The good news: danny is moving to san francisco!

The bad news.- he's a no-good, cheating dawg who left his boyfriend, Aaron, for another man. Danny's new love is a lawyer (I hate him already) who works in The City, and Danny met him at a club where new lawyer man went one night while on a business trip in NYC, and where Danny had gone to shake off the sad news that he and Aaron's business, The Village Idiots, had failed. Danny and Aaron lost the lease on their café and couldn't afford a new space so they closed up shop, and not long after that Danny met new lawyer man, putting a closing notice on Danny's relationship with Aaron.

True love may be a lie.

For a no-good dawg, Danny sure looked chipper when I picked him up at the airport. Danny looked exactly like I remembered him--like me, like Frank-dad, but shorter and sweeter, with an open face that had the gall to be glowing with happiness. At the airport curbside pickup he hopped into my car and kissed my cheek. "It's so great to be in California!" he said. "I just escaped the fourth snow storm this February. I thought if I saw one more snowflake, I would lose it. Ah, California sunshine and CC, too. How lucky am I? This change of scenery is just what I needed. I love it!"

I kissed his cheek back, but then had to say, "Don't look so happy. I am very cross with you."

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Danny smiled bigger. The nerve! "Who's looking pretty happy herself?" he teased. Danny lifted a piece of my hair. "Purple?" he asked. Apparently when I proclaimed I would never go for body art as a form of self-expression, I was lying. Shrimp and I were in his rooftop hammock at a rare time when we had the house to ourselves. He was explaining to me about dysentery, which he had in Papua New Guinea, while we were listening to a Prince CD. Then Shrimp and I shared, let's call it a lovely interlude (I told you it would get good again), while the Purple One sang "Erotic City," an interlude so inspired I had no choice but to celebrate it by going to Haight Street to get violet streaks highlighted into my long black hair. Some girls might get tattoos with their boyfriend's name--Johnny Angel or Stud Muffin or whatever--but I prefer a more wash-out-able form of branding to express my love for my man.

"Don't change the subject," I told Danny. "What's his name, anyway?"

Danny said, "Terry."

"That's a girl's name."

Danny did the whistle-snap. "There's nothing girl about Terry, let me tell you. I have never dated a man that beautiful in my life. Wait till you meet him!" The whistle-snap from Danny? Since when did he become a stereotypical Chelsea boy? Danny is the upstanding homosexual who wears wrinkled T-shirts and blue jeans from ten years ago, he has a scraggly mess of black hair and kind brown eyes with dark eyebrows so bushy he practically has a unibrow, and then there's also his avowed love of Pamela Anderson (don't ask me, I have no idea). Danny is the guy that if you didn't already know he was gay you would think he was a

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fence straddler at best, not a confirmed Friend of Dorothy. I am all for Chelsea boys, I have great appreciation for their beautiful bodies and exceptional fashion sense, and I, too, share their love for The Golden Girls, but that's not who Danny is.

"Well, where do you want me to drop you off?" I asked him. 'At Terry's house in the Oakland hills, or at the local intervention clinic for bad bad boyfriends who dump their true love just when the going gets tough for some shallow-vain he-man who probably shaves his chest and gets facials more frequently than my mother?"

Danny turned down the car radio and turned his body so he was facing me. "Listen, Ceece, I know this is hard. If you think you're taking it bad, you should know that lisBETH hasn't spoken to me since Aaron and I broke up. She's been too busy helping him find a job and a new apartment, like Aaron is her brother, not me. Dad's freaked out. He's never been comfortable with the gay thing anyway, although he always puts on a PC show about how it's all fine, but at least with Aaron he knew what to expect with me. Aaron is a great person--don't think I am not fully aware of that. We had some great years together, but we'd gotten to be more like friends than mates. Aaron and I were over long before Terry came along. The spark had died. So now I am unemployed and treading in dangerous territory. I don't know what I'm going to do with my life now that The Village Idiots is gone, and I'm so insecure with Terry, I'm sure I'm gonna blow it. I could really use some support. Help me out here, okay, Ceece?"

Faux-wanna-be Chelsea boy or not, he's still my Danny, the half-brother who made my summer in Manhattan

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worthwhile, the only person clever enough and who would care enough to give me a nickname like Ceece. "Okay," I said.

"So when do I get to meet the famous Shrimp?" Danny asked.

"He's out in the East Bay scouting a new Java the Hut location with his brother this afternoon, but he wants us to get together tomorrow. Maybe we could go get coffee and breakfast together or something."

Danny laughed. "I know your tricks. I am not enabling you to skip school on my account. Let me talk with Terry and maybe all of us can get together this weekend."

'Are you moving in permanently with Terry?"

"No. We're gonna see how it goes--no commitments as of now. I needed to get out of New York for a while, and what better place to escape than the Bay Area? I hardly got any time with you last summer, and it would be great to see Uncle Sid again too. Terry has a huge house with a great kitchen, so I can keep myself occupied just fine while he's working during the day."

Because Danny is a relatively new discovery in my life, I forget that other people besides me, Josh, and Ash have a claim to "Uncle Sid." Sid-dad was a doting godfather to lisBETH and Danny when they were kids, because he and bio-dad Frank were old college roommates and best friends, until Nancy came between them. As I looked at Danny through the corner of my eye, I felt proud to call him brother, and couldn't wait to introduce him to Shrimp and my friends--Helen, Autumn, Sugar Pie--but I can't say I was cool with the thought that Danny planned to hang with "Uncle Sid" during his time in San Francisco.

Weirder than the thought of Danny interacting with

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my parents would be Danny interacting with Nancy's mourning period. Mrs. Vogue hadn't been to yoga in a month, and she spends most of her days moping around the house wearing Sid-dad's plush old Ritz-Carlton hotel robe. Neiman-Marcus may possibly go out of business for how long since Nancy has shopped there. While Nancy's cooking skills haven't improved, she has mastered the art of the Duncan Hines mix. We no longer have to sneak sweets into the house because Nancy herself is making them and eating them. I found it hard to imagine how the Danny-Nancy chemistry could mix, especially since they were both at such strange intervals in their own lives.

The good news still was Danny had arrived in San Francisco and planned on staying a while, but the queasy news was having Danny in my Left Coast world may mean the separation gap between the two families can no longer be kept separate. Danny's presence could cause the vortex separating the old friends, and me from my other family and them from me, to close permanently, in a way my short summer Manhattan fling never had.

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*** Chapter 30

True love may be making a comeback.

Helen's eighteenth birthday has passed, but that doesn't mean she's legally sanctioned to bring Eamon upstairs to her room. I feel her pain, so I am doing what I can to help her out. Originally I started hanging out in the kitchen at Helen's mom's Chinese restaurant on Clement Street because my work-study job had ended. Then it turned out I actually missed the restaurant environment, and I was looking for a way to get back at Helen for proclaiming Mrs. Vogue to be the "coolest mom ever." Helen's mom refuses to hire me for a regular shift--she said if her own daughter won't work in her restaurant, neither shall I--but she has been teaching me how to make her most excellent dumplings in exchange for occasional early-evening assistance with vegetable peeling and chopping. Helen's mom would also like me to encourage Helen to get rid of her new copper-spotted tiger-print eyebrows, and she'll throw in noodle lessons if I can convince Helen that proper ladies do not draw action-hero cartoon series about dirty old men with names like Ball Hunter.

The pot stickers Helen's mom makes are so good I have composed a love song to them: "Oh, pot stickers you are so yummy and juicy, so porky and full, love that ginger flava whateva..." That's the extent of my song so far, but I am working on a new, international tribute song in celebration

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of the new delicacy in my repertoire--steamed shrimp dumplings--and inspired by the minor language lessons the kitchen crew at the Chinese restaurant have been giving me: "Hen hao chi de hsia long bao, delicious, yummy dumpling, hsia ren hsia ren hsia ren, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp."

I was singing my pot sticker song while I stuffed a stack of gyoza wrappers with meat filling when I looked up to see Helen waving at me from the window at the back door of her family's flat, the back door that opens into a hallway leading upstairs to the apartment, or through which the restaurant kitchen can be entered. She must have jumped a dozen backyard fences to get to that back entrance without coming through the front. I saw the spikes of Eamon's fire-red hair behind Helen's head. Got it. I spilled the bowl of vegetable filling onto the floor, causing Helen's mother, who is crazy for cleanliness, to join me pronto under the work table to help clean up the mess. I looked up from underneath the table to see Helen leading Eamon by the hand as they creeped up the back stairs. "Thanks!" she mouthed at me. Ah, chu lian, young love.

Helen's sneak reminded me that my restaurant time was over for the day. Shrimp was due to pick me up in his Pinto, as my Betty Boop car does not do Clement Street, because Clement Street does not do parking. We were going to a fancy restaurant in the East Bay to meet Danny and Terry, the first time Shrimp would meet Danny, and I would meet Terry, like a double date. When I got outside, The Richmond fog spread a cold mist over my face while I scanned for Shrimp's car on Clement Street. I was especially excited to see him because he hadn't shown up at school for

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two days, and I missed seeing him live and in the flesh something bad. Two whole Shrimpless days equaled a veritable drought. I thought: I am the luckiest girl in the world. I live in the coolest Jog city, I have a boss boyfriend, and we're going to meet my new best half-brother and his lover for dinner, all adultlike and fancy. Life is good.

It would be reasonable to expect some doomsday prospect at this point, just for the sake of irony and all. There I am, standing on my favorite street in San Francisco, life is peachy, I'm in luuuuv, blah blah blah, and then, you know, Shrimp's Pinto bolts down Clement Street and smashes into a fog-covered, double-parked UPS truck. Tragedy ensues; Shrimp is either dead or in a coma, and I spend the rest of my life believing it was my fault for starting to believe in the universe's grand scheme to bestow true love and a good life on me after some really fucked-up years.

The reality wasn't that bad but it wasn't pretty either. When I got into Shrimp's car he didn't kiss me. He announced, "Once we get to Oakland, I can only come inside to meet your brother for a minute. I have to go over to Berkeley to see about a room at some guy's house."

I couldn't go into a tirade about how dare Shrimp bail on the dinner with Danny and Terry, how many times have I sat through dinner the last few months with the Fightin' Shrimps, it's called being a supportive girlfriend and getting to know the important people in your partner's life, because I first had to know, "What do you mean, a room at some guy's house?"

"I'm gonna move over to the East Bay for a while. Now that Dee is pregnant, she wants Iris and Billy out of the bedroom

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they've been using so she can start the remodel to turn it into a baby room. But Iris and Billy, you know," here Shrimp mumbled low, "they don't, like, have enough cash for a new pad. So they're gonna move into my room for a while, lay low by spending some time up north with their friends up there, and since I am going to help start up Java's new store in the East Bay, I oughta just live over there for a while."

Where should I begin with this bombshell? I said, "How are you going to manage living and working in the East Bay and going to school in The City?" To say nothing of girlfriend time--when did he plan to fit that into this new schedule? What--and who--were his priorities, anyway?

Shrimp played with the dial on the radio station before settling on the news radio station with the traffic report. He is obsessed with hearing the traffic on the :08 every ten minutes. To piss him off I turned down the radio right as the traffic report started.

"Why'd you have to do that?" he griped.

"You haven't answered my question."

We were stuck in inch-along traffic on the freeway entrance toward the Bay Bridge, so it's not like Shrimp could escape my line of questioning. He said, "If you have to know, I'm failing out. I lost my scholarship, and Wallace doesn't want to pay the tuition if I'm failing or just not showing up because I can't catch up no matter what I do. The school was basically gonna kick me out anyway. So I dropped out this week. It was, like, a mutual decision all around."

It certainly was not a mutual decision all around because I'd never been consulted and wasn't I the girl for

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whom he painted Blitzkrieg CC, the one whose cell phone he called at home every night to rap love songs into her ear before she went to sleep? And what about those other so-called important people in his life, the ones called parents!

"Iris and Billy signed off on this?" I asked.

"Sure." He shrugged. "They're cool with it. They know I'll get my G.E.D. eventually."

I turned the radio volume back up and changed the station to the pop music station, which was spinning the latest puke-pop princess's saccharine hit. Shrimp gave me a dirty look and changed the station to the alternative music college station playing a morose Radiohead tune. I met his dirty look and changed the radio station back to the pop princess number. Sometimes Shrimp is just too hipper-than-thou. Sometimes I just want to be a geek and listen to bad pop music and not care whether that's pathetic.

"WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM?" The Artist Formerly Known as Mr. Don't Harsh My Mellow yelled at me. "I hate that shit music. What's the look for? Don't tell me you're mad about me dropping out of school. You hate school. What do you care?"

"I care enough to know I ought to just finish it," I said. I also care enough to know that parents who were "cool with it" were less than cool themselves. I certainly care enough to know that he should have brought all these issues up with me much, much earlier. We'd been sleeping together, talking about our dreams together, assuming we had a future together, for months now, and this was the first I was hearing about all this? Now I felt like all the time we'd spent together since becoming a couple again was a lie, because he had been holding out this crucial piece of

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him all that time--and I had let him, wanting to bask in the glow of true love.

We settled on the hip-hop radio station and rode in silence the remaining journey to the East Bay. When we reached Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Shrimp slowed down to look for a parking space as we neared the restaurant. Shrimp said, "I can only come in for a second to meet your brother. Then I'm gonna head over to Berkeley." The car was not quite at a full stop, but I opened my door and hopped out of it. "Don't bother," I said. I slammed the passenger's door behind me. The Pinto came to a complete stop, as if hesitating on how to proceed, then pulled an illegal U-ey and bolted down Piedmont Avenue in the opposite direction.

Danny was waiting for me outside the restaurant. "Terry's getting our table. Where's Shrimp? Parking the car? I can't wait to meet him at last!"

"He's not coming," I murmured. "I don't want to talk about it." I felt stiff in Danny's embrace, wanting to go home, get in bed, and throw the covers over my head.

'Ah," Danny said in my ear as I let go of his hug. "The elusive Shrimp remains elusive."

My hellacious mood didn't help, but it was not the reason I hated Terry. As expected, Terry was a shallow-vain he-man, only worse--he's married to his job instead of his looks. And he's old, like at least forty, though his fake tan, blond looks, and runner's body gave him the appearance of a much younger man. How could I get to know him, try to like him, if he answered cell phone calls from his office every two minutes? Danny explained to me during our appetizers, while Terry excused himself for a good fifteen minutes to take a call, that Terry is a lawyer, a partner at a

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big SF law firm, and he was in the middle of closing an important deal. I couldn't imagine Danny's ex, Aaron, even owning a cell phone, much less using it during an awesome meal that a noted Bay Area chef had prepared. I mean, show some respect.

"I'm bored," Danny sighed halfway through his entree, a fabulous cut steak cooked to perfection. Terry was back outside again on the phone, his salmon untouched on the table.

"Bored with Terry?" I asked, hopeful. That didn't take long.

"You wish!" Danny said. "No, the Terry part, when I get to see him, is great. And I saw you lunge for his phone the last time it rang, and it's a good thing Terry's reflexes are quicker than yours because I know what you were planning on doing to that phone." Danny looked toward the shrub outside the open window behind our table. My brother is truly psychic. "No, I'm living-bored. The 'burbs are killing me. I hate being dependent on a car, but I have to use Terry's car to go out during the day because everything is so far apart, and there's always traffic. And it's so quiet at night at his house up in the hills. I'm a New Yorker. I need energy and noise, subways and cabs, dirt and grime, diversity. I'm actually missing snow and cold--real cold, not this bogus California cold! Every day the weather in the Oakland hills is the same.- perfect. Everybody looks the same: perfect. It's boring. Boring, boring, boring."

Maybe my brother, not Shrimp, is my soul mate.

Terry returned to the table, but I caught him checking out the waiter's tight behind as the waiter refilled a wineglass at the next table. In fact, Terry had yet to look me

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straight in the eyes, because the little time he was in my presence his eyes scanned the room, like he was looking for someone better to mingle with. He must be from L.A. Terry turned to me. "So, kiddo," he said, like he hadn't spent the majority of our dinner away from the table and thereby, in my opinion, forfeited his right to rejoin our conversation. "College in your plans?"

I almost spit out the water I was gulping, because that was when it hit me: Terry was just like bio-dad Frank! These were almost the exact words Frank had asked me last summer, on the one day he'd grudgingly given me some time and we went strolling through Central Park together. Like Frank, Terry was great-looking but with a wandering eye, a deal maker and workaholic, probably incapable of being in a committed relationship--it couldn't be a coincidence that a guy as old and successful as Terry lived in a big house in the hills by himself. Poor Danny and his Oedipal-whatever thingy! Please let this horrid relationship be over soon, I prayed, before Danny's therapy bills grew higher than the debt left over from The Village Idiots' failure.

Before I could answer Terry's question, his cell phone rang. Again. This time my reflexes were quicker, and I grabbed the phone from the table before Terry's hand reached it. I tossed the phone out the window into the shrubs.

Men. Sometimes they just need to be taught a lesson.

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*** Chapter 31

The Sugar Pie-Fernando-Sid-dad hotline must be in full effect because I have been summoned to Sid-dad's study for a Talk. I didn't tell my parents about Shrimp dropping out of school, I haven't mentioned our fight or that Shrimp and I aren't speaking, but my parents can't be completely clueless.

Sid-dad shut the door to his study and started out the Talk with, "So I understand our friend Shrimp is no longer matriculated at school." Our friend Shrimp's painting, Blitzkrieg CC, hung behind Sid-dad's desk, purchased for a tidy sum at the hospital charity auction. Nancy sat next to Sid-dad on the leather couch, her hand pressed into his. Those two are getting ridiculous. I have to resist the urge to spontaneously hurl every time they touch each other like that when I'm around. PEOPLE: children are present. Restrain yourselves!

"So?" I said. He's not their kid--what do they care?

Nancy said, "Well, I am just horrified." Good--but I didn't ask your opinion.

Sid-dad said, "But we're not his parents, so we have no say one way or the other in his decision. But we're concerned because we are your parents, and we thought now is a good time to get a sense from you of your intentions."

"I'm not dropping out or failing out!" I said, on the defensive. I was bummed enough about the Shrimp situation. Did we have to have the DO something talk just now?

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Nancy said, "We know that. But we're concerned that you're flailing." I glanced toward Lady Liberty CC in the painting, holding out the silk stockings over her legs, and suddenly I pictured her like a fish just plucked out of the Hudson River and gasping for water, placed on a piece of the tabloid newspaper bound for the morning fish market, headline: flailing!

To parents, flailing is just another word for failing. "What does it take to get through to you people?" I huffed. "I am this close to graduation and I have a perfectly respectable GPA this year. Have some faith in me--how about that? And if you really must know, since you're so nosy, I think Shrimp made a mistake myself. I think he's gonna wake up in a few years and all his friends are going to have moved on, and he's gonna feel left behind and regretting this decision, bad. But I'm only his girlfriend and barely that right now, and I was offered no influence in the decision. So be happy. I would have said not to do it. And Shrimp and I are not even talking now because of how he handled the whole thing."

"Oh," Sid and Nancy both said. It was hard to tell if they looked pleased or surprised--maybe it was somewhere in between.

Sid-dad said, "My secretary has tried reaching him regarding a contact I'd like to give him, but no one seems to be able to track him down." That's the truth. Elusive Shrimp hasn't been by my house, Java the Hut in Ocean Beach, or Sugar Pie's, and he must have been struck with amnesia when it comes to my cell phone digits. I have no idea where he's been since our fight. "I can't condone his decision, but I thought he would be interested in knowing

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there is a gallery owner here in The City who was at the hospital auction, who is interested in seeing more of Shrimp's work. Could be a tremendous opportunity for the young man."

"Forget about it," I said. This much I know about the elusive Shrimp, for sure: give him an opportunity to turn his art into cash from The Man, not just a charity opportunity accepted to get into my parents' good graces, and Shrimp will disappear faster than you can say Hang loose.

Nancy gestured to a stack of brochures on the coffee table. "We're well aware of your feelings about college, and while we don't plan on insisting..."

"... I don't want to go to City College next year, not even part-time--"

Sid-dad interrupted me. "Now whose turn is it to show some faith? We've got your message already: NO COLLEGE. Forgetting that most students your age would be thrilled to have the privilege you take for granted, to go to college without the worry of financing the education or the burden of student loan debt, we nonetheless have heard you loud and clear on this point. You'll be an adult soon; we can't force you to go. And frankly our time is better spent than trying to force this issue. No, these brochures are for culinary school. Your work-study time at the restaurant last fall proved what I suspected: You're a natural candidate for a culinary arts curriculum."

The idea was intriguing, but why did he have to use the word curriculum! Talk about a buzz kill. Also, I did not appreciate that my sentence to work with Lord Empress Kari had, in fact, been part of an evil, manipulating scheme to test the waters on my restaurant abilities and culinary

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inclination. My eyes lingered on the brochures but I didn't reach for them. I couldn't give my parents that much satisfaction.

"There are some excellent schools here in the Bay Area. Your brother Danny and I have been talking about this, and he's recommended a few schools he thinks would be appropriate matches for you," Sid-dad offered, like I was a suspicious cat to whom he was offering his hand to sniff first, before getting in close.

I considered touching a brochure, maybe even lifting one from the table, when we heard loud--I mean LOUD-- music playing from the street. I went over to the window and pulled up the shade to see a Pinto in a sea of BMWs and Mercedeses on our street of Victorian and Edwardian houses, shaking from the decibel level of music blasting from its stereo. Those damn tear-inducing Von Trapp children were harmonizing ah-ah-ah-ah in full ghetto blaster surround sound. Neighbors peeked from their house windows and some Japanese tourists on the street walked by with their hands over their ears, then snapped photos of the Pinto once they were at a safe enough distance to take their hands from their ears. I don't know why the tourists looked so confused--hadn't they seen Say Anything! I'll take Shrimp over John Cusack any day, but Shrimp's knockoff scene had to be inspired by Wallace and Delia's favorite movie, where John Cusack holds the boom box playing the Peter Gabriel song outside the house of his girlfriend.

Oh, the make-up is going to be sooooo good, once we're past the talking (me) and the apologizing (Shrimp).

I looked toward Sid and Nancy, both shaking their heads. "Go," Nancy sighed, waving her hand at me.

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"But take a brochure," Sid-dad said, quickly handing me one as I sprinted toward the closed study door. He looked toward the window again, shook his head again, and murmured, "Odd duck."

I grabbed the brochure from his hand and bolted. "I'll be home tomorrow morning," I called out as I got to the front door.

"MIDNIGHT!" Sid and Nancy both yelled.

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*** Chapter 32

Shrimp and I have a secret.

No, I'm not pregnant.

Next September, after I've walked the graduation plank and turned eighteen, I am moving over to the East Bay to live with Shrimp. By then Shrimp will have saved enough money to move out of Some Guy's house in Berkeley, and I will get a job at a restaurant or a coffeehouse on College or Telegraph Avenue. We won't care if we're minimum-wage dirt poor and have to live in some dilapidated shack with crack vials strewn on the ground outside and the cops driving by at all hours, as long as we're together. We'll be making love too often--in privacy, whenever we want, however long we want, buh-bye curfews--to care. When important decisions have to be made, like dropping out of school or taking off to Joshua Tree for some solitude time, we will make those decisions as a team, like Sid and Nancy, Wallace and Delia, Bill and Hillary.

Culinary school was an interesting idea, but I have the rest of my life for that. I'd rather work full-time after finishing high school. Next year is the year that will be all about Shrimp, for real this time. I plan on a full CC makeover to transform myself into an East Bay girl. I will trade in fog for sun, espresso for straight black organic coffee slush, and I will make every best effort to drop the word hella every other sentence. In lieu of attending Berkeley, the

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university, I shall study Berkeley, the food mecca. I will become hella food snob and learn about smelly cheeses, only shop for the best produce at the Berkeley Bowl, and grind fresh pasta instead of making it from a box. Shrimp and I will plaster our living room with Shrimp's art and with record covers--vinyl, not CD--by East Bay icons like Tower of Power and Green Day, and we will have exotic plants, Mount Fuji artwork, and a white noise machine that plays Kitaro to get that Japanese sanctuary love-shack vibe happening.

The person I most want to share this news with, Danny, arrived at my fave Italian café in North Beach looking tired, unshaven, and wearing yesterday's clothes. Not that I expected Danny to spiff up to meet my boyfriend for the belated first time, but I was still surprised at how bad he looked when he walked into the café.

"Terry and I broke up," Danny announced before he'd even sat down. I resisted the urge to jump up from my table and do a little Irish jig that Eamon taught me on a recent IHOP night. 'Apparently I was mistaken when I thought our relationship was exclusive."

I am soooooo good, I did not say I told you so. I said, "I'm sorry, Danny." Sorry that you're hurting--not sorry that it's over with that loser who was nowhere near good enough for you. "Coffee and chocolate help."

"So does more upbeat music," Danny said. He spoke loud and directed his voice to the barista who was standing near the café's stereo: "Is the Wagner opera so necessary? Ever hear of Puccini or Mozart? You want to encourage customers to relax, not to want to slit their wrists." I guess you can take the New Yorker out of New York, but not New York

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out of my who-knew-he-could-be-so-moody brother New Yorker.

Shrimp arrived next, also mad moody. All Danny got from Shrimp was "Hey," and this long squint-stare of realization that I had actual blood relatives who looked like me, followed by a slight snarl that only I knew was a snarl; Danny could easily have mistaken it for Shrimp having gas or something. Or something being that Shrimp thinks bio-dad Frank is "bad news" and will need some convincing that Danny is not the same story, though you would think Shrimp would just take my word for it, but boyfriends are weird protective that way.

Shrimp ordered a double-shot espresso and said, "I can't stay long. I couldn't find a parking space so I'm illegally parked in a yellow loading zone, and Iris is expecting me in Ocean Beach to take her downtown to deal with some passport issues."

I would be cross with Shrimp's rudeness except the poor boy is getting slammed from all sides: crashing on the couch at Some Guy's house in Berkeley and having a long commute between the East Bay and Ocean Beach for work, and being the intermediary between Wallace-Delia and Iris-Billy, to say nothing of his girlfriend who would like to toss all his other concerns aside, have exclusive access to his time, and force him to fall instantly in like with her newfound brother. But since I am a patient girlfriend, I could play this scene cool instead of wig out about Shrimp's rudeness, because I knew within a few months, I would have Shrimp all to myself, and now that Terry is out of the picture (hallelujah) Shrimp and Danny will have plenty of time to bond.

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Danny has got to be in the All Men Suck frame of mind right now because he said to Shrimp, "Hypothetical situation: You've moved back to Papua New Guinea and Cyd Charisse comes to visit you for a few months to see how your relationship progresses. No pressure, but it's understood it's an exclusive deal, right? I mean, isn't that implicit?" I could see Shrimp's small head realizing that harshing someone's mellow may have been part of bio-dad Frank's DNA lineage.

If Sugar Pie were here she would probably pronounce that it's Mercury retrograde or some astrological disaster time when new beginnings should not be embarked upon. I'd wanted my true love boyfriend and my true love half-brother to meet, but looking at them together at the table now, my mind thought: abort mission! abort! abort!

I found a way out when I looked out the café window. I told Shrimp, "Baby, the meter maid is pulling up behind your Pinto. You better go." As I am a fully actualized being, I kissed Shrimp on the lips, which unsnarled his lips just fine. Shrimp said to Danny, "Let's try this again another time, buddy. Later."

"Isn't he great?" I sighed after Shrimp left Danny and me sitting alone at the table again.

"He's exactly as I expected," Danny said. I have no idea what that meant, but I'm going to hold off a little longer on confiding my big news to Danny.

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*** Chapter 33

Since I don't think Sid and Nancy are going to be so keen on my new plan to DO something, as in move in with Shrimp, and I am going to bust if I don't tell someone soon, I have decided I am ready to spill my news to Danny, who can be enlisted to help butter them up. Danny is not only my bridge to my other family back in New York, he shall also, in my grand scheme, become the bridge by whom I eventually break the news to Sid and Nancy.

Spring has sprung and my true love is back in bloom, but not for Danny. Get this: Since his breakup with Terry, Danny has been staying at our house in Pacific Heights. The lease on the apartment in Nueva York where he and Aaron lived is in Danny's name, but Aaron's new place isn't ready yet, and lisBETH still isn't speaking to Danny, and Danny can't be bothered with asking Frank for help, so guess who got him? The "other" family.

At first I wanted to be sick at the thought of Danny meeting Nancy--what could they possibly say to each other? I imagined a puppet show acting out a scene like:

DANNY PUPPET

Ah, so you're the other woman who split my family apart?

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NANCY PUPPET

Sho 'nuff. My God, I'm getting the creeps by how much you look like the married man who got me in trouble when I was young and stupid, then lied when he said he would always be there for me.

DANNY PUPPET

Well, nice to meet you, I guess.

NANCY PUPPET

Likewise, [puppets butt heads in conciliation]

Sid-dad and Nancy invited Danny out for lunch without me knowing it, on a school day. I'm relieved I wasn't present at the initial meeting and didn't know it was taking place until it was already over. However strange or awkward or just plain huh their first meeting was (or maybe it was just me, worrying about how it would go), Danny and Nancy hit it off. Danny, who had spent all his time alone at Terry's house watching music video channels on the satellite TV, said my mother is "full-on bling." She of the full-on bling proclaimed that Danny is "like a kind, happy version of Frank." Soon after the inevitable Danny-Terry breakup happened, as rebound romances with shallow-vain he-men are bound to do, leaving Danny broke and homeless for the time being, "Uncle Sid" and his lovely wife, mother of his illegitimate sister, helped Danny pick up the pieces by offering him their guest room until his apartment in NYC was vacated by Aaron.

Nancy finally has a full-time cook in the house again, and maybe it's the relief of not having to prepare meals, or

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Nancy giggling when Danny reminds her, "Butter is not your enemy, Nancy," as he pulls another batch of shortbread cookies from the oven, but she appears to be coming out of her post-Granny A funk. Neiman-Marcus can officially breathe a sigh of relief. There's even color in Nancy's face now, and she's got hips on dem bones from the extra pounds from Danny's baking. She looks great: healthy-- and happy. Ash idolizes Danny because the Barbie birthday cake he made for her was a three-tiered masterpiece decorated like a wedding cake. Sid-dad is thrilled to have his godson reinstated in his life, and to finally have someone in the house who will play Fantasy Baseball with him. The exception to all this Danny love is Josh, who HATES Danny. When he was little and didn't like someone, Josh would go over to that person, drop to the floor, and try to bite his/her ankles. Now he just gives Danny the cold shoulder, and cannot be physically removed from his PlayStation whenever Danny is around. Danny doesn't seem to mind--in fact, I would dare say hanging out with my family has helped break him of his postbreakup funk.

We all know where I stand with respect to Danny, even after him wrecking his true love with Aaron. Not only is he my brother, he is also my kindred spirit. And like me, he is a total pyro who likes to burn candles and pour the hot candle wax on hands and arms, then pull it off and smush the wax like Play-Doh. Sid and Nancy don't share this affliction, however, and don't appreciate Ash and Josh being exposed to it, which is how Danny got to be hanging out in my room late one night, door closed, while we burned candles and watched a movie while sitting on my futon.

I said, "There's something I have to tell you." I saw

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Danny's concerned face and said, "Gawd, I'm not pregnant, okay?"

Danny, who let out an audible sigh of relief, said, "There's something I have to tell you too."

"You first," we both said at the same time.

I zapped the movie off, some music on, and said, "Shrimp and I are moving in together. Next fall. Will you be there when I tell Sid and Nancy? They'll take it better if you're there to cushion the blow."

Danny: "One, you can't be serious. And two, no way."

Well, well, perhaps Danny is not 100 percent my kindred spirit. I did not expect the You're Just a Kid, You Don't Know What You're Doing reaction from Danny. I answered, "I am hella serious. We're going to get a place in Berkeley or Oakland. We'll have jobs; we're not asking anybody to support us." Danny's face looked less than convinced. Enlisting Danny to my cause had seemed like a no-brainer, but now I needed to defend it to him? I told him, "I spent all this time waiting to get back together with Shrimp. If I can only love him more, even after really not being cool with some of the things he'd done, something must be right about this relationship. Right? Every time something happens that could split us apart, we still end up making it through, stronger and more in love than before. Dude, Shrimp and I are meant to be together. I can't wait too much longer to live with him, share my life with him. Don't give me that look. You have hardly spent any time with Shrimp; you barely know him. You don't know us together, haven't been able to see how real it is."

"If I haven't been able to see how real it is, why do you think that is?"

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"Because you won't give Shrimp a chance, you--"

"I would give Shrimp many chances, if he gave me the opportunity. He's not a fellow who likes to make himself known, maybe except to you. I see the artwork everywhere--obviously the guy is in love with you--but where is he?"

"You don't like Shrimp?" I asked. I wanted so badly for my brother and boyfriend to have a love connection, but the truth was, there was no chemistry between them, not like I'd had with Danny's boyfriend Aaron, that feeling of, Wow, I'm so glad my sibling has hooked up with you, you're a great person.

"I like him just fine, what little I've gotten to know him, considering the few times I've met him he's barely mumbled three sentences to me. Shrimp strikes me as just being... young. Maybe not ready for the long haul."

"You're wrong," I said. I did not share with him the purple candle wax I was pouring onto my arm.

"I hope I am, Ceece, I really hope so. What do your friends think about this plan?"

"I haven't told them yet, but Sugar Pie, I'm sure she'll think it's great--she's all about the true love. Helen will probably want to move in with Eamon next year, so I know she'll understand. And Autumn, well, she'll probably go to Cal next year so she'll practically be our neighbor, and anyway, I think I deserve a triple-bonus friend score for the fact of even becoming her friend, so I'm sure she'll be supportive."

Danny said, "No one deserves bonus scores for the mere act of becoming someone's friend. If that's what you think, you have a lot to learn about how to be a friend."

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I couldn't yell at him because the rest of the household was asleep, so I whispered, 'Are you quite finished with your CC bashing? Because I think I'm ready for you to leave my room. Why don't you go bake something, spread your perfect-happy-even-after-two-doomed-romances-I-love-everybody self somewhere ELSE?"

Danny didn't look hurt or mad; he just smiled. It really is hard to get under his skin. He must have developed that ability as some post-traumatic reaction from growing up with lisBETH, monster bossy older sister. Danny pulled the purple wax that had hardened on my arm, then placed a finger kiss on the tender spot. "But I haven't told you my news yet."

"What?" I pouted.

'Aaron has moved into his new place. I can go back home. I gotta get around to picking up the pieces and starting my life over sometime--can't live in this California fantasy world forever. Wanna fly back with me, hang out for the Easter holiday weekend? I already talked with your parents. It's fine with them. I could use some company and support easing back into what will be a semi-empty apartment with lots of memories."

New York in spring, just like Easter Parade with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, with mean Danny who wanted my help? Twist my candle-waxed arm, why don't you. "Okay," I said, but still sulking. "Can Shrimp come too?"

"No. Let's see how you survive a weekend alone in a new city without your true love, then you can tell me more about your supposed moving-in-together plans."

Poor, sweet, ignorant Danny. Shrimp and I will prove him wrong.

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*** Chapter 34

I must have repressed-memory syndrome, because I have lived on the East Coast before but I totally forgot what real cold felt like. We arrived late on Good Friday night, and an April shower coupled with unusually frigid temperatures had turned the city into a temporary winter wonderland, blanketing the streets in a thin layer of white snow. WOW! Beautiful--and burr-ito like for real. Just thinking about the accessorizing potential--the need for knit mittens, a long, heavy faux fur leopard-print coat (the kind that requires the ritual sacrifice of many teddy bears), maybe a babushka scarf--had me contemplating some thrift-store shopping for Saturday morning, but the cab driver burst my snow bubble during the ride from the airport to Danny's apartment. The many-voweled-name man said, in an accent originating somewhere between Pakistan and Nairobi via Haiti, "New York! Eees crayyy-zeee! Snow today, spring tomorrow!" As he drove us through Central Park, its trees in early bud, looking peaceful and calm as the snow dusted the branches, the driver turned up the news radio station so we could hear the forecast predicting a warm-temperature spring thaw for Saturday.

By the time we reached Danny's building in the Village, after a whirlwind taxi experience in which the driver zigzagged across lanes; ran every yellow light; cut off dozens of taxis, buses, and trucks; and flipped off many

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pedestrians, I considered popping into the all-night pharmacy at Danny's corner to pick up Fernando's remedy of choice, Excedrin for migraines. But no minor headache could crush my excitement at being back in NYC. Just breathing the cold air and watching the city fly by through the cab window, my heart pounded from the city's energy. The streets teemed with people, cuddled together under umbrellas and wearing snow boots, looking cozy and rarin' for a night that would never end. The bars and restaurants we passed were packed with people, and you could hear music playing from all corners. It was like the cold city had its own pulse and it was hot, hot, hot.

You'd think a person as sensible as Danny would have enough sense not to be excited about returning to an apartment for which you had to climb five long flights of stairs through narrow, dark, and creepy stairways to reach the top of the building, but then again you'd also think that someone with so much supposed sense wouldn't let a gem like Aaron out of his life and out of his apartment to begin with.

Danny's excitement didn't last much past the opening of the five door bolts. When we stepped inside the door, wheezing from the stair climb, I saw that Danny's apartment looked completely different than when I visited last summer: empty. The lease may be in Danny's name, but obviously most of the furniture was Aaron's, because all that was left in the living room was a tattered sofa with a sheet thrown over it, a foldaway chair that looked like it would collapse from the weight of a kitten, and a glass coffee table covered in ring stains--the coasters must have been Aaron's too. Even the drapes were gone, so the view out to the Village scene was bright--and we could see

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directly into the apartment across the street, where a chunky naked guy was playing guitar and watching TV Aaron could keep the drapes.

Danny threw his luggage on the floor and walked around the apartment, inspecting. The slump of his body and the high degree of sighing he picked up from Nancy indicated the homecoming was as painful as he'd anticipated. His bedroom was left with only a sleeping bag on the floor, an ancient kids'-room lamp with a base in the shape of a model airplane, and a set of dresser drawers. The spare bedroom that Danny and Aaron used for a study was empty except for a bookshelf with Danny's cookbooks. Danny sighed the Nancy Classic when we got to the kitchen and he opened the fridge. He pulled out a shopping bag that said barney greengrass on it, read the note attached to the bag, his eyes welling up a little, then told me, 'Aaron left some bagels and nova for us."

'And this random act of kindness is a cause for sadness because...?"

"Because he went to my favorite restaurant for nova and he got H&H bagels too. He would have had to go all the way to the Upper West Side this morning to pick this stuff up and deliver it here, and just when he's starting a new job over on the East Side."

Didn't I say Aaron was a gem? I knew I was there to be supportive but I couldn't help myself. "Not something I could ever see Terry doing for you. Is Aaron seeing anybody new?"

Danny said, "I have no idea. But Ceece, if you try to play matchmaker you will be excommunicated. I wasn't kidding when I said it's over between Aaron and me. That

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doesn't mean he and I won't always love each other, but we won't be getting back together."

WHY?!?!?! I don't understand how they can still love each other but they're still completely over.

Danny obviously didn't want to talk about it anymore so I said, "Well, I don't like nova--it's too salty for me--so why don't you put that bag away for the morning and order us a proper New York pizza?" That's what I love most about New York, not the arts and culture and diversity and whatever, but the fact that you can order any kind of food-- Chinese, Italian, Dominican, Thai, pizza, or whatever--to be delivered to your fifth-floor walk-up any time of the day or night.

Maybe Danny had most been homesick for proper NY bagels and Barney Greengrass nova, but what I most missed about NY was the "grabba slice" that almost-summer fling boy Luis got me hooked on last summer. NY has the best pizza, but it's not just about hot, plump crust or the zesty tomato sauce, it's also about the way it's eaten in New York: Dab the oil off the cheese with a napkin (if you so choose), sprinkle the slice with your spices of choice (I like garlic powder and oregano), fold the slice in half, and then eat it with your hands, starting from the bottom tip (keeping the paper plate underneath the crust side for the oil to run onto, if you have not gone for the previously mentioned napkin-dabbing option).

While we were sitting on the floor eating the pizza, Danny told me our agenda for the weekend: cheap furniture shopping on Saturday morning, followed by a job he had to see about that afternoon, and, biggest bonus, Aaron's note said his band was playing at some dive in the Village on

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Saturday night if we wanted to go. WE DID! The downside: Easter Sunday brunch with Frank and lisBETH. "Do we have to?" I asked Danny. There should be some family law where you can pluck just one favorite member of a family and keep them all for yourself and never have to deal with the rest of them. "Yes," he stated, although he didn't look too thrilled by the prospect himself.

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*** Chapter 35

Neither of us slept much that night. Who could, between the excitement of being back in NYC and all the freaking noise? We had to sleep with the living room window open because the chronically banging radiator was too hot. But if I thought the radiator noise was aggravating, it was tame in comparison to the noise coming from the street below: constant honking and brakes screeching, people yelling, and some guy who kept shouting, "Yo, Sal" from outside the bar at the ground floor of Danny's building. The noise, along with the bright night lights followed by early-morning sun streaming through the drapeless apartment windows, meant I didn't get more than four hours of sleep. I slept on the tattered sofa that was too short for my legs so I was crunched into a ball shape all night, and Danny slept through the noise like a contented baby, nestled in his sleeping bag on the floor below the tattered sofa because he got too spooked being in his old bedroom by himself for the first time in years.

I woke earlier than Danny, so I went out for caffeination. The temperature was significantly warmer than that of the night before, but the spring air was still chilly. The streets were wet from the melted snow, which with the brisk cold air made the city feel unusually clean and fresh. I found the closest deli and asked for regular coffee, which I forgot means something different in New York than in the

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rest of the world-- coffee regular means coffee with milk instead of straight black coffee--so I had to toss the first cup in the heaping trash can on the street. Then I went into two different cafés for an espresso, one that was too weak and bitter and the other that just plain sucked, both of which also had to be tossed in the trash. Finally I went into a juice bar for a cup of fresh grapefruit juice, because Danny's café and Dean & DeLuca were the only places I remembered where you could get a good coffee in Manhattan, and The Village Idiots was now extinct and I couldn't remember how to get to D&D. Plus, my coffee budget was shot for the whole weekend.

When I got back to the apartment Danny had showered, eaten his bagel and nova, and was ready for us to hit the city. We wandered the streets of the Village, browsing in some used furniture and antique stores. All the furniture was either too ugly or too expensive, though, leaving Danny, who said he couldn't be bothered to go all Martha Stewart with the time, money, or effort required to refurnish the apartment, to settle somewhere in the middle. He opened a credit account at Crate & Barrel, where he bought a basic sleeper sofa that could double for a bed for him until he could afford a new one, a table and some chairs, and a desk. He was all but hyperventilating at the total cost, but I reminded him he had a job interview lined up for later in the day that was a sure thing, and it wouldn't kill him to ask Frank for some help, either. I would never ask Frank for help again, but why shouldn't Danny? Frank was just my biological father, and maybe he'd never been Father Knows Best for Danny, but he was still Danny's real dad. If Frank had been willing without a moment's hesitation to help his

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love child pay for an emergency clinic visit on the OT, he'd probably be more than willing to help his legitimate son if Danny for once asked him for help.

Once Danny stopped looking like he was going to have a heart attack I stepped outside the store to wander around, as completing the transaction was going to take longer than I could spend browsing Crate & Barrel without collapsing from utter boredom. Also I've never paid attention to what furniture costs before, but: Yikes! Shrimp and I will have to get many, many jobs to get our own apartment.

As I walked through the Village streets, I couldn't help but wish Shrimp were here to experience this city with me. The chilly air was so cozy, I could snuggle right into him. The masses of people walking around all looked so different--young to old, black, white, yellow, brown, and red, yuppies to hipsters to freaks to old-timers--that I suspected Shrimp's art could find more inspiration in a block of this city than he ever could in the whole of the East Bay. Shrimp had promised to pick me up at the airport when I got back home, and my first order of business would be to try to sell him on the potential idea of us living in New York together, instead of Oakland or Berkeley. Why not? True love knows no city boundaries, so why shouldn't we keep our options open? Did we have to live in the East Bay? Wasn't it more important that we move in together somewhere than that we stayed near home?

All the thinking about Shrimp and the knowledge that this time next year the two of us would be sharing a love shack made my insides warm. It was probably no coincidence that I found myself stopped at a fence, standing on the sidewalk watching an extremely hot group of sweaty

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guys wearing long shorts and no shirts playing a game of pickup basketball on the other side of the fence. Saliva was possibly hanging from my mouth down to the pavement for how beautiful these guys were, to say nothing of what amazing hoop players they were: fast, graceful, intense, like an NBA street gang. Them dudes had serious game. My eyes homed in on one guy in particular--was I having déjà vu, or was that New York Knicks tall guy with the cinnamon skin and shiny-slick black hair none other than Luis, a.k.a. Loo-EESE? When I saw him miss a pass because he was staring back at me, then get slammed by his teammates for losing his focus, I realized, Yup, that's who.

Maybe Nueva York is not the city for me to move to after all. The last time I was here I ran into my ex Justin at the Gap on Madison Avenue. What is it about this city and the randomness of running into people from your past, especially the ones who having lustful thoughts about will get you into big, big trouble?

When the guys called a time-out in the game, Luis dribbled the b-ball over my way until he was standing opposite me on the other side of the fence. "Terrorizing the big city again, are you?" he asked, smiling, his eyes appraising me up and down, from my black combat boots with the thick black leggings to my short black skirt to my biker babe black leather jacket.

Small beads of sweat dripped down his face, begging to be licked off. "I'm spending the weekend with my brother," I told him. "What's up with you?"

Luis dribbled the basketball, not needing to look down to see the ball for it to connect with his hand, and my mind had to repeat a mantra in time to the bounce's beat,

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reminding me: Shrimp. Boyfriend. Shrimp. Boyfriend. Luis said, "I went away for a while. Spent time with some cousins down in Virginia, thought I might move down there--fresh air and cheaper cost of living and all that-- but I ended up back here. I'm a New Yorker, yo. This is the only place to be where you can feel truly alive, right? So I'm enrolled at Hunter College full-time now, living at my aunt's new house in the boogie-down Bronx, gonna get serious about finishing that business degree already. One of my boys plays ball down here every Saturday, so I came along with today." He had this thick New York accent that sounds ugly until you get used to it, and he was friendly in that genuine New York kind of way that pretends hostility but is in fact gracious, and that you never find in California, where people are all sunny disposition but would prefer not to give you the time of day. "What about you? Did you and that boyfriend of yours ever get back together?"

"YES!" I stated, maybe overkill on the enthusiasm. "We're moving in together next fall. Probably in Berkeley; we'll get a place there." Definitely, Berkeley. Nueva York: bad, bad idea, loconess.

Luis laughed. "Berkeley? No way. You don't belong there."

"How do you know? Have you been?"

"No, but I don't need to. Do you realize there is a bum peeing on the wall next to you, and a crazy lady singing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' for change behind you, and you haven't even noticed? Does your wardrobe know any color other than black? You're a New Yorker, niña, whether you know or not. I didn't spend all that time showing you around for Frank last summer not to know that."

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We couldn't talk longer--the game was starting back up and the guys were whistling and teasing Luis to tear himself away from the fence. After Luis and I said our goodbyes, I headed across the street to the street corner subway stop where I saw Danny waiting for me at the spot where he'd told me to find him after he left Crate & Barrel.

"I did not just see you and a guy who looked disturbingly like Luis programming each other's numbers into your cell phones, did I?" Danny said.

"You need glasses, old man," I told him as we bopped down the stairs into the skanky-smelly-glorious subway station.

When we got downstairs to the subway platform, as if on autopilot I walked right over to the platform edge to peek into the subway tunnel to see if I could see the distant train lights on the rails indicating a train approaching the station, as Luis had taught me to do last summer. "Check out the New Yorker girl!" Danny said. A train barreled into the station and Danny yanked me back from the edge by the collar on my leather jacket. "But not enough to know not to stand on the platform edge when the train is coming in, idiot!" he shouted over the thundering sound.

We rode the train a few stops to Chelsea, where we walked toward the culinary institution where Danny was going to find out about a potential teaching opportunity. While we were walking down the street I asked Danny, "What is it about the randomness of running into people in Manhattan? I hardly know anybody in the world at all, and yet both the short times I've been in Manhattan, I've run into people I knew."

Danny said, 'Aaron and I used to call it OINY--Only in

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New York. I have no idea why that happens, but this city is full of those stories. I just ran into a girl I went to college with while I was at Crate & Barrel--she was choosing her wedding registry. Have you ever watched a TV show that takes place in Manhattan and noticed how people are always running into one another, in this city of millions? That's because it happens all the time here. Don't ask me why. New York, man.- the world's biggest small town."

We took the elevator up into the culinary institute building in Chelsea, and walked down a long hallway past a series of classrooms with glass windows. In the first window I saw a chocolate-sculpting class putting the final touches on an all-chocolate, lifelike display of white chocolate roses in a dark chocolate vase. Another classroom had a roomful of students wearing chef's whites, standing over a steaming wok, stirring veggies and meats. The last room we passed must have been the Italian cooking class, because the garlicky smell of fresh tomato sauce and the dreamy looks of a dozen middle-aged students hinted that they, like Nancy, may have read Under the Tuscan Sun one too many times.

We stopped at an empty kitchen, where Danny led us inside. The haze he'd been in since reentering his ghost town apartment appeared to retreat, and I could see his face coming alive again as he admired the immaculate kitchen full of state-of-the-art industrial equipment. "Why don't you open another café?" I asked him.

"So much work; so much money." He lingered over the huge KitchenAid mixer on the floor, touching his hand along the rim of the bowl so big you could almost jump into it and take a bath. "I don't have it in me right now. I just

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want an easy teaching job, a regular paycheck without worrying if the balance sheets are in the red or black this month. I can also pick up some cash making some cakes for a friend's bakery. I'll probably have to get a roommate to make my rent if I'm just working part-time, but that's fine. Owning and operating a café is so much work, CC--and I can't go it alone, without an Aaron."

A lady wearing chef's whites and a most excellent white chef hat came into the room and grabbed Danny in a hug. "Looks who's home, finally, back where he belongs! So glad you could make it over during the break in my class!" she said to him.

Danny introduced me to her, saying, "This is my little sister, Cyd. Yeah, I know, 'little* indeed. I brought her along so she can check out the place. She's thinking of enrolling in some courses here."

"No I'm not...," I started to say, surprised, but Danny hustled me from the room because his friend had only a short break to tell him about the job opportunity.

I went outside the empty kitchen and sat on a bench while I waited for my "big," sneaky brother. Along with the many delightful smells coming from the kitchens, I also smelled a plot brewing to distract me from Shrimp.

I whipped out my cell phone and placed a call to Shrimp at Some Guy's house in Berkeley, praying Shrimp and not Some Guy or Some Other Guy at the group house would pickup the phone. I scored. "Hey, beautiful," Shrimp said when he heard my voice. I slid to the other end of the bench, away from the chocolate class, not wanting the heat from the high degree of melt in my heart at hearing Shrimp's gravel voice to affect the class's brilliant chocolate

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sculptures. "You're not falling in love with New York and forgetting about our plans?" he asked, teasing.

"No way," I answered. Though I acknowledge that the threads the chefs wear, all white and crisp and geometric, are indeed most excellent and accessorizeable and tempting.

"Good. Cuz I'm working on a special piece for you this weekend, to introduce you to a new idea I have about what we should do next year. I'll tell you about it when I pick you up at the airport tomorrow night."

"Tell me now!" Knowing that Shrimp was also thinking about variations on our plans to be East Bay people, I didn't feel so bad about my momentary lapse of considering a pitch for New York.

"Nope. You gotta wait. No words shall be spoken until the art is complete. Gotta run. Some guy here needs the phone." I would so buy Shrimp a cell phone if I didn't know he'd just toss it into the trash, or break it apart and use the parts for an art piece, like he did with the phone Wallace gave him that Shrimp turned into Cell Phone Interruptus-- smashed cell phone parts glued onto a crucifix with green-sprinkle acid rain falling from the top of the canvas.

Hearing Shrimp's mood brightened my spirits, so I decided not to be mad at Danny's potential manipulation, trying to weasel me to NYC so he could make me fall in love with this amazing city and this place in Chelsea that my eyes and fingers and taste buds were itching to experience.

"So great place, huh?" Danny said when he came out of the kitchen.

"Eh, whatever," I said.

What was not a great place was the "club" where

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Aaron's band was playing that night. The "club" was really a narrow pub with a tiny stage at the back, where no one in the place cared about the no-smoking rule and I couldn't imagine them caring about a band playing, either, cuz most of the patrons had their eyes fixed on the Knicks game on the television.

Aaron was sitting at the bar nursing a Guinness when we arrived that night. His long strawberry blond hair was thinning at the top of his head and cut short to just below his ears, falling around his face just enough to partly obstruct a new double chin. When he stood to greet us, I noticed there was a lot more pudge creeping out over his belt buckle than last summer, like he'd been on a diet of beer and complacency since Danny was no longer dragging him out of bed in the mornings to go running in Battery Park. Aaron hugged me but avoided eye contact, then he and Danny had an awkward moment where one tried to kiss the other on the cheek while the other went for a hug, then vice versa, ending with a weak handshake and a pat on each other's arms. They both looked like they knew this first meeting since the breakup, after almost a decade together, was something they had to get through, but they'd both be relieved when it was over.

Aaron's band, My Dead Gay Son, which used to be a motley group of guys he and Danny knew from college who got together to jam at The Village Idiots, with no favored music style, just a melting pot of covers--punk to soul to rock to show tunes--was now a nameless one in search of identity. Aaron said they were thinking of changing their name to Recession Apathy or Hamlet Syndrome, because a majority of the guys had lost their jobs or their wives or

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lovers in the last year, and none of them knew what they wanted to do with their lives, except play in a band. The band wasn't bad, focused primarily on alt-country type tunes, but rock stars these guys were not.

The last time I'd seen My Dead Gay Son play had been at The Village Idiots last summer, when the jammin' band sounded relaxed and fun. Listening to the dudes play now, tighter from more rehearsal time and with a focused repertoire of songs, was much less fun: They looked and sounded like a sad sack of nice fellows. The experience reminded me of Frank Sinatra Day back in December, when I'd worked the counter at Java the Hut after many months away. I wanted to experience Danny and Aaron as the great couple again, hanging with them at The Village Idiots while My Dead Gay Son warbled through covers just for fun, but everything was different. The past was over, done, finito.

There was nothing to do now but look ahead, because you can't force good times to come back, I suppose. Things change. People change. True love maybe can just fade away.

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*** Chapter 36

Easter brunch with Frank and lisBETH demanded no less than a shocking fashion statement from me. I went for the short skirt, sure, but the Goth getup and combat boots would not be adequate for this occasion. I wanted the full "bad girl" look to meet Frank's and lisBETH's impression of me as the wild love child. And what could be more shocking than a "bad girl" wearing a horrendously tasteful, pale pink Chanel suit swiped from her mother's closet, with the couture shoes to go along with, and sheer ivory stockings to complete the look? I'd blown out my hair to WASP straightness, added a headband, and placed a pendant around my neck--the heart-shaped Tiffany necklace Frank had sent me at Christmas, salvaged from the donations pile for the occasion. For makeup, I applied some baby powder to my cheeks to get that society-lady anorexic death glow, and I glossed my lips with a beige matte lipstick. Admiring myself in Danny's full-length bathroom mirror, I considered hanging on to this outfit for Halloween on Castro Street, where I could stroll through the parade introducing myself as Mrs. VonHuffingUptight and hand out museum docent guides to the crowds.

"We're late!" Danny shouted to me from the living room. "C'mon already, CC! I've never known you to be one of those girls who takes an hour to get dressed--what's the problem already?" My look complete, I went to the living

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room. Danny's face was cross until he caught a glimpse of me in front of him. Then he laughed so hard tears ran down his face and he fell off the sofa. He was still laughing when we got into the cab to take us to Frank's on the East Side.

We asked the driver to let us out a few blocks from Frank's building, because even though we were late we were both dreading this brunch, and also we wanted a little walk so we could admire all the church ladies strolling the avenue in their Easter dresses and fine hats. A guy we passed on the street tried to hand me a sticker. People are always trying to hand you something in Manhattan--advertisements for psychics, band gig flyers, Jesus-freak paraphernalia--so you get used to not reaching out when they try to push paper into your hand. The sticker this guy was trying to hand us said mean people suck , and I sidestepped him to turn it away, but Danny, who was getting tenser as we neared Frank's building, knocked the guy's hand away when the guy tried to shove the sticker in Danny's face. The sticker guy yelled after Danny, "You need this!" Mrs. VonHuffingUptight turned back around and told him, "No, you do, asshole." Mean People Suck sticker-givers are my new most-hated people, after the ubiquitous counter clerks anywhere you go now who have good karma ! tip jars at their cash registers. Perhaps I am a sucky mean person destined to walk through life without Good Karma! Oh, well. I accept my fate. Could you all go away now, please?

"Well done, Lady Cyd Charisse of New York City," Danny said.

Frank lived in an upscale high-rise condominium building where everything looked and smelled new and fresh. A lot of apartment buildings in New York are old,

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dank on the inside, and sooty on the outside, but Frank's was a relatively new building, flashy, with a lobby that had a chandelier, big floral displays, and gilded mirrors. The doorman knew Danny but did not remember me, perhaps because of my disguise, and he sent us up without buzzing Frank's apartment.

I was hella nervous as we rode the elevator up into the sky and then walked down the hallway to Frank's apartment. My visit last summer had ended up fine, in this epically disappointing kind of way. We all sort of got along by the end, but I also wouldn't say there was any grand love connection, except between me and Danny. It was like, Well, I met you all and I am glad I did and you are all sort of pains in the asses and you probably think I am too, but I think we can all agree we had some good moments together, and let's just leave it at that. Family, for better or for worse--though I'll take my real San Francisco family over you in a heartbeat. No need to send letters or cards or make regular phone calls or visits, just be well and I'll see you when I see you. Now here we would be, seeing one another again. I can rip on Frank and lisBETH plenty, but the fact of actual face time with them makes it harder for them to be caricatures in my head instead of live and in-the-flesh blood relations.

Frank opened the door. Geesh, he's tall and good-looking in that scary aging movie star way. Sometimes last summer I would sneak long looks at him when he wasn't paying attention, so I could etch his face into my memory. His face looked as I recalled--like mine--but I'd forgotten the sheer physicality of him: his height, his shiny black hair that should have the dignity to be graying or thinning at his advanced age (I bet he dyes it), his orange-tan skin (salon,

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for sure), how he sucks you in with the salesman's smile and his ease with people. Also he wears very fine, expensive suits. So does Sid-dad, but on him they look frumpy and wrinkled, endearing, but on Frank, full playa.

"Welcome!" he said. He looked genuinely glad to see us, or maybe it was the possible face-lift crinkling his smile. "Come in, Happy Easter." He had Easter baskets with our names on the hallway table for us, with chocolate bunnies and eggs swimming in that fake green grass stuff. Minor point score to Frank for effort.

"How ya doing, kiddo?" he asked me, patting me on the back instead of hugging me (relief). "You're looking well. And, ah, different. This is the first time I've seen you not wearing all black. You look good, kid, you look good." I felt pride and ick, like, Stop looking at me, you don't know me! Frank turned to Danny, gave him a stiff hug, and said, "We missed you at church this morning!"

Danny grumbled, "Well, I didn't get the memo about the Vatican embracing my people, so I'm gonna skip on the Catholic services for the time being. But I'm sure you and lisBETH had a lovely mass without me."

Frank looked like, 'Scuze me, sonny boy. I informed Frank, "I'm not any religion." Mrs. VonHuffingUptight is a natural diplomat.

I liked this moody Danny. If he was going to be the ornery one at the family brunch, that took all the pressure off me. Thanks, Danny!

Danny stepped inside the kitchen for some words with lisBETH in private. This brunch was the first time lisBETH had deigned to see him since Danny left Aaron, and Frank and I both stayed behind so they could have their first

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reunion in private. I sat down with Frank on the couch, and without realizing it crossed my legs in full Nancy pose. Frank and I didn't have much to say to each other, though, so Frank handed me a piece of the New York newspaper, folded and creased in straphanger style for easy reading on the subway. Frank pointed out a small article in the business section to me. I skimmed the article, which announced that Frank had retired from his job as CEO at the big New York advertising firm.

"Retired?" I asked him. Frank didn't strike me as the retiring type. In fact, he struck me as the type who will be chasing deals as actively as he's chasing skirts until he literally plunges into his grave, expired.

"Canned," Frank said. "'Early retirement' is a genteel way of saying, So what if I built the company up from nothing over the course of the last thirty years, transformed it from a small shop into an industry giant? Who cares about the loyalty and best years of my life I gave that company? The new CEO, my former protégé, and all his chums on the board, that's who doesn't care, lemme tell ya."

Mrs. VonHuffingUptight might have responded, Well, Frank, DAHling, there is a saying: What goes around comes around.

"What will you do now?" I asked him.

He smiled. He definitely gets his teeth whitened professionally. "The usual. Consulting. Golf. Tennis. Try to enjoy my life already. Get to know my kids. Got some time if your old man comes out to see you in California?"

Nancy has been pestering me to let her throw a graduation party for me. She wants to make over the garden area at the back of the house, with fantastic flower arrangements

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and a full-swing catered affair to commemorate the occasion. She said she would be open to inviting Frank to the garden party, if I wanted. But a lavish garden party seems like overkill for celebrating an occasion I'll be glad just to make it through but don't feel the need to observe further. And I'd sooner celebrate graduation alone with Shrimp than be trapped in a Pacific Heights garden party with low-cal hors d'oeuvres and phony expressions of congratulations from Nancy's friends shocked that I even graduated at all. Also the mere thought of My Two Dads sharing a scene, Nancy sobbing in pride between them, gives me the creeps. Danny could stay at our house, but I'm not ready for full integration yet. Garden party--pass.

"If you want," I said, but in this voice that said, Don't do me any favors, bub. But my eye caught the Easter basket on the table, and I remembered Frank's warm greeting when Danny and I came in. I knew he really was trying, so I figured I could a little too. "Sure," I amended, sounding nicer. "You could visit sometime."

Frank was clearly searching for something, anything, to say in the long, empty pause that followed between us, and what he came up with was, "So it's getting to be that junior prom time of year. Any special plans? Any fella you're sweet on?"

I touched the heart necklace he'd given me as a "sweet sixteen" Christmas present as I talked. "Well, Frank, as you may recall, I'm seventeen, not sixteen, and graduating, which means senior prom, not junior prom. And I go to an alternative school for freaks. The student council voted to abolish the prom on the basis of proms being a capitalist marketing tool like Valentine's Day, just another form of

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vicious propaganda intended to separate the haves from the have-nots. But even if there was a prom, Shrimp--that's my serious boyfriend, not just some 'fella'--and I would probably bail on it. Blech, prom. Not our scene."

"Oh," Frank said.

LisBETH and Danny emerged from the kitchen. LisBETH was also dressed in a Chanel suit, although hers was gold. A pink scarf with embroidered Easter bunnies on it held back her long locks of thick, curly, gray-specked black hair. "Don't you look pretty!" she said. The chiquita has no sense of irony. She didn't try to kiss or hug me, so I warmed to her right away. "You look very nice too," I said.

LisBETH had gone to great effort to set the Easter table with fine linens and good china, and she'd laid out a beautiful brunch with an Easter ham, shrimp and avocado salad, eggs, fresh biscuits, and fruit. She must have been up since the crack of dawn to put on this feast for us at her father's apartment. I associate family meals with noise--Ash and Josh banging utensils, arguing with each other, spilling drinks--so I was unaccustomed to a meal that, first off, started with Frank saying grace and then lisBETH leading some Easter prayer, and second, after we were seated, fell into polite silence. To kick start the conversation I asked lisBETH, 'Any cute guys come into the picture since I saw you last?"

LisBETH groaned. "My dear, there aren't any single, straight, well-to-do men in my target age bracket left in Manhattan. If it weren't for Aaron's company these last few months..." LisBETH shot Danny a mean look. "I am considering adopting a baby, perhaps from Asia or South America. Don't you think that would be fun?"

Ring, ring, lisBETH, time for your wake-up call. You

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have a big Wall Street job that requires you to travel all over the world, and you work like at least eighty hours a week. Adopting a baby might sound cute to you, but it won't be cute for baby who wants and needs attention! You're a workaholic, like Frank, and maybe you're not a dawg like him but you're not Superwoman, lady.

'And you," lisBETH said. "College plans?" Seriously, if I get asked that question one more time, I cannot be held accountable for my actions. I will lose it.

"Nah," I said.

"Maybe you just need a year off. Go to Europe for a year," she said.

"Nah," I repeated. "I am just not going to college. No joke. And there's plenty to keep me busy and happy in California." Shrimp, Shrimp, Shrimp, I miss you, can't wait to see you tonight at the airport!

Danny said, "I think she should go to culinary school here."

LisBETH snapped, "Oh, so then you could have your little princess sister all to yourself?" There we go, that's the vintage lisBETH we were waiting for. I don't know what's lisBETH's problem--it's not like she's tried to contact me or see me since last summer. She was probably mad because I've gotten Danny all to myself these past few months-- even though that's been by her choice.

Danny said, "Or we could all get to know her a little better, if she moved here and pursued the craft for which she has an innate talent."

I speared a piece of shrimp on my fork, dangled it in front of my lips for Danny to see, and ate it.

Frank, obviously wanting to move the conversation in

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a new direction, said, "Danny, how is Aaron doing? Have you seen him?"

"He's alright, Pops." I felt Danny's frustration--Danny wanted his father to ask him about his future plans, not his past.

"Well," Frank said. "I'll miss him at Thanksgiving." What the hell did that mean? Frank had no clue the hole he was digging for himself. "I still don't understand why you and Aaron couldn't work it out. So you two needed a break, needed to see other people. But that's over now. Why not give it another go?"

Danny slammed his fork onto his plate. "Is that what you want from me, Daddy, to be like you? Stay in a loveless marriage like you did after your affairs so everyone can be miserable?" Danny got up and left the room. Whoa!

Frank looked at me and lisBETH, as if he wanted to know, What did I say to deserve that? Truly Frank lives in the land of the completely clueless and he's never gonna get it unless someone shoves the clues down his throat. I don't know why I wanted to help him, but I did, probably because I don't like to see Danny hurting. I told Frank, "Go talk to him. He'll never ask you for help, but he needs your help. He left his long-term boyfriend for another man, then that didn't work out. He lost his business, practically lost his apartment, and now he's back home starting all over, broke and anxious and alone." Frank hesitated, his Handsome Man eyebrows furrowing as he contemplated my statement, like the obviousness of what I'd told him had never occurred to him. "GO!" I added.

Frank tossed his napkin on the table and followed Danny into the other room.

I reached for a third biscuit. LisBETH makes delicious

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biscuits; it's really a shame she never got to do that house-wifey thing.

LisBETH said, "Well, I guess a family holiday wouldn't be complete without at least one fight. You know, you have quite the appetite."

"Thank you. You make great biscuits. Could you pass me some more of that strawberry butter?"

LisBETH watched me eat, probably knowing I was trapped by my hunger and couldn't escape her. Then she excused herself from the table, and I thought she was going to butt in on Frank and Danny's conversation, but instead she returned to the table carrying her briefcase. She opened it and handed me a stack of postcards tucked inside it. There were four tourist postcards, from Cleveland, Beijing, Dallas, and Milan. When I turned them over, I saw each had been addressed to me, dated at different intervals since last summer, and each had a short note from lisBETH.

Oct. 18, Cleveland: Did you know the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is here? We should visit together sometime.

Nov. 30, Beijing: This city makes New York seem like a ghost town.

Jan. 23, Dallas: Do those cheerleaders from this city's basketball team annoy you as much as they do me?

March 2, Milan: Clothes, food, clothes, food: BLISS.

"Uh, thanks?" I said to lisBETH. She said, "I've never had a chance to mail these to you. But I do think of you sometimes." She looked at me hope-

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fully, like maybe I had been writing her postcards too but also not getting around to mailing them. I guess I could, if I ever thought of it. In the future, I decided, I will. LisBETH, my new postcard pen pal--signed, sealed, but delivered.

I felt like I owed her a confidence in return since I had no cryptic correspondence to share. "My boyfriend and I are moving in together in the fall," I said. "But don't tell; it's a secret so far."

"You're not getting married or pregnant, are you?" she said, like, Don't compete in my territory of ambitions!

"Ew, no way," I said. Hmm, thought brewing. "LisBETH, I have this friend who goes to one of the Ivies around here. He's a business major, straight-A student, straight-up good guy. I think he needs a part-time job next fall. Do you think your firm would look at his resume?"

LisBETH took a business card from her briefcase and handed it to me. "Tell him to give me a call. I'd be glad to at least help him get his foot in the door."

Hee hee-. LisBETH, older single woman, intelligent but overbearing NYC career gal, wants to be a mommy, meet Alexei the Not-So-Horrible, overbearing Ivy League stud with the older-chick fetish, living in the tri-state area during the school year, would make great babydaddy. I'm a genius; I don't need college.

Later, after Frank and Danny had returned to the table looking calmer and happier, if tired, we finished the meal in peace. When it came time to leave, Frank gave me a minor hug--the kind where you lean in and pat but don't make full body contact--and said, "I'll be hoping to see more of you in the future."

I said, "Likewise, Frank."

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In the cab on the way back to Danny's apartment, Danny slumped his head onto my shoulder. "That was awful!" he said.

I massaged the back of his neck. "Oh, come on, now. It wasn't that bad."

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*** Chapter 37

Here's how I know Shrimp loves me. He picked me up that night in the arrival area inside SFO instead of a curbside pickup. You don't go to that trouble unless it's true love.

I was so happy to see him I lifted him in my arms when he hugged me. I know he's the guy and he's supposed to do that, but he's also on record (T-shirt variety) as being a feminist , man enough to deal.

"Nice to see you too!" Shrimp said after I let him down and smothered his face and neck in kisses. "New York agrees with you. God, you look awesome." We shared a long, deep airport kiss, the kind that if you're disembarking from an airplane and you're not in love, you want to slap the couple upside their heads for sharing in public.

I said, "New York is like a shot in the arm--makes you feel alive! But all the feeling more alive did was make me miss you more, make me more excited to get home to see you." Repeat above kiss, add in one additional minute and three groans of "Get a room" from passersby. When we pried our lips apart, I asked, "What did you have to tell me?"

Shrimp said, "You have to wait a little longer, till we get to the special place." I assumed he meant our make-out spot, Land's End, but that was very out of the way if he still had to go to Some Guy's house in the East Bay after dropping me home in Pacific Heights.

In fact, the special place turned out to be Outback

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Steakhouse in Daly City. "Huh?" I said, when he pulled into the crowded parking lot. What special announcement could a vegetarian have to make at the 'Australian" steakhouse that's probably about as Australian as Frank Sinatra was Venezuelan?

Once we were seated at a booth, I ordered Shrimp on the Barbie in honor of guess who, and guess who ordered the Walhalla pasta with no meat. Once the waitress had taken our orders, Shrimp started in. "First announcement is this: Iris and Billy are moving to New Zealand. A friend of theirs has some property down there and invited them to take over the guest house, oversee the property when the friend is gone, and Iris and Billy will have some land to use as well. They're becoming organic farmers."

Farmers, indeed. Is there such a thing as organic marijuana? I wonder who is running them out of town: Wallace and Delia or the feds. "That's nice for them," I said. "I hear it's very beautiful there."

"Exactly!" Shrimp said.

My brain connected the dots: Outback Steakhouse... Australia... close to New Zealand... "Exactly!"...OH SHIT. I had barely finished computing Shrimp's logic, but he left me no chance to respond. He was going for it.

Shrimp stood up from his side of the booth and got down on bended knee on my side of the booth. He held out his pinkie finger, dangling from it a hand-carved wooden ring, with a setting carved and painted like a kiwi. This isn't happening, I thought. DO NOT CRY! This is Outback Steakhouse in Daly City, for God's sake--and Shrimp is a vegetarian.

Shrimp looked up into my eyes. "I know you're not the

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marrying kind, but I'm wondering if you would make an exception for me? I've been working on this ring for you ever since Iris and Billy told me their news. I really want to move to New Zealand with Iris and Billy. The surfing is killer there, and I can do my art, and we could travel all around Australia and Indonesia and Bali. I loved that part of the world I saw last summer, and I want more--but it's no good without you there with me. The East Bay idea was alright, but this one is so much better! We can go backpacking Down Under--Tasmania, Sydney, Perth--then on to the Asian Pacific islands and all over NZ. Surfers are like their own community, they always help each other out, so we'll always have places to crash wherever we go, and we can make cash at odd jobs when we need to. We can stay with Iris and Billy as home base. Their friends who made the offer to them have a killer place--huge, they say. Fuck, I love you so much, it's, like, painful. You are the coolest babe I could ever want to share my life with. What do you say?"

A waitress carrying a large tray of entrées bumped into Shrimp from behind his kneeling position, pushing his face onto my knee, so now he was looking up at me like a puppy.

I had no idea what to say, so I nodded my head in confusion and just plain being overwhelmed by the proposal. Shrimp took my head nodding and the unfortunate tears streaming down my face for a yes. And I didn't have the heart to reeducate him, not when he placed the ring on my left hand, stood up, held his hands out for me to stand up, and this time he lifted me in the air. Our fellow Outback Steakhouse diners applauded, much "oohing" and "ahhing" came from the nearby tables, and two comp bottles of

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Foster's, Australian for beer, landed on our table--which the restaurant manager promptly took away when neither Shrimp nor I would tear our lips apart to show ID.

I was grateful now that Shrimp had chosen Outback Steakhouse for his proposal, because no one Sid and Nancy knew would be caught dead here, and my parents would have simultaneous heart attacks when I got around to telling them, so better not to have spies breaking the news to them first.

After the crying and the kissing and the applauding, Shrimp and I sat back down opposite each other in the booth. I took his hand from across the table, admiring my new ring. I said, "I know I want to be with you." In fact, maybe marriage wasn't such a bad idea. If we got married, we'd be locked down. No distractions, like Loo-eese or surfer chicks, could have the potential to pull us apart. And why bother to transform myself into an East Bay girl if I could gallivant across the flip side of the world with my soul mate? Well, it would be far from home, and Sid and Nancy had been supportive so far of my relationship with Shrimp, but this new development would tip them over the edge into hysteria and fights and all-out disapproval again. Alcatraz would no longer be an option this time around, though, because I'm almost eighteen, and after that birthday I can do what or go where I want, with whom I want, so long as I am willing to make my own way. And if I want to marry Shrimp, dedicate my future to him because he's the best future I could ever imagine, well, that's my choice to make, not theirs. Sid and Nancy, or Ash and Josh, Danny, or Sugar Pie and Fernando, Helen and Autumn, my family, the people I care about most, they would just have to live

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with my decision and the fact that I will not be present to share their lives. They will have to love me just the same, and I will have to get over the hurt of missing them.

But crashing with Iris and Billy as our "home base"? I said, "I'm not so sure about the following your parents, though. Maybe that part's not the best idea."

"But they go to cool places," Shrimp said. So? They're also crazy irresponsible! Iris and Billy do whatever suits them in the moment--like abandoning Iris's daughter from her first marriage so they could be together, or leaving fourteen-year-old Shrimp with Wallace so they could go to Papua New Guinea. Nancy might also be crazy, but at least she's not irresponsible--and she's in for the duration of the game, come hell or high water. (She's also not really crazy, although I will jump into the Grand Canyon before admitting that to her face.) I like Iris and Billy okay--they did, after all, breed Shrimp--but I don't want to attach my destiny to theirs.

I pointed out, "New York is cool. That doesn't mean I'm going to live there because bio-dad Frank does."

"This is different and you know it. And you said yes." Shrimp stood up on his side of the booth and thumped his chest like Tarzan. "SHE SAID YES!" he announced for any of the diners in the packed restaurant who might not have caught the earlier bended-knee proposal scene. He did a little hip-hop dance on his seat before the restaurant manager came back over and asked him to be seated or be asked to leave.

Only I didn't say yes, not just yet. I'm thinking.

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*** Chapter 38

So we're having a wedding and a new baby in the family. Nancy got her garden party after all.

We chose May 15 for the wedding day, the anniversary date of Frank Sinatra's passing from this mortal earth, because Sid-dad said he wanted that date to now be associated with new beginnings for the people in his family. Since he was throwing the wedding, he thought he should have some influence in choosing the date.

I wore the lavender Chinese silk gown that lisBETH gave me last year, that had been her grandmother's (mine too, even though I never knew her) favorite dress, but I couldn't deal with those high-heel horrors called fancy shoes, so I went barefoot with black toenail polish and a wood-carved pinkie toe ring that had a kiwi setting. Shrimp changed his hair for the occasion, so he looked like he did the day I first met him-- short mop of dirty blond hair with a patch of platinum blond spikes at the front of his face. He wore an oversized hand-me-down suit and tie from Wallace that made Shrimp look like an earnest Sunday school teacher with punk hair, from the Church of the Stoked. The look of infatuation on Shrimp's face in the back garden at my parents' house that day was the same one he gave me that first day we met at Sugar Pie's room at the home. When I looked back at him, in this haze we've been in ever since Outback Steakhouse, I knew I will never love another person in my life the way I love him.

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As Sugar Pie and Fernando said their vows to the judge under a trellis custom-built for the occasion, strung with white roses and vines, I stood at Sugar Pie's side, her maid of honor, and Alexei stood at Fernando's side, the best man. Chairs were set out in the garden for the ceremony, but it was a small affair, strictly family and a few friends. Fernando's daughter and grandchildren were there, Sid and Nancy and the kids, Helen and Autumn, and Shrimp, Wallace, and Delia. Iris and Billy left for New Zealand almost as soon as they received the call to go. Nancy sat next to Dee, patting Dee's growing belly, and discussing morning sickness.

Delia is due in November, and Nancy is due in December. Trust my mother to do something fashionable like get pregnant at her advancing age. Nancy seems happy but reluctant. Sid-dad is ecstatic. He is already interviewing for a new housekeeper and nanny, so in the end Nancy wins again. I don't think their new addition is like some TV show where the writers have run out of plot lines so they throw in a late-in-life baby to rejuvenate the tired old parents. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that two people who married for convenience--Sid so he could be a dad and protector, Nancy so she could be rich and a protectee--have now, more than ten years after the fact, fallen in love with each other. And baby makes six. It's still disgusting, but maybe not totally.

The apartment at the side of our house has been renovated for wheelchair access for Sugar Pie's dialysis days, and Sugar Pie will move in after the honeymoon at Disney Land with Fernando's grandkids. I think someone should build a senior citizen commune that's also an amusement

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park, where the wrinkles on the old people's faces are like a map of their lives, and all the rides are custom-designed to accommodate wheelchairs and memory loss and a complicated array of prescription side effects.

After last Christmas, when Fernando didn't take Sugar Pie to Nicaragua to meet his family back there, she asked him, 'Are you in this or aren't you?" Fernando said he'd thought it would be too difficult to travel with her because of her dialysis needs, and Sugar Pie said, "Where there's a will, there's a way, and I repeat: Are you in this or aren't you?" So Fernando said, "57, I'm in if you're in." But where Sugar Pie just meant she wanted the next trip to Nicaragua because she heard it was a really cool place, Fernando meant it's time to get legal with this true love. And that is how Sugar Pie came to be a bride for the first time at age seventy-something, and probably the only person I will ever meet who's done a reverse nursing-home swing, moving out of one to start a new life instead of going into one to wait to die. She made a beautiful bride in her white suit and church lady hat, standing with the cane that Ash and Josh decorated with strings of flowers and mini chocolate bars. It was Fernando, the tall, broody man of steel wearing a most excellent Italian black silk suit, who was the weeper during this particular ceremony.

After the ceremony I took Alexei aside to hand him lisBETH's business card. I told him, "Just because you're an insufferable faux intellectual doesn't mean Wall Street wouldn't be lucky to have you. Here, this is my sister's card. She's a managing director at some big investment firm. She needs a college student to help her out part-time next fall. Call her, okay?" Rule #1 of Matchmaking, by Cyd Charisse:

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Always go for the sneaky setup, where the two interested parties meet without knowing they're being matched. That's how I got Sugar Pie and Fernando together, and I'd have to say the evidence is weighing in favor of my methods on that one.

Shrimp came to my side and took my hand. I looked toward Sugar Pie and Fernando, holding hands and beaming, and I thought, Sugar Pie waited a lifetime to have her moment. I'm barely eighteen and I could have mine now if I want. But would mine be as heartfelt, as accepted by my friends and family? Would mine last? Josh came to my other side and latched on to my other hand. He looked up at me with that beauty-boy face and said, "Shrimp said you guys are taking me to the rickety roller coaster at Santa Cruz after your graduation. You're going to stay here all summer and not go away again like last summer, right?"

I've been thinking about Shrimp's proposal since the Outback Steakhouse, and letting Shrimp think that we're going through with it, but only at this moment, seeing Josh's trusting face, did I realize my answer. Soon I will have to tell Josh that when I assured him I wasn't leaving, I meant it at the time, but things change, people change. I will be going.

But first I have to tell Shrimp.

Later that evening, after the guests had gone home and the party cleaned up, Shrimp and I took a walk through the Presidio to talk about our plans. We wound up at Fort Point, at the old brick military building underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, where the Hitchcock Vertigo movie lady with the freaked-out eyebrows jumped into the freezing cold Bay and poor chump Jimmy Stewart had to dive in to rescue her.

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We sat down on the ledge at the water, our feet dangling over the Bay. I am not a drag-the-moment-out type of girl, so I just came out with it. I told Shrimp, "If I'm going to be on an island, I want one that's a city at the center of the universe, not one that's its own nation at the bottom of the world. I don't want to be so far from my family. If I wanted to be married, I would want you for my husband and life partner, but no way am I ready to be married yet. Can't we go to New York instead?"

Shrimp answered like from a script, like he'd been practicing what to say when the moment of truth came. "I want to surf, to travel, to paint, without the burden of a steady job or the need to make rent. It's both our freedoms I want." He breathed on my neck like how I love, and while I didn't push him away I pulled back from him so we were looking at each other eye to eye.

"You say it's both our freedoms you want, but really I think its yours you want."

He rubbed the kiwi ring that I'd moved from my toe up to my finger. "If that was true, would I have made you this?" he asked. He brought my finger to his lips.

"Yes," I stated, though I did not stop his finger sucking. He's an artist; that's what he does--speak through his art. But a kiwi ring was about his desire to go to New Zealand and not lose me at the same time, not about his desire to marry me. I don't want to be a wife because Shrimp is hedging his bets. "You have to choose between New Zealand and your girlfriend."

"I can't," he mumbled, letting go of my finger.

I kissed him long and hard so he would know that when I took my mouth from his, there was no bitterness to my words. "You just did, baby."

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I could feel the relief in his mouth when he leaned back in to kiss me. We didn't need words to finish this conversation. Hands, bodies, and lips could take care of the rest of our conversation, in private, in the back of that legacy Pinto.

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*** Chapter 39

If my life was a movie, here is where my closing scene voice-over would tell you (in lame-actress voice filled with precocious teen melancholy and über-wisdom) that, I thought my year was all about Shrimp, but, in fact, it was really all about me. A quick clip montage would remind moviegoers searching for the last vestiges of popcorn from the bag on the sticky theater floor that, along with falling crazy deep in love (but not crazy koo-koo, like last time), I also became a member of my own family and found out there are chicks my own age who are actually cool and friend-worthy. Well, technically I only made two new friends, and I have to disagree with Danny--I DO deserve a triple bonus score for Autumn, but that doesn't make me like her or Helen any less, or take away from the fact of: girlfriends.

The life-as-movie montages would bleed into that last scene with the all-important soul mate and true love. Insert over that scene a soundtrack song by folky-arty singer with stringy hair who basically sounds like a bored white person, and watch as Shrimp and I have our fade-into-the-sunset good-bye at dusk on the rare sunny day at Ocean Beach, right as the big red sun falls over the horizon on the Pacific. Our good-bye would be bittersweet; not a dry eye in the house as the two lovers take off their separate ways. But then--surprise! Don't leave the theater quite yet, kids,

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because there I am popping up next to Shrimp on the plane to New Zealand, giving him some snarky comment about not letting him get to see the flip side of the universe without me, and blessings on the screenwriter for throwing the word antipodean into the final dialogue before the big screen kiss. True love, fading into the sunset as the plane travels over dusk skies. Roll credits.

In the not-movie starring the not-movie-star Cyd Charisse, we got the Ocean Beach last scene, but on what had to be the most frigid, fog-ridden day of the year-- seriously, you could see our bodies cutting through the mist as Shrimp and I walked along the beach. At least in New York when you get that cold, you get snow too. You can do stuff with snow. You can't do anything with fog.

New Zealand was an interesting prospect, and I'm sure the costume changes merited by the new culture alone would have been worth the trip, but in the end I decided to split the difference with my family. I won't be going Down Under, but I will move to New York. I will be Danny's roommate for a while, get a café job, and take some classes at that culinary school where Danny will be teaching, and if I like it, maybe I will apply to the Culinary Institute of America next year.

I'm not going to New York alone, it turns out--my triple bonus score is coming along too. Autumn surprised us all by turning down Cal in favor of a scholarship and mucho student loan debt at Columbia, so we're gonna conquer Manhattan together. Helen, who you'd think would be the one most eager to escape to freaktown NYC, is staying home in California. She got rejected by the art schools she wanted--apparently Ball Hunter is "derivative"--but Helen

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surprised us more than Autumn by deciding to go to UC-Santa Cruz, where she's going to show those fuckhead art school people wrong. She won't admit it, but although Helen said her choice allows her to stay close to her boyfriend, the dirty truth is, I think Helen wasn't ready to be so far from Mommy yet.

Gingerbread is doing a reverse retirement, like Sugar Pie, and has been permanently liberated from Ash's captivity (Ash says she is getting "too old" for dolls anyway-- yeah, right), so she's coming along to Nueva York with Autumn and me. Fifth-floor walk-ups are a bitch, though, so Gingerbread's probably just gonna hang out on my bed in Greenwich Village.

I understand now how Danny and Aaron can still love each other, but they're still over, done, finito. Why does it hurt more to lose someone you love than someone you despise? Shrimp and I both understand: I love you, you love me, but you're going your way and I'm going mine, and let's not fool ourselves into believing one of us will be waiting around for the other. We will never be that couple who lies and says, "We'll always be friends," because we won't. We'll always be each other's first loves, and I suspect we'll always find our way back into each other's lives, but friends? I doubt it. Maybe later in my life Shrimp will make a great second husband, after I've married for tempestuous passion the first time around but then husband number one leaves me for the teenage baby-sitter when I become a super-successful restaurant mogul who thought she was doing a great job balancing career and family, and maybe she was but she just married a schmuck the first go-round. Shrimp will have gotten all that travel and wanderlust out

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of his system, and I will be ready for some rest after the city that never sleeps, and we can move to Ocean Beach to raise my kids, with maybe some new ones thrown in if we're feeling very Nancy derivative, back in the place where it all started. I can cook and bake and he can do art and surf at Ocean Beach, and we will be settled and old.

Shrimp and I shared the long, deep Hollywood kiss at Ocean Beach, but we were so cold from the extreme chilly temp that our lips were almost blue and in danger of freezing onto each other's. Maybe the teeth-chattering, bone-shivering cold was a cosmic message from God or Buddha or Allah or whomever for Shrimp and me to let go already. After our Ocean Beach time, Shrimp had to leave right away for the airport for his trip to NZ. I elected not to go to the airport with him. I can't be that girl, crying and regretting and holding on till the very last second. I won't be that girl, because I want to be her. I want the tearful good-bye, the long, clinging kisses, the false promises and the running to the airline counter to buy a ticket to follow Shrimp to the end of the earth, if that's what it takes to be with him.

He'll always be in my heart, but I have taken measures to ensure Shrimp physically remains with me for a lifetime, no matter what part of the universe he's in. On the obscure nonsexy flab that hangs under my arm (placement choice out of respect for prospective future boyfriends), I have a new tattoo, my first, picturing a pink-veined piece of raw shrimp. He got a tattoo of a mini Nestle Crunch bar on the same spot on his arm.

Our final-scene movie kiss was broken by the barking of Aloha, the dog Iris and Billy left orphaned, except, of course, Wallace and Delia have kept Aloha; they wouldn't

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let the dog be punished because of the grandparents-to-be's fickle ways. Even Aloha was too cold for this scene and wanted to go home. Shrimp's lips parted from mine, but I leaned into him for one more taste of his espresso-flavored mouth. My lips left his, touching his cheeks, his nose, his eyes, to freezer burn the feel of his cold face into my memory. "Burr-ito," Shrimp said.

Memory load complete, Shrimp took my hand as we walked toward Great Highway. I'm not worried. When we cross over the dunes at Great Highway and see Wallace and Delia's car waiting on the street to take Shrimp to the airport, I will let Shrimp's hand go. I will walk away and not be tempted to look back. I know that at the end of the road, there will always be a Shrimp.

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