The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan

The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan

Author:Deborah Copaken Kogan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2012-04-03T05:00:00+00:00


• • •

After all six Zanes have pushed down paper plates into overflowing bins, and Zoe has fallen into a postsuckling stupor in her stroller, Jonathan volunteers to take the kids into Harvard Square so Mia can catch up with her friends in peace. Max, whose science fair project on melatonin and sleep cycles won him third place in the California Intel Science Talent Search, will be applying to Harvard in a few months, and he wants a chance to stroll through the Science Center labs unencumbered—Jonathan explains this with a wink to the assembled group—by a mother who can’t tell her Ohms from her oms.

“Look who’s talking,” says Mia.

“I know,” says Jonathan. “How the hell did you and I make a kid who’s into science?” He leaves Mia sitting at a chicken-bone-strewn, fruit-punch-stained table in the company of Clover, who said it’s so weird, she went to get a water for Jane and a Popsicle for Sophie, but when she got back to the moon bounce, they’d vanished; George Crowley, who lived across the hall from Mia and her roommates’ Adams House A-entry suite and had once sold one of his poems to the New Yorker but now sells Subarus to Rhode Island; George’s wife, Sarah, who will not shut up about scrapbooking; Lytton Hepworth, George Crowley’s roommate, with whom none of them have exchanged more than a few sentences (though not for lack of trying) during the twenty years-plus he’s been doing battle with schizophrenia, but who nevertheless showed up at the reunion picnic on a whim after George found him playing three simultaneous games of chess outside Au Bon Pain, and Lytton realized, to his surprise, that his most recent cocktail of meds seemed to be working well enough for him to engage in an actual conversation with an old friend; and Mia’s once-boyfriend Clay Collins, who played Trigorin to her Nina in The Seagull and who is today, though it’s hard for his classmates to fathom the unfairness of genetics, even more handsome, winsome, and everything-else-some than he’d been back in college, when he was trying to cure himself of his yen for men by serially dating female cast members who showed interest. (There were, Clay had been surprised to realize, many a young woman who wanted to date a man who listened to her stories, was raised as a southern gentleman, had a knack for finding the perfect suede jacket in a vintage clothing store, and spent enough hours pirouetting in a dance studio to have the abs of the Calvin Klein models after whom he secretly lusted.)

“I mean, you would not believe the things you can do with a glue gun, some felt, and a little lace,” Sarah drones on, which causes Clay to choke bitchily on his Diet Coke.

“Buttercup,” he says, his southern twang still raw if somewhat tempered by two decades in northern climes, “whatever you’re doing with your scrapbookin’ lady friends in Pawtucket, trust me, there’s a tranny right now in



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