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seems disappointed when I buy jeans and sneakers and T-shirts. That’s when she really shows how mean she can be. She’ll pick up some filmy little Band-Aid of a dress and say, “This would look so pretty on you, Maisie, if you just lost a little weight.” It’s evil, pure evil. I’m not even fat. I just have big boobs.
    Everything Joan does is embarrassing. She has a boxing coach who makes her run up and down the steps of city hall, like Rocky Balboa, at nine o’clock in the morning, when the whole town can see!
    Now, Joan turns away from the oven, straightens up, and when she faces me, she actually claps her hands with joy.
    “Cookies in ten minutes, Maisie dear! Chocolate chip!”
    “Thanks, I’m not hungry,” I say.

CHAPTER FOUR
    It’s strange how sometimes you can turn your back for one minute—one minute—and by the time you turn around, the whole world’s completely different. My mom—my real mom—says that about computers, and cell phones, and the most basic technical stuff. My dad is always blathering on, if you let him, about how drastically dentistry has changed since he started out in the profession.
    Of course, when I finally left Dad and Josh Darlingand the Evil Stepmother and went to live with Mom and Geoff, I stayed away a lot longer than a minute. I stuck it out for a whole school year. Eighth grade, as it happened. Unfortunately, for me. It’s hard to believe that it was only last year. It seems like another lifetime.
    Why did I imagine that life with Mom and Geoff would be any better than life with Dad and Joan? I guess I wasn’t thinking all that clearly. I was fighting with Joan all the time. She was getting nastier, letting her true nature show. Every so often, I’d complain to Dad, but he only shrugged and looked sad and said that it was a pity that Joan and I didn’t get along better and appreciate each other’s good points. Which made me think that Joan was probably complaining about me, too.
    I’d only met Geoff once, when he and Mom came to Philadelphia for some sort of academic conference. I think he was interviewing for a better job, which he didn’t get. Geoff seemed mind-blowingly dull—but nice enough. Harmless, you might say. I began to think that living with him might be an improvement over Sitcom Mom Joan, who was anything but harmless.
    Sitcom Mom insisted we eat dinner “as a family”every night. She was constantly telling us about these horribly dysfunctional households she was seeing in her practice—imagine, they actually ate their evening meal in front of the TV! No wonder the American family was in so much trouble! She liked to quote statistics and studies that proved that the combination of food and television led to poor grades, juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, obesity—and worse. Joan loved saying “and worse” in a scary, tragic tone, but, knowing Joan, I couldn’t imagine what she thought was worse than obesity.
    At those moments I tried not to look at my dad, who was trying not to look at me, so neither of us would have to acknowledge that that was what we used to do when we lived with Mom. We often ate with the TV on. We’d liked it, it had felt comfortable. And it didn’t mean we never talked, or that we weren’t close. We had our conversations at other times—breakfast and bedtime, for example. But maybe Joan was right about the TV not helping families stay together. It certainly hadn’t done much for our family.
    Those long-ago dinners with Mom and the TV seem like heaven now compared to the torture mealswith Joan making me and Josh finish our sentences and keep our elbows off the table. Elbows off the table! Is my dad hearing that ? And why doesn’t he defend me as I plunk my elbows down beside my plate and keep them there until Joan flips out and starts asking why I’m trying to undermine her? Undermine her ? It has nothing to do with her. Okay, almost nothing. Elbows off the table isn’t who we are . But that isn’t quite true,