“Lana. Did you hear me? We need to talk.”

I opened the door to my room. “Talk to yourself,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

“I’m your mother,” she said. No one could ever accuse Hilary Spiggs of being original. “I think I have a right to know where you’ve been all night.”

“Selling my body,” I said. “Where else?”

I would’ve slammed the door in her face, but she’d wedged herself against the frame.

“Lana, look, I know I overreacted—”

She touched my shoulder. I jumped as if she’d stabbed me.

“Get your hands off me,” I ordered.

She got her hands off me. She must’ve been more drunk than I thought, though, because she almost looked like she was going to cry.

“I’m sorry, Lana. I don’t want things to be like this.”

Maybe if I hadn’t had the best birthday of my life, and maybe if I hadn’t realized I had enough power to make her cry, I would have broken down then and said I was sorry too, and everything would’ve been different. That’s what I think now, at any rate. But it’s not what I thought then. I didn’t care that she was sorry. I was chuffed I could make her cry. And I didn’t give a stuff what she wanted. I was like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, standing on the yellow brick road with the Emerald City shimmering in front of me. Only it wasn’t the Emerald City I saw, it was my future. It was nearly six feet tall, had a tongue like a lizard’s, and drove a Ford.

“Well, that’s the way they are,” I told her. And I gave her a shove that knocked her against the wall and slammed my door behind me.

My mother always told me that love wasn’t like it is in films and songs and stuff like that. Meaning that it wasn’t like that for her. Charlene and Dara’s father died when they were little. Hard though it was to believe, the Spiggs had been madly in love with him. She married my father because he was the best she could get with two children and cellulite and her lousy personality. Charlene and Dara’s father was God’s gift to the earth; mine was a reminder that God likes to punish people.