If I Have a Wicked Stepmother, Where's My Prince?

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"Sure, she's coming," said my dad. He looked confused. "Why wouldn't she come?"

Well, why would she? "I thought we were, you know, going into the city just the two of us." I tried to remember the actual conversation in which I'd told him about the exhibit. Had he

mentioned Mara's coming? When I said "together" did he think I meant the three of us together?

Now my dad was frowning. He lowered his voice. "Lucy, I think it would really hurt Mara's

feelings if she thought you didn't want her to come with us."

I lowered mine, too. "It's not that I don't want her to come," I began. But then I didn't know how to finish the sentence. Because quite frankly, that's exactly what it was.

"I thought you liked Mara," said my dad. He didn't seem mad anymore, he seemed hurt, like I'd

opened a present he'd been really excited to give me only to see my face fall.

"I do like Mara," I said. "Really." I went over to where he was sitting and dropped to the floor by the side of his chair. He put his hand on my head.

"Honey, we're a family now," he said. "And families do things together."

I was about to say that plenty of the families I know do things separately, but just as I opened my

mouth, Mara came down the stairs.

"Ta-da!" she said, standing in the archway between

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the living room and the foyer. "Only fifteen minutes late. A personal best."

My dad applauded. "And worth every extra second," he said. She came over and kissed the top

of his head, then bent down and kissed the top of mine. My scalp tingled with a

her lips had touched it.

"Ready?" she asked.

"You betcha," said my dad, standing. He stretched out his hand to help me up from the floor.

"Lucy? You ready?"

I looked up. His face was a mixture of concern and impatience I'd never seen before. "Yeah," I

said, reaching my hand up to take his. "I'm ready."

When we got to the car, I opened the passenger-side door and was about to get in when I saw my

dad looking at me. He frowned and shook his head slightly.

I made a face at him and gestured toward the seat. "Hop in," I said to Mara.

"Now, that's what I call service," she said, slipping into the car. I shut the door and opened the one behind it, sliding across the backseat to sit in the middle. I caught my dad's eye as he looked

into the rearview mirror before backing up.

"You okay back there?" he asked.

But it was more of a statement than a question, so I gave the answer I knew he wanted. "Sure," I said. "Just great."

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"That's what we like to hear," he said, putting the car in reverse.

It certainly is, I thought. It certainly is.

"Thanks to Lucy, we're seeing one of the hottest art shows in New York," my dad said, reaching

across the gearshift and taking Mara's hand. There was no traffic on the parkway, and he was

driving about a thousand miles an hour. "Clemente's huge right now." Lying across the backseat,

I rolled my eyes at the roof of the car.

Mara turned around and smiled at me. "How did you hear about the show?"

I knew she was only talking to me because my dad was there, so I kept my answer as brief as

possible. "From my art teacher."

Mara was still turned around facing me. "It must be nice for you to have a teacher you respect so

much for art class," said Mara.

"Yeah? Why's that?"

Mara's always going on about how important it is that girls have good teachers for math and

science because once they hit high school, they apparently start flunking those subjects. It's

pretty fu

being supported by not just one but two husbands. I think my stepmother's idea of equal

opportunity is women taking every chance they can to charge something to a man's credit card.

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She dropped my dad's hand, reached behind her, and patted my thigh before turning to face

forward again. "Well, I guess I was thinking how important Ms. Daniels must be since your mom

was an artist," she said.

Mara's totally convinced I never talk about my mom because of how traumatized I was by her

death. It's one of the many brilliant theories of human behavior she's concocted from the library

of self-help books she accumulated during her years as a divorcee. I sat up and tried to get my

dad to make eye contact with me by staring in the rearview mirror, but in spite of its being an

overcast day, he had put on his Terminator sunglasses, and I couldn't find his eyes.

"She's okay," I said, and I lay back down again.

The Guggenheim Museum is at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-Ninth Street, directly

across from Central Park. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the strange and beautiful building--a

stack of white circles that expands from the bottom up. Today the museum was packed with

tourists, most of whom looked like they'd just stepped off a cruise ship and couldn't wait to

reboard. As we stood reading the exhibit's introductory panel, Mara, who was leaning up against

my dad, whispered something in his ear, and he laughed and wrapped the arm that wasn't around

her waist across her chest.

Was this what he meant by families doing things together?

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"Hey, Dad, check it out," I said, "wouldn't that be a great name for a band--Prodigious Oeuvre?"

I pointed at the phrase on the panel.

My dad had been whispering something into Mara's ear when I started talking, and now they

both looked at me, like they'd forgotten I was even there.

"What'd you say, honey?" he asked.

Just as I was about to repeat myself, my dad tickled Mara, who let out a yelp and said, "Doug!"

God, compared to the two of them, Madison and Matt actually had a sense of decorum.

"I said I think I'm going to go on ahead," I said.

"How come?" Mara had her fingers intertwined with my dad's. Her cheeks were flushed.

"I kind of have to look at some things for class."

"You mean like an assignment?" asked my dad. He ran a hand through Mara's hair, letting the

fingers rest at the nape of her neck. I thought of last night and Co

Everything had officially gotten just a little too weird.

"Yeah, exactly," I lied. "Like an assignment."

"Well, okay," he said. "I guess we'll find each other at the end."

I was already stepping back, letting myself get lost in the crowd. "Great," I said, nodding

enthusiastically. "I'll see you at the end."

I made my way past decades of Clemente's work,

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too mad to see any of the brightly colored canvases surrounding me. If all he was going to do

was nuzzle Mara, why had my dad even bothered to come? Had he actually wanted to ruin my

day? That was a plausible theory, except that in order to plan on ruining my day, my dad would

have actually had to think about me, something he clearly never did anymore.

And then, suddenly, just as I was considering storming out onto Fifth Avenue and putting Mara,

my dad, and the museum behind me, I was stopped in my tracks by a painting that took up

almost an entire wall: a crazed face of red and green and yellow. The mouth was open in a