Tune in Anytime - Hardcover

Caroline B. Cooney is the author of The Face on the Milk Carton (an IRA—CBC Children’s Choice) and its companions Whatever Happened to Janie? (an ALA Best Book for Young Adults) and The Voice on the Radio (an American Bookseller Pick of the Lists). Her other novels include What Child Is This? and Burning Up.
From the Paperback edition.

How to star in a soap opera.

There are probably many ways to break into soap operas, but one way, Sophie discovered, is just to stand there. As your parents lose their minds, their sense and their money, you will be the star. The one around whom all the action pivots. This will be a show you cannot quit. A script you cannot rewrite. You will be stuck on the set, surrounded by bad lines and bad actors. Every morning, you will say, “No more episodes! End this!”

But in a soap opera, there is always another episode.

By the time Sophie Olivette realized that she was a star in her own soap, the action had been going on for some time. She just hadn’t had the TV on. Or she’d been watching some other channel.

It was as if Sophie’s father walked in, grabbed the remote and turned up the volume.

Chapter 1

Sophie loved the sound of her father in the house, and when she heard him bounding up the stairs, she hopped off the bed where she and Jem and Ash were sitting to paint each other’s nails. She had so much to tell him. It had been the kind of school day where everything explodes—Sophie had whipped the history exam, given her first ever speech (without even throwing up), been awesome in field hockey, and now she had incredible fingertips.

The carpeting on the stair and the upper hall was thick and nubbly. It had muffled the sound of a second pair of feet.

Sophie grabbed the doorjamb to stop her momentum. She could not fling herself on top of her father, nor order him to sit quietly and listen to her brilliant three-minute A-plus speech. His arms were full, and he was the one about to deliver a speech.

No, thought Sophie. Please, no.

She was not addressing her father, but some Power that ought to protect marriage.

But her father was bursting. “Sophie!” he cried joyfully. “Persia and I,” he told his daughter, “are getting married.”

Jem and Ash were still holding their fingers stiffly and separately, like children about to trace around their hands. They sat on the bed, right behind Sophie, and heard every word and saw every gesture.

Sophie would never forgive Dad for telling her in front of people, leaving her nowhere to move. There was no way to make up her own version. No way to pretend it wasn’t happening and didn’t matter. She could not call her sister and talk it through, or pick up a brick and throw it at Dad and hope he was scarred for life.

Sophie tried to stare her father down, but he was not looking at her. He had not looked at her in weeks. He saw only Persia.

How quickly it had happened. As fast as a computer crashing, that fast had her parents’ marriage gone down.

Only two months before, Sophie’s happily married parents had been proud and nervous: their older daughter, Marley, was going off to college.

Marley was one of those capable, competent people who stride across rooms and life and get what they want on the first try, mostly by stepping on other people. Sharing a life, a house and a high school with Marley was exhausting. That last week of summer, when Mother and Dad drove away with Marley and her million possessions, Sophie had twirled around the empty house, clapping and yelling, “Marley’s not here!” and then falling down on her bed laughing.

Life without Marley! It was a beautiful thought.

At college, however, Marley faced a problem. She was assigned a roommate. Marley was not a roommate kind of person. People who must get their own way are difficult to live with in a space ten feet by twelve feet.

The only kind of roommate that would have worked for Marley would have been the submissive, doormat kind. The kind who said, “Oh, Marley, please let me fold your laundry too.”

Instead, Marley got Persia, who was a few years older, having been a model before starting college. Marley, sharpened by years of bickering with her sister, expected to control Persia.

And what had Persia expected? A regular old freshman year?

Sophie could have asked, but she and Persia were not on speaking terms. Only Sophie knew this, because Persia had a great capacity for not noticing other people’s emotions. Persia was untouched by irritation or anger or even homicidal threats.

In any event, after only ten days of college, Marley decided to come home for the weekend. Invoking some ancient rule that roomies could always go home with roommates, Persia came too.

The rest was history.