Baja Zuma

Chapter 5

CHRISTINA'S P.O.V.

There was nothing good on television this evening and some of us decided to play Pictionary, as usual enlisting Mom as moderator.

It was sisters, Amy, Lauren and I, versus brothers, Alex, Christian and Nick, for our game. Each team had a dry-erase board to mark on. Mom wrote single sentences on each of nine scraps of paper. She showed Alex and me her sentence for Round One, and said, "Go!"

I sketched a microphone with cabling attached to it, then a jowly, ugly face with hairy ear rims. Lauren immediately guessed "Music producer." I held my index finger close to my thumb to indicate she was nearly there.

"Music produces," Lauren tried.

Yes! I nodded, and turned to my board to draw a syringe.

"Hypodermic," Amy guessed. I shook that off.

"Drugs," Lauren said. No. "Medicine." No.

"Dope," Amy ventured.

Yes! I now drew a hill with a shadowy opening in it. I glanced over at our brothers and could see they were really struggling.

"Landslide," Lauren tried. No. "Avalanche." No.

"Cave," Amy guessed. I made my "that's close" gesture.

I sketched some coins tumbling out of the hole in the hill to show its purpose.

"Mine," Amy called out. Yes! I signaled for them to put it all together.

"Music produces dope mine?" Lauren questioned, looking puzzled. Once again I made the "you're close" hand gesture, even raising my eyebrows to indicate it needed only a tiny tweak.

"Music produces dopamine," Amy adjusted it.

"Correct," Mom informed. We won the first round!

"What's that tadpole-looking thing supposed to be, with the letters hanging off of it?" Nick scowled as he pointed to Alex's dry-erase board.

"That's a benzene molecule hexagon, see, with a pair of alcohol groups attached to the ring and an ethylamine group attached. The structural formula for dopamine," Alex explained.

"Jeez, Alex," Christian muttered, shaking his head.

The boys won the next two rounds. But we won the game this evening, six rounds to three rounds. My sisters and I toasted our victory in the kitchen with bowls of French vanilla ice cream.

"I remember the first time I got asked for my autograph," I told my two sisters, our win in Pictionary sending my mind back to another triumphal moment. "It was after we sang the anthem at a basketball game."

"It was at the Roseville concert for me," Lauren recalled. "It took me by surprise, so I had, like, lockjaw of the brain, you know? I signed her autograph book, but I literally couldn't think of anything to say to her. She probably thought I was deliberately being antisocial."

"That girl who rode her pink bike around El Dorado Hills had heard us on the radio and came up to me when I was out in front of the house and asked for my autograph," Amy remembered. "Hey, imagine if some day we have to deal with paparazzi," she added, making me giggle.

I raised my hand to shoulder level as though it were grasping a trophy for others to look at, and pretended to fondle the imaginary trophy with my other hand. In a voice oozing condescension I said, "I'd like to thank all the little people... for not winning this award," and followed it with a prim curtsy.

There was something about French vanilla that always got us into a gossipy mood.

I offered the opinion, "Fans are what the band needs for us to make a career out of what we do, obviously, but they can be such a pain. If I become a psychologist, I'm telling you, I'd like to get certain ones of them on my office couch for analysis. Some of them you can tell are passive-aggressive. Some are chronically depressed and want others to wallow in their misery too. There's several who use food as a coping mechanism. Some supposed fans are just plain ornery. I mean, there's no way to sugar-coat it."

"Tell it girl," said Amy. "Like that one in Europe, Lois. If we say one thing that doesn't mesh with Lois's political convictions, we are treated like Satan on her twitter page. One day we are her heroes, the next day we are trash."

Lauren had a complaint too. "There are quite a few girls who project their own proclivities onto me—I think more onto me than onto the rest of you."

"Yep, I have noticed that, Lauren," I assured her. "And then there's that guy with the funny name on twitter, what is it... Hadlee Polkinghorne? Always asking us personal questions. As if we haven't already been way more generous than most bands and influencers in putting personal details out there on our social media."

"Ew," agreed Lauren. "Certain things are just none of his business. Some of our fans, ya know, I wish were not fans. There, I said it."

Amy pursed her lips, then said, "Amen sis."