Rachel Cohn - Shrimp

Shrimp

Rachel Cohn

For Mom, Grandma, and Grandpa

Acknowledgments

Grateful thanks for their extraordinary support to David Gale, Alexandra Cooper, Beth Gamel, Xanthe Tabor, Virginia Barber, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Alicia Gordon, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Robert Lipsyte, and Ceridwen Morris. Hi to Joey Regan and Molly Regan, and thanks to The Writers Room in NYC for the awesome writing space. Most especially, big love and thanks to all the readers who wrote asking for a sequel.

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SHRIMP

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*** Chapter 1

My little sister Ashley officially took custody of my doll Gingerbread on my seventeenth birthday. You may say that seventeen is a little old to finally be relinquishing a childhood doll, but Gingerbread was no ordinary doll. She had been my lifelong soul sister number one, the cherished rag doll that was the one decent thing my bio-dad, Frank, had ever given me that wasn't a trust fund, genetic mutant tall-ness, or a summer in New York just spent with him that revealed he was a world-class dawg. And anyway if you did say How old are you to still be carrying a doll? I would just give you a blank look back like, Why do you care?

I was dead asleep b-day morning when I felt my new futon mattress shaking. My dreams told me to get out of bed and into the doorway: earthquake. The feel of flannel pjs rubbing my arms and the smell of hyper munchkins' Cocoa Puffs breath told my sleep otherwise. I opened my eyes to see the faces of my half-sibs, Ashley and Joshua.

"Happy Birthday, Cyd Charisse's Pieces!" Ash said in what sounded like basic yelling but was probably an attempt at a song. The futon frame creaked under her weight as she jumped on the bed. Ash is a second grader in age, but a fifth grader in weight percentile. The actual fifth grader, Josh, attempted to roll himself into the futon mattress, as if he wanted to mummify himself in it. Perhaps asking for the new futon as a birthday present to replace

the old puke princess four-poster bed that used to be in my room--my mother's decorator's plot to curse my sleep--was not my smartest idea ever.

Ash said, "Guess what Mommy and Daddy got you for your birthday!"

"You're ruining it right now!" I groaned. I grabbed her and pulled her down onto the bed next to me. Ash and Josh were asleep when I'd returned the night before from New York, so this was the first time I'd seen them since getting home to San Francisco. I'd only been gone a few weeks that felt like an eternity, so I needed to see if Josh and Ash looked as different as I felt. They looked the same, maybe cuter-. Josh, with his Buster Brown cut of light blond hair and baby blue eyes, got our mother's Scandinavian good looks. Ash, with her round cherub face and brown curls, takes after Sid-dad, who has a few brown hairs left on his mostly bald head but, like Ash, is always rosy-cheeked and happy to finish your dessert. After this past summer, I am well aware that I am a skinny, freakishly tall, black-haired clone of my bio-dad Frank, at least in looks. In personality I aspire elsewhere.

Ash rubbed her head of brown curls against my shoulder, then turned her eyes onto Gingerbread, lying on the pillow next to me.

"I think Gingerbread should effin come live with me," she whispered in my ear. Ash's summer camp must have had some kinda charm school effect to result in the successful downgrade of Ash's favorite F-word to effin. And, she'd had the decency to know not to speak such thoughts aloud in front of Gingerbread, although Gingerbread probably knew anyway. Wow, progress.

"No effin way," I whispered back. If I hadn't left Gingerbread behind in New York with Miss Loretta, her gingerbread-baking spiritual mother, why would I leave her with Ash, who is a holy terror? Although Gingerbread was getting cranky about my gallivanting around and had hinted that she might prefer a more laid-back lifestyle, like lying on someone's bed and watching over the other dolls.

Josh climbed on top of my stomach. "Mommy and Daddy got you something else besides this new bed. They got you a crappuccino machine." His mouth blubbered out a farting noise.

"It's CAPP-U-CCINO, not CRAPP-U-CCINO," I said. And ugh, I appreciated the idea behind Sid and Nancy's b-day prezzie, but not the reality of it. The whole point of my grand master plan to one day become the world's greatest caf owner is to get out of the house, not stay in it. That's why one says, "I'm going out for a coffee," not, "Oh, let me whip up some decaf capps for the parentals and let's all watch a feel-good chick flick together." *Shudders.*

"Did you see the cupcakes last night?" Josh asked.

When I returned home from the airport, Ash and Josh had left a present on the dining room table for me: mini chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting arranged on the table to spell out the words HAPPY BIR...

'Ash and Josh ran out of cupcakes after bir, Cupcake," Sid-dad had said when he found me in the dining room. He wrapped me in a bear hug, except I was the bear; he just comes up to my chin. My stepfather, but more than that cuz he's the only dad I've ever really known, was giving Ash and Josh credit for the cupcakes, but I knew the idea was his. When my mother and I first came to live with him, to

his Pacific Heights house that when I was five seemed bigger than any castle I could have imagined in the Magic Kingdom, he took me by the hand to my new bedroom, where a tray of cupcakes were waiting for me on the dresser. The cupcakes spelled out, WELCOME HOME CYD CHARISSE. Nancy had tipped him off that I had a thing for cupcakes, which I have always considered infinitely superior to whole cakes. Cupcakes are their own little independent beings. That's why when Sid-dad isn't calling me Little Hellion, he uses his other pet name for me, Cupcake. If Frank, my bio-dad, ever had a nickname for me, it would probably be a Native American one, like Relieved When She's Gone.

I told Josh, "Yes, Hyper Boy, I saw the cupcakes, and thank you very much." I flipped down the bedcover on my other side and he plopped down next to me. I was trying to imagine ever lying down in bed with lisBETH and Danny, my half-sibs in New York. LisBETH and Danny are adults and there just wouldn't be room for all three of us in the bed anyway, but I still couldn't see the three of us close like I am with Ash and Josh. LisBETH, not Elisabeth, not Beth, lisBETH, is sort of like my mom--annoying, but there for you when you need her--but no way would I feel comfortable having a morning convo with lisBETH, eye-to-eye with bed head and teeth that hadn't been brushed yet. I barely know her. With Danny--maybe, someday.

Josh said, "If you were in New York this summer visiting your other sister and brother, how come they aren't our sister and brother too?"

Honestly I am all for being the cool big sister lying in her birthday futon in the middle of an Ash-Josh sandwich as they played with my hair on either side of me. But I do

not think it is my responsibility to explain to them about how Nancy, our mom, was a twenty-year-old dancer-turned-model in New York who got pregnant by a married man, had me, dumped the married man, and later moved to San Fran to marry Sid-dad and procreate Josh and Ash with him, then waited almost seventeen years to send me back to New York to meet my bio-dad and his two grown kids. So I just told Josh, "Because the stepmonster fairy who lives in the attic decided I was the chosen one."

I was saved from further explanation by Nancy standing in the doorway to my bedroom. She was wearing a pale pink yoga outfit. With the pants cut low to show off her flat stomach and matching pert pink bra top, her blond hair pulled into a ponytail on top of her head, and a face of pink lip gloss and pink cheeks, she looked more like a teen queen than a close-to-forty mother of three. For a moment she looked happy to see the three of us lying together on my new bed, then her perfectly plucked eyebrows burrowed in and she frowned just a little, her classic joyless society wife pose, like she'd just bit into a lemon.