I walked to the front and sang the first part:
My town’s an all-American town,
We all say “how do you do?”
We welcome friends old and new.
I walked back to the group and Duncan took over:
My town’s an all-American town,
Where I get to share my vision
Of Technicolor television.
Then Hallelujah came to the front. We didn’t change the words for her part, but when she sang it, it had a different meaning. A better one.
My town’s an all-American town,
Where we’re on the same team,
And we all have a dream.
Then we all came together for the end, with Hector and Tara and Jennifer and Kelli Ann, and Ricky swinging his hips in a leather jacket:
Our town’s an All-American town,
Where we find inspiration
In a new innovation.
What took us so long?
How could we be so wrong?
You can see our hips shakin’,
And there’s just no mistakin’,
We’re an all-American town!
We were supposed to be singing about Hula-Hoops. But that night, in front of the crowd and Mrs. Tyndall, it felt like we were singing about ourselves as we held the Hula-Hoops high over our heads, showing the audience that not everyone looked exactly the same in Pleasant Valley, Tennessee. But we still all belonged there. Maybe some of us were not considered stars, but together we were a constellation.
We’re an all-American towwwwwwn!
The audience burst into applause, rising from their seats. It was an excellency, a thousand times over.
When we ran offstage, Tara and I hugged.
“I can’t believe we did it,” I said.
“We did! We did!”
“Yes,” Mrs. Tyndall said. “You did.” It sounded like an accusation. She was on her feet once again, looming over us, looking fierce. She didn’t yell at us for destroying her play. But she didn’t say anything positive, either. She just stood there, staring, as the principal hurried up to her.
“Edna,” he said. “What a triumph. A triumph. Kids, you were glorious. I expect a repeat performance tomorrow!”
Tara and I looked from the principal to Mrs. Tyndall, who was still staring at us like a cobra ready to strike. She twisted her lips together, hard. And then she nodded her head a single time and thumped her cane. It was her reluctant seal of approval. Our version of the play was getting an encore! Tara and I hugged again, and my hair caught on something. As I tried to untangle myself, I saw what it was. Tara was wearing a Vincent Chin button, too.
“Where’d you find that?” I asked.
“I found it on the floor,” said Tara. “I figured you meant to give it to me but forgot.”
I had made a button for Tara, but I had left it in my jewelry box when I thought she didn’t care about Vincent.
But there it was. Maybe one of the boys had dropped theirs.
Or maybe.
Ghost.
AFTER OUR PERFORMANCES ON Saturday, we had a cast party, better known as popcorn and punch in the art room. I made buttons as presents for the cast and crew.
With some prodding from Tara, I even gave one to Mrs. Tyndall. She put on the button and then straightened her sweater.
“Thank you,” she said politely.
“You’re welcome,” I said, just as politely.
“That was quite a change,” she said, finally talking about it. “What you did with ‘All-American Town.’ You were lucky that the audience responded as positively as they did.”
And Mr. Hoban, too, I thought.
I sighed. It was clear that Mrs. Tyndall hadn’t gotten our point from the dancing. But she kept talking. “You might have a career as a choreographer.”
I knew it was a compliment, but that wasn’t what I had in mind.
“I think we’ll do Alice in Wonderland next year,” Mrs. Tyndall said. “More age appropriate, I think. And with an eighties update.”
I imagined the Cheshire cat saying things like tubular. And I thought about my mom, who wanted to stand up for other people. And me. But I’d promised her I’d stand up for myself.
“Alice doesn’t have to have blonde hair and blue eyes,” I said.
Mrs. Tyndall’s eyes—which were not blue themselves—widened. “That’s the way Alice has always …”
“It’s Wonderland,” I said. “Let people wonder.”
After the party, I walked to the car with my family. There was a spring chill, which made the stars look extra bright.
“This look was my favorite,” David said, doing a very good impression of me looking adoringly at Elvis Presley.
“You’re our superstar,” Mom said, which is a thing moms are supposed to say.
“You know what will make you a star?” Safta said. “Work.”
“And luck,” said Wai Po. She pulled a newspaper from her purse and handed it to me.
For a second, I thought it would have something to do with Vincent Chin. But it was a current newspaper, and inside was a small notice that had been circled three times:
“That’s in five days,” I said.
Wai Po and Safta nodded.
“What would I wear?” But I knew the answer before the words finished going into the air. The Nudie suit.
“We stitched our names on the back pocket,” said Safta.
“It’s designer,” Wai Po told me.
I pictured myself onstage in the shiny red suit. It was different but not necessarily bad. There was another, bigger issue.
“What would I sing?” I asked.
“What do you want to sing?” asked Dad.
“Patsy,” I said. After all the sadness of not singing, and the joy of returning to song, I could finally sing Patsy the way I wanted to. I wouldn’t sing it the way she did, but the way only I could.
I turned and walked backward in front of my parents. “So you’d be willing to let your one and only Chinese Jewish daughter put on a homemade Nudie suit and sing country music in front of a huge, possibly national, audience?”
“Isn’t that how all great musicians get their start?” teased Mom.
“I might be the first one with this start. But I’m okay with that,” I said.
“That’s the secret,” said Wai Po. “You are someone they’ve never seen before.”
“There’s only one Lauren Horowitz,” Safta said.
“Lauren Le Yuan Horowitz,” corrected Wai Po.
I looked at my parents and my grandmothers. In front of us, David was walking with his friends, trying to catch up to Kelli Ann without being obvious about it. Tara, my True-Blue best friend, was handing out buttons with her mom. “Buchanan for mayor!”
“Hey, Lauren,” Duncan yelled. “Wait up.”
All around us, people were shouting and laughing.
And that was a supposed-to I was okay with. Because in that moment, with my friends and family around me and all of the possibilities in front of me, everything felt like it was exactly the way it was supposed to be.
Read on for a sneak peek at David Da-Wei Horowitz’s story in This Is Just a Test!
The closest I ever came to being a hero was when our class took a field trip to McKimmon’s Farm. It was the middle of November, and we’d already had a couple of frosts, which killed off a lot of the green things and which made us wonder whose idea it was to visit a farm this time of year. Spring would make more sense, when they were planting stuff. Or if the farm grew pumpkins, which it didn’t. When we went, everything was dying on McKimmon’s Farm, and that included the poison ivy, which Mr. McKimmon wasn’t growing as a crop or anything; it was wild.
Wild, and, like I said, mostly dead. The sun was shining down hard on us, in that cloudless blue postcard way that happens in Virginia.
The teachers told a group of us to sit at the picnic tables so they could pass around seeds and dried gourds, which Mr. McKimmon actually did grow. Hector,
my best friend, squirmed between the bench and the table and ducked underneath.
“What are you doing?” I asked. The other kids were giving Hector a look.
“It’s shadier down here,” Hector said. One thing I’ll say about Hector is that he’s not afraid to be unconventional. It used to be a quality I admired, like when Hector suggested that we do everything backward for a week, or when he signed us up for correspondence classes in French because he wanted to go to the Cannes Film Festival one day. But in junior high, unconventionality was usually another word for dork.
“Knock it off,” I told Hector. I was pretty sure that under the transitive property of junior high social lives, whatever our group was thinking of Hector, they were going to start thinking of me. Hector popped back up.
“My little brother does that all the time,” said Kelli Ann Majors. I happened to know that Kelli Ann’s little brother was eight; it was one of the facts I had collected about her. It was also exactly what I was afraid someone would think.
“Watch this,” said Scott Dursky, who was in a couple of my classes. Under normal circumstances, I ignored Scott and his stunts. But now he was providing a distraction—the good kind. I watched him, hoping everyone else would, too, as he walked to an oak tree that had a bunch of vines attacking the trunk. They looked like tentacles. Scott grabbed one to try to get some climbing leverage, but the vine was loose and fell out of the tree while he was holding it.
Terry Sutphin stood behind him and said, “Nice try. Let me show you how it’s done.” Scott grabbed a different vine for a better hold. It was furry. Even from where we were sitting, I could tell it was poison ivy.
“That’s poison ivy,” I told Hector. “They shouldn’t be touching that.”
“Hey!” Hector shouted. “That’s poison ivy.”
“Says who?” Scott didn’t let go of the vine, though you could see his grip relax slightly.
“Says David,” said Hector. We walked over to the tree.
“I don’t see any leaves,” said Terry.
“You can get poison ivy from the vine, too,” I told him. “You know: ‘Hairy vine, no friend of mine?’ It still contains urushiol.”
“I’ve never heard that,” Scott said, but he let go of the vine.
“He’s making it up,” said Terry. He patted the vine, which looked like the tail of a scruffy cat. “This is my pet, Lucky. He would never hurt me. Don’t you want to meet my pet?” He reached for the closest girl, who shrieked and ran away.
“Why would I make it up?” I said. If I were going to make something up, it would be something like: studying too much for your bar mitzvah can stunt your growth, or eating only Chinese food causes premature baldness. Personally, I would like to spend less time studying Torah and more time eating pizza.
“I thought the plant had to be fresh and shiny for you to catch poison ivy,” said Kelli Ann, who was fresh and shiny herself. She ducked behind me to avoid Terry, who went to chase some other kids across the field.
“No,” I said. “Lead deaves and vines, too.” I resisted the urge to punch myself in the face. Kelli Ann had nice eyes, which made it hard for my brain to do normal things, like form words.
“Group B!” yelled Mrs. Osterberg, our science teacher. She was standing near a tractor, next to a red barn that looked as though it had been painted just for our field trip. “It’s time for your hayride.”
“Scott Dursky touched poison ivy,” said Kelli Ann. “So did Terry Sutphin.”
Mrs. Osterberg took a first aid kit out of her purse and sifted through it. There didn’t seem to be much in there besides aspirin and Band-Aids. Then she looked toward the front of the farm, about a million miles away, where there was a small public bathroom. She seemed to be calculating something in her head.
“Very well,” she said. “You can take the hayride with Group D. For now, go get those hands washed. With soap, Mr. Dursky. Lots and lots of soap. Mr. Horowitz? You go with him.”
“But—” I said.
“Go.” She turned to Hector. “Mr. Clelland, round up Mr. Sutphin and tell him to do likewise.”
Kelli Ann waved as she went off on the hayride. Scott waved back, because Scott was the kind of person who always assumed that someone was waving to him. I did a low-key kind of wave, the kind that would count if she was actually waving at me, but one I could also say was for someone else if she wasn’t. It would have been nice to be on the same hayride as Kelli Ann, not that I would sit directly next to her, but maybe I would sit near her and practice not feeling nervous. Instead, I had to go with Scott to the bathroom. Even though Scott and I had gone to school with each other for a couple of years, I’d never had a real conversation with him.
“If there wasn’t a bathroom,” I said, “you could rub lemon juice on your skin. The acid cuts through the oil.”
“Where would we get lemons around here?” asked Scott. Mr. McKimmon didn’t grow those, either; Virginia had the wrong climate.
“Maybe someone packed lemonade in their lunch?” I suggested. Scott seemed impressed by my idea, which gave me another one.
“And bananas,” I said. “If you were too late to do anything about the oil, the inside of a banana peel will cut down on the itching.”
“How does that work?”
I thought for a minute. “Maybe some kind of oil in the peel? Banana skins are also good for shining shoes.” I had done a project in fourth grade on bananas. “You can even put a banana peel on your forehead to cure headaches.”
“I’ll bet that doesn’t work,” Scott said. “Though if someone standing near you had a headache, they’d probably forget about it while you were wearing your banana bandanna.”
Hector found us just as Scott finished up in the bathroom. “I told Terry to come to the bathroom, and he said he wasn’t interested in ‘doing likewise,’ ” announced Hector. “Even though he had to make.”
“ ‘Make’?” repeated Scott.
Hector’s mom hated what she called “bathroom” words, so Hector just said make, which, up to this point, had never bothered me.
“Take a leak,” I translated.
“He went behind the barn,” Hector said.
Scott shook his head. “That’s Terry for you.”
“Should we talk to him?” I asked. “Maybe he’ll listen, if you tell him to wash his hands.”
“He’ll probably be fine,” Scott said.
“You washed your hands,” Hector pointed out.
“That’s me. To me, it’s a low risk/high reward situation to wash my hands.”
“You really can get poison ivy from the vines,” I said.
“He had his chance,” said Scott. “Besides, some people don’t get poison ivy.”
To everyone who has been there for us all along, thank you. Our wonderful editor, Lisa Sandell, and the encouraging crew at Scholastic. Our agents, Susan Cohen and Tracey Adams, who are always warmly supportive. Our Wednesday morning critique group, where we have shared much more than stories. Our families: David, Matthew, Jason, and Kate Harrington, and Butch, Graham, and Karina Lazorchak; our moms and brothers and in-laws! Some of our writing friends went the extra mile for us this year. We love you. Sara Lewis Holmes: You need to start teaching. Thank you to Amy Yam, DVM, for sharing your knowledge of how things go. Special thanks to our beta readers: Elisa Rosman, Camille Saperstein, Lucia Saperstein, and Evelyn Khoo Schwartz. And to every teacher, librarian, or bookseller whose heart flutters every time they match a kid with the right book: Thank you from the bottom of our own fluttering hearts.
Madelyn Rosenberg is the author of Dream Boy, co-written with Mary Crockett, and many other books for younger readers, including the How to Behave books and Cyclops of Central Park. She writes books, articles, and essays for children and adults, and you can visit her online at madelynrosenberg.com.
Wendy Wan-Long Shang is the author of The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, which was awarded the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award for Children’s Literature,
and The Way Home Looks Now, an Amelia Bloomer List selection and a CCBC Choices List selection.Visit her online at wendyshang.com.
Madelyn and Wendy cowrote the companion to this book, This Is Just a Test, which is a Sydney Taylor Honor Book. They both live in the suburbs of Washington, DC.
Also by Madelyn Rosenberg and
Wendy Wan-Long Shang
This Is Just a Test
Text copyright © 2020 by Madelyn Rosenberg and Wendy Wan-Long Shang
Interior art © 2020 by Chris Danger
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rosenberg, Madelyn, author. | Shang, Wendy Wan Long, author. Title: Not your all-American girl / Madelyn Rosenberg and Wendy Wan-Long Shang.Description: First edition. | New York: Scholastic Press, 2020. | Audience: Ages 9–11. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: Sixth-graders Lauren and Tara have always done everything together so it is only natural that they both try out for their middle school musical play, about “all-American” girl in 1958; Tara gets the lead role, as usual, because in the teacher’s mind Lauren, half-Jewish and half-Chinese, does not fit the image of all-American girl—Lauren is hurt but resolved to support her friend, but her two grandmothers are furious and they intend to do something about it. Identifiers: LCCN 2019031957 | ISBN 9781338037760 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781338037784 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Children’s plays—Juvenile fiction. | Musicals—Juvenile fiction. | Stereotypes (Social psychology)—Juvenile fiction. | Best friends—Juvenile fiction. | Friendship—Juvenile fiction. | Grandmothers—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Theater—Fiction. | Musicals—Fiction. | Stereotypes (Social psychology)—Fiction. | Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Grandmothers—Fiction. | Racially mixed people—Fiction. | Jews—United States—Fiction. | Chinese Americans—Fiction.Classification: LCC PZ7.R71897 No 2020 | DDC 813.6 [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031957
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