I'm going to do something I should probably not do, and that is conform to the standard of submitting chapters with no idea of a story's direction and very little editing. (Everything will be proofread and spellchecked, of course, but I won't spend weeks or months on chapters like I usually do.) So I would actually love to hear plot suggestions in the comments, because this is just about all I've got so far. Enjoy!

"Rachel," Mr. Remora said loudly. "Rachel!"

Rachel Cuddy looked up from the gossip magazine concealed not-so-discreetly behind her Algebra book. "Mm-hm?"

"Can you tell the class how to do example three?"

Rachel sifted through the papers on her desk to find the notebook with the neatly numbered list of examples worked out on it. "Um, it seems kind of self-explanatory to me. You just move the numbers around until you get the equation into the right format."

Mr. Remora raised his eyebrows at her, irritated. "And what is your answer?"

Rachel rolled her eyes. "Y equals two-X minus forty-three." After participating in an awkward staring contest with her teacher, she said deliberately, "I'm paying attention."

After deciding that he had no reason whatsoever to give her detention, no matter how much he wanted to, he moved on. Rachel returned to her magazine, reading an article about certain types of exotic fruits that could apparently be used to increase the sex drive. She had learned enough from her mother to know that the article was mostly nonsense, but she read it anyway. (She read everything, whether it was a magazine or a novel or a textbook, from cover to cover. Not like her father—he read everything backwards and upside down, and sometimes he skipped whole chapters in books.)

When the end-of-the-day buzzer sounded—a prolonged, high-pitched noise that Rachel felt was the kind of noise that should only be heard in Hell—she jumped up from her seat and was out the door first, shouldering the only hot pink backpack in the classroom.

Rachel hated the yellow bus, smelly from exhaust fumes and rotting bologna sandwiches under the seats. She always sat directly across from the stairs, sitting by the window with her backpack on the seat next to her to prevent anyone from sitting beside her. It wasn't that she didn't like people, really—just that there weren't any other eighth-graders who rode her bus, and the sixth- and seventh-graders were…

She searched for the word for a moment. Stuck-up. That was right. Eighth-graders were more grounded (at least sometimes.) They knew what they were doing, and they were preparing for high school next year, and they were smart enough to know how to manage their teachers. Some of them were, anyway. Rachel was.

It took thirty minutes for the bus to get to her stop, and then she had to walk two blocks home. Both her parents were doctors, and got home late, so she had the house to herself for about two hours after school. She never did much with the time—homework, computer, sourdough toast with peanut butter and tomato. (Both her parents called her crazy for that one.)

She was finishing up her last piece of sourdough when she heard a key rattle in the lock.

"Dad?" she called, as the hinges creaked. Her father usually came home first.

"No, Honey," her mother's voice called back. "I came home early to check on you. Dad's got a big case."

"Oh," said Rachel softly. She could hear the barely-restrained frustration in her mother's voice, but she was only disappointed. A big case meant more than nine-to-five hours: it meant her father getting home at all hours of the night and pacing when he couldn't sleep. Rachel could never sleep, either. Her schoolwork always suffered.

"How was your day, Rachel?"

Rachel shrugged. "Mr. Remora hates me, Maddie says I'm a slut because her boyfriend kissed me, and Alyssa still won't talk to me and I'm not even sure what I did. So basically a normal day."

"Mr. Remora…" Rachel's mother said distractedly. "He's—Science, right?"

Rachel shook her head. "Algebra."

"Why does he hate you?" She was busy, had already spread out a ton of paperwork from her bag onto the table and was sifting through it. She was a good multitasker, but Rachel had read somewhere that actually, really, multitasking, as in giving your full attention to two different things, was technically impossible. She could tell which task her mother wasn't paying as much attention to.

"I read magazines in his class 'cause it's so boring. I guess he gets offended or something, but I do all my work."

"That's good," her mother mumbled. "Maddie's boyfriend kissed you?" She stopped sifting through paperwork and was looking at Rachel completely, as if she had filed away Rachel's whole sentence without looking at it and had just pulled out the part about Maddie's boyfriend.

"Yeah," Rachel said, shrugging. "He's kind of a creep. I don't really know why she likes him."

Her mother shook her head slowly. "I don't know either. When did he kiss you?"

"He was at Maddie's house when I went over there last week, remember?"

"I didn't know he was going to be there. I thought it was just you and Maddie." She looked suspicious suddenly. "Who else was there?"

"A couple of people. Look, Mom, why do you care? It's not like I've never kissed a guy before."

Rachel's mother sighed. "You're growing up so fast," she said softly, brushing her own dark hair out of her eyes. "I feel—" She shook her head. "I feel like I haven't even gotten to know you. Like I'm missing your whole life."

"Trust me," Rachel said, rolling her eyes, "you see plenty of my life." She forced a laugh, and pulled an English book out of her backpack.

Her mother went back to her paperwork, which turned out to be a bunch of identical forms that said Employee Review at the top. Rachel peeked over the top of her school-issued paperback at her mother, who was sighing and making irritated noises, and brushing the little curls of dark hair that escaped her ponytail behind her ears.

Rachel would never have admitted it to either of her parents, but sometimes it bothered her that she didn't look like them. She knew the whole story of her existence—her mother had adopted her when she was a baby, and back then she had been with somebody else (somebody mysterious named Lucas whose only definition in her mind was that he was not her father.) She and Rachel's father had gotten together over a year after the adoption, and it had taken until she was five years old for them to get married. Rachel had some vague memories of the wedding, but mostly she remembered her father stumping in, leaning on his cane, waiting for the movers to bring in a few boxes of things. The biggest thing, the craziest thing, was the demolishing of the wall. They tore down the wall of their house to get her father's stupid piano inside.

Even though he was only married to her mother starting when she was five, he had always been Rachel's father. Her mother had been frantic, anxious about what her daughter should call the man she was with, and had told a very young Rachel that she could call him Greg if she wanted. But Rachel called him Dad.

And yet it bothered her that she didn't have her mother's square jaw or her father's vibrant blue eyes or any predilection toward medicine whatsoever. And it bothered her that she wasn't a genius like them—that she wasn't going to be all that great because she didn't contain any of her parents' brilliance. She wanted, ached, to be great.

Her mother made something for dinner. She had never been a particularly good cook, but she had gotten better over time. This particular thing was a kind of soup with beets, and in Rachel's opinion it looked too alarmingly like blood for ingestion. Her mother had already set out two bowls of it and poured them glasses of water when there was a knock at the door.

"Greg," Rachel's mother breathed thankfully. She got up from the table and opened the door, and as Rachel's father limped in, they embraced, lips on lips, for a full minute, while Rachel gagged and looked determinedly at her purple-red soup.

Until around fifth grade, when she had started noticing how her friends' parents acted, she had taken her own parents' kisses for granted. She assumed that everybody's parents kissed like that (like each of them held the life force for the other, like they didn't care if they crushed each other so long as they could keep holding on.) Now she was definitely not in favor of the way her parents kissed, because the way they did that strongly suggested sex, and she knew exactly how much she did not want to think about her parents doing that.

Rachel squealed as an object appeared in midair, hurtling toward her. She caught it in between her palms. At the sudden feeling of something squishy and wet, she squealed again and dropped it.

Plop! it went, landing in the soup. Her father was laughing, in that borderline unpleasant way where she felt vaguely that he was laughing at her.

The object bobbed to the surface, and when she saw what it was, pink-stained and everything, she screeched. "Dad!" she cried. "An eyeball?"

Her mother looked frustrated, but not overly surprised. "What kind of eyeball?" she asked as they sat down at the table.

"Not human," Rachel begged. "Please say not human, please—"

He shrugged. "Okay. It's not human."

"Dad!" Rachel whined again. "Are you telling the truth?"

"Everybody lies," he intoned.

Rachel rolled her eyes. "What is that, like, your mantra? You say it all the time. What kind of eyeball is it?" She peered down at the bobbing object, still attached to the retina, stained bright pink by her soup.

"What does it matter what kind of eyeball? It's an eyeball, and it's in your soup. Either you eat it, or you don't."

Rachel nearly choked. "You think I'm going to eat this?" She sighed. "If I were, which I'm not, it would matter what kind of eyeball, because if it was a human eyeball, I would be guilty of cannibalism."

"Were," her mother corrected mildly. "If it were a human eyeball."

Rachel rolled her eyes again for the seventeenth time that day. (She made a point of counting.) "It's disgusting that you can both talk about this so calmly." She picked up her bowl of soup and dumped it down the sink, turning on the garbage disposal and feeling a bit sick thinking about the eyeball being chopped into pieces by the blade down there. "You should really come up with a new motto, by the way, Dad. Your 'everybody lies' one is getting boring."

"The truth," he said, with the air of someone imparting a great wisdom, "can never be boring."

"If that 'everybody lies' thing is the truth, then that means that you lie, too, which means that your thing is not true because you're a liar, but then 'everybody lies' is no longer true which means you don't lie…see? It doesn't work."

"No." He shook his head. "I'm not saying 'everybody lies all the time.' Just 'everybody lies.' You're mixing up your riddles."

Rachel sighed. "Either way, it's boring."

"You just don't like it because it gives me an excuse to snoop into your diary."

"Dad! You can't!" She panicked, but he shook his head.

"It would be stupid of me to tell you if I were going to do that."

Rachel relaxed.

"Or," he said suddenly, "maybe I'm just saying it so you'll think I have no intention of snooping in your diary."

"Mom, please," Rachel moaned, "make him stop it!"

"Greg," her mother said. "Stop antagonizing your daughter, please."

"But Mommy," he pouted.

Rachel groaned inwardly and got up to microwave some leftover macaroni and cheese. She hated when he did that.

"Behave in front of Rachel," Rachel's mother snapped, and hit him lightly in the shoulder.

"Does that mean I can not behave when I'm not in front of Rachel?" He dipped his spoon into the soup again and slurped it noisily, splattering purple droplets everywhere.

"Dad!" Rachel whined, as the microwave beeped. "You're so disgusting." She got up and pulled out the plate of steaming macaroni. Her mother looked slightly hurt as Rachel sat down with something that wasn't her soup, but Rachel couldn't bring herself to care when the sight of the purple mush made her immediately think of the possibly-human eyeball now sitting in fragments somewhere between their sink and the sewer.

Dinner, thank goodness, ended uneventfully. Rachel's father had to be discouraged from licking the bowl by her mother, who told him off in an exasperated-yet-pleased-that-someone-liked-her-cooking kind of way. Rachel disappeared to brush her teeth and change into pajamas. (They always ate dinner late.) Her parents were left in the living room, sitting close to each other on the couch.

That night was a record for the two of them: it took until 10:38 for Rachel to start hearing raised voices from the living room. She recorded the time in her carefully kept notebook, and beside it she wrote NEW RECORD, followed by seven or eight exclamation points.

Her stomach clenched, and she pulled out her cell phone to text the one good friend who was still speaking to her: Claudia.

claudi. u up?

She received a response almost instantly.

always. whut u need?

parents yelling again. just need sum1 2 talk 2.

whut they yellin abt?

Rachel paused for a moment and crept to her bedroom door to listen.

First her mother's voice, tense and strained with fury. "Because I let you get away with murder—and God knows, Greg, I never could deny you anything—you think you're invincible! At least you could tryto connect with your daughter."

A pause. Then her father, low and dangerous. "You hypocrite," he said softly, so softly that Rachel had to press her ear to the door to listen. "That doesn't mean a thing from the woman who didn't feel a thing for her new baby."

Rachel heard her mother gasp. "Who—?" but she stopped before she started. "Wilson," she whispered.

Her father kept going, cruelly. "No matter what you feel for her now, you'll always know what it was like in the beginning—that she was just a temporary solution to your damn insecurity."

Rachel couldn't breathe properly. She came away from the door, gasping a little as if her lungs weren't taking in air. She pressed her fingers to the pulse in her wrist, feeling the speed and force of it.

She checked her phone, and pulled up the most recent message from Claudia again.

whut they yellin abt?

Last week, Claudia's parents were fighting, and Rachel had asked her the same question.

idk, Claudia had responded. theres lots of swaering. i think its abt bread.

Bread, Rachel had thought. Some people's parents fought about bread.

So instead of saying something truthful, like me or each other or hypocrisy, she typed back:

toilet paper i think…

o, responded Claudia. that suks.

Rachel didn't reply. She curled up under the covers, burying herself in a cocoon of blankets and bright, flowered sheets, and cried hot, messy tears into the scratchiest of her several blankets. She cried that she couldn't have normal parents who only kissed on the cheek and argued about groceries with curses that didn't mean anything. She cried that she couldn't at least fit in with them, at least be smart like them and have her mother's hair and nose and her father's eyes and chin.

But she wasn't like them and she never had been, so she just closed her eyes and pretended she wasn't hearing the passionate, halfway-stifled end to their argument through the wall between their bedroom and hers.