None of them, Jen was certain, could even begin to handle her secret.
“I’m Jen Chun-Pagano,” she managed to say. “And I love Regency fiction. Bodice rippers. The steamier the better. I’m hoping that’s embarrassing enough to also qualify as my something unexpected.”
Jen’s chest melted into liquid warmth at the group’s kind laughter.
“Last but not least,” Janine trilled, “our hostess with the mostest. What’s your favorite book, Harriet?”
Harriet, another book club mainstay, had lived in Cottonwood Estates longer than anyone else in the club. She had a severe gray crop, a perpetual frown, and the belief that every book had one correct interpretation, which it was her job to understand. Ostensibly to further this goal, she brought a yellow legal pad to every book club meeting and spent the entire discussion filling the thing with furiously handwritten notes, as though she were anticipating a test.
“One favorite book?” Harriet said with skepticism. “That’s impossible to answer.”
“Genre then? You love your mysteries.”
“I suppose any amateur sleuth story,” Harriet said. “Or the classics. Can that be our segue, Ms. President, to get on with this month’s selection?”
Jen largely ignored the Lolita discussion. She had studied the book in high school and college and was already familiar with the role of games, the metacommentary about how Nabokov played with the reader.
As per usual with Lolita, there were two camps: those who couldn’t get past the molestation and murder and those who thought the ugliness was exactly the point—that the book was a master class in unreliable narration and satire.
Jen had probably argued both sides in her life, but who cared?
It had been a mistake to call Scofield. Jen already regretted it.
She wasn’t even sure that Abe had smiled in the car; he had been subdued all afternoon. And he seemed so relieved to not have to go back to Foothills.
School must have been even worse for him than Jen had realized.
Jen didn’t know what exactly had happened to make Harper turn on Abe, but the aftermath had been awful—whispers on line for PE, shoves in the cafeteria, “not it”s during group projects for school, all perfectly timed for when the teachers’ backs were turned.
Find a new friend, Jen had urged, but Abe explained with resignation that everyone had already heard he was a freak. If only he smiled more, Abe had said, but he was always nervous there and could never remember to do so.
Jen had tried to tell the school, but they were over Abe at that point. When Abe found a note in his drawing kit that said “Satan’s Minion,” Jen brought it up to the art teacher. Are you sure he didn’t draw it himself, Mr. Marley had said in his infuriating stoner’s drawl, Abe can get pretty dark.
What her son needed, more than anything else, was protection. Foothills had not provided it.
Jen’s career ambitions were not the cause of Abe’s issues—linking the two was misogynist draconian nonsense—but part of Jen had always wondered deep down, oh so very deep down because she knew it was crazy, plenty of parents worked, but—
If Janine were Abe’s parent, she might brag about him, but she also would have been a solid, irrefutable daily presence, there in his corner from preschool on. Janine would have volunteered to be room parent and signed Abe up for Scouts, organized a troop if there weren’t one in existence. She would have served punch at the class parties and dances （assuming that was an actual job and not just something Jen had seen on TV）。 She would have thrown him into social situations, and maybe he’d have developed better skills.
Paul said that Jen couldn’t help but compare herself to other parents because she was a fundamentally competitive person. All parents compared themselves to other parents, though. People operated in relation to each other, just like wolves did, or prairie dogs or meerkats.
Or birds.
Lately, Jen’s research had been heavy on the birds—there was a lot of recent work in the avian-navigation field—and reading about a flock’s inexplicable telepathy, how it majestically ascended to the skies in one coordinated rush, Jen could not help but picture her neighbors, similarly in thrall to the mandates of a group soul.
At book club, differences were not celebrated, they were barely acknowledged. Last year, Jen had initially been pleasantly surprised to note that she was not the only book club member with a multicultural background. There was Priya and also Athena, who was half Liberian, half French.