eggs for two boys, sitting at the kitchen counter. They looked like twins, in their grey drainpipe jeans, raggedy sleeves hanging over their fingers, their hair, the requisite blue-black, covering their eyelinered eyes almost down to their pierced and sulky mouths.
    “Hi!” Andi said brightly, putting the grocery bag on the counter. “I’m Andi. Emily’s stepmom.”
    “My father’s wife,” Emily muttered, belligerently, from the stove. Andi didn’t respond, putting her hand out to shake hands with the boys.
    The first looked down at the hand as if he’d never seen one before, then warily took it and sort of held it limply before dropping it quickly. “Hey,” he said.
    “Hi,” said the other. “I’m G-man.”
    There was something familiar about him. “G-man?” Andi peered at him.
    “Yeah,” he grunted, looking down.
    “George!” she exclaimed suddenly. “George Mitchell?”
    He shrugged.
    “Oh, my goodness! You’ve … changed. I haven’t seen you for years. How are your parents?”
    “Dunno.” He shrugged again as a hot red blush filled his cheeks. Oh, God, she thought, wondering if Beth Mitchell was going through the same hell as she was, wondering what had happened to her sweet, clean-cut son. She hadn’t seen Beth in at least a year, not since she had run into her at a Bikram Yoga workshop (which Andi hadn’t been able to complete, thanks to almost passing out from the heat halfway through).
    “Is your mom still teaching at Red Dragon?”
    George grunted something that sounded like a yes.
    “Well, tell her I said hi,” Andi said, peering at the black bone hoops in his ears, which had stretched the original piercing hole to half an inch, half an inch through which Andi could clearly see the French doors at the other end of the room. “So Geor … G-man.” She frowned, unable to tear her gaze away. “Can I ask you a question? What is it about the holes in the ears? I know I’m old, but I just don’t get it.”
    All three teenagers looked at one another in horror as George shrugged, and mumbled in embarrassment, “It’s just what everyone does.”
    And what will you do when you are my age? Andi thought. What will you do about the inch-wide holes in your ears? What do you think your children will think, and how in the hell do you correct it? Can a plastic surgeon sew your ear back together?
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