The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

Claire shrugged, almost flirtatiously.

“I didn’t get a chance to talk to my mom before they left,” Lauren said. She tried to introduce a businesslike clip to hervoice, as in the thirty-second addresses they had to prepare each week for Speech & Communication class. Thirty seconds tosummarize the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Thirty seconds to encapsulate the Bush administration’s response to the AIDS crisis.Synthesis of facts, stripped of analysis or interpretation. “My mom says Mirela’s behavior will calm down when she learnsEnglish—she won’t be so disruptive if she can express herself in the same way everyone around her can.”

Claire nodded. “That’s probably true. Did you know that Abby didn’t speak a word of English until she was five?”

“What? No way!” Lauren heard the edge of screeching shock in her voice. She looked at Abby in the rearview. Abby’s mouth twisteddown on one side, in concentration or annoyance.

“Yup,” Abby said after a moment.

“How come?” Lauren asked, softly. “I mean, if you want to say.”

Abby puffed through her nose and her frown deepened. “It’s not some big secret. That’s when my family came here from Korea.I went to kindergarten, there was no ESL where I went to elementary school, so I just figured it out.” Claire had turned backaround in her seat and started singing to herself, like the conversation had nothing to do with her.

“Hey, I made you this,” Stitch said, handing Lauren a cassette. He had written down the names of the songs on the sleeve of the cassette, in pencil. “That way,” he said, “if you don’t like the record and you want to tape over it, you can just erase the track listing and write in the new songs.” The instructions were so straightforward and obvious, and his delivery of them so wide-eyed and earnest—like he was slightly unsure whether she would understand or remember—that Lauren could not figure out if he was putting her on or not. In the front of the car, Claire was looking over at Abby with a hand over her lips, pretending to stifle a giggle.

Julie and Deepa came back, poured out part of each Slurpee onto the asphalt, filled each cup to the top again with vodka fromthe elegant flask, which, it turned out, belonged to Julie, and passed the cups around.

“I also have cough syrup if anyone needs it,” Deepa said, and everyone but Lauren nodded in appreciation of her foresight.

The movie was called The Man in the Moon, about a family in the South in the 1950s. The scenes were humid and sleepy, and the movie and the spiked Slurpee made Laurenfeel the same, and she faded in and out of sleep. The pretty teenage sisters in the movie lived with their golden-backlitmom and sweaty, attractive dad and adorable toddler sister in a nice old house on many acres of farmland. They didn’t havemuch to do. Whenever Lauren woke up, one of the sisters was brushing her hair or swimming in a pond or lying around. Theirmother was pregnant, although her oldest was about to go off to college. Lauren wondered why Mom hadn’t just had her own babyif she wanted another one—she had to be younger than the mother in the movie.

Then a boy showed up and both sisters fell in love with him, and they thought of little else but him. Lauren thought about who her new friends might be in love with. Claire was dating a football player, Dan DeFilippo. He wasn’t a particularly good football player, and he had the highest GPA on the team. Lauren was pretty sure they’d had sex. Abby was sort of seeing a guy who went to Buff State and worked at the Home of the Hits record store on Elmwood Avenue and had tattoos on his arms and maybe other places. They’d definitely had sex. Deepa was sort of seeing a guy at Canisius College who she’d met through Habitat for Humanity. They probably hadn’t had sex. Julie, who was an aspiring opera singer and always played the lead in the spring musical, wasn’t dating anyone. Neither was Stitch, obviously.

Lauren woke up again with her head slumped toward a man sitting beside her, her hair falling on his sleeve, and she put apinky to the corner of her mouth to wipe some drying saliva as she started to tell Mr. Smith she was sorry for invading hispersonal space when she smelled Stitch’s outdoor smell. It was Stitch’s arm—it was Stitch sitting beside her. She heard someonegiggle, and someone else passed her the Slurpee.

“I’ve never seen a movie where nothing really happens,” Lauren said in the lobby after it was over. Everyone laughed, althoughshe hadn’t meant it as a joke. “Not like that was a bad thing. Just new to me.”

“Nothing happens except for when the hottie farmer boy runs himself over with his own tractor,” Deepa said.

“I think Lauren was asleep for that part,” Claire said.

Abby dropped Stitch off at his house and pulled into her own driveway, on the opposite end of the block. It had been decidedthat all the girls would sleep over at Abby’s. Lauren felt an intense contentment in the drift of the evening, how she swamalong in the calm, unyielding current of these efficient and leaderless girls. They seemed to view their boyfriends as casualhobbies—they wouldn’t obsess or compete over a boy like the girls in the movie. They came to decisions about food and entertainmentand sleeping arrangements and the arc of their lives’ destiny with little discussion and no apparent conflict.

“May I use your phone? I just have to call my mom,” Lauren asked Abby, and she felt very young.

Lauren was the first one to wake up the next morning. Abby’s house was bigger and nicer than hers. The living room where they all slept had an arched, double-height ceiling. Great wooden beams, windows down to the floor. She lay still under her down sleeping bag, Claire and Abby in sleeping bags on either side of her on the piled rug,