For Better or For Worse Read online

  Yours Truly,

  Lucy B.

  PARKER

  For Better or For Worse

  “But how are you going to plan a whole wedding in a month?” Laurel asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The women on all those reality shows about weddings take like a year to plan theirs.”

  “Not to mention they have a lot of meltdowns and scream at people,” Laurel added.

  Mom shrugged. “There’s really nothing to plan. It’s just going to be the six of us—well, seven, including Ziggy. Very low-key. I mean, it’s not like I’m really the wedding type.” That was true. Mom was so laid-back that sometimes as a joke, Alan would grab her wrist and hold it and say he was feeling for a pulse. “Other than the fact that after I’m going to have to start checking the ‘married’ box again on questionnaires, it’s just going to be like any other day.”

  I looked at Laurel and put my arm around her shoulder. “Except that’ll be the day that Laurel and I become official fristers.”

  She smiled as she put her arm around mine.

  Which, as far as I was concerned, would be the most awesome day of my life.

  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!

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker: Take My Advice!

  Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker: For Better or For Worse

  For teens:

  Cindy Ella

  Geek Charming

  Little Miss Red

  Wicked Jealous

  Yours Truly,

  Lucy B.

  PARKER

  For Better or For Worse

  ROBIN PALMER

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Puffin Books and

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons, divisions of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Robin Palmer, 2012

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  ISBN: 978-1-101-57565-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Katie Malachuk,

  a grown-up Lucy in all the best ways

  Yours Truly,

  Lucy B.

  PARKER

  For Better or For Worse

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Dear Dr. Maude,

  I know that the last few (okay, more like twenty) e-mails I’ve written you, I’ve sometimes (okay, a lot of times) ended up mentioning the fact that you never write me back. Well, the reason I’m writing to you today is to tell you that when I say that, it’s only because my teacher Mr. Eglington is always on us to “state the facts in a clear and concise manner” and that just happens to be a fact. But, the other day when I was watching this show on Animal Planet about female animals that completely IGNORE their babies—not even FEEDING them, which means that some surrogate animal has to do it or else they DIE OF STARVATION—for some weird reason it reminded me of you.

  I started to worry that maybe the reason you haven’t written me back is because you think when I say stuff like that—you know, the fact that I’ve been writing to you for more than a year and haven’t gotten a SINGLE response—it’s because I’m trying to make you feel guilty. But that is so not true. Like I said, I’m just stating the facts in a clear and concise manner. And, well, unfortunately, that’s a fact.

  Like I’ve ALSO said a bunch of times before, I wasn’t going to write to you anymore—especially not to ask you for advice—but now that I’ve gotten this far, I should probably just go ahead and do it this one last time. So my problem is this: Mom and Alan have been acting VERY weird the last few weeks. We’re talking lots-of-conversations-behind-closed-doors-in-such-soft-voices-that-even-expert-overlisteners-like-myself-can’t-overlisten. (As I’ve told you before, overlistening is not the same as eavesdropping. It’s different.) And lots of closing their laptops very quickly whenever Laurel and I happen to walk by them. And lots of Mom, who’s usually in a very good mood because she’s a Buddhist, acting a little cranky. She even ended up gong to her shrink twice in one week instead of her usual one time.

  Laurel and I have tried to figure it out, but so far we haven’t been able to come up with anything other than maybe they’re breaking up. There’s no real reason why we think that would happen, except the fact that Laurel did a movie once where she played the daughter of a couple who was about to get divorced and they acted like this right before they told her.

  I guess because we’re a family that’s so big on communicating, we could just call an emergency Parker-Moses Family Meeting and ask them what the heck is going on, but I’m afraid to do that. Because what if they ARE breaking up? Laurel and I have already decided that if that’s the case, we’re going to continue to be best friends and fristers anyway.

  Obviously, this is a very important matter, so even though you’ve ignored all my other e-mails, if you could answer this one, I would appreciate it. Seeing that it’s a life-and-death thing. Well, not a death thing exactly, but you know what I mean.

  Thanks very much.

  yours truly,

  Lucy B. Parker

  “Maybe your mom is pregnant and that’s why she’s so cranky. According to one of my moms, pregnancy is like PMS times a hundred,” my non-frister BFF Beatrice said as we ate lunch in Arizona the next day. Well, the area of the cafeteria that, if it were a map of the United States, would be Arizona. Becoming class president hadn’t made me so popular that I had moved to Kansas (the state that was smack in the middle of the countr
y and where the super-popular kids, like Cristina Pollock, sat), but at least I wasn’t in Alaska anymore. Although the looks on our Colorado and Utah neighbors’ faces once they got a whiff of Beatrice’s sardine sandwich made it seem like they wished we were.

  I shook my head as I swallowed a bite of my peanut butter and honey sandwich. It may have made my mouth stick together, but at least it didn’t reek. “No. She’s too old,” I sighed. “Plus, whenever I ask that, she pats her stomach and says, ‘This store is closed.’”

  After Sarah got pregnant with Ziggy, my biggest fear was that Mom was going to go ahead and have a baby, too. That was back when I didn’t really like babies because I had never held one before and I was afraid I’d drop them. But once Ziggy was born, I discovered I had this crazy baby-whispering talent where I could make them stop crying the minute I picked them up. Because I wasn’t good at singing or anything coordination-oriented, I considered the baby-whispering thing my second official talent after advice giving (I had a column in the school paper). Which is why I decided I wouldn’t have been all that upset if Mom did get pregnant.

  “Oh! Oh! I know!” gasped Alice, my next non-frister BFF after Beatrice. As she bounced up and down in her chair, a meatball fell out of her sub and rolled off the table, just missing my next, next non-frister BFF Malia’s leg. Because Alice was what Alan called “an overexcitable type,” she could be very dangerous to eat with. “Whoops. Sorry,” she said to Malia. “Wait a second—what was I just saying?” she asked after she picked up the meatball.

  “You were saying ‘Oh! Oh! I know!’” Malia replied in a very Alice-sounding voice. Although she was much more into drawing (with two parents who were artists, she had been lucky enough to inherit that talent from them), I was always telling her that she should try out for the school play because she was great at acting.

  “Oh right,” Alice said. After pushing her tray into the middle of the table, she began to bounce up and down again. “Oh! Oh! I know!” she gasped as Beatrice rolled her eyes and shook her head. As a born and bred New Yorker, Beatrice had no problem saying what was on her mind at all times—even if it was just with her expressions. When we were first becoming friends it was a little intimidating, but after we had known each other a while, I realized that someone saying “You have a booger hanging from your nose” was a lot more helpful than someone who was so afraid of hurting your feelings that she let you walk into the cafeteria like that.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What what?” Alice replied, confused.

  This time I was the one who rolled my eyes. Partly because, after eight months of living in Manhattan, I was on my way to becoming a New Yorker. And partly because you had to be like a nun or a super-duper mellow yoga person to not get annoyed with Alice. “We were talking about my mom, and why she might be cranky, and you said ‘Oh! Oh! I know!’ in a way that made it seem like you knew.”

  “Oh right. Now I remember,” she said. “What I was going to say was maybe your mom is really a spy. From, like, Russia or something. And she didn’t mean to fall in love with Alan but she did. And once the president of Russia found out he got really mad and now she’s not allowed to go back there or else they’ll kill her.

  This time even Malia—who was pretty much the nicest person I had ever met— rolled her eyes.

  “Okay, (a) my mother isn’t a Russian spy—”

  “How do you know?” Alice interrupted. “She could be. Just because she speaks perfect English and doesn’t have an accent doesn’t mean anything. Spies are expert actors. In fact, maybe that’s why she started going out with Alan—so she could learn acting tips from Laurel.”

  I shook my head. “You know what? That’s just so crazy I’m not even going to go to (b),” I said.

  Beatrice patted my hand. “Don’t worry, Lucy—if they do split up and you have to move back to Northampton, we’ll come visit you.”

  “Sure,” Alice said. “We won’t forget about you like that girl what’s-her-name who moved away before fifth grade.” She turned to Beatrice. “What was her name again? The really nice one who wore headgear at night?”

  Beatrice shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

  I hadn’t even thought about that part. If Mom and Alan split up, would we move back to Northampton? Granted Dad and Ziggy and Sarah were there, but I felt like New York was my home now. Plus, I had only recently stopped being the New Girl. I wasn’t ready to become a What’s-Her-Name again.

  “Okay, this is not good,” I said.

  “I have an idea,” Malia said. “If you were giving yourself advice about this situation, what would you tell yourself?”

  I thought about it. Advice was definitely something I knew about. After the original advice columnist for our school newspaper got fired for plagiarism, I ended up taking over the job, and it turned out I had a real knack for it. So much so that when the trial period was over, Dr. Remington-Wallace, our principal, extended my contract. Although I had been using the pseudonym of “Annie” at first, I decided to come out and let everyone know it was me, mostly because as class president I felt that keeping my identity secret, while not exactly a lie, wasn’t the best example to put out there.

  “I would tell myself…that this is not good,” I replied.

  “But you can’t move!” Laurel cried that night from her bed before dinner after I told her about the conversation at lunch.

  “It’s not like I want to!” I cried back as I paced around her very neat, not-a-thing-out-of-place bedroom. I tried to ignore the fact that my ten-year-old cat, Miss Piggy, was curled up in Laurel’s lap, purring so loud they probably heard it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean in France. Or at least a few floors down in Beatrice’s apartment.

  Even though I was the one who fed Miss Piggy and scooped her litter box and cleaned up her yakked-up hairballs and gave her Greenie treats, she had never really liked me. And when Laurel had come into the picture? Forget it. Suddenly, she started sleeping in Laurel’s room (I had to lock my door to get Miss Piggy to stay in mine) and cuddling with her. (When I tried to force her to cuddle, all I got were hisses and scratches.)

  That was why a few months earlier I had launched Operation New Kitten in order to get a pet that I could train to actually like me. As if to try and make me feel worse, Miss Piggy burrowed down deeper into Laurel’s lap and began to make biscuits on her legs. Although Mom said that cats didn’t know how to give dirty looks, Miss Piggy sure did. And she also knew how to smile. Well, at Laurel.

  I stopped pacing. “Wow. You really do look blind,” I said, impressed.

  Laurel focused her eyes. “I do?! Thanks,” she said with a smile before she unfocused them again.

  Ever since Laurel had signed on to do this new movie called Life Is What Happens When You’re Making Other Plans she had been obsessed with getting into character, which explained why she looked blind. According to her agent, Marv, and her publicist, Marci, Laurel was going to win an Academy Award for the movie. Even though it hadn’t even started shooting (not until next spring) they were all very sure about this fact.

  When I first started living with Laurel, I had loved reading her scripts. Not only were they interesting, but I was super flattered that she cared about my opinion. But because she was offered like five movies a week, and the scripts were over a hundred pages, that was a lot of reading—even for someone like me who enjoyed reading. So now I only read the ones that she was seriously considering.

  I loved Life (it got tiring saying Life Is What Happens When You’re Making Other Plans) right away. First of all, it was based on a quote by John Lennon, my favorite Beatle. (The exact quote was “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” which is even more exhausting to say.) But even if had had a different title, I still would’ve liked it. By the time I was done reading it, I had laughed and cried so many different times I felt like I needed a nap.

  The movie was about was this girl named Jenny who goes blind and, instead of being sad
about it, decides to make a list of one hundred things she wants to do before she dies and then sets out to do them all. In the end, she gets an eye transplant and can see again, so while it’s sad for a lot of the movie, it ends up being happy on account of the fact that people in Hollywood are really big on happy endings. Although I didn’t like Laurel’s publicist, Marci, because she had gotten mad at me on the set of Laurel’s movie in L.A. after I had mistakenly talked to a reporter who I didn’t know was a reporter, I had to agree with her when she said that it was one of the best scripts she’d ever read.

  “But the Oscars won’t be half as great if you’re not sitting next to me,” Laurel said. “Plus, if you move, you’ll have to find a whole new official local crush.”

  Oh no. I hadn’t even thought about that. I sighed. This whole Three-Crush Rule was a major pain in the butt. When Beatrice and I became friends, she had informed me that it was common knowledge that everyone had to have three: a local one; a long distance/vacation one; and a celebrity one. Although we didn’t have this back in Northampton, apparently this was a well-known fact in New York. So well known that, according to Malia, they even knew about it in Italy, which is where she lived before moving to New York and replacing me as the New Girl. That’s why I had decided it was log-worthy and had become the Keeper of the Crushes with my official log called “The Official Crush Log of the Girls at the Center for Creative Learning in New York, NY.” (I had another log as well—“The Official Period Log of the Girls at the Center for Creative Learning in New York, NY,” which, sadly, my name had yet to be entered in.)

  Frankly, I didn’t know what the big deal about boys was. It wasn’t like you could go do fun stuff with crushes like you did with your friends such as play TWUO (The World’s Ugliest Outfit). Plus, even the really cute ones who showered on a daily basis gave off this funky boy smell that was a mix of chicken noodle soup and wet socks.

  That being said, because of all the pressure being put on me to come up with my picks, I had recently decided on Beatrice’s brother, Blair, as my local crush. Although he played chess, talked with his mouth full, and had food stains on his clothes, the fact that he lived only a few floors below me in our apartment building made him extremely local. I had even gone as far as to ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance that my school recently had (the girls had to ask the boys, which was awful). He couldn’t go, but he had said in an e-mail to me that we’d go do something some other time. Which I was still waiting for.