All of it! The celebs might try to deny the stories, but the mags wouldn’t print them if they weren’t true, right?
Almost all of it. The part about your two favorite singers being nuts was probably blown out of proportion, but you wholeheartedly buy the rest.
Most of it. The cast members of that new show are definitely dating one another. But the celebrity feuds rundown was probably made up to boost sales.
You don’t believe any of that mumbo jumbo. Everybody knows the tabloids can’t be trusted. But they sure are fun to read!
You’re the leader for a group project in school. Johnny, a notorious slacker, is in your group. He has a major role in the presentation and promises to pull his weight. So you:
trust him completely. If he says he’ll come through, then you’re sure he will. You’re glad to be able to relax and focus on your own share of the work.
believe him, but check in on his progress every few days just to make sure.
let him handle his part but secretly prepare his section on your own, just in case he slips back into his lazy ways. You know he has the best intentions, but he doesn’t have the best track record.
assign him a less important role in the project—like announcing your group name or something. No way are you leaving your grade in Johnny’s hands. You doubt he’ll deliver.
A new sneaker just came out that promises to make you run faster, jump higher, and be cooler. Do you buy them?
Of course! You’re sure that as soon as you lace those puppies up, you’ll be able to run a mile a minute!
Yes. Even if they don’t make you jump any higher, they’ll definitely score you some cool points at school.
Maybe. You don’t really think they’ll help your softball game at all, but if there is even the slightest chance that they will, you’ll give them a shot.
Nah. No sneaker can make you run faster. Those ads always exaggerate the truth.
Give yourself 1 point for every time you answered A, 2 points for every B, 3 points for every C, and 4 points for every
—If you scored between 5 and 12, go to Chapter 9.
—If you scored between 13 and 20, go to Chapter 8.
You’re a rules girl. You tend to do things by the book and very rarely get in trouble because of that. At a time when some of your friends are rebelling against everything, you rebel against rebellion. It’s not that you’re crazy about all the rules you have to live by. But you respect them (as long as they’re fair) and know that you’ll get to make your own someday.
As much as you would love to get in some practice before the audition, you head to history class as scheduled. If you do score a solo spot, you don’t want it to be because you cut class. (Detention would probably be the least of your worries if that happened.)
Too bad the only reward you get for your good behavior is seeing Mona’s snarling face as soon as you walk through the door. You know for sure that life is unfair, because if it weren’t, you wouldn’t have any classes with Mona. She’s lucky it isn’t true that if you make an ugly face for too long, it stays that way, because her modeling career would have been over a long time ago.
You take your seat and do your best to ignore her glares, focusing instead on Ms. Krell’s lesson for the day: Napoleon’s quest for power. You are furiously taking notes about the events leading up to Waterloo when you feel your bag vibrate at your feet. It’s your cell phone, letting you know you have a text message. You aren’t supposed to text in class, but curiosity gets the best of you.
Without drawing too much attention to yourself, you reach into your bag and pull out your phone, flipping it open under your desk. You click on the little envelope icon and get the nastiest shock of your morning so far. Mona has sent you a text message:
U don’t stand a chance against
me in choir. Drop out now!
You close the phone and try to keep your face stone still, as if you’d just read another perfectly normal text from Lena or Jessie. You refuse to give Mona the satisfaction of getting a rise out of you! Instead you’ll concentrate on how Napoleon conquered so much of his empire.
But as you’re scribbling away in your notebook, your phone vibrates again.
U probly don’t even know what
2 sing l8tr. What a joke.
That’s it. You tried to take the high road, but you can’t bear it anymore. Who does she think she is anyway? You flip open the keyboard on your phone and furiously type back a message.
I’ll B singing U B long with Me
and it’s going to rock!!!
There! That ought to shut her up. Of course, just as you’re hitting Send you see a shadow loom over your desk.
“Care to share what you’re writing with the whole class?” Ms. Krell asks you. “I mean, whatever it is must be awfully important, since you know good and well texting is not allowed in my classroom.”
Sigh. You do have a choice here. You could tell Ms. Krell that Mona started it by texting you first. But what are you, in kindergarten? Besides, one thing you aren’t is a snitch. Telling on Mona probably won’t get you out of hot water anyway. So you figure the safest thing to do is say nothing and try your best to melt into your chair.
“Hand it over,” Ms. Krell demands, holding out her hand. You were afraid of that. Ms. Krell’s greatest joy in life is confiscating what she considers contraband in her classroom: Cell phones, PSPs, gum, iPods, magazines…the list is endless. But cell phones are definitely at the top of her hit list of classroom no-nos.
You plop the phone into her hand, praying that will be the end of it. But noooo.…
“I’ll be holding on to this phone until tomorrow.”
Your mouth gapes open. Tomorrow? That’s practically a lifetime away. You’ve heard of living off the grid, but this is ridiculous. And she isn’t even finished yet.
“Since you seem bored and want to do something with your hands, maybe you’ll enjoy spending your lunch period cleaning up the library. As you know, it’s in quite a state. But with nimble fingers like yours”—she wiggles your phone in the air—“you should be done in no time.” With that, she turns with military precision back toward the chalkboard and continues rattling off facts about Napoleon.
You don’t even need to look over at Mona to know that she’s smiling from ear to ear. Ugh. The scoreboard so far: Mona—1, you—big fat goose egg.
You have always been a good girl, a law-abiding citizen, someone who plays by the rules. So why did you end up in trouble? Even though you were tempted to skip class, you went to history like you were supposed to, only to get baited into a text-message war by none other than Mona Winston. Without even breaking a sweat, she managed to get you riled up, your cell phone confiscated, and your precious freedom taken away. Okay, maybe the last one is overstating it a bit, but you will be missing out on lunch with your friends (one of your favorite pastimes) in order to clean up the disaster area that is the school library. You might as well be heading off to jail. Your only hope of saving face is to finish cleaning early so that you have time to plead your way back into your teacher’s good graces and reclaim your phone. But come on, is it even possible to clean such a massive mess before lunch is over? Take the quiz to find out if you have the drive to get the job done.
QUIZ TIME!
Circle your answers and tally up the points at the end.
You really, really, really want the new iPhone, but your folks won’t spring for it. They think you should get a job this summer to save up the money. What job do you go for?
A paper route in your neighborhood. You’ll have to wake up at the crack of dawn every morning and it will be hard work, but it pays well, you’ll get some exercise, and you’ll have your iPhone in no time.
You apply to help out at the local pool. You’ll have to help clean the locker rooms, but you’ll also get to swim and lie out by the pool during slow times.
Apply to take tickets at the nearby movie theater. You’ll barely have to do anything and you’ll even ge
t to see some movies. It doesn’t pay that much, but at least you won’t have to break a sweat.
Get a job? Hellloooo, it’s called summer vacation for a reason. No way are you going to ruin two straight months of freedom just to get an iPhone. You don’t want one that badly anyway.
You have to present a research paper in English class. It counts for a lot of your grade, so the teacher gives you lots of time to prepare. Naturally, you:
write a really well-researched paper, adding a few more pages than you needed. Plus you throw in a PowerPoint presentation and handouts. You’re after an A+ so you go all out.
write a paper that is exactly what the teacher asked for, no more, no less. The teacher thinks you could have done better, but come on, you do have a life.
hand in a paper that is a little shorter than the teacher asked for. But for something you just threw together over the weekend, it isn’t bad. It won’t get you anywhere near an A, but it’ll keep you out of summer school!
try to use a paper you wrote for last semester’s English class. Sure, you could have written a five-star paper if you’d wanted to, but who actually wants to do that much work?
You have a snow day off from school. What do you do with it?
Catch up on all your school assignments, reorganize your closet, update your blog, squeeze in a workout, and read a few chapters of the great book you just bought.
Get a few chores out of the way so you have more of your weekend free. Then spend some quality time with your little sis. (You did promise to help her decorate her doll-house a while ago.)
Go have a snowball fight with some friends, and then get warm again by drinking some hot cocoa and playing board games with your family.
Sleep till noon, and then spend the rest of the day in your pj’s vegging in front of the TV. That’s what snow days are for!
You and some friends join the talent show planning committee. The faculty advisor asks for volunteers for various roles. What do you volunteer to do?
Head up the whole committee. If you want the show to come out right, you’ll have to step up to the plate.
Be in charge of the music. That way you’ll have to worry about only one aspect of the show.
The least taxing job possible, like posting the talent show announcement on the school’s Web site. The less you have to do, the better.
Before you get sucked into taking on too much, you ease your way off the committee. You have enough on your plate as it is, and taking on extra stuff will seriously cut into your free time.
You’re babysitting your neighbor’s kids for a few hours, and they’re bored—and driving you crazy. What do you do to pass the time?
Write a short play for the kids to perform for their parents, complete with costumes and props. What kid wouldn’t love that? And being so busy makes the hours fly by.
Play hide-and-seek. They always hide in the same places, but you take extra long to find them anyway just to savor the peace and quiet.
Give them a stack of paper and a giant box of crayons and let them go wild. You get to supervise from the couch.
Sit them in front of the TV watching cartoons while you gab on the phone with your friends. This babysitting business is a piece of cake!
Give yourself 1 point for every time you answered A, 2 points for every B, 3 points for every C, and 4 points for every
—If you scored between 5 and 12, go to Chapter 13.
—If you scored between 13 and 20, go to Chapter 12.
Good for you! Because you’re such a skeptical chick, no one is going to put anything over on you. You don’t believe everything you see on TV, in magazines, or on the Internet. And you take what other people tell you with a grain of salt—especially if you’ve been burned by them in the past. That means your critical thinking skills are in good working order. However, not believing anything can be just as bad as believing everything. It’s great that you are by no means gullible, but the ability to give people the benefit of the doubt could allow them to surprise you—in a good way.
You feel like you must have accidentally stepped into another dimension and ended up in bizarro land. That is the only plausible explanation for Lisa and Maria suddenly accepting Jessie into their exclusive inner circle. Not that Jessie isn’t totally A-list in your book, but those girls usually treat anyone who isn’t a part of their posse like they’re strictly D-list. So, why the sudden change?
Yes, the song you had Jessie sing did make her sound light-years better than she did before. But you don’t buy that Lisa was just bowled over by Jessie’s vocal stylings. Something is definitely going on. And if you had to guess, you’d say that whatever it is, you wouldn’t like it.
In light of that fact, you don’t feel the least bit bad about channeling your inner Nancy Drew and following Lisa and Maria between classes to see what they’re up to. As they make their way down the stairs and past the library, you start to get a little nervous. They are heading straight for the cluster of lockers outside the auditorium, where there isn’t too much traffic, which means there won’t be anywhere for you to hide. Quick, what would Nancy do?
As you glance around, you notice that the auditorium doors are open and no one is inside. So you silently walk behind Lisa until you get to the open door, then you slip inside and slide down into the nearest seat, hoping your head isn’t visible over the back of it. Nancy would be proud.
The girls spend the next few minutes discussing all the movies they want to see and sales at the mall they want to hit. Yawn. When are they going to get to the juicy stuff? you wonder. And as if you had asked that question out loud, Maria’s next words confirm your worst fears.
“Can you believe Mr. Carber?” you hear Maria complain while her locker creaks open. “Giving us all that math homework on a Friday? What’s his problem anyway?”
You hear another creak and the thud of books being slammed onto a metal shelf. “Who knows? He must hate kids or something. Weekend homework is just cruel and unusual punishment.”
So far nothing you disagree with there. Mr. Carber is known around school as the weekend ruiner. “Speaking of cruel and unusual punishment, how are we going to deal with that girl Jessie?” Maria continues.
“Shh!” Lisa warns. “Keep it down! We don’t want the whole school to hear.”
“Sorry,” Maria answers. “But you heard her singing that Miley song. She doesn’t sound half bad. And if she actually beats out Mona for a solo, Mona is going to be a drag to be around for the rest of the year.”
Lisa shuts her locker and lowers her voice even more, making you strain to hear. “I know. Relax. I already have the perfect plan.”
“Of course you do!” Maria cries in honest admiration. “I should have known. So what is it?”
There’s a pause—probably Lisa doing a quick check over each shoulder to see if anyone’s listening. Good thing she doesn’t think to check the auditorium!
“Well, you saw how quickly Jessie jumped at the chance to have lunch with us, right?”
“Totally. It’s like she’s desperate to upgrade out of her own loser clique.”
“Exactly,” Lisa confirms. “Which means she’s like putty in our hands. She’ll do whatever we say, as long as we make her think she’s one of us. So all we have to do is give her some really, really, really bad advice for the audition. I bet she’d sing the Barney theme song if we told her to.”
They’re lucky you’re in hiding, because your fists are clenched in fury and there’s no telling what you’d do if you could break cover. That’s your friend they’re talking about! The nerve of them!
“Yeah, but even she wouldn’t fall for that. Hmm…Let’s see…,” Maria mutters, the wheels in her brain working overtime.
“Hey! Didn’t Amy tell us that Jessie was originally going to sing that Taylor Swift song but that it was way too high for her?”
“Oh, that would be perfect! It must be way out of her range! If we can just get her to sing that instead of the Miley song, she’ll hu
miliate herself onstage, and Mona will have the solo handed to her on a silver platter.”
“Genius,” Lisa declares. “Maybe we can even get her to wear something stupid, just to put the whole thing over the top. But we’d better hurry. What do you say we go find our new best friend?”
You hear two locker doors slam shut, and the girls go giggling down the hall.
Finally! Your back was starting to cramp in your supersleuth position. But no time to dwell on that. You’ve got to find Jessie, fast! Someone has to warn her about her new “friends.”
Two more periods go by before you spot Jessie bending over the water fountain on your way to gym class.
“Hey! I’ve been looking all over for you!” you shout, clapping her on the back.
She probably would have been happy to see you too, if she weren’t so busy gurgling. You kind of pushed her into the water-fountain stream by accident. Oops.
As she slowly backs away from the fountain, dripping water from her face and all over her shirt, her mouth hanging open in shock, you can practically see the steam shooting out of her ears. (Especially when Celia and Delia walk down the hall, see Jessie, and start snickering.)
“This had better be good,” she snaps. “I just got this top from H&M and now it’s soaked!”
“Um…well, maybe you can say it’s the new style? You know, water-fountain chic,” you offer.
Jessie smirks at you. She is so not buying that one. Better just change the subject.
Your Life, but Cooler Page 6
