Page 19 of Wreck Me

But she corrected herself. “I mean,Ican get some scissors. Be right back.”

By the time she returned, he’d gotten everything else for their dinner out and ready, including a container of potato salad, another of fresh berries, and a selection of beverage options. They opened and skewered their veggie dogs in relative silence, then sat in their chairs as they held them over the fire.

The recent Santa Ana had scrubbed the skies clean, and the night was crystal clear. Stars began popping out all over with unusual brightness for Los Angeles. In the grass nearby, the dogs lay in a pile. The muted roar of the nearby freeway was frequently interrupted by grunts and snores of happy doggy satisfaction.

Ginny checked her veggie dog for doneness, then returned it to the fire. “It’s stupid embarrassing how much I’m enjoying a cookout in my front yard.”

“Why embarrassing?”

“I mean, we're surrounded by chain link fences and dilapidated houses but, I can’t help it. It’s been years since I sat around a fire. My dad used to insist we all go camping twice a summer. He was about as organized as me, so there was always something essential that he forgot, but that only made it more fun. One year we spent a whole evening whittling spoons so we’d be able to eat our morning oatmeal. Another time we fell asleep in the car making up stories about how happy our tent was that it got to stay home.”

A flame licked at Ginny’s veggie dog, and it caught fire. “Oh, watch out,” Nico said, gesticulating toward it.

“Oops!” she said and laughed as she pulled it away. “Guess it’s done now!”

“You can donate it to the dogs.”

She slipped the partially charcoaled wiener into a waiting bun and began adding ketchup. “It’s fine. I love the way imperfection tastes.”

“Well, okay then,” he said, wondering what the heck that meant as he pulled his perfectly browned link from the fire. “But, somehow, I can’t imagine Monique camping.”

“When we were little, we all enjoyed it, but the older she got, the more she seemed to dislike it,” Ginny said around a mouthful of her dinner. “By the time she was a teenager, shehatedit. Spent most of her time in the car reading. Now she hates nature in general.”

“I guess that gave you more quality time with your dad, though.”

“I had my mom and younger sister too.”

“You have another sister?”

“I do. You actually know her. You just don’t know that you know her.”

Nico froze, his fully loaded veggie dog midway to his mouth. “Oh, no,” he groaned. “Is she my accountant? My home insurance agent? Do you Heppner sisters secretly run my life?”

Ginny laughed again. She laughed a lot, Nico was realizing, and her laugh was relaxed and easy, not forced or anxious. “Nothing like that. You know her because she’s famous. My little sister is Sadie Mason.”

“The surfer movie actress?”

“The very one. She took Grant’s last name.”

He sat back in his plastic chair hard enough to make it creak in complaint. “Wow. So, like, your older sister is this high-powered attorney, and your younger sister is a Hollywood up-and-comer, and?—”

She slid gaze toward him. “And I’m the loser filling in an overachievement sandwich?”

He sat forward again, his eyebrows tented together in worry and alarm. “No, I didn’t mean that.”

She calmly dished potato salad onto her plate. “Sure, you did. Everybody does. I used to think that too. There was this one afternoon—I must have been in third grade—I’d gotten another math test back with a giant, red C-minus slashed across the top of it. Monique, she would have been ten, had just won a chess tournament and a tennis tournament back-to-back. Sadie, who was six, had gotten the lead in a Christmas production ofAnnie. I stared hard in the mirror at my freckle-splattered face and nondescript hair and accepted the fact that I couldn’t compete with either of my sisters—not on athletic ability, not on grades, not on popularity, not on looks, not on pleasing Mom and Dad, not on anything. I felt loved and encouraged by them all, but I was bound to disappoint. I just was.”

“That sounds devastating.”

She grinned at him. “Just the opposite. It was freeing! Since there was no use trying to be like them, I realized I might as well be one hundred percent myself. It took a few years, but now I love the weird way my brain works, the odd things I notice that no one else does, the way I can get completely lost in something I’m curious about, and how easy it is for me to not care about the thousand and one things everybody is so ridiculously obsessed over.” She gave her legs a slow stretch, careful not to unbalance her chair. “To my surprise, I ended up an overachiever myself.”

What was he supposed to reply to that? That she was an overachiever in stealing houses? He shoved half his dog into his mouth to give himself time to think, but even after a good, slow chewing, all he managed to come up with was, “How so?”

“Well, how many people do you know who are truly satisfied with their life just the way it is, and without achieving some big, outward thing? Probably not many.”

He couldn’t help himself. The snark was just too easy. “So, you’re an overachiever in not achieving things?” Again, he worried he’d gone too far, but again, she didn’t get mad.

“Almost. I’m an overachiever in notneedingto achieve things—in valuing my inherent self-worth despite living in a culture that demands constant achievement to earn externally-derived self-worth.”

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