Your Life, but Sweeter

by Crystal Velasquez

  Enjoy all the books in the

  Your Life, but … series!

  Your Life, but Better!

  Your Life, but Cooler!

  Your Life, but Sweeter!

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2010 by Crystal Velasquez

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89913-3

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To my grandparents,

  David and Guillermina White,

  for your deep love, kindness,

  strength, and generous sharing

  of chocolate-chip cookies

  And to my niece and nephew,

  Eli and Jasmine Velasquez,

  the apples of my eye

  Acknowledgments

  Even though my name is on the cover of this book, to say I wrote it alone would be a big fat lie. Stephanie Elliott, you are truly an excellent editor. I’m not sure that I would ever have written these books without your help and encouragement. Thank you for being so unbelievably awesome. Your new baby is one lucky little girl.

  Again, I must thank Krista Vitola, the editorial assistant with the mostest. I’m so glad you’ve been involved with this series. Thank you to copy editor Ashley Mason for doing another great job and fixing all my embarrassing mistakes. Thank you to Tamar Schwartz, managing editor; Marci Senders, designer; Natalia Dextre, production associate; Colleen Fellingham, associate copy chief; Barbara Perris, copy chief; Meg O’Brien, publicist; Alyssa Sheinmel, marketing manager; and the entire Delacorte Press team. You have all gone above and beyond to make these books successful and I am forever in your debt.

  Thank you to Angela Martini for her adorable cover illustrations, Dan Elliott for a wonderful author photo, and Maria Flores for creating my website. (Thanks also to Maria and her husband, Jason, for letting me spend a few days at their beautiful house in the mountains, where I wrote the first two chapters of this book. The peace and quiet helped!)

  Thank you to Debi Lampert Rudman, the event coordinator at the Barnes & Noble in Princeton, NJ, where I had my first ever author appearance, for making me feel like a rock star. Thanks to Shona, Maria, Helen, Julie, and Phil for attending! Huge thanks to Bina Valenzano and Christine Freglette for inviting me to their lovely store in Brooklyn, The BookMark Shoppe. And to all the kids who participated in their choose-your-adventure writing contest, I’m so proud of you! It was a ton of fun to meet you all, and I hope you keep writing! And thanks to Dionne, Derek, Maria, Shona, and Jen for being there.

  Ellen Scordato, thank you for interviewing me for your top-notch grammar blog on BN.com. I feel so famous! Thank you to the fine folks at the Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, NJ, for inviting me to be a part of your Writing Matters series, and to the Princeton Public Library for letting me participate in your annual Children’s Book Festival. I am honored. I would also like to thank Aisha, my first official fan in California, for actually reading my blog!

  Thanks to Madelin Velasquez, who spent several hours helping me figure out the outline. You’re the best, Mom. And I’m so proud of you for going back to college! Camille Dewing-Vallejo gave me lots of great ideas for places to send the characters in New York City and gave me some fun quiz ideas too—even when she was home sick and had no voice. She also called me when I was at my most stressed to give me a much-needed pep talk. Thank you! Tom Wengelewski insisted that I use a particular feature of Times Square, which I did. Great advice. Dereeka Minks Marte spent an afternoon at Dave and Buster’s brainstorming with me (and a few phone calls after that). If not for the four of you, I might have pulled out all my hair. And thank you to my father, Eliezer Velasquez, who passed down his creativity and is the kindest, most amazing man I know. Love you, Dad. Love you too, big brother Eli! Thank you for being so supportive of my writing, and for making the best tents ever when we were kids. You helped show me how to use my imagination. Thanks to all my friends, who buy multiple copies of my books and make me laugh every day. I’m so lucky to know you all.

  Thank you to the ladies of the Aegean Arts Circle Writing Workshop in Greece. I learned so much from all of you! And to the readers: I can’t thank you enough for choosing my books. I’m happy to occupy even a small space on your shelf.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “There it is!” Jessie Miller shouts. “The Empire State Building! And it’s all lit up in red and green!”

  She leans over you to get her face as close to the bus’s window as possible, flattening the last bit of bagel you had stashed away in the brown paper bag on your lap. “Hey! You’re crushing innocent bystanders over here,” you moan.

  Jessie looks down at the squished paper bag. “Eek, sorry,” she says, resuming her position on the seat next to you and straightening out her bouncy blond ponytail. “I’m just so excited! Can you believe we’re actually here? And right before the holidays too!”

  To be honest, you can’t believe it. Up until you started seeing bits and pieces of the New York City skyline, you were still kind of skeptical. When your school’s choir lost the final singing competition that would have sent them to Carnegie Hall to perform, everyone—including kids who weren’t even in the choir—was bummed. So the choir director, Mr. Parker, rallied the administration and cooked up a plan to get you all to New York City anyway. But even though everybody in your grade has been doing fund-raisers for weeks to go on this trip (if you never hear the words “bake sale” or “car wash” again, it’ll be too soon), you secretly thought your teachers would pull the old bait and switch and you’d end up at an exhibit about New York City at a local museum instead of seeing the real thing. But there was no shadiness involved at all. You’re even meeting a couple of classes from a sister school in New York. (Mona won’t shut up about that part. Apparently, a boy named Paul Renner, who used to live next door to her when she and
her mom lived in the city, is one of the kids coming on the trip. According to Mona, he worships the ground she walks on. Just what you need—another Mona groupie.)

  After what seems like forever inside a dark winding tunnel, the bus emerges back into the daylight, and you are officially in New York City. And not a moment too soon! The first hour on the bus was kind of fun, but after a while those seats start to feel a lot like concrete, and your butt could use a break. Although that will mean braving the cold outside the warm, heated bus. Brrr!

  “Yeah, this is going to be awesome,” you agree, as the bus rattles its way uptown through the early-morning traffic. “For one of us, anyway.” You tap the top of Lena Saldano’s head as you add the last part.

  Lena, your other best friend, turns around and peeks over the back of the seat in front of you so that all you can see is her big brown eyes and matching hair. “Now, now, I can’t help it if I have high-powered connections in New York.”

  “High-powered connections?” Amy Choi squeaks from across the aisle. She leans toward the three of you, her dark brown eyes brimming with curiosity. “Who? Somebody famous? Tell me, tell me!”

  “Relax, Amy,” you say, resisting the urge to call her Perez. (If anyone could take the gossip crown away from Perez Hilton, it would be Amy.) “Lena’s just talking about her cousin Amanda. She goes to school here in the city.”

  “Not just any school,” Lena insists, her eyes growing larger. “An Ivy League school! She’s pre-law at Columbia.”

  “Oh,” Amy says, turning around immediately. Nothing juicy about a cousin doing well in college and heading for law school. But you can tell that Lena is superproud. If she could skip ahead to college right now, she would. Amanda is a total rock star in her book.

  “Anyway, I haven’t seen her since she moved to New York and she felt bad about not being around for my last birthday. So she wants to spend the day with me.”

  “But doesn’t she have classes?” you ask.

  “No, she’s taking her last final of the semester this morning. She did say something about having to go to her job later, though. I bet she interns at a big-time law firm and I won’t even recognize her because she’ll be wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase! We probably won’t even get to do that much, since she’ll be called away to consult on some big important case.”

  “Still, getting to see more of the city, even for a little while, sounds awesome.” Jessie sighs wistfully. “I still can’t believe Amanda got Ms. Darbeau to agree to let you leave the school trip. She must be a magician and a law student. Where is she going to take you, anyway?”

  Lena shrugs. “Beats me. She said something about ‘hopping a train and seeing where the day takes us.’ Maybe I’ll get to see her campus. And maybe a bunch of other campuses! There are so many schools here. NYU, FIT, Baruch …” Lena turns around slowly in her seat, visions of Barnard and Columbia dancing in her head.

  “That’s great for her,” Jessie whispers to you, “but we’re stuck. I was hoping to get in some quality celeb watching while we’re here. I mean, hellooo, MTV films right in Times Square. And I read on his Facebook fan page that Nick Jonas will be there today! Plus there are loads of famous people who live in Greenwich Village. There’s so much we could do if we could sneak away on our own! But just look at this itinerary we actually have to follow.” Jessie unfolds a crumpled piece of paper from the back pocket of her jeans. “There’s hardly anything on it. And according to this, we’ll be spending half our time in a ginormous museum!”

  It’s true. Since the art teacher, Ms. Darbeau, had a hand in planning the trip, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first thing on the menu—not that you could possibly have enough time to see it all. After that you’ll be having lunch in the museum’s cafeteria, followed by an hour and a half at the Sony Wonder Technology Lab, less than an hour at the Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink, and a show at Radio City Music Hall. “Actually,” you tease Jess, “we won’t even get to do the few things on this list. The Metropolitan Museum of Art alone will probably take all day!”

  “Oh, great,” Jessie says miserably. “That makes me feel way better.”

  You giggle and nudge her with your shoulder.

  “Just kidding. Besides, the museum might be kind of cool.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But here’s what I had in mind!” She pulls out her purse and extracts a tiny little pink square. She unfolds it to reveal a piece of lined paper filled to the brim with Jessie’s curly purple handwriting. You take it from her and begin to read.

  “ ‘See every Broadway show; Madame Tussauds wax museum; shop at Henri Bendel, Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Tiffany’s; have lunch in Little Italy; tour MTV Studios and meet Nick Jonas!!!’ ”—this last one is underlined three times—“ ‘go to the top of the Empire State Building; visit Dylan’s Candy Bar; poetry slam in Greenwich Village; horse-and-carriage ride in Central Park …’ ” The list continues, but you run out of breath. “Jess,” you say with a laugh, shaking the paper in her face. “You would need to be here for a month to do all this stuff!”

  “And win the lottery,” Lena’s voice shoots over the bus seat. “Twice.”

  Jessie shrugs. “A girl can dream,” she replies, refolding the piece of paper and putting it in her purse. “But the Nick Jonas thing is totally possible. Or at least some celebrity. All we have to do is keep our eyes peeled! Promise you will.”

  You shake your head and sigh. “I’m not sure I should support your obvious celeb addiction, but fine, I promise.” Jessie smiles, satisfied. But really, you just hope New York is as glam as you picture it in your mind. You and your mom have started having classic movie nights together, and not too long ago you watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring Audrey Hepburn. Now, there was a woman with style! Since then, you’ve totally had a fantasy of gallivanting around the town in a chic black dress and pumps, a string of pearls, a slick tan trench coat, and black sunglasses that cover half your face. It seems like the right outfit to wear while shopping at pricey boutiques and fancy salons. Too bad in reality you’re wearing a superthick blue parka, warm boots, and the blue and green knit cap your grandmother made for you last winter, complete with an embarrassing pom-pom on top. And you only have enough money to buy a few souvenirs, and we’re talking plastic snow globes, not diamond earrings. Oh well. Like Jessie said, a girl can dream.

  At last the bus pulls up behind a caravan of other buses and parks in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (You overhear Mona telling Lisa Topple that no one calls it that. Real New Yorkers—and she’s including herself in that group—just call it “the Met.” Ugh. You hope she’s not going to be bragging like this all day.) As you climb out of the bus and start lining up on the stairs leading to the entrance, your gym teacher, Mr. Nocera, who you assume they invited along because he was once a drill sergeant in the army, checks you all off on his clipboard and blows his whistle to make sure you’re in a straight line. Even though Mr. Nocera is kind of a cutie, you can already tell you’re going to hate that whistle by the end of the day. Jeez, is this going to be a fun trip or boot camp? you think. The other kids grumble, probably thinking the same thing. But after you pass through the threshold into the gigantic lobby, everyone is speechless—especially Jimmy Morehouse, who you catch a glimpse of near the back of the line next to Charlie Daniels. While Ms. Darbeau goes off to speak to a museum rep and the other teachers, Jimmy cranes his neck to look up at the ceiling, which seems like it’s about a million miles away, it’s so high. After Jimmy’s successful art debut not too long ago at the local community center, he has seemed a lot more confident about his dream of becoming an artist. He sketches all the time now, and his determination makes you like him even more.

  For some reason you’d thought your school would have the run of the place today, but there are people everywhere—some browsing through the pamphlets at the big round information booth in the middle of the lobby, some thumbing through books in the gift shop, and some gathe
ring around the small group of musicians playing classical music in the far corner. Even Jessie has to admit it’s pretty awesome.

  “All right, kids,” Ms. Darbeau says, clapping her hands quickly to get your attention. “As you know, we are on a tight schedule today, so we can’t possibly see as much of this museum as I—uh, you—would like. So we will be taking a self-guided tour through the Egyptian artifacts and then moving on to view the Picasso collection.”

  At that, Jimmy’s ears perk up beneath his wavy brown hair, and his deep green eyes have a sudden twinkle in them. Picasso is his favorite, and he reacts to this news the way other kids might respond if someone told them that they’d be spending the day at the beach. His inner artist is geeking out big-time, and it’s adorable.

  After you all turn in your heavy winter coats at the coat check and Lena texts her cousin to let her know where she’ll be, Ms. Darbeau leads your group through the dimly lit rooms full of Egyptian art. The glazed bowls look just as good as anything you’d find in IKEA. But the giant statues of ancient pharaohs who look a little like lions take your breath away.

  Jessie nudges you and Lena. “Hey, don’t you think that one kind of looks like—”

  “Nick Jonas?” Lena finishes for Jessie.

  “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “Because thou art afflicted with Jonas fever,” Lena says gently, touching Jessie’s shoulder as if breaking the news that she has some fatal disease. “You’ve already seen his visage in a painted vase, a coffin lid, and a cave painting. The situation is dire! Recover and spare us this folly!”

  Jessie looks to you to decipher Lena’s Elizabethan English once again.

  “In other words, snap out of it!”

  Jessie has to laugh at herself, which starts you and Lena giggling too. “Okay, you’re right. I just can’t help it! Knowing that he and I are in the same city right now is driving me insane.”

  “We know. And you’re taking us with you!” Lena finishes. You all laugh and are heading toward the giant tombs when a girl comes running up to you three, her dark brown hair swept up into a messy bun and her jeans worn and faded. She looks like an older, slightly more disheveled version of Lena.