' Sometimes, if Lindsay's dad wanted some quality alone with his girlfriend, Lindsay was allowed to stay his apartment alone and order in whatever she wanted, watch whatever she wanted on TV, surf the Internet, and talk for as long as she desired on the phone. Lindsay celebrated Hanukah with her dad and Christmas with her mom, so she got tons more presents than Sarah. She was going to have a Bat Mitzvah and a Sweet Sixteen -- Sarah and Lindsay were already planning these things. If Lindsay ever had a fight with her mom, Lindsay would say that she was going to hop on the train and go straight to Manhattan, and then her mom would cry and let her have her way. If she got in a fight with her dad (which was rare, because she only saw him two days a week during the school year) Lindsay would let her eyes fill with tears and say: 'But daddy, let's not fight because I have to go home on Sunday night,' and he'd ignore Lindsay's C. In pre-Algebra.

didn't know why Lindsay's parents got divorced, although they had been apart as long as she could remember. Sometimes if Lindsay said something Sarah's mom didn't like about boys, Sarah would hear her mother say on the phone to someone 'well, what do you expect, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, I don't know what Joan was thinking when she married him' and this made Sarah wish that she had an equally good excuse for her bad behavior. She wished she could shake her long ironed brown hair and say 'well, my parents are divorced' like Lindsay. Sarah K. only had short curly black hair and there wasn't anything she could say about her parents, other than her mother was a schoolteacher and her father was a financial advisor. Sarah wasn't even sure what a financial advisor did -- but she did know that if her parents were divorced she would have two lives, instead of just two BORING parents, and more of something is always better than less.