Sealed With a Kiss

by Robin Palmer

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  An Interview with Robin Palmer, by Lucy B. Parker

  Teaser chapter

  yours truly, LUCY B. PARKER

  sealed with a kiss

  I really needed some advice about this crush stuff—especially the part about Beatrice thinking I was nuts for having one on her brother. Yes, my mother had been totally ignoring me ever since the move to New York, but if I told her I really needed to talk to her, she’d listen. And it wasn’t like I was going to tell her what was really going on. That would’ve been way too embarrassing. Instead, I was going to do the whole “Okay, so I have this friend . . .” thing.

  With the move to New York, and living with a superstar, and my mom ignoring me, and my dad about to have a baby, and having to get a new bra every six weeks because my boobs would not stop growing, and not having my period yet, sixth grade had already been hard enough. But now, having to find a crush that my BFF thought was acceptable? Jeez. How much could a girl take?

  Books by Robin Palmer:

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker: Girl vs. Superstar

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker: Sealed with a Kiss

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker: Vote for Me!

  (coming soon!)

  For teens:

  Cindy Ella

  Geek Charming

  Little Miss Red

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

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  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale,

  North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,

  London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Puffin Books and G. P. Putnam’s Sons, divisions of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2010

  Copyright © Robin Palmer, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

  ISBN : 978-1-101-53808-1

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my parents, Susann and Ken Palmer, who instilled the belief in me that I could do and be anything I wanted in life . . . as long as I got good grades and was home by curfew.

  Acknowledgments

  For the incredible team at Penguin Young Readers Group—Don Weisberg, Jen Haller, Nancy Paulsen, Eileen Kreit, Scottie Bowditch, and Kristin Gilson—for their amazing support of Lucy. And, as always, immense gratitude to my goddess of an editor, Jennifer Bonnell, for knowing long before I do what it is I’m trying to say.

  For Kate Lee, the world’s best agent.

  And for BFF Extraordinaire Amy Loubalu, who patiently reminds me during the course of every book I write that, yes, there have been other times when I’ve been absolutely positive that what I’ve written is completely unreadable but that, strangely enough, that feeling ends up passing. Even though every time she says that, I’m absolutely positive this is the time she’s going to be wrong.

  chapter 1

  Dear Dr. Maude,

  I’m sooooo sorry I haven’t written in such a long time. I hope you haven’t been worried or anything. Because you’re so busy with the new season of Come on, People—Get with the Program, you probably don’t have all that much time to spend thinking about twelve-and-a-half-year-old girls like me who have a lot going on in their lives and could really use help from a world-famous therapist like yourself. I WAS thinking of going down to your apartment and knocking on your door, but Pete said that wouldn’t be a good idea because you’re kind of a private person. Even though he knows I’m not a crazy stalker, it’s still his job as the doorman at the Conran to keep regular people like me away from famous people like you. (BTW, I still can’t get over the fact that we live in the same apartment building! I mean, New York City is a REALLY big place. Don’t you think that’s just super-weird? I do.)

  Anyway, I’m fine. It’s just now that I’m an official New Yorker (Rose, our housekeeper, told me that she once heard on the news that that happens after you’ve lived here for a month, and I’ve been here for one month, one week, and four days), I’m busy, like, ALL the time. Which I’m sure you understand, seeing that you haven’t written me back. At all. Not even once. Even though I’ve written you fifteen e-mails. Sixteen, counting this one.

  So much has happened this last month that I don’t even know where to start, but here are the main points:1. For the most part, things with Laurel and me are okay. I mean, after you’ve been an only child for twelve years and five months, adjusting to having another non-adult in the house is hard. Especially when it’s actually THEIR house and NOT yours. Oh, and when you happen to be the kind of person who doesn’t really mind a little—or a lot—of mess, but that other non-adult can’t stand it to the point where, when she comes into your room, her right eye starts to twitch and she starts to organize YOUR things even though it’s YOUR room.

  2. And then there’s the issue of that other non-adult being the most famous teenager in the world and the star of the hit TV show The World According to Madison Tennyson. Which means that while everyone in the house might treat her normally, when you’re out in the world during family outings, you almost get trampled to death because suddenly she’s Laurel Moses, Superstar, instead of Laurel, the Girl Whose Bedroom Is Next to Yours. But even though we don’t have screaming fights like Marissa (my sort-of friend back in Northampton) and her sister do, it’s still weird. Like sometimes Laurel’s all friendly, and other times she acts like she wants nothing to do with me and just goes into her room and shuts the door.

  Mom says that’s just part of being a fourteen-year-old girl, and that once I really hit puberty, I’ll probably be just as moody, but I hope not. The only part of puberty I’m really interested in is the getting-your-period part, which, unfortunately, has still not happened. The boob-growing part, however, just KEEPS happening. (I’ve outgrown TWO bras since I got the first one last fall, if you can believe it. Totally not fair.)

  3. That’s another issue—Mom. You know—that woman who I USED to see all the time? The one who’d let me watch TV with her in bed at night after the divorce with a big bowl of popcorn and wouldn’t yell at me if a few pieces ended up falling under the covers, which was pretty much always bec
ause of my coordination problem? The person with whom I had Manicure Mondays, where we’d do each other’s nails and she wouldn’t say, “Lucy, are you sure you want to use that shade of purple, because it’s awfully bright?” like some other mothers might say? The one who, when I was telling her about my day at school, would actually LISTEN instead of saying things like, “I see what you mean,” at times when I hadn’t SAID anything for her to know what I meant?

  Yeah, her. Well, ever since we moved here she’s way too busy for me. Either she’s on the computer searching for places to get married, or she’s at some lecture at the 92 Street Y with Alan (that’s my soon-to-be stepdad), or she’s driving Laurel to the studio in Queens because she wants Laurel to have “some normalcy in her life instead of going places in fancy town cars with drivers.” But I’ll tell you what she’s NOT doing—spending time with me.

  4. Which is why I’m spending most of MY time with Beatrice. Remember in my last e-mail to you I mentioned that I had finally made a friend? That girl Beatrice who also lives in our building—10D—and is in my class at the Center for Creative Learning? Well, we’re now officially BFFs. We had The Talk the other day, and I feel a lot better. Even though I was pretty sure we were heading down that road, you never know for sure until you have the conversation. I know when I first met her I was worried that she was one of those overly polite kids, but she’s totally not. In fact, she’s probably the most New York-y New Yorker I know, the way she wears a lot of black and is sure she’s always right.

  5. Alice—that girl I sat with at lunch the third day of school after spending the first two in the bathroom because the kids at the Center are a lot less friendly than they are back in Northampton—keeps asking if she can be my second BFF, but that alone should tell you why she can’t. I mean, you don’t ASK to be someone’s BFF—it just happens. And then you have a conversation about it.

  6. Other than the two of them, and Laurel (kind of), and Pete and Rose, I haven’t made any other friends yet. And Pete and Rose don’t really count because Pete is forty-nine and Rose is forty, so they’re more adult-friends than friend-friends. Mom, during one of the few times she and I DID spend together recently, walking to the dentist (which totally doesn’t count as quality time as far as I’m concerned), said that the reason I get along so well with adults is because I’m so precocious, which, when I looked it up, means something like mature. But during our weekly Wednesday night phone call, Dad said that I’ll make more friends my own age. He wasn’t willing to swear on the life of my brother-or-sister-to-be or anything, but he does think it’s going to happen. Remember, my dad accidentally got his girlfriend, Sarah, pregnant? I don’t know if I believe him, though. If he really thought it was going to happen, he’d swear on the baby’s life, even though the baby’s not coming until November.

  So that’s what’s going on here. If you could write back and give me some advice about the Mom thing, and the how-to-make-more-friends thing, that would be great.

  yours truly,

  LUCY B. PARKER

  P.S. If you have any suggestions as to what I might do to bring on my period, that would be great, too. I know you’re not a medical doctor, but, still, I thought you might know.

  If I had waited a few days to send that e-mail to Dr. Maude, I would’ve definitely asked her about the Crush Thing.

  It was a Wednesday evening in May, about a month after I had moved to New York, and I was hanging out with Beatrice in her room. There were times I really missed my old house in Northampton, even if it was really drafty because it was so old that none of the windows shut right, but there were things about living in an apartment that were very cool. Like when your BFF lives eleven floors below you, so you just have to take an elevator there instead of riding your bike.

  “So did you figure out who your local crush is yet?” Beatrice asked.

  My face got all red as I shook my head. “No,” I sighed. I could feel my stomach get all tight, which is what it did when I got anxious, like, say, when I heard the words “And now it’s time for a mixed-fractions pop quiz.” “Yesterday I thought maybe I could have one on Sam Rothenberg, but then I saw him pick his nose during science.”

  Beatrice shook her head. “Yeah, no crushes on nose pickers,” she said. “That won’t work.”

  I reached into my pocket for my purple pen and the Moleskine notebook I had recently started carrying around that had “Important Pieces of Advice People Have Given Me” printed on the front page. Most of the stuff in it so far had come from Pete, my doorman. Things like Try not to make eye contact on the subway, because you never know who’s going to end up being a total nutjob and If a tourist stops you and asks you for directions and you’re not one hundred percent sure of where the place is that they’re trying to go, refer them to a doorman because doormen know everything. That one came in really handy on account of the fact that in addition to my coordination problem, my sense of direction isn’t so great.

  When choosing a crush, make sure they are not a nose picker, I wrote neatly. At least my penmanship was good. According to Beatrice, having a crush in sixth grade was something you just HAD to have—like a computer, or a cell phone—or else you were just plain weird. I was pretty sure that that was a New York City thing, because back in Northampton some of the more boy-crazy girls I knew had crushes (like, say, Marissa, who was always saying things like, “I think I saw my soul mate in the food court at the mall today”), but it wasn’t like you were considered weird if you didn’t have one.

  “But I keep telling you—you need to find one,” Beatrice said as she opened the e-mail folder full of e-mails she had gotten from Eli, this boy who lived in California whom she met when her family was on vacation in Mexico. He was her long-distance/vacation crush. According to Beatrice, everyone needed three crushes: a local crush, a long-distance/vacation crush, and a celebrity crush.

  “Fine. I’ll keep looking,” I replied, shifting in my chair to try to get comfortable. I don’t know why all the furniture in New York apartments had to be so hard to sit on, lots of wood and leather and sharp corners. It was the same in Alan and Laurel’s apartment, too. It really hurt my butt. Our furniture back in Northampton may not have matched, on account of the fact that it came from thrift stores because Mom and Dad are “creative types” who like things with “character,” but it sure was a lot more comfortable. “But I don’t understand why I need three. It’s hard enough for me to find one!”

  “I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Because if your local one doesn’t pay any attention to you, or is absent for a long period of time because he has the flu or chicken pox, then you can think about your long-distance one. And if your long-distance one stops answering your e-mails—which is what Eli is doing to me—then you can just sit there thinking about your famous one and make up stories about what it will be like when you’re going to movie premieres together. Which will probably never happen. Unless you’re Laurel.”

  I had to admit it all made sense logically. Not to mention that thinking about your crush was a much better way to spend your time than worrying about whether you were going to have a mixed-fractions pop quiz, or whether your mother was ever going to start paying attention to you again. But to be honest, if someone said to me “Okay, you have to choose: either you get your period, or you get a boyfriend,” I’d choose my period.

  “Hey, do you have any extra Moleskine notebooks?” I asked. “I’ll pay you back for it.” Before New York, I just used regular notebooks you’d get at Target or Walmart, but now that Beatrice and I were BFFs I had gotten into the Moleskines. According to her, they were very French and not at all bourgeois, which was her favorite word. I still wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. I wasn’t even sure that Beatrice knew, but from what I could figure out, it was French for “totally loserish.”

  She handed me one. On the first page, I printed “The Official Crush Log of the Girls at the Center for Creative Learning in New York, NY.”

  Beatrice gasped. “You’r
e going to start another log?”

  I nodded. Back in Northampton, I had kept one called “The Official Period Log of Sixth-Grade Girls at Jefferson Middle School in Northampton, MA” because you never knew when you might need to know that information. I was the Keeper of the Periods. Everyone back there had thought it was a brilliant idea, and in New York the sixth graders seemed to like it, too—EXCEPT for Cristina Pollock, the most popular (and meanest) girl at my new school, who started calling me “Period Girl” because of it.

  “C’est brilliant!” Beatrice gasped, which was French for “That’s brilliant!” She liked to say that and C’est stupide a lot. “I knew I was right to choose you as a best friend. It’s a good thing I happen to already know a lot of this information so I can totally help you.”

  “Let’s start with Cristina Pollock,” I said. “Who are her crushes?” Beatrice and Cristina had been BFFs before Cristina dumped her out of nowhere. In fact, one of the reasons Beatrice and I had bonded was because we had both been friend-dumped. Not only that, but it turns out it happened just days apart. Mine was three days BEFORE sixth grade started, and hers happened three days AFTER, which we decided meant that we were totally destined to be friends.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure her local crush this week is Finneas Larkin,” she said. “At least that’s what Alice said she heard Alexandra Brodsky and Lusia Strus say in gym the other day.” Finneas was a seventh grader who, like Cristina, was also super-popular, which made them a good match. “And as for long distance, there was some boy from Connecticut she met when her family went to St. Barts for winter break that I heard she was e-mailing with. But I know for sure that her celebrity crush is Connor Forrester.”