Lone Star. Paullina Simons

climbed aboard the girls’ slow-chugging teenage dream.

      Hannah stopped listening. She pulled on Chloe to slow down. “Now I really have to talk to you,” she said. “Come by before dinner?”

      “Is it about Barcelona?” Chloe looked up into Hannah’s flat expression.

      Hannah blinked. “No and yes. Do you have your passport yet?”

      Chloe didn’t reply.

      “Chloe! I told you—it takes two months to get a passport. Come on. Do you want to blow it?”

      “Of course not. But that’s easy for you to say—you’re eighteen. I have to ask my parents to sign for my passport.”

      “So?”

      “Well, I’ll have to tell them I’m going first, won’t I?”

      “I can’t believe you haven’t told them!”

      “Yeah, well.” Chloe couldn’t believe a whole bunch of things.

      Blake was in front of them, panting, eyes blazing, his body heaving. “So what do we have to do to get a passport?”

      “Go to the post office,” Hannah said. “But take Chloe with you, because she doesn’t know how to get one either.”

      “I know how. I just …”

      Hannah batted her lashes. “Are you guys really going to come with us? Because don’t get our hopes up and then not come. That’d be mean.”

      “I never disappoint you, pumpkin, do I?” Grabbing the slender Hannah, Blake pretended to dance with her and stepped on her feet. She yelped.

      “Blake, you do know where Barcelona is, right?” Hannah said, her arms around his neck. “In Spain. And you know where Spain is, right? In Europe. As in—on another continent. As in, you need not just a passport, which costs upward of a hundred bucks, but also a plane ticket, and train tickets, and maybe, oh, I don’t know—some lodging and food money.”

      Mason began to look doubtful, but Blake shrugged with gleeful indifference. “You know what they say, babycakes.” He squeezed her. “You gotta spend money to make money. It’s like the ten grand I’m getting for my story. We can’t start our own business till we win this thing. And we can’t win this thing till we do this other thing.”

      “This other thing,” said Chloe, “meaning horn in on my lifelong dream?”

      “Exactly. Mase, let’s jet. We gotta go get ourselves some passports. We have no time to lose.” As they sped up, their boots kicked up dust in a bee cloud. “Where’s this post office, anyway?” Blake called back.

      “Are you joking? You’ve never been to the Fryeburg post office?”

      Hannah poked Chloe. “You’ve never been there either, missy.”

      Chloe poked Hannah back. “Yes, I have, stop it.”

      Blake pulled on his brother. “Let’s hoof, bro. Should we pick you up, Chloe?” The Hauls lived three houses up from Chloe, around the pond through the scraggly pines and birches.

      “Yeah, Chloe,” Hannah said, sticking a finger into Chloe’s back. “Should they pick you up to go get your passport?”

      “It’s okay,” said Chloe, swatting Hannah’s fingers away. “I’ll have my mom take me.”

      The girls gazed after their young men, and then resumed walking. Hannah shook her head—in distress? In wonderment? Chloe couldn’t tell. “I guess I’ll be going to Spain with my boyfriend and your boyfriend, but not with you.”

      “Har-de-har-har.”

      “You think I’m being funny? You can’t start your adult life being such a chicken, Chloe. What are you afraid of? Be more like me. I’m not afraid of anything.” She said it as if she didn’t mean it.

      But all Chloe heard was be more like me. Ain’t that a kick in the teeth, she thought, stiffening. They were almost at the clearing in front of Chloe’s green bungalow. Hannah slowed down, as if she wanted to linger, but Chloe sped up as if that was the last thing she wanted. “I have to be diplomatic,” she said. “I need their permission to go. I can’t just present them with an I’m-going-to-Europe vaudeville routine.”

      “If you don’t start acting like an adult, why should they treat you like one?”

      How much did Chloe not want to talk about it. It wasn’t that Hannah was wrong. It was that Hannah always said obvious things in such a way that made Chloe not only think her friend was wrong, but that she wanted her friend to be wrong.

      “I’ll talk to them tonight,” she said, hurrying across her pine needle clearing.

      “I wouldn’t tell them about Mason and Blake just yet.”

      “Ya think?”

      Since Mrs. Haul and Lang went shopping on Fridays, Chloe had a feeling that her silence on the subject might be short-lived.

      “Okay,” Hannah said, “but start slow. Don’t make your mother go all Chinese on you. You always make her nuts. First dangle our trip, then wait. The boys might be pie in the sky anyway. Where are they going to get the money from? It’ll pass, you’ll see.”

      Chloe said nothing. Clearly Hannah had no idea who her boyfriend was. There was no talking Blake out of anything. Short fiction indeed! And as if to prove Chloe’s point, Janice Haul’s Subaru came charging toward them from around the trees, Blake rolling down his window, slowing down, honking.

      “We’re off to get our passports!” he yelled. “See ya!”

      Chloe turned to Hannah. “You were saying?”

      “All right, fine. But don’t tell your mom about them yet.”

      “What did you want to talk to me about?” Chloe asked. Only a flimsy screen door separated Chloe’s mother’s ears from Hannah’s troubles.

      Hannah waved her off. “Just you wait,” she said, all doom and gloom.

       2

       Sweet Potato

      “I’M IN THE KITCHEN,” HER MOTHER CALLED OUT AS SOON as Chloe opened the screen door. A statement of delightful irony since they lived in a winterized cabin that was one room entire, if one didn’t count, which Chloe didn’t, the bathroom, the two small bedrooms and the open attic lost where Chloe slept.

      I’m in the kitchen, Lang said, because this month she was baking. Last winter, her mother was scrapbooking so every day, when Chloe came home, she would hear: I’m in the dining room.

      The previous fall, her mother decided to become a seamstress and told Chloe that from now on she was sewing all of her daughter’s clothes, in the craft room.

      When she was tracing out the family tree on her new Christmas-present software, Lang was in the computer room.

      During the summers, Lang said nothing, because she was outside, fishing and tending her vegetable garden, voluminous enough to supply tomatoes to all eight homes around their part of the lake. Bushels of zucchini and cucumbers went with Chloe’s dad to work.

      Chloe’s mother Lang Devine, née Lang Thia of Chinese descent from Red River, North Dakota, reinvented herself constantly into something new. She had wanted to be a dancer when she was young, but then she met Jimmy and wanted to be a wife. After many years as a wife, she wanted to be a mother. And after many years as a mother of one, she wanted to be a mother of two.

      Jimmy’s favorite, he said, was when Lang took up tap dancing. He built