Everybody Knows Your Name Read Free Page A

out instantly became one of my favorite hobbies? Maybe from the outside it was, Oh, there’s another one of those girls , but from the inside, I still don’t understand why a romance can’t matter until you’re old enough to say you’re going to stay together forever and no one laughs.
    Mrs. Corinthos looked so bummed out for me. So I threw her a bone and said, “I also like singing in my room, and in the car too.”
    â€œThat’s it,” she said, staring me at me intensely with an important message. “Get into singing.”
    If only Mrs. Corinthos could have seen a semester into the future, then she would have been happy to find out not only that I’d been released from the terrible easygoing influence of my boyfriend but also that I was as serious as ever about singing in the car, and it would lead me to where I’m standing right now.

    Scott and I broke up at the beginning of this summer. He was supposed to go away to do environmental studies at Reed, moving to Oregon at the end of June, and I was only going into my junior year.
    But then he put off leaving, saying that there were things he still needed to take care of. Those things turned out to be lots of surfing and sleeping on people’s couches but didn’t have much to do with me. We never talked about why we’d actually broken up if Scott wasn’t going anywhere. We just stopped hanging out. But in July he started a habit of calling every few days to pretend like we’re actual friends.
    So my phone will ring at two in the morning, and Scott will be there, asking, “Did I wake you up, Tiny?” That’s what he calls me, even though I’m not ridiculously small or anything.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I’ll say, but I’ll wish I could just hang up because I quickly learned that every one of our surface conversations (usual topics: weird things neighbors are up to; pollution at the beach; the theory of the universe as a hologram and how much it stresses me out; secret cures for surf rash) leaves me feeling more hollow than when I picked up.
    Why don’t I hang up on Scott? Well, here’s exactly what I’ve been getting toward—and I understand this sounds really, incredibly simple—but it is so hard to change how you act .
    Like at school, I know that there’s this idea of me, and all I’d have to do to shake it up is do something surprising. Smile for a whole day. Invite someone new to have lunch. Join a committee. Wear a conversation piece sweatshirt. I don’t know. Same deal when it comes to Scott. Instead of being a person he can still call, all I have to do is not pick up the phone. I think the real obstacle to changing is that once people decide on an idea of you, it’s so hard to ditch it yourself that it basically feels impossible.
    Which is why I’m here.

4
    A few months ago my mom and I were driving to the beach and she had her phone’s camera on record, which I didn’t know. So I had my head tipped against the window and I was belting out Beyoncé’s song “Halo,” because my mom always has the radio on a top 40 station and that’s what was on. She says it keeps her current, in this way that makes it sound like the Black Eyed Peas deliver her the world news.
    She’d already been trying to get on The Real Housewives of Orange County for a few years. The producers had brought her in for three different interviews, and they’d even come by to see our house. My mom showed them what she looked like coming down what she called our “grand staircase.” But the interest never turned into anything.
    When my mom realized she hadn’t gotten on the show, first she said that she knew it was because she was too stable. “It’s hard to make me cry,” she told me, “and people can tell that about a person.”
    Then she got more depressed about how close she’d come, and she