Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1 - Meet Bee
Chapter 2 - Bee Bops
Chapter 3 - Bee Stung
Chapter 4 - Bee-fuddled
Chapter 5 - Bee-reft
Chapter 6 - Bee-friended
Chapter 7 - Are You Kidding Bee ?
Chapter 8 - Bee-lieve It or Not
Chapter 9 - Bee Takes Flight
Chapter 10 - Bee in Hives
Chapter 11 - Busy Bee
Chapter 12 - Bee Season
Chapter 13 - Bee Joins the A-list
Chapter 14 - Like Bee to Honey
Chapter 15 - 2 Cool 2 Bee Forgotten
Chapter 16 - Bee Stings Back
Chapter 17 - Bee-twixt and Bee-tween
Chapter 18 - Bee’s Boyfriend Is Back
Chapter 19 - Bee-sieged
Chapter 20 - Oh, Bee-have!
Chapter 21 - Just Bee-astly
Chapter 22 - Begin the Bee-grime
Chapter 23 - Plan Bee
Chapter 24 - Humble Bee
Chapter 25 - Queen Bee
Chapter 26 - Just Bee-achy
Chapter 27 - Bee Loved
I was waiting at the Dean and DeLuca on Broadway and Prince when I saw this woman coming up to the counter. She was super-cool looking, around forty, wearing a pink shearling coat, diamond-studded heels, and skinny dark blue jeans.
“I’m sorry, I’m saving this seat for somebody,” I said.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you look a little like Savannah Hughes?”
I rolled my eyes. Yeah, right. Savannah Hughes was a big-time model. She used to be really skinny, then she almost went into cardiac arrest on diet pills. A year later, she was back in the game as a plus-size model.
I look nothing, I mean nothing, like Savannah Hughes.
But the woman wasn’t going away. “Have you ever modeled before?”
I looked down at my chocolate chip muffin.
“Look,” she said, taking my silence for a no. “I’m a modeling agent, and I’m looking for a plus-size girl to star in the new Prada campaign.” I didn’t know what to think. It seemed like those words—plus size—were just hanging in the air like a flag made up of granny panties.
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RAZORBILL
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1
Meet Bee
This is the most important thing I’ve learned in my seventeen years on earth. Sometimes dreams change. Take for example, my decision to enter the premed program at Columbia University. Being a doctor sounded all good and noble when I was sitting at home watching a special on TV about Doctors Without Borders in Zimbabwe and imagining that in some small way, I could change the world. But sitting in my dorm apartment, trying to remember the fundamental laws of kinematics, rotational dynamics, and oscillations, I’m pretty sure that I should’ve picked a different major.
I’m looking at the course catalog right now, and I’m here to tell you that outside the world of geometrical optics, there’s some pretty rocking stuff. If I hadn’t been such a doofus and rushed into premed, I could be taking a class called Security, Globalism, and Terrorism. How cool would that be? I bet someone from that class will get recruited by the CIA to be a spy, like Jennifer Garner in Alias. I’ve rented the whole series on Netflix. Twice.
I should’ve been a spy. I would’ve been a really good spy. I can hear people whispering all the way across the other side of the room. My dad says I’ve got ears like a bat. He meant it as a compliment. But if you actually look at a picture of a bat, you might think different.
Unfortunately, I am not a spy. I’m a freshman poindexter with a flat chest and size-ten feet. Everyone thinks I have a thing for capri pants, but it’s just that I’ve got this defect where my legs are disproportionately long compared to the rest of my body, so my pants are never long enough. In junior high, they called me “stork legs,” and there are still a couple of knuckleheads I see when I go home to visit my parents who’ll yell out that inane nickname if they see me at Ben & Jerry’s or in Rittenhouse Square.
I skipped a year of high school, so yeah, I’m pretty young to be a college freshman. But I’m what clinical psychologists term an overachiever. I think the Latin term is doae toomuchus. If it weren’t for my science whiz skills, I’d be lost. It’s pretty much the only thing that’s always come easily to me. These days, even science is tough.
As my adviser, Professor Kelly (she’s a psychology prof, so she’s the one who diagnosed me as an overachiever), told me, I could’ve taken elementary physics (V-1202) or intro to mechanics and thermodynamics (C1401). But oh no, that wasn’t good enough for me. I had to prove I was a badass. I signed up for C2801, physics with differential and integral calculus, which required special permission from the instructor. Who was I trying to impress? I have no idea. I have three friends from high school and they all went to college in California, so I see them like never.
The thing is, math and science were always so easy for me. I guess it’s genetics: when you take a mama nerd and a papa nerd, they tend to give birth to a really geeked-out strain of super-nerd. My dad is a scientist at the Franklin Institute, a museum back in Philly. It’s an egghead heaven where you can walk into a giant human heart and see how it works or step into a chamber that simulates how it feels to walk on the moon. When I was a kid, there was a school trip to the Franklin Institute every year, and I always loved the way Dad would come out to the giant main lobby in his white lab coat, looking smart and kind and a little loopy, like he was the Wizard of Oz, like he had the answer to any question you might ever have—which most of the time he did.
Dad’s been a big proponent of the grossology trend in science museums: meaning he creates exhibits about things like boogers and farts. It’s a little too much for me, but Dad loves it. All you have to do is sneeze in front of him to get a twenty-mi
nute speech on the wonders of snot. He’s a funny guy. I guess in some ways, he’s also the reason why I decided I wanted to become a doctor. I want to be the girl in the white lab coat, the one with all the answers.
My mom is an economist and does a lot of work with the World Bank. She’s really involved with micro-loans to women in India and other developing countries. I guess the idea is that if you give a woman like a thousand dollars, she can buy fabric or goats or coconuts and make stuff she can sell in the market, and it helps her family and her whole community and creates some sort of sustainable economy. What this meant in practical terms is that my mom refused to buy me a decent pair of jeans and I spent all three years of high school dressed in tribal outfits made by women in countries like Ghana and Peru. She refuses, I mean refuses, to buy anything in a real store since she claims that it’s all made by underpaid child workers in third world countries.
So anything I wanted, I had to buy for myself. I tried to argue that giving a girl who does the dishes, cleans the guest bathroom, and takes out all the recycling FIVE DOLLARS A WEEK in allowance IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY made me as exploited as a child laborer in China. But Mom just got even more mad at me and said, “And how much do you think they pay children to dig up land mines in Cambodia?” You’d think my dad would intercede, but he and my mom have this rule where they never contradict each other. I think the Latin term for this is: gangio upsa onihi daughterus.
It took me nearly six months to save up enough money to buy a pair of jeans, and even then I was still wearing Mexican peasant blouses and hand-beaded moccasins every day. Honestly, it’s gotten to the point where I kind of like my global village clothes. But it would be nice if my mom would take me on a trip to some of these places so when people go, “Nice poncho, where’d you get it?” I’d have some cool story about how I spent the summer in the Amazon instead of having to tell them my mom bought it at a fair-trade store in Washington, D.C.
But lest you think my life totally sucks: I should tell you that I have this rocking boyfriend. His name is Brian Alexander. He’s a sophomore, and he’s like something out of a J.Crew catalog. I’m tall—around five-foot nine—though honestly, I’ve stopped measuring because I swear if I grow another inch, then the giraffe wranglers at the zoo are going to come and get me.
That’s why it’s extra nice that Brian is taller than me. He’s six-two with this massive red hair, so you can always spot him in a crowd. He’s got these adorable freckles and this smile that could melt butter. The thing is that he’s such a good guy. I swear he’ll probably be president of the United States one day. He’s really into public service. Not in an annoying way like my mom, but in a cool way like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
I met Brian during frosh orientation when I went to a Blue Key meeting. Blue Key runs a lot of the charitable groups on campus like blood drives and the soup kitchen and all kinds of fund-raisers. Brian was giving the welcome talk, and he was so good looking, he could read the telephone book and I’d find it fascinating. The talk he gave was super-powerful.
We were sitting in a room of about thirty students. I was at the back, helping myself to the free cookies, when I noticed him approaching the podium. He got up and said, “The summer after my freshman year, I traveled with the Red Cross to tsunami-affected villages in Tamil Nadu. It was a shock to me because of how I grew up, and what I was taught at school and was aware of, to see that there was a world with so much poverty and so much distress. We all hear about charities fighting for clean water, fighting for shelter. The question is, is it charity or is it a right? I joined Blue Key because I believe it’s a right. It’s not simply a question of being nice and helping with these things. It’s not about good people doing nice things for desperate families. I disagree. Children should have an education. Children should have clean water. This is their right. It’s not charity; it’s human rights.”
I wrote it down in my notebook in huge letters: IT’S NOT CHARITY. IT’S HUMAN RIGHTS.
I was staring at him, wondering what it would be like to kiss somebody so amazingly generous and kind. I flipped the page and I wrote: Bee Alexander
Ms. Bee Wilson-Alexander
Mr. and Mrs. Wilson-Alexander
Then I noticed that the girl next to me was kind of looking over my shoulder, so I balled up the page with his name and put it in my bag to dispose of in a garbage can far, far away.
Brian told the group all about how he had met Bono at a benefit to raise awareness for debt relief in Africa. He’d organized three triathlons for spina bifida. (By the by, I didn’t even know what spina bifida was; I had to go home and look it up in the dictionary.) Watching him, I thought, Wow, this is what college is about. I totally want to do cool stuff like benefits and triathlons. So I went up to him after his talk, determined not to geek out.
“Hi,” I said. “That was a great speech.”
“Thanks so much,” he said, totally humble like. “Tell me your name again?”
I hadn’t even said my name, but the way he asked the question, it was like he was determined to remember it.
“Bee,” I said. “I mean Beatrice. But my friends call me Bee.”
He took my hand and held it, not in a nice to meet you handshake, but in a sitting in a movie theater on a first date kind of way. “So pleased to meet you,” he said.
“I totally want to join Blue Key,” I said, sounding so totally like a dork.
“You should,” Brian said. “Why don’t you give me your number and I’ll call you sometime and tell you more about the work we do.”
I didn’t think he’d call. But he did, that same night. We went out for pierogies—delicious Polish dumplings—the following Saturday, and we’ve been dating ever since. Fall in New York City has got to be the most romantic time of year, and I lapped up every minute of it. I went with Brian to hear all these cool speakers at places like the Council on Foreign Relations. We went to see all these indie movies at the Film Forum, and then, as it got colder, we started swinging by MarieBelle, after classes, for hot chocolate. But the best thing of all was meeting Brian at this little diner near his house to read the Sunday paper, then taking long walks through Central Park, watching the leaves change and discussing all of the issues that were going on in the world.
It’s been more than two months now, and I know people look at us and wonder how I snagged him. All I can think is that it’s scientific. Take for example, lightning. It’s the result of one kind of charge in the clouds during a thunderstorm and an equal and opposite charge on earth at the same time. The two totally opposite charges meet together in space and neutralize as lightning.
Brian is really sweet. He’s always saying that I’m beautiful and that my clumsiness is charming. But I think he’s just being nice. My theory is that Brian and I are like lightning. My ultimate nerdiness and his ultimate hotness came together and manifested itself into one very electric kiss that sparked a whole relationship.
2
Bee Bops
Here’s the dealeeyo. I’m not some kind of prude. But I’m a virgin, and I had planned on staying that way for the foreseeable future. Maybe it’s because my sophomore year of high school, Mason Riley, the girl who was class valedictorian, got pregnant. I didn’t even know her, but like everybody else in school, I stared as she walked around the hallway, her belly getting bigger and bigger. By the time graduation rolled around, she looked like she was going to pop that puppy at any second.
There was a whole big flap because the principal didn’t want her to give the valedictorian speech, but her parents threatened to sue, and so she gave this speech—the usual hooha about working hard and dreaming big. But as I watched her, I thought, This is a girl who scored 2380 on the SATs. She must’ve been using birth control. For the first time, I believed the sex-ed hype. No type of birth control is infallible. Accidents happen. I’m a clumsy girl. There’s only three steps at the front of our house and I fall down them on the regular. I looked at Mason Riley’s big old belly and I
didn’t want that accident to happen to me.
That was all well and good in high school, when I went to the junior prom with this kid, Max, whose parents have known my parents since college, when they all joined the Peace Corps. Max was cute, but our parents used to bathe us in the tub together until we were in like third grade, way past the point they should’ve stopped. So while it was really nice to make out with him on prom night, I think we both felt like it was practice for something bigger and better.
When Brian and I first started dating, I told him I was a virgin and he said it was cool. But he’s nineteen; he’ll be twenty in the spring. I can’t expect him to wait around forever. So a couple of weeks ago, I went and got a prescription for the pill. Then I bought some condoms and kept them in my purse. And then just for good measure, when I went home last weekend, I saw my ob-gyn and got the patch. I left the doctor’s office feeling very mature and sexy, like Lady Chatterly’s lover. Or I guess, I mean like Lady Chatterly. You know what I mean. Mature. Sexy.
This weekend, Brian’s roommate went out of town, so he called and asked me if I wanted to sleep over. “Sure,” I said, hanging up the phone and trying to be cool. But then I totally started freaking out. Everyone says I’m so lucky because I got a single apartment in the housing lottery, but these are the days when I think, yeah, right. I really wanted someone to talk to. I could call one of my friends in Cali, Rebecca or Haylie, but I felt so awkward. There’s always this whole long catchup about the weather and classes and folks from back home when all I’d want to do is say, “Look, I think I’m going to have sex for the first time tonight and I am SCARED OUT OF MY MIND.” I looked at the dingy beige dorm phone and it was like I had temporary paralysis. I could see the phone. I knew how to use the phone. But I was not going to pick up the phone and say those words. I just couldn’t.
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