by Robin Palmer
“Well, it’s not saying you’re . . . sad,” Alan corrected. “It’s just saying that you’d feel more fulfilled if you had some other kind of hobbies. Like piano. Or . . . Girl Scouts.”
I shook my head. “Not going to happen.” We had been through this a bunch of times. I was so not a Girl Scout girl. Not only wasn’t I good at crafts, but the one time I had tried on Marissa’s blechy green uniform back in Northampton, it was super-itchy.
For a while I thought maybe overlistening could be my hobby, but while I loved our apartment here in New York, I didn’t get to practice it as much as I did back in Northampton. It had been a lot easier to overlisten at our old house, on account of the fact that I knew exactly what stair to stand on to both (a) hear, and (b) not get caught. Our apartment here in New York may have been big compared to most people’s (“You know, Lucy,” Pete was always saying, “for a lotta people in New York, their kitchens are in their living rooms!”), but it wasn’t big enough for me not to get busted. Some people’s mothers say they have eyes in the back of their head, but mine had ears in the back of hers. (“Lucy B. Parker—I can hear you breathing! And if you don’t stop eavesdropping right this second, I’m going to go into that closet of yours and take all those boxes of maxipads and pantiliners and throw them in the garbage!” was one of her favorite threats.)
“Plus, TV is very educational and makes you well rounded,” I added. “Especially the shows on Animal Planet where they go to Africa.”
Laurel nodded. “She’s right.”
I smiled at her. That was one of the best things about having a frister (friend + sister, and a much nicer-sounding word than stepsister)—there was always someone to back you up. Unless you were having a “your mom this”/“your dad that” moment.
I pointed to my cat, Miss Piggy, who was lying at my feet waiting for me to drop some food on the floor. For the most part she didn’t like me too much, but when it came to meals, she was my BFF because my coordination problem meant I dropped food a lot. “And I like to spend time with animals myself. That’s a hobby.” Okay, maybe I was stretching the truth a bit. Maybe some particular animals hissed when you tried to snuggle them and meowed nonstop when you tried to lock them in your room so you could spend quality time with them. But even if it wasn’t a hobby of Miss Piggy’s, it could still be mine.
“And that’s all really great, Lucy,” Alan said. “It’s just that those kinds of things don’t make a lot of difference on school transcripts when it comes time to applying to colleges—”
“Honey, why don’t we talk about something else?” Mom asked gently. She knew that having to talk about college when I was only in middle school freaked me out and made my stomach hurt.
Alan shrugged. “Okay.” He scrolled down the agenda. “Well, in the Important Announcements and Reminders section, I just want to remind everyone that in three weeks, Rebecca and I will be going away to celebrate our one-year anniversary.”
Laurel and I kicked each other under the table at the same time. We knew what that meant: adults going away = them Doing It in hotel rooms = BEYOND GROSS.
“Did you decide where you’re going?” asked Laurel.
“Somewhere in the country,” Mom said.
“Somewhere in the city,” Alan said at the same time.
They looked at each other and sighed. As much as Mom and Alan had realized they had in common when playing the I-Can’t-Believe-You-Like-That-Too! game the first time we all went out for dinner together, they were also opposite in a lot of ways. Like, say, the fact that Mom finds hikes in nature very relaxing, while Alan finds them very stressful because of all the bugs. And the idea that Alan was usually seven and a half minutes early for every appointment, whereas Mom was fifteen minutes late because, even with the hook Alan had put up for her near the front door with the big sign that said REBECCA’S KEYS she still managed to misplace them. Mom said it was okay to be different in some ways because of the whole “opposites attract” thing, but it sure seemed to make planning weekends away difficult.
“We’re still working on it,” she said.
I was sorry they were having trouble, but if it took Alan’s mind off the fact that my only extracurricular activities were watching TV and eating cupcakes, I was okay with it.
After our weekly assembly at school that Friday afternoon, I had a lot more to worry about than if Alan thought I was just taking up space in the apartment with my averageness.
As always, the assembly was super-boring, with our principal, Dr. Remington-Wallace, aka Dr. Rem-Wall, going on and on about things no one really cared about, like the signed copies of the new book How to Become a Math Lover by her cousin Stanley Frisson that were for sale in the office. Which, as far as I was concerned, was a total waste of paper because everyone knew that nothing short of a math hater having a brain transplant could do that.
It was 2:07, that point in the day where absolutely no one was paying attention other than the total butt kissers like Lydia Hudson and Jared Levine. Because of the seventh-grade class-president thing, I had to sit on the stage with the presidents of the other grades, which meant that not only did I have to look like I was paying attention, but I also had to look like I found what Dr. Rem-Wall was saying was interesting. At least I had my Bonne Bell Coconut Lip Smacker to keep me going. It was so yummy that if I pretended hard enough, as I slathered it on my lips, I could almost convince myself that instead of listening to Dr. Rem-Wall go on and on about math, I was at home at my kitchen table making my way through a slice of coconut cream cake. I had recently realized that Lip Smackers didn’t just make your lips soft—they were also a good snack substitute if no actual snacks were available at the moment.
Other than Jared and Lydia, no one in the audience was paying attention. They were either drawing on their arm (Malia), twirling their hair around their finger and getting it stuck in their ring (Beatrice), admiring themselves in the tiny mirror that they brought with them everywhere (Cristina Pollock), or staring into space and drooling (Mitchell Fries).
That is, until the Announcement. After that, things got nuts.
“And before we dismiss you for the weekend, I have an announcement to make,” said Dr. Rem-Wall. Before she went on, she tapped the microphone really hard, which is what she liked to do to make sure we’d hear what she said next, but instead it split our eardrums. “And that is, I’m pleased to announce that because of an overwhelming amount of suggestions in the suggestion box, for the first time in the history of the Center for Creative Learning, the seventh grade will be able to attend the Sadie Hawkins dance this month—”
As a tidal wave of gasps rose from the audience, I stood up. “Wait a minute—what?!” I yelled. Not very presidential of me, but if this was true, this was not good. In fact, this was very, very bad.
“Lucy, I knew you were wrong when you said that Dr. Rem-Wall just threw away the suggestions from the suggestion box without even reading them!” Alice yelled from the audience.
I plopped back into my chair and slunk down as Dr. Rem-Wall gave me a look. It wasn’t Alice’s fault that she was deaf in one ear, which made her talk REALLY loud. Or that once I had taught her to overlisten, she had learned that, according to her mom, she was an “overexcitable type.” But stuff like that did not earn her points on the second-non-frister-BFF front.
“OMIGOD, THIS IS THE BEST NEWS EVER!” she screeched. Why was it that all really annoying people screeched? My friend Marissa back in Northampton screeched, too. And why did they jump up and down in their seats like they were in the audience of a game show and had just gotten called up on stage?
Best news ever? Try the worst news ever. Ever since Beatrice had told me about the eighth-grade Sadie Hawkins dance during our first official friend get-together at Billy’s Bakery back in April, I had been dreading getting older, even though getting older meant that at some point I’d have to get my period. (Although if I didn’t get it until I was sixteen, which, when I Googled “do some girls just NEVER get their
periods,” was something I had read happened, I was going to be REALLY mad.)
We didn’t have Sadie Hawkins dances back in Northampton, Massachusetts, where I had lived for my entire life until Mom fell in love with Alan. According to Beatrice, Sadie Hawkins was like the first woman to ask a man out ever, so in honor of her, the girls had to ask the boys to be their dates. (Later on when I Googled her, I found out that, actually, Sadie Hawkins wasn’t real—she was a made-up character in an old comic strip. But because I didn’t know Beatrice very well yet and I had no other friends in New York at that point other than Laurel and Pete, I didn’t bring that up in case she got all mad and embarrassed, which is what some people tend to do when you tell them they’re wrong.)
I’m sorry, but why would someone want to dance with a boy? Most of them smelled gross from far away to begin with, so to be up close to them and have that smell actually get on your clothes? Yuck. Plus, I wasn’t even sure what you did when you danced. Did you talk? Did you look at each other? Or did you just move your feet around looking at the floor while trying not to breathe on them in case you had recently had a piece of pepperoni pizza and hadn’t had a chance to brush your teeth?
As far as I was concerned, boys were overrated. Why would you spend your time totally obsessing over them (like how Laurel did about fellow superstar Austin Mackenzie before he became her boyfriend back in June) when it could be spent doing things that were a lot more interesting. Like making crank calls. Or trying to get the people at the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market to sell you things like old cowboy boots for less money than they were asking for. (Although Laurel’s germ phobia had gotten a lot better since I had come into her life, she still thought that the idea that anyone would wear used shoes was disgusting. But since I had done it a bunch of times and had never gotten anything gross like athlete’s foot, I disagreed.)
The only reason I was bothering to come up with a crush was because, according to Beatrice, everyone was supposed to have three of them: a local one, a long distance/vacation one, and a celebrity one. We didn’t have the three-crush rule back in Northampton, but it was very big in New York City. So much so that I decided that it was log-worthy and started the Official Crush Log of the Girls at the Center for Creative Learning to go along with my Official Period Log of the Girls at the Center for Creative Learning . And because it looked weird for the Keeper of the Crushes not to have her own picks in there, I had to come up with some.
It was taking me a long time to find a local crush on account of the fact that most of the boys at our school were either (a) gross, (b) obnoxious, or (c) had already been picked by a bunch of girls already. Which is why, after a lot of thought, I had decided on Blair, even though Beatrice was always saying her brother was bourgeois. (Because Beatrice planned on living in Paris when she grew up, she liked to use French words whenever she could. Even though I still wasn’t sure she knew what they meant.) She also thought he was obnoxious, annoying, gross, and a know-it-all.
Other than the know-it-all thing, I hadn’t noticed those other qualities in Blair. But since moving to New York and living with Laurel and Alan, I had learned firsthand that you didn’t really know a person until you lived with them. For instance, as perfect and superstarry as Laurel may have looked to the rest of the world, no one but me knew that she was a little weird and nerdy thanks to her fear of germs, and the fact that she was so into organization that her favorite two events of the year were the half-yearly Container Store sales.
“So, girls, start thinking of who you want to ask to the dance,” Dr. Rem-Wall went on.
I knew who I was asking—NO ONE. Even if I did finally get up the guts to tell Beatrice that Blair was my crush, I was not asking him to the dance. I needed to figure out how to get out of this. Maybe I would start getting really, really sick about four days before the dance, so by the time it arrived, I would still be contagious with whatever the sickness was. (Strep throat or bronchitis sounded believable. Malaria, which was a deadly disease you got from mosquitoes in the jungle, did not.)
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that getting sick wouldn’t work. I’d still have to ask someone, before I could claim sickness. The only way to really pull this off was if I pretended to break, or at least seriously sprain, my ankle or foot, way in advance. That way I could use the excuse that because I wouldn’t be able to dance, it wouldn’t be worth me asking anyone because it would be unfair for whoever I asked to just have to sit there with me on the bleachers the entire night.
I needed a plan. And fast.
At least I wasn’t the only one who needed advice about this Sadie Hawkins thing. All my friends did. And while I may not have been able to figure out what to do about my own situation—like, say, how to hurt my foot in such a way that it didn’t hurt too much and I could still walk without crutches—I was pretty good when it came to helping them with their problems. Turns out all the time I had spent after school watching Dr. Maude had paid off.
Not only that, but because I had been keeping a notebook called Important Pieces of Advice, I had a lot of advice already available to me. Some of the stuff in there was kind of boring (from Rose, our housekeeper: “If you spill something on yourself, try dabbing—not DRENCHING, but dabbing—a little club soda on it”). Or only good for New Yorkers (from Pete: “If you get on the subway and realize you’ve gotten in an un-air-conditioned car, make sure you jump off and get into one with air-conditioning because it gets real stinky real fast”). But other bits were very interesting (based on my own experience: “The idea of fighting with a friend or a frister—that’s a combination of sister and friend—might be really scary, but it can actually bring you a lot closer because [a] you get to get your feelings out and [b] when it’s over, you get to find out that the other person is still there”).
A few days after the assembly, we were sitting at our lunch table in Alaska. Not literally the state Alaska. Everyone just called that part of the cafeteria that because it was the northernmost point, and it was where the Have-Nots sat. Even after winning the election and trying my best to make all students into Haves, I still ended up sitting on the outskirts of the cafeteria with all the other Have-Nots. I turned to Malia. “So did you do the homework assignment I gave you on Saturday?”
She nodded.
While filling up on candy at Dylan’s Candy Bar over on the east side Saturday afternoon, Beatrice, Alice, and I had decided that Malia should ask Sam Meltzer to the dance on account of the fact that he was the least annoying out of the five boys who acted like they liked her in that I’m-a-boy-so-I-can’t-REALLY-act-like-I-like-you-because-my-friends-would-tease-me-about-it-but-I-really-do way. Malia said she would’ve asked him if there was the slightest chance he wouldn’t completely laugh in her face, but because she was sure he would, she didn’t want to risk it.
Luckily, I remembered an old Dr. Maude episode about this woman who had been married for twenty-five years who, every morning when she woke up, was scared that that was going to be the day that her husband would turn to her and say, “I don’t want to be married to you anymore, so I’m taking Fluffy, the cat, and moving out.” Dr. Maude made her make a Reality List of all of the facts about the situation—the being-married-twenty-five-years thing; the fact that every night before they went to sleep he turned to her and said, “I’m the luckiest man in the world”; the week before he had talked about having a second wedding in Las Vegas with Fluffy as the maid of honor. Then, after she made the woman read it aloud, Dr. Maude asked her what part exactly made her think that he was going to leave. After a lot of “Ahhh . . . well . . . ummm’s,” the woman had to admit that she didn’t have an answer, and by the end of the show, not only had she stopped crying, but she was laughing.
When I first suggested to Malia that she make a list of all the facts about Sam and the way he acted toward her, she thought it sounded dumb. But after I told her that, according to Dr. Maude’s website, she had a 92 percent success rate, she agreed.
The Rea
lity List was really handy when a person was being completely nuts and believing the lies their heads told them. Like, say, that they were ugly and no one liked them. It was hard to believe that as pretty as Malia was—because she was biracial, her skin was the same color as hot chocolate, and she had long dark hair all the way to her butt—she would think that, but she did. Which made her massively shy around boys.
I held out my hand. “Let’s see it.”
With a sigh she dug it out of her notebook and handed it to me. “‘The Facts Surrounding Me and Sam Meltzer That Might Give People the Impression That He Likes Me Even Though I Know They’re Wrong by Malia Powers,’” I read. Beatrice rolled her eyes. “‘Number one: He keeps telling all of you, “Not that I like her or anything, but that Malia girl isn’t horrible.”’”
We all nodded. This was true. Not only that, but he got all red faced when he said it.
“‘Two,’” I continued, “‘he’s always complimenting me on my drawing.’” With two artists for parents, Malia was really good at sketching. Unlike me, who couldn’t do more than stick figures. Not only was it her hobby, but she had even won contests for it. I bet Alan would’ve loved to have had her for a stepdaughter. “‘And three: I overheard him say to Max Bellack that if there was a school dance, he’d ask me—’”
Wait a minute—what?! The three of us turned to her. “He did?!” we shouted in stereo.
She turned red. “Did I not mention that part?” she mumbled.
I sighed. “Malia, you do realize that this is all just a case of your mind playing tricks on you because that’s what a neurotic person’s mind does, right?” I asked. That was what Dr. Maude had said to the Fluffy-the-cat woman after she read her list. Neurotic was a big word both on Dr. Maude’s show and in New York City. Pete was always saying that I was one of the few people in the city who wasn’t neurotic. Laurel, on the other hand, with her Purell habit, was. And Alan and his typed agendas for every Official Parker-Moses Family Meeting? He definitely was.
