The Trouble Is

Chapter 1: Summer

The summer starts with a bang.

I lie on my back listening to the sounds of our house—cabinets slamming, doors squeaking, the washing machine already spinning off balance and banging. I can hear my little brother digging through the hall closet. Doug is my seven-year-old brother, all long legs and boyhood bruises topped with sun-kissed blonde hair. The door to my bedroom opens. Doug can read the KEEP OUT sign; he just assumes he's the exception.

"Annie, can I have this?" he whispers, just a scrawny arm sticking through the doorway, holding a faded Hello Kitty sleeping bag.

I can still see the stains of Kool-Aid and nail polish from slumber parties and sleepovers. At seventeen, Hello Kitty seems like a lifetime ago. I throw a pillow at him in response and dig around in the tangled sheets for my earbuds. I hear him banging his way down the hallway singing to himself. I totally agree. The first day of what promises to be a horrendous summer should not be faced without music. I'm pretty sure that today will be a Bruno Mars kind of day, so I kick it off with a little "Grenade." Who wouldn't want a guy who would catch a grenade for her?

Here are the top five things you need to know about me:

1. In the social structure of T.R. High School, I am a nobody. I'm not the cheerleader or the lead in the school musical. I'm not the drugged-out ski-cap girl hiding in the bathroom during PE class. I'm just kind of there. I participate on the edge of things. I go to the football games and the occasional school dance; I just don't seem to fully commit while I'm there. It's as if I'm watching myself from some place far away. I'm OK with this, really. I think I've always known that my purpose in life has nothing to do with T.R. High School and its social structure. I just haven't figured out exactly what that purpose is.

2. I have one brother, whom you just met. I have the traditional two-person parental-unit structure of a mom and a dad. I have one grandmother, who lives nearby, and a zillion relatives scattered across the country.

3. My best friend is Katie. Katie's full name is Katherine Leigh Robison. We've been best friends since kindergarten. Katie has a car and a driver's license. I point this out—the car and the driver's license—because I don't have either. Which is probably irrelevant since I don't even know how to drive.

4. I've never had a serious boyfriend or a true kiss. Oh, I've had the boy-from-another-town-at-summer-camp kiss and the occasional hold-my-hand-in-the-movies kind of thing. But the soul-crushing kiss of someone who really sees me . . . no. I'm not ashamed to say that I picture it like an Edward and Bella thing except without the glittering sunlight through the trees. I just haven't yet met someone who would let me go first in the lunch line, much less be willing to "take a bullet straight through my brain," as Bruno says.

5. The one thing I can't leave home without is my notebook. Each school year, I evaluate all the spiral notebooks that the local Wal-Mart has to offer. I wish our little town had a Target so I could get the fancy spirals, but some things are just not meant to be. We have the typical small-town-in-Texas things like Sonic, Taco Bell, and even Starbucks. But we will never have a Target—it's just beyond our reach. So I go through all the available options at Wal-Mart in order to determine which one is the most durable yet unique—personal without screaming "Look at me!" And for just a few dollars, I begin a new year. And I begin each year with a list.

More sounds bounce around the house, threatening to disrupt my first-day-of-summer moment of Zen. The garage door opens, and I know my dad, Skip, is already headed out for the weekly grocery run. Dad's real name is Charles, after his father, but everyone calls him Skip. I have no idea why. It's one of those things that has always been. I don't think it would occur to him to respond if someone did call him Charles.

Lately I've found that he's so distracted that he is more likely to hear me if I call him Skip than if I call him Dad. Skip insists on purchasing organic these days, which means a weekly trek down to the local farmers market and a never-ending search for hormone-free chicken and beef. Over the last year, it seems that all this healthy freshness takes up most of his Saturday as he drives around, smelling and squeezing produce, and chatting up his newfound organic buddies, comparing recipes and trading stories like expert food bloggers. I'm not complaining. He's right, of course. It does taste better. It just seems as if his attempts to go back to a "simpler time" have become a bit complicated.

I feel the vibration from a text message coming from somewhere in the tangle of my bedding. On my list of close friends, there is only one. I wait for it . . . wait for it and start counting. I hit four before the vibrations start coming in like a string of firecrackers. Katie is not a believer in long-form texting. She relies heavily on emoticons and words sometimes stripped of vowels, and she rarely leverages any form of punctuation—until she's really, really pissed. Then she pulls out the ever-helpful king of punctuation, the period. The ender.

<a>

<u up>

<a>

<A>

She's officially yelling at me now. Capital A.

<A get up>

<smmr is 2day>

<time 2g2 wrk>

<put down da spiral&pen>

I feel just like that guy in Skip's favorite movie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off: if I don't answer, she'll keep texting. 

<i own smmrs list this yr>

<b there n 30>

<get up>

<shwer n all that>

<now.>

     <k>

See that? That little dot after the word "now"? It's the most effective use of the period in the history of anyone ever. The ender. I give in, and the day begins.