What Happens Here - Softcover

Chapter One

Months of begging and pleading had done nothing to change one fact: I was going to Europe and Lindsay was not.

She was lying on my bed, flipping through my Lonely Planet guide to London, and I was packing and pouting. "If you don't quit it," she said, "I'm going to loosen the caps on all your ridiculously cute trial-size toiletries and pack them next to your favorite top."

I folded a T-shirt. "I'm sorry. I just wish it had turned out differently.""Yeah, well, me, too." She tossed the book into my suitcase. "But if anyone should be pouting, it's me."

She was right, of course. I was going to Europe. I was living out the dream we'd shared since we were little. Lindsay would be stuck here in the oven that is Vegas in summertime, just going to work and going home at night and minding our dog, Burt, who was staying with her family while we were gone.

My parents had announced on Christmas -- when my sister, Zoe, and I no doubt seemed disappointed with that morning's meager offerings around the tree -- that after years ("Years!") of saving and planning, they were going to take us to Europe for two weeks come summer.

"Two whole weeks?" Zoe had said, clearly not entirely pleased with the prospect of being apart from her beloved loser boyfriend, Johnny, for such a long stretch of time. She was two years older than me but was in the habit of acting like a petulant child.

"You'll live," my mother had said, and then she'd turned to me, expectantly. My father did the same.

They no doubt expected my response to be "Oh my God!" or "All my dreams are coming true!" After all, I was the one who was always talking about backpacking through Europe and Southeast Asia, spending summers in Tuscany or at some culinary institute in Paris. I was the one who had plastered the walls of my room with pages ripped from travel magazines of amazing places around the world, places I hoped to someday see firsthand. I was, in a word, obsessed with the world beyond Vegas and even more so with the world beyond the U.S. But going to Europe was one thing; going with your family was another.

I said, "Can Lindsay come?"

My father shook his head and my mother tightened her bathrobe belt, probably imagining using it to strangle the two ingrates she'd raised. She said, "We should get dressed. We'll be late for Mass." Which was kind of a funny thing to say, considering we only went to Mass two times a year, on Christmas and Easter. Like anyone was going to miss us or even notice if we were late.

A few days later, when I was still asking the same question about Lindsay, my mother said, "I'll talk to your father. But even if we say it's okay, you have to understand, honey, Judy just might not go for it, for a million reasons. The money...I'm not sure I'd let you go with them." Judy was Lindsay's mom -- Mrs. Woods to me -- and also happened to be my mother's best friend. Her husband, Lindsay and Noah's dad, had shocked us all a few years before by running off to shack up with a Vegas showgirl. We seriously never saw the guy again and the funny thing was that Mrs. Woods seemed to be the one who minded least.

When my father agreed to our asking Lindsay along, Lindsay and I knew a miracle had occurred. Because my father wasn't exactly the warm and fuzzy kind of dad who'd think it was a peachy idea to invite his daughter's friend on a family vacation; my whole life long, he'd been the bad cop to my mom's good cop, saying no to sleepover parties and dates and all kinds of purchases, and there was a part of me that was, if not scared of him exactly, then certainly wary. But my mother's persuasive powers were clearly operating at their finest -- she convinced him! -- and so she promised to talk to Lindsay's mom.

Thinking Mrs. Woods was sure to agree -- that my mother had gotten that bit wrong -- Lindsay and I were giddy for a few days, imagining European boyfriends and going shopping on the Champs-Élysés. We paid more attention in French class than ever before, even tried to text each other in French -- no small task considering it was hard enough to understand Lindsay's texting in English; she abbreviated to the point of frustration, then got annoyed when you had to text back "what?" We spent hours on the web, researching the places on the itinerary my parents had selected: London, Paris, Rome, Venice, all the top cities on Lindsay's and my dream list. These were the cities you had to knock off right out of the gate, the way I saw it. If you'd been to these cities, you were no longer an amateur; after these cities you could expand your horizons in any direction: Amsterdam, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Sydney, Buenos Aires. It would be good to get started at the age of sixteen since there was so much of the world to see. But Lindsay's mom said no and we were devastated. For a while, Lindsay had pressed for a reason -- "just tell me why!" she'd said maybe two thousand times -- but all her mom would offer was "because I said so."

* * *

"How many pairs of underwear are you bringing?" Zoe said as she walked into my bedroom in a backbend. Her black hair was in a ponytail, the tip of it brushing the floor. I resisted the temptation to grab a ballpoint pen and draw a face on her upside-down chin. Burt followed her into the room and climbed up on my bed to rest his head on Lindsay's legs. He adored her.

"Well, this is a new trick," Lindsay said with a quick glance at Zoe. She played with Burt's wiry fur; he was a purebred Welsh terrier -- an expensive breed that my father splurged on due to completely uncharacteristic passion for the Welshie's characteristic curly hair and long flat face -- and couldn't have been cuter if he tried.

"The crab walks like this." Zoe made a quick turn, then shimmied sideways on her hands and feet. "I want to show them I'll take any part they have. Even if it's the stinkin' crab."

The fact that Zoe wanted to join Cirque du Soleil -- she'd been training as a dancer and an acrobat in addition to going to college -- was probably the number one cause of arguments over the dinner table in our house, but Zoe was not in the least bit discouraged. She walked around on her hands, she watched TV upside down on the couch, and her precious trampoline out back was second only to standing in front of a mirror, admiring herself, as her favorite place to be. Sometimes it was like living with a monkey -- a very vain, annoying monkey -- and when we were younger, especially, her admitted natural ability would drive me insane. She could slip into the smallest cabinets and closets so she was always a nightmare to play hide-and-seek with. Games usually ended either with me in tears screaming "I can't find her!" or, when I was old enough to know better, just going into the den and watching TV until she got sick of hiding wherever she was.

"Doesn't that hurt?" Lindsay asked as my sister made a full rotation, belly stretched high in the air. My best friend has always sort of been wryly amused with Zoe; the two of them had almost nothing in common.

"No pain, no gain." Zoe rested her butt on the floor, then pushed up again. I couldn't imagine having arms that strong.

"Don't you get dizzy?" Lindsay asked.

"I'm getting used to it." Zoe pushed herself up to stand. "I think." She sat on my bed, looking a bit woozy; her sharp nose seemed out of focus on her face.

"Do you actually have an audition yet?" Lindsay asked, and Zoe tilted her head in contempt at Lindsay. Zoe was mostly all talk, no action, but she constantly insisted she was just honing her craft. You had to apply to be invited to audition for Cirque du Soleil, apparently, and Zoe didn't want to apply for an invitation before she was ready. At least that's what she said. The rest of us were pretty sure that day would never come and my parents, in fact, were counting on it. The idea of their oldest daughter running off to join the circus -- even if it was an arty upscale circus -- didn't exactly thrill them. Adding to their hatred of the idea was the fact that Johnny, who'd held the title of boyfriend longer than anyone would've expected, wanted to run off and join the circus, too. In the meantime, Zoe and Johnny both worked at this totally cheesy pirate show outside the Treasure Island casino, where Zoe was one of the sirens who supposedly lured bare-chested pirates like Johnny into troublesome waters. We'd all gone down to watch Zoe's first show when she got cast, and then had never gone again. It was too painful to watch.

"There's a crab?" I wanted to redirect the conversation.

"Yeah. There's a scene on a beach in Ká." Zoe sounded excited now; Ká was the Cirque du Soleil show at the MGM Grand casino on the Strip. "These guys sort of have a fight with a huge crab."

"Well" -- Lindsay stood up -- "as fascinating as this is, if we're gonna go, Chloe, we should go now." She usually got tired of Zoe about that quickly.

"Where to, kids?" Zoe asked.

"None of your business," I answered. I couldn't believe that once we got on the plane the next day, there'd pretty much be no escape from Zoe for two weeks.

"Well then, how many?" Zoe said.

"How many what?" She was already annoying me and we hadn't even left.

Zoe bent back into her backbend to follow us out of my room, feet leading the way. "Pairs of underwear?"

Zoe had blocked my car in, as per usual, so we walked over to Lindsay's house -- just around the block; we could actually see each other's bedroom windows over the fence between our yards -- so we could take hers. Her older brother, Noah, with whom I was always falling in and occasionally out of love, was just pulling up, loud music blaring from his car. He was studying hotel management at a college in Arizona and interned at the Four Seasons -- a superupscale hotel -- when he was home for the summer. Ever since he started working there, he seemed to look down on casinos like Paris and the Venetian and New York-New York with their theme-park attractions, so the fact that I worked at New York-New York, selling photos of people taken on the roller coaster, probably didn't impress him much....