Caddie stood up. “Maybe I liked you better when you weren’t acting like my father,” she told him, going around the table and kissing him on the forehead. “You know, when you were just an asshole.”

She scurried from the room as her father tried to swat her. “Go to your room!” he called after her.

She did, lying down on the bed and closing her eyes. There was a lot for her to think about. Despite what her father had said, she was still mad at her mother. She couldn’t believe her mother had had an affair. And with his best friend! she thought. They were going to have to have a talk about it at some point when she got home.

Home. She’d forgotten that she would be leaving, that she had a whole other life back in L.A. And now that she remembered, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to it. She would have to face her mother, and Sam and Bree. They would be the same as they were when she left, but she would be different. She didn’t know if the new her wanted to go back to that place, or if she even could. Suddenly, L.A. seemed like the Garden of Eden, not when it was beautiful but afterward, when it had been ruined forever by the discovery of the truth and when Adam and Eve, ashamed of their nakedness, had been driven out.

Only she wasn’t ashamed. Not even of her mother (although the word slut kept crossing her mind whenever she thought about her, but she suspected that was just a temporary thing) or of her own behavior. She had just changed. Things that had seemed so important just a few weeks ago now held no meaning for her. She had moved beyond them, just as she’d outgrown her Barbies and wanting to be Britney Spears. Speaking of sluts, she thought.

As much as she’d dreaded the thought of a whole summer with her father, she now dreaded the thought of the summer passing too quickly. She wished she could slow the passing of time, take the sun in her hands and drag it backward across the sky so that it was always morning and she was always looking ahead to what might be. There was so much she wanted to do before she was plunged back into the murky waters of her old existence, which seemed to her now polluted and slicked with oil.