The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Julie Schumacher

  Jacket photograph copyright © 2012 by Ghislain & Marie David de Lossy/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon in a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Susan Bergholz Literary Services for permission to reprint excerpts from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, copyright © 1984 by Sandra Cisneros. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York, NY, and Lamy, NM.

  Brief excerpts in this book have been reprinted from the following: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin; Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; The Awakening by Kate Chopin; and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schumacher, Julie.

  The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls / Julie Schumacher. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When four very different small-town Delaware high school girls are forced to join a mother-daughter book club over summer vacation, they end up learning about more than just the books they read.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98571-3

  [1. Books and reading—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Book clubs (Discussion groups)—Fiction. 5. Delaware—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S3916Un 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011010266

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Bella and Emma and Lawrence Jacobs—

  my all-time favorite real-life raucous group

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  “The Yellow Wallpaper”

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Frankenstein

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  The Left Hand of Darkness

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  The House on Mango Street

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Awakening

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Name: Adrienne Haus

  Assignment: Summer Essay

  Instructor: Ms. Radcliffe

  Class: English 11 Advanced Placement

  Thesis statement: Book clubs can kill you. (This essay ends with a person drowning. It turns out you don’t need much water for a person to drown.)

  Essay options: Check A or B. Whichever you choose, you must include a bibliography and demonstrate—in your own words—an understanding of at least twenty literary terms listed on the English 11 AP website.

  [ ] Option A: argument and analysis

  [X] Option B: creative narrative. For example, how have the books you chose to read for this assignment affected you?

  Please explain your project in the space below.

  I was planning to choose option A because I thought it would be easier. But that was before I dragged myself through the gates of the West New Hope Community Swim Club, before the monster in the closet and the hermaphrodite sex scene and the stolen pills and the revolving blue and red lights of the ambulance and the crazy woman who locked herself away in a yellow room.

  I want to apologize for some of the things you’ll read in this essay: they might not be appropriate for the assignment. In The Left Hand of Darkness Genly says, “I’ll make my report as if I told a story.” That’s what I’m going to do. And I’ll explain how the books affected me—because whoever I was at the beginning of the summer, I am not that person anymore.

  1. SETTING: The place where the author puts the characters. It’s like setting a table, except that instead of using plates and silverware, you’re using people.

  On our first day of membership in what CeeCee would later call the Unbearable Book Club, I was sitting in a plastic lounge chair at the West New Hope, Delaware, community pool, reading a dog-eared copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” According to the thermometer on the lifeguard stand, it was ninety-seven degrees. My hands were sweating so much they left stains on the pages.

  CeeCee paused by the empty recliner next to mine. She was wearing a white crocheted bikini and dark sunglasses, and I saw a copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper” sticking out of her polka-dot bag. CeeCee’s thighs didn’t touch at the top, I noticed. We weren’t friends.

  “Don’t you think we’re too old for this?” she asked.

  I wasn’t sure she was talking to me: I wasn’t the sort of person CeeCee Christiansen usually talked to. The two of us chatting? It was like a dolphin hanging out with a squirrel. “It wasn’t my idea,” I said as a river of sweat worked its way down my spine. “I think our mothers set it up. They were in a yoga class together.”

  CeeCee didn’t glance in my direction. She unpony-tailed her long blond hair and let it fall toward the ground like a satin curtain. “Believe me,” she said. “It wasn’t my mother’s idea. She doesn’t have the imagination.”

  “Good to know.” I wiped my hands on my towel.

  Twenty feet from the edges of our chairs, across a stretch of cement too hot to stand on, the pool flashed and glittered, a turquoise rectangle full of multicolored bodies leaping in and out of the water like flying fish.

  CeeCee was staring at one of the lifeguards, who was staring back at her and twirling his whistle around his finger on a string: three twirls to the right, three to the left. She had apparently finished talking to me, so I picked up my book.

  “You’re actually reading it.” She sat down and took the cap off a bottle of sunblock. When I turned toward her she smiled a closed-lipped smile, making me think of an alligator sunning itself on a riverbank.

  “That’s the assignment,” I said. “We have to read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and four other books.”

  “And learn a list of literary terms and write an essay,” CeeCee said. “This teacher’s insane. No one else assigns that kind of homework during the summer. I don’t care if it is AP.”

  I squeegeed the sweat from my eyebrows with an index finger. I didn’t mind doing the reading—whatever I read would be more interesting than my day-to-day life—but I wasn’t looking forward to the essay. Most of the papers I wrote for school came back with suggestions in the margins about how my ideas could be organized. “I can’t find an argument here,” my tenth-grade history teacher had said.

  “So you’re not going to read the books?” I asked CeeCee. I didn’t know Ms. Radcliffe yet, but she had a reputation for being stern and precise. I imagined her snapping a steel-edged ruler on my desk.

  “It doesn’t matter if you read them.�
� CeeCee squirted a white ribbon of lotion onto her stomach. “Most of the books we read for school are crap. I usually just read the summary online, or I read the first couple of pages and then skip to the end.” She glanced at my copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” “You’re planning to read the whole thing?”

  “I think that’s the point of a book,” I said. “You start at the beginning and you read to the end.” I hadn’t learned how to read until halfway through first grade, and I still felt grateful to my teacher, Ms. Hampl, who had knelt by my desk one afternoon and smoothed her finger across the parallel rows of two-dimensional black marks in my book—and as if she had opened a hidden door, I felt the patterned surface break and give way, and the words let me in. I still loved opening a book and feeling like I was physically entering the page, the ordinary world fizzing and blurring around the edges until it disappeared.

  “You don’t have to take Advanced Placement,” I pointed out.

  “Right. Only the helpless take regular English.” CeeCee squeezed some lotion onto her arms, which were thin and hairless. “AP classes have two kinds of kids in them: the kids who are smart, and the kids who don’t want to spend the year in a room full of losers. Do you have a four-oh?”

  “A four-oh grade average? No.” I wasn’t sure what my average was. Teachers often referred to me as a student with “a lot of potential.” This meant they expected me to be smart; but in fact my mind was often packing a mental suitcase and wandering off on its own. I sometimes pictured all the things I had learned during the previous week at school jumping into brightly painted railroad cars and disappearing into the distance on a speeding train.

  CeeCee scanned the perimeter of the pool, presumably for more-worthwhile people to talk to. The pickings were slim. “So what’s your deal?” she asked. “I don’t really know you. Who are you supposed to be?”

  Who was I supposed to be? I was Adrienne Haus. I was fifteen. I lived in West New Hope with my mother, who had signed me up for a summer book club. Now I was reading—or trying to read—a book at the pool.

  CeeCee recapped her lotion. “Are you a religious freak?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “A shoplifter?”

  “No.”

  “A partier?”

  “No.” I was waiting for her to come up with something else. “Are those my only choices?”

  “Those are three of them.” She picked up her cell phone and frowned at its screen. “You’d look better if you parted your hair on the other side. Why do you have that thing on your leg?”

  One of the lifeguards, his calves dangling like dark, hairy fruit from the perch of his chair, blew his whistle at a cluster of boys who were holding each other’s heads underwater.

  “It’s a knee brace,” I said.

  “Can’t you take it off?” CeeCee asked. “It’s going to stink.”

  “I don’t think it stinks.” I sniffed at the thick black cloth on my leg, then gently unfastened its Velcro straps and looked at my knee: it was swollen and fleshy, like an unidentified vegetable discovered at the bottom of a bin. “I fractured my kneecap,” I said, talking more to myself than to CeeCee. “And tore my ACL. I’m supposed to exercise my leg in the water.”

  I expected CeeCee to be disgusted by the sight of my scar—a pink wrinkled worm—but she lifted her sunglasses and leaned toward me for a better look.

  “You probably heard about it at school,” I said. “An ambulance came for me after lunch.” I explained to CeeCee that about a week before the end of the school year, I had tripped over nothing in a crowded stairwell, and even before my knee hit the metal riser I understood that the six-week canoe trip I had signed up for with my best friend, Liz, was going to happen without me and I would be stuck in West New Hope, alone. “Liz left last weekend,” I said. “I saved four hundred dollars toward that trip.” Liz was probably paddling across the Canadian border on her way to being friends with someone else. “Anyway,” I said. “You probably knew most of that already.”

  “Actually, no,” CeeCee said. “I know nothing about you. You’re like an Etch A Sketch to me. Or a dry-erase board. You know: blank.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She crossed her legs and waved halfheartedly to someone on the other side of the diving board. “It is a coincidence, though,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here, either. I should be in France. My sister’s studying there, for the year. But my parents canceled my trip because I dented their car. One of their cars. They got all freaked out because I don’t have a license.”

  “You have a permit?” I asked.

  A little boy wearing dinosaur swim trunks paused by our chairs.

  “Not yet. Anyway, as punishment,” CeeCee said, “because I was such an ‘irresponsible girl,’ the parentals signed me up for summer school. Apparently, sitting in an unair-conditioned classroom with Monsieur Crowne every day for six weeks is the perfect way to learn French. It’s much better than spending the summer in Paris. I don’t like little kids,” she said to the boy in the dinosaur trunks. He wandered away.

  With her phone, CeeCee took a picture of her painted toenails in front of the pool. “When I think about being stuck in West New Hope in a literary play group with my mother I want to scoop my eyeballs out with a spoon,” she said. “This town is hell during the summer. There’s nobody here.”

  I knew what she meant. The only things to do in town involved the pool and a Softee Freeze and a decrepit mini-putt and a handful of unpopular stores in the badly spelled Towne Centre. The joke about West New Hope was that there was no East New Hope, and there was No Hope. We lived in a flat, oversized suburb west of nothing, a dot on the map in a state people drove through to get somewhere else.

  Besides, most of the people our age who had hung around during previous summers had gotten jobs (all of which were taken by the time I applied, with my leg in a brace), or had left town to do something fulfilling and educational: they were working in orphanages or curing diseases or preventing war. My plan for the summer? Relax, read, and spend some unstructured leisure time not being at school.

  I looked around the pool for people over the age of twelve and under thirty. “There’s Jill D’Amato. She’s in our book club.” I pointed. Past the lifeguard stand and the shuffleboard court and the baby pool, between the men’s and women’s locker rooms (a series of dripping cinder-block caverns that always smelled of Band-Aids and feet), Jill was working the snack bar. She sat in a folding chair under an awning, selling Italian water ice and soda and chips and ice cream. When I’d walked past her earlier, she was reading an SAT prep book and a thesaurus. Jill’s mother had also attended the infamous yoga class that spawned the idea of the mother-daughter book club of No Hope, DE.

  “Oh, good God,” CeeCee said. “I know that girl. She was in choir with me last year. She likes country music. And she’s sitting there studying. Bizarre. Is she a friend of yours?”

  “Not really.”

  Jill looked up as if she had heard us.

  “So who do you usually hang out with?” CeeCee asked.

  “Usually … Liz,” I said, adjusting the top of my bathing suit, which appeared to be losing its elastic. “Liz Zerendow. But she’s—”

  “Gone for the summer,” CeeCee finished. “I already heard.”

  I didn’t bother to ask her who she was friends with because the answer was obvious: the ruling class of glamorous despots who floated like rare and colorful aquatic creatures through the toxic fishbowl that was our school. My general goal—and it appeared to have succeeded—was to remain forever undetectable to their radar.

  CeeCee seemed to have temporarily run out of questions. I leaned back in my chair. The heat was barbaric. The sky, cloudless and flat, was pressing down on us like a steam iron. I shut my eyes and slipped into a coma for a little while, dreaming about Liz paddling away in a silver canoe on a strand of blue water.

  I woke up when the lifeguards blared their whistles. They called for a buddy check—CeeCee lig
htly touched my wrist and said “Check”—followed by fifteen minutes of adult swim.

  I rubbed my eyes and sat up and found my place in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The story was strange, but I liked it. It was about a woman who was depressed and whose husband thought she would feel better if they rented a house in the middle of nowhere so she could spend all her time doing nothing in a yellow room.

  I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer.

  “Are you ignoring me?” CeeCee asked. “I said, why did you agree?”

  “Why did I agree to what?” I tugged at my bathing suit again. Bathing suits never seemed to look good on me. My body was thick in the middle, almost cylindrical. The word trunk—as in trees and elephants—often sprang unfortunately to mind.

  “Why did you agree to be in the book club?” CeeCee watched me struggle with my bathing suit. “You said it wasn’t your idea.”

  I noticed the waterfall of her hair and the silver rings on three of her fingers and her hip bones poking out on either side of the perfect flat plane of her golden stomach. “I burned our house down,” I said. “I had a choice between book club and jail.”

  CeeCee turned her head slowly and looked straight at me for the first time. “That was funny,” she said. “Unless you think you’re making fun of me.”

  I went back to my book.

  Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able—to dress and entertain, and order things.

  “I wouldn’t mind as much if it was a father-daughter book club,” CeeCee said. “Fathers aren’t as annoying.” She popped the top on a can of soda. “Are your parentals fairly normal?”

  “I just have a mom,” I said, still looking at my book. “I don’t have a dad.”

  “Cool. He’s dead?” CeeCee sipped from her drink.

  “No. He’s just not around.”

  “So he ran off? Is he a deadbeat?”

  “I never met him. He’s not … part of the picture.” I went back to the yellow room and the gate at the stairs and the bars on the windows.