You're Invited

by Jen Malone

  The door tinkles and a woman teeters in on seventeen-inch heels (approximately), wearing a hat I’ve only seen people in the stands at the Kentucky Derby wear. It’s purple straw and so wide it brushes the sides of the door. She’s paired it all with a tiny tube top that shows off a giant tattoo of some kind of bird covering her entire left shoulder and a pair of too-tight black capri pants. Whoa. I don’t really know if  “glamourpuss” is the right term. More like a weird cross between royalty and . . . I don’t really know what.

  “Do you think that’s her?”  Vi whispers.

  Becca cranes her head around. “Ooooooh yeah.”

  “Do we go over?” Lauren asks.

  “I think it would be more professional if she came to us, right? Just look busy. And important.” Becca shoves a menu at each of us, while throwing her head back and letting out a fake laugh that can only be described as “tinkling.”

  I peek over my menu to watch Alexandra Worthington’s eyes sweep right over our table and then turn away to peer down at her watch with a frown. She’s still hovering just inside the doorway.

  “I don’t think it’s working, guys. I’m gonna go get her.” I push my chair back and make my way to the front. “Excuse me, by any chance are you Alexandra Worthington?”

  She looks at me and one eyebrow lifts (I’m so in awe of people who can do that.) “I am. I’m sorry. I can’t really chat, though. I’m supposed to be meeting someone, or rather, a group of someones. Though they’re late, which is inexcusable, really.” She begins to pick at a thread on her tube top.

  “Oh, no, actually, we’re all here. See?” I gesture to our table where Becca, Lauren, and Vi give little waves. Lauren’s is a regular one, Vi’s is more of a tomboy kind of hand flick, and Becca’s cupped fingers and back-and-forth motion make her look like Miss America on a parade float. I can’t help grinning at all three of them.

  “Beg your pardon? I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding. I’m meeting four women who run a wedding-planning business,” Alexandra Worthington says.

  “Party-planning, really,” I say. “You’ll be our first wedding.”

  Oh yeah. The thing that happened yesterday? It’s this: Becca, Lauren, Vi, and I were meeting at the Purple People Eater, which is what we call the abandoned yacht that we turned into our clubhouse. The whole point of our meeting was to dissolve our little summer company and say good-bye to the Best Summer Ever. But then, right as we were toasting RSVP with glasses of lemonade, the phone rang and it was Alexandra Worthington, wanting to know if she could book us to plan her wedding.

  Up till now, we’ve mostly been doing birthday parties for kids plus a few parties at the senior center (where Lauren’s sorta-crazy grandmother Bubby lives), which were basically matchmaking ventures to get Bubby together with the elderly guy she was crushing on. They were great and we rocked them, but they weren’t anything on the level of a wedding.

  But when Alexandra Worthington called, she said she’d been hearing our name all over town. I guess people really liked the parties we planned and, well, Sandpiper Beach is really tiny and the rule of living somewhere really tiny is that you have to spend approximately fifty percent of your time gossiping about everyone else, so I guess word got out about us.

  Before the rest of us could even sign off on it, Becca grabbed the phone and said, “We’re your girls, Miss Worthington.”

  Judging by how pale Alexandra Worthington just got behind her tan, it kind of seems like the “girls” part might not have computed.

  She takes a tiny step backward. Her head gives a tiny shake back and forth. “No. No, no. No. No. You’re . . .” There’s a long pause before she says, “CHILDREN!”

  Um, ouch? We’re going into seventh grade. We’re not that young!

  Becca, Lauren, and Vi can tell something is wrong and they all get up and race over.

  “Excuse me, is everything okay?” Lauren asks.

  “Everything is most certainly not okay,” Alexandra Worthington says. I know I should probably call her Miss Worthington or just Alexandra (though not to her face, of course!) but she’s just such an “Alexandra Worthington” that I can’t.

  “I already fired my wedding planner.” Alexandra Worthington is getting screechy now. “I can’t go crawling back to her. I won’t. That’s not how I operate.”

  Oh yeah. If you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, here you go: the wedding planner Alexandra Worthington fired?

  That would be Lorelei Pleffer. A.k.a. my mom.

  So there’s that.

  Hence the iron anchor in my belly. Because when Mom finds out her client fired her to hire me, one of us is dead. Me, because Mom has killed me, or Mom, from a broken heart. Either way, things are not looking good for the Pleffer family.

  Alexandra Worthington’s voice screeches up another note and her hand hits her hip. “Apparently, now I am sans planner because you are not at all what you represented yourselves to be! Why didn’t you tell me you were a bunch of kids?”

  Other people eating their breakfast are starting to stare at us now and I kind of wish I could melt into the floor. Lance comes out from the kitchen with a crinkled forehead, carrying a tray of biscuits and sausage gravy. Becca, Lauren, and Vi share desperate looks. I would be in on that look too, except at the moment, I’m halfway hoping Alexandra Worthington will turn and walk out before this whole mess goes any farther.

  On the one hand, I love my friends and I even love RSVP and I’m still a tiny bit mad at my mom for firing me in the first place and then not making it to any of the parties this summer. If I wanted her attention, hooo boy, will this get it. But on the other hand . . . it’s my mom we’re talking about.

  “Pardon me, Alexandra,” Becca says. See what I mean? Becca’s never afraid of authority figures. She calls her Alexandra to her face. “But we never ‘represented’ we were adults. In fact, you referenced so many of our clients when you called to hire us, we assumed you knew everything there was to know about us. Why wouldn’t we have?”

  “Well, none of them thought to mention you’re barely out of diapers!”

  Becca bites her lip, and Lauren claws her fingers into Becca’s arm to stop her from answering that comment with whatever she’s about to say next. Becca takes a deep breath, smiles oh-so-sweetly at Alexandra Worthington, and says, “Probably they didn’t mention our age because how old we are is totes not relevant to how fantastic our party-planning skills are.”

  Which would have sounded a lot more impressive if Becca had skipped the “totes.” Then again, if she had, she wouldn’t be Becca.

  Alexandra Worthington stares hard at Becca for a second and Becca lifts her chin and stares right back. Neither one blinks. After a couple of seconds, Alexandra Worthington’s eyes narrow slightly and she says, “You may have a point.”

  She takes off her hat, tucks it under her arm, and pushes past us into the restaurant. “Where are we sitting? I’ll need to tell you some things about myself if this is to be a successful client/planner relationship. First things first. I do not do liver and chicken steak for breakfast and I sincerely hope none of you do either. If so, I will need to excuse myself because that is just plain disgusting and I won’t hear of it.”

  Okayyyyyyyy, then. I guess we’re hired.

  Which is a good thing, right?

  Right?

  JEN MALONE once traveled the world and planned movie premieres for Hollywood stars, but now she caters to far more demanding clients: her identical twin boys and their little sister. Luckily, her husband handles all the cooking! She lives outside Boston and loves school visits, getting mail, and hedgehogs. Jen is also the author of the Aladdin M!X title At Your Service. You can visit her online at www.jenmalonewrites.com.

  GAIL NALL lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her family and more cats than necessary. When she’s not writing books, she manages grants for a homeless shelter and chases her toddler. She once drove a Zamboni, has camped in the snow in June, and almost got trampled in Paris
. Gail is also the author of the Aladdin title Breaking the Ice. You can find her online at www.gailnall.com.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  This Aladdin M!X edition May 2015

  Text copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Malone and Gail Nall

  Cover illustration copyright © 2015 by Marilena Perilli

  Also available in an Aladdin hardcover edition.

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  Book design by Laura Lyn DiSiena

  The text of this book was set in Bembo.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Malone, Jen, author.

  You’re invited / by Jen Malone and Gail Nall.

  p. cm.

  Summary:  When twelve-year-old Sadie is fired from her mother’s wedding planning company after a disastrous mishap, she starts her own party planning business and recruits her three best friends.

  [1. Parties—Fiction. 2. Birthdays—Fiction. 3. Business enterprises—Fiction. 4. Best friends—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction. 6. Beaches—Fiction.] I. Nall, Gail, author. II. Title. III. Title: R.S.V.P.

  PZ7.M29642Yo 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014031625

  ISBN 978-1-4814-3197-2 (hc)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-3196-5 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-3198-9 (eBook)