Don't You Wish Read Online Free Page B

is hung up on self-improvement and celebrities. Not to mention iPhone apps! It’s the perfect combo of our biggest fixations. I call it—”
    Mom pitches that magazine so hard, it sails across the room like some kind of wild colored airplane, all six dollars’ worth of gloss and glitz, and
wham!
It slams into the nest of electronics, sliding the motherboard, cracking the diodes and rectifiers and whatever else there is. The contraption yanks the mirror so hard the whole thing tumbles forward, shattering with a noisy crash.
    “Picture-Perfect,”
Dad finishes with a whisper.
    No one moves. We all just stare at the jagged jigsaw puzzle of mirror shards and computer parts and really bad ideas.
    Then Mom runs back upstairs, shoving a whining Watson into the kitchen and banging the basement door behind her.
    Theo throws his arms out, his mouth wide in speechless surprise. Dad stares at the stairs, his expression as broken as his invention. Then he steps over the glass and the cartonand all the newspapers and follows Mom, quietly closing the door, leaving us alone with what was once the prototype of Picture-Perfect.
    Theo lets out a loud belch, and I just kneel down and carefully start to pick up the pieces.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    The whole night royally sucks. I can’t get on Facebook—which I am dying to do, because there has to be something on there about the bus incident. In fact, when Lizzie doesn’t call after her flute lesson, I’m pretty sure that means I am Facebook-ruined for life.
    And we don’t even eat dinner together, which is really bizarro for the Nutter house, since Mom and Dad insist on it most nights if everybody’s home.
    To top it all off, a storm moves in, pounding our roof with nonstop rain, which means I have to get the bucket from the mudroom and put it in the hall where the ceiling leaks. Lightning and thunder add to the doom and gloom of a really dismal day.
    Mom and Dad disappear for hours in their room, the softsounds of their conversation drifting out if I walk by the door. Or stand there and listen. Not that I would
ever
do that.
    Dad comes out and says Mom is resting, claiming she’s just a little upset about “things,” which usually translates into “money” or “Dad’s latest trip to the lunatic fringe.” Those are the only two things they fight about.
    I bet Jim Monroe doesn’t fight with his wife about—Wait. He doesn’t
have
a wife. I wonder if Mom is thinking about leaving Dad and going to hunt down her rich ex-boyfriend. Maybe she thinks she could fill that “hers” closet with clothes and shoes. She is fabulous, if not flawless.
    My heart thuds down to my feet. Do I want to be rich
that
bad? That I’d wish a
divorce
on my parents? I study Dad for a minute, trying to compare him to Jim Monroe. There is no comparison. Jim is better-looking, loaded, and probably hasn’t kept the rusted parts from every barbecue grill he’s ever owned.
    “Starving!” Theo whines from his room. “Where’s food?”
    “I’ll make pancakes,” Dad says quickly.
    “Pancakes?” My brother and I are in complete unison for once.
    “Breakfast for dinner,” Dad says. “I’ll make eggs, too. And bacon. The real way, not in the microwave.”
    Theo is too dumb and hungry to even notice how strange that dinner menu is, and I decide to let it go. Chocolate chip pancakes and the works it is, but Dad doesn’t eat, so Theo and I take our food into the den and eat in front of the TV until some pretty serious lightning kills the cable, and Theo leaves me alone.
    I give my bacon to Watson and sit in the lonely den fora few minutes anyway, the smell of our breakfasty-dinner lingering in the air, the rumble of thunder and the steady drop of water in the hallway bucket the only sounds I hear.
    It is kind of impossible not to compare our family room to the house that Forever Flawless built.
    We have the green leather sofa—pleather, Dad calls it, since it really is more in the plastic family than