Gandhi's Guide to Getting By

chapter one

"Out Ax, or I kill you."

I don't bother to look at Ax when I say this. Ax isn't even her real name. It's short for Accident (not her real name either), something my parents swear she wasn't. "A wonderful surprise" is how my parents explain her unplanned existence when people comment on the thirteen year age difference between the two of us.

I don't know what people think when they hear the words "wonderful surprise". I especially don't know what they think when they find out my parents only wanted one child. Ten to one, though, it begins with their wondering what kind of seemingly responsibe, intelligent committed-one-child adults decide it's okay to skip the condom for one night. Ten to one no sooner do they ask this question then they start to suspect that maybe my parents aren't the responsible people they pretend to be. Ten to one they go home and maybe the wife (whose close-in-age-children are all grown up) says to the husband, Thirteen years? And the husband says, You'd think Dave and Liv would know better than to behave like two irresponsible horny sex-crazed teenagers and the wife says, Did you see the younger one? She looks like she probably tortures her perfect older sister. And the husband says, You're right, the little one did look sort of demonic, and the wife says, Wonderful surprise, my ass!

"Whatever," Ax says, slamming my door. I swear, driving me crazy, combined with extortion, is one of the things Ax and her best friend, Linny, do best.

"You think maybe there's something wrong with her?" Kate asks. She pulls back her light brown hair, then leans down and reaches for her make-up case. She's wearing a black top and a pair of high-waist shorts with Jeffrey Campbell wedges. Then again, she has a new job whose fat paycheck can support rent and fashion. My paychecks support me still living at home at the age of twenty-four.

The shorts make Kate's legs look skinnier than they usually look. She's thin enough to be anorexic, only she's not. She's just one of those people with an incredibly small appetite and an incredibly quick metabolism. I think most of us spent all of high school secretly resenting her for this, especially those nights we'd gather in my parents' basement, watching a string of horror movies while eating a few gallons of ice-cream. Of course it wasn't until all the ice-cream was finished that we'd think to complain about how fat we were. Kate would always complain the loudest until Jen threw an empty carton of Hagen Dazs ice-cream bars at her and told her to shut-up. "From now on only we get to complain," she said, "Otherwise I'm putting forth a  motion: No eating of junk food with skinny people."  Jen's threat, whether real or not, worked. Or rather it worked until Kate, who's never been the quiet type, decided to play the role of sympathetic friend. "I'm so fat," one of us would say, "From now on I'm eating only carrots." Kate would nod and say something like, You can eat celery too. And salads, only maybe stick to the low-fat dressing. Needless to say, Jen withdrew any threat of a motion or rather she changed her motion to: Anyone who comments on anyone else's fatness will be FOREVER banished. 

"There isn't a moment I don't think that," I say. I plop down on my beanbag, the one my parents got me from Target fifty years ago. Okay, maybe it was ten years ago, but it feels like fifty. I'm the only one who isn't changing for the party at Stella's place tonight. I figure the jeans I wore to work look fine, as does my shirt.

"That was Stella," Jen says, reading the text on her phone, "She tried texting you, but your phone is off. Your uncle and his girlfriend are leaving for the airport in about an hour and Hannah is already at your aunt's house."

Stella and Hannah are my first cousins. Stella, who is also my best friend, is my age. Hannah is seventeen. I don't bother to correct Jen about calling Frank, Stella's and Hannah's father, "uncle". Mom has forbidden us to call Frank anything but "that bloody bastard even bigger asshole" ever since he announced he was leaving Dad's sister, Grace. He didn't exactly say I'm leaving. What he said was, "I need a new life." New life meaning no Aunt Grace and no over-sized-hasn't-been-updated-since-they-bought-it-twenty-years-ago house in the suburbs. New life meaning a penthouse condo in SOHO, along with a twenty-five-year-old girlfriend who doesn't get parenting concepts like "adult supervision" and the "importance of the occasional no" when it comes to Hannah. She thinks weekends were created for romantic getaways to places like the Bahamas and Miami and so what if your seventeen-year-old step-daughter is throwing wild parties every second weekend (Grace and Frank agreed on the alternate weekend thing when it came to Hannah) while you and her father are doing it on some beach.