Fade Out by Nova Ren Suma

problem with child-labor laws or his parents own the place and they let him answer the phone. Well, it’s not my fault he sounds like a girl.
    I give him my order (pepperoni and peppers, I’m curious) and before he can hang up I ask if there’s a girl who delivers the pizzas for Pie-in-the-Sky.
    And he says, “What girl? Joe will be there in forty-five minutes or less with your pizza,” and that’s that.
    So here I am. No closer to explaining away the girl in the polka-dot tights and just now remembering I don’t really even like peppers.
    “You didn’t just order peppers, did you?” my mom says from the doorway. “I thought you hated peppers.”
    “‘Hate’ is a strong word, Mom,” I tell her. “I’m trying to give peppers a chance. I’m trying to be mature.”
    “Really?” my mom says, raising an eyebrow. She’s got the start of a smile on her face—which is reason alone to suck down a few peppers, people. “You’re trying to be mature now?”
    (Is she thinking of the time I “ran away” in protest so I wouldn’t have to go to my dad’s? Is she thinking of the time she asked me to stay put in the car and I took off after the imaginary kitten?)
    “Yes,” I say. I grab two plates from the cabinet even though it’ll be almost an hour before we can even use them. “So how do you think I’m doing?”
    “I think you have a ways to go,” she says, then sighs. “But don’t we all.”

 
     
    8

Some Things You Might Not Know
    H ere are some things you might not know about Rita Hayworth. Sure, a lot of people know she started off as a dancer, and that Rita Hayworth wasn’t even her real name (it was Margarita Cansino before the movie people made her change it), but there’s more.
    She was shy. Like, really shy. You wouldn’t expect a movie star famous all over the globe to want to stay home instead of go out to parties, but Rita did. She was glamorous on the outside, but inside she was maybe just like you. Or me.
    She had trouble with love. She got married and divorced, married and divorced, like five times. One time she married a prince, but even that didn’t work out.
    When she died, of Alzheimer’s, she didn’t know who she was. That’s the disease where you forget the people you know and the things you once did. That makes me sad, to think Rita didn’t know how incredible she was.
    Here are some things you might not know about my mom. Right now, all you know is that she cries a lot, and her face looks like a hot-pink balloon when she does, and she’s so sensitive, bottles of water can turn her to stone. But she’s also funny. She makes me laugh when she’s not blowing her nose into a wad of tissues. And she’s smart—she wouldn’t be managing editor of the town paper if she wasn’t.
    Her favorite color is blue, that pale turquoise-y blue you can notice in the sky sometimes on a real nice day if you live in the middle of nowhere. I’m not sure what the name of it is. Anyway, a lot of stuff around our house is that color blue. Our mailbox is that color blue. The kitchen cabinets are that color blue. The plates we eat our pizza on are that color blue.
    So when my mom is doing okay—picking the peppers off her pepperoni pizza and sticking them on the edge of her blueplate—I tell her that her house is so much prettier than Cheryl’s house. I tell her I love her blue curtains and I love her blue candlesticks and I love the blue rug by the door where we wipe off the mud from our shoes. It’s the perfect color, I tell her, that muddy rug.
    I’m on a roll, but she stops me.
    “Dani, you don’t have to say all that.”
    So maybe I’m being too nice. But she needs that right now, don’t you think? If you look at her a certain way—like sideways, and while squinting, and if the kitchen lights were a touch dimmer, and if she had her hair up, and lipstick on even though she hardly ever wears lipstick—she might look almost exactly like Rita Hayworth. Almost exactly.
    The phone