Reinventing Mona Read Free Page A

and hats that my mother made. When I say she made them, I mean she really made them—from shearing the wool, spinning it to yarn, and knitting it as she softly sang her favorite Cyndi Lauper songs. We were eighties hippies, after all.
    So, in all honesty, I could tell Greta emphatically that no, I had never met a bigger group of bitches than the girls at the Academy. Greta was beautiful in a natural, not-trying-at-all sort of way. Other girls in our school spent a tremendous amount of time making sure their irreverently individual appearance received high marks from our peer fashion critics. It absolutely amazed me that many girls were allowed to highlight their hair, don leather pants, and have their weak chins reconstructed. Greta threw herself together like a girl who didn’t give much thought to her looks, and yet was still stunning. She has her Japanese mother’s straight black hair and thick lips, and also moss green eyes compliments of her American father, the chief of staff at Scripps Memorial Hospital. Greta always wore a blue hoodie with “La Jolla Country Day Soccer” in chipped white print on the back. Her hair was always combed and tied in a low ponytail. No one could see that she was pretty because she had an unfinished, tomboy look. But there was no doubt about it, Greta was the best-looking girl at our school. Today, she maintains the same low-maintenance style with a uniform of starched white button-down tops, simple black pants, and patent leather “roach stompers,” accenting the look with one of her dozens of artistic necklaces from her travels.
    “So, new girl. You got a name?” shot young Greta.
    “Mona.” I wasn’t sure if Greta was really being friendly, or if she was just taking inventory of the new, lowest level of the social totem pole. She was so blunt in her delivery. “So, what’s your story, Mona? Where’d you come from? What are you in for?” Greta was the first to confront me with the rumor of my drug addiction. I kind of liked the cachet of being the exiled tweeker, but then again, anything was better than the real story of my journey to Coronado, so I decided I’d be evasive with Greta and let her draw her own conclusions.
    “You know, sometimes a girl needs a change of atmosphere to clear her head,” I said.
    “Clear her head of what?” Greta shot.
    “You know, stuff…”
    “No, I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking,” Greta persisted.
    “I don’t really want to get into it. I just thought I needed a change in scenery, and what better place than sunny Southern California?”
    “You know what they’re saying about you, don’t you?” Greta asked. I shook my head and knit my brows, coaxing her to continue. “They say your parents kicked you out. Couldn’t deal with you anymore.” My heart took a five-story plunge. I hated this group of over-privileged nitwits. I had heard about my supposed drug problems. I was even amused by the ludicrous rumors. But my parents kicked me out? Not amusing in the least.
    I saw my mother sweeping a spider up with a sheet of newspaper and gently escorting it out the door. Once she even argued that a grape juice stain had every right to permanently reside on the blouse she spilled it on. She said there was no point in trying to wash out grape juice, so she may as well think of it as a new design. She used watercolor paints and placed petals around the misshapen purple center of her makeshift flower. Fully functional clothing would never be discarded on our Utopian commune. Ants were “redirected” to the outdoors through strategically placed slices of lemon rind. But according to the know-it-alls at the Academy, my parents kicked their own daughter out of the house.
    I remembered how my father looked the last time I saw him, closing the door of the school bus and giving me a thumbs-up as if their road trip to the capitol for a nuclear disarmament rally would actually make a bit of difference. As if a few thousand hippies were