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have the hard conversation. He just drifts away and depends on everyone else to call it fate.”
    I remember lying in my bed that Christmas Eve, thinking about when I believed in Santa Claus. I mainly believed in him because my father used to put on a big show, making footprints on the carpet and creating reindeer tracks in our front yard and writing little notes from Santa on my presents. I knew he was doing it but part of me still wanted to believe. So I decided that because he, Santa, was famous, he knew my dad, who was also famous. They traveled in the same circles; they understood each other.
    As I was crying in my bed that night, thinking about Santa Fraud (my new name for him), I thought also about the other big headliner of Christmas, which was God. It was all a big act. My parents didn’t believe in God, really, but because they occasionally made references to Him in the early days, I bought it all. Big fat guy who brings presents, big loving Dad in the sky, why not?
    Santa leaves, my father leaves, why wouldn’t God leave?
    My life was an evacuation site.

Wisdom from Gigi
    I CAN’T TAKE YOU RIGHT INTO M ADRIGALS CLASS . W E’RE going to need to stop by the lunchroom first, where I spent an hour complaining to my best friend, Gigi.
    If you think this is going to be a story about how I came to love Madrigals, then keep reading. You haven’t found the toy surprise.
    Gigi was sitting at one of the two long Victorian tables at LaHa, studying for AP biology, even though we were three days into the semester.
    Gigi was feeling a lot of pressure from her parents to become president. I’m not talking about president of the class, either. Though they were hoping for that, too. They were making her run for class office in the spring because they said any career in politics starts early. Bill Clinton, they said, was president of his class all the way through his variousschools. Hillary didn’t make it, but she left eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling. Gigi was supposed to make it.
    Gigi didn’t talk back to her parents. They weren’t that kind of parents.
    She was going to be the first female minority president. She was some beautiful exotic mix of Latina, African American, and Native American. No one could be entirely sure, since Gigi was left in the parking lot of a hospital, in a basket with a note attached to her. It said: “I can’t handle it.”
    One of the doctors at the hospital had a friend who had a friend who was Rodney Stone, a well-known real estate magnate. His face was on benches all over the city. His slogan was “Your Dream House Is Just a Stone’s Throw Away.” Rodney had grown sons but he had recently married his third wife, an exercise guru, who was shocked to find she couldn’t have children after all those years of eating broccoli on the elliptical machine. The doctor called Rodney and Mrs. Third Wife, and that’s how Gigi ended up in a mansion in Beverly Hills being groomed for president.
    Gigi’s full name was Georgia Erika Patterson Stone. Her mother, whose name was Erica Patterson, gave her a “k” because it seemed more ethnic. Her mother was as white as the space on my application where clubs and sports should go.
    Gigi had a good attitude. She thought it was awfully big of them to rescue her in the first place and she loved them. She didn’t mind being treated as if she was a project. They did it in a nice way. She knew she saved them as much as they saved her. Besides, it wasn’t as if Gigi didn’t have a heap of her own ambition. Her GPA was higher than mine, andthat wasn’t easy to pull off. She wanted it, too. She felt lucky they’d taken her in. Life was good.
    Someone like Gigi belonged in one of the better private schools in L.A., like Marlborough or Harvard Westlake. The reason she wasn’t was that her parents decided she would have a better chance of getting into her first-choice college if she was top of the class in a lesser-known school. I always gave