my name is not loulou

"Mom, how do you spell Loulou?" Saturday morning. Sarah was sitting on the kitchen floor, yanking up her shinguards. "Is it L-o-o-l-o-o, or L-u-l-u?"

"Me! I'm Loulou!" shrilled Loulou, jumping up and down. "I need to go pee!"

"Can't we leave yet?" said the other one, my monster in the middle.

I smiled at Sarah. No one had ever asked before. "Well. It's L-o-u-l-o-u. But that's not the usual way it's spelled," I said. "Actually, there's a story there."

"Tell us the story, tell us the story!" yelled all three little monsters in unison. Suddenly I remembered why it was that I had kids. There's nothing quite as good as a captive audience hanging on your every word.

Long ago and far away.

Long ago and far away, in a moldering public library with a cracked ceiling that leaked in heavy rains, an unattractive girl of, let's see, about fourteen picked a book out of a wire rack. You know those racks -- the ones where they stick the books that aren't important enough to get a slot on an actual bookshelf. Books with lurid covers. Teenage romances, pulp horror reads -- a melange of dubious literature jammed in haphazardly, whose only common feature is that they aren't worth the trouble of the Dewey Decimal filing system. Books like the one I picked up that day, that changed my life.

It was a how-to travel guide by a freewheeling, paisley-wearing child of the 70's. He'd spent five years hitchhiking across several continents. Finally -- after seeing volcanos throw fire into the sky and waves crash on warm exotic shores, after bumping across the Andes in a truck driven by a drunken lunatic, picking fruit for fast cash, scoring illicit substances in Kathmandu, getting robbed, getting stoned, falling in love -- he'd come home to grad school and written a book telling all wannabe globetrotters how we too could have the life he'd lived. Didn't take money in the bank, either. It just took a backpack, an outstretched thumb and a sense of adventure.

I read the first chapter standing there at the wire rack, transfixed. I took the book home and read it six times. Returned it, paid the late fee, took it out again, returned it two months later but found I couldn't live without it. Finally I stole it once and for all, using an elegantly simple trick my brother had taught me: I dropped it out of a window from the dusty second-floor Journal Annex, and snuck out to retrieve it from the shrubbery after closing time. I slept with it under my pillow after that, bringing it out late at night, drinking in the words, dreaming of my future. Forget suburbia, my mother's crappy marriage, the freedom she'd sacrificed in favor of convention, the surprise pregnancy that had ended her studies, the children who had weighed her down, the nine-to-five, and her false-cheery resignation to it all. ("Of course I got married when your father asked me. Back then, it was just what people did. I didn't want to live at home forever.")

Not for me. I would run amok among the rough,wild wonders of the world. Homeless, wings on my feet, owning nothing more than I could carry.

"Mama! Where my Care Bear? I WANT my CARE BEAR!" I slung the soccer gear into the trunk of the minivan and drove the monsters off to practice, down the street lined with lollipop-shape trees, where every fourth house has the same floor plan.

"Keep going," Sarah prompted. "Then what happened?"

The first bitter fight my mother and I had was over that book.
"When I hit eighteen, I'm doing it, I'm leaving," I told her.
"You'll get killed out there," she spat. "They'll find you in a ditch."
"Eighteen's legal. You won't be able to stop me."
"If that's what you plan on, you just leave right now. Pack up and go. Spare me the next four years of worry."

I was shocked by her vehemence. I had thought she'd shrug and answer, "Okay, silly girl. Whatever you say." Then it hit me: she was taking me seriously. Like she looked at me and saw for the first time not a silly girl, but someone whose daydreams were hardening into plans, whose plans might turn into facts. Someone to be reckoned with.

I considered this, long after she'd swept out of my room in tears. I hadn't known I was so grown up already.

"But what about Loulou?" Sarah asked from the back seat.

"I'll get to that," I told her. "The story has to start at the beginning. But everyone shush now, or I'll miss the exit."