Vote for Me! Page 4

  “Till Monday,” I replied. This wasn’t fair. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to put my be-nice-to-mean-people resolution to the test because they weren’t being mean to me.

  “You should come hang out with us on Main Street later,” she said.

  “Why?” I blurted. Oh no. It was starting. When I was nervous, I blurted. I was pretty sure it was a medical condition. I waited to see if I was so nervous that I began bloversharing (that was a combination of blurting and oversharing, and it was not pretty). Luckily, I stayed silent.

  “So we can hear all about New York!” Missy said.

  I searched their faces to see if they were joking, but they looked normal. In fact, they looked just like they looked back when we were all friends. Except for the makeup and the boobs and the bikinis. I wracked my brain thinking of a good response (“Okay” seemed pretty boring, while “Are you kidding? After the way you treated me, I’d rather eat salmon, and you guys know how much I hate all seafood other than fried clams from Friendly’s!” felt a little on the angry side). I heard Dad’s voice in my head. Lucy, it said, when you have the opportunity to forgive people, take it. Not only will it make you feel better, but it helps with your karma.

  “Okay,” I said, feeling my stomach start to unclench a bit. “That sounds like fun,” For this, I deserved some seriously awesome karma.

  When Rose, our housekeeper, started going on and on about miracles, and how they could happen in an instant (this usually came up as we were watching some guy return from the dead on one of the Spanish telenovela soap operas we liked to watch together in the kitchen), I tended to zone out. Sure, I had experienced a few miracles in my life—like when I got an 88 on a mixedfractions quiz after completely making up the answers because I hadn’t studied—but the whole miracle thing seemed a little hokey to me. But that afternoon, as Rachel, Missy, and I browsed in Faces—one of my favorite stores on Main Street before those guys won it in the friend breakup—I started to think maybe there was something to this miracle business. Not only did all my nervousness go away, but I was relaxed to the point where I started putting on funny hats and glasses in a version of TWUO, aka The World’s Ugliest Outfit, a game the three of us had made up in fourth grade. Maybe people could change. Or, in this case, change back to who they used to be. Maybe now that almost a year had gone by since they had dumped me, Rachel and Missy had gotten a lot more mature and had come to realize (a) what a great BFF I had been and (b) what total jerks they had been.

  Afterward, as we sat at a table at Scoops, Rachel turned to me. “I totally forgot how good you are at coming up with ugly outfits!” She giggled. Yet another miracle—she rarely ever gave out compliments like that. As I thought about it, I realized that, actually, another miracle in my life had happened at Scoops—because it was there that I had run into Laurel one night and learned that even though she was a superstar, she still had to go through normal-people-like things, such as being dumped by her BFF.

  “Thanks,” I said proudly, trying not to eat my scoop of mint chocolate chip in one bite. I was feeling so good, it felt like a sundae kind of afternoon, but when Rachel and Missy ordered one scoop of frozen yogurt each (when did they start eating that?) I decided to stick to one scoop. Without even one topping, which took a huge amount of willpower.

  “And those Lip Smackers are so cool,” Missy said. “I’m so glad you pointed those out to us.” Yet another miracle—I had been the one to discover something cool first. Not only that, but Faces ended up having the Cotton Candy Lip Smacker, which was very hard to find because it was so yummy.

  The two of them looked at each other. “So ... we heard you went to L.A.,” Missy said.

  “Actually, we read about it,” Rachel corrected her. “On the gossip blogs.” She leaned in. “We can’t believe you got to kiss Connor Forrester!” she squealed. “You have to tell us what that was like!”

  My stomach fell to my knees. That’s what this was about. Boy, did I feel dumb. Here I was thinking that the two of them wanted to be friends with me again, but really all they wanted to know about was The Connor Thing. I knew that I was going to have to deal with that a lot when school started, but because I had spent most of the time since I had been back from L.A. doing QT things with Mom, I had been spared so far.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything,” Missy said, “but you and Connor Forrester seem like a very weird combination.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Rachel. “It’s like ... peanut butter and ... hot sauce.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Anyone who knew me knew that the fact that my first kiss was with a super-cute, super-famous actor who used the word dude a lot was almost as unbelievable as the idea of Marissa suddenly acting normal and unannoying. I couldn’t even say he was my type because I didn’t even have a type. And because Connor was so famous—not quite Laurel Moses–famous or Austin Mackenzie–famous, but still up there—it had been all over the gossip blogs.

  “He must be the coolest boyfriend ever,” said Missy dreamily.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I corrected her.

  She leaned in. “Uh-huh. So has he been to visit you in New York? Have all your friends met him?”

  “No-o,” I replied. “Because like I said—he’s not my boyfriend. We’re just friends. Sometimes we have Triple S’s, but that’s all.”

  “What’s a Triple S?” Rachel asked.

  “A Skype Snack Session. We eat snacks together while Skyping. It’s a friend thing, NOT a boyfriend thing! I don’t even want a boyfriend!” I rambled. Uh-oh. Bloversharing. And to make it worse, part of the reason they had given for dumping me last year was that I didn’t have a crush on anyone. Now they knew I didn’t want a boyfriend!

  “Do you have a seventh-grade dance at your school?” Rachel asked. “Are you going to ask him to be your date?”

  “I just said I don’t like him that way. Plus, he lives all the way in California.”

  “That would be so romantic!” Missy cried. She gasped. “Do you think he’ll go to the junior prom with you?”

  “Prom?!” I yelped. “That isn’t for another five years!” What part of I-don’t-like-him-like-that was in a different language?

  “So Lucy, we were thinking ...” Rachel said, “we know that we haven’t been so good about staying in touch since you moved—”

  Since I moved? How about staying in touch since they dumped me?

  “—but the truth is we really, really miss you,” Missy said. When she said that, I noticed that she blinked a lot. I knew from when we had been BFFs that was something she did when she was lying.

  “Totally,” Rachel agreed. “And because of that, we were thinking that maybe we could come visit you in New York some time!”

  “Yeah. Like maybe even when Connor happens to be there,” Missy added.

  “And maybe Laurel and Austin, too.”

  I looked at them.

  As dumb as it sounded, and as mean as they had been to me, ever since the day they had dumped me, I had been waiting for them to apologize and say they missed me and wanted to be friends again. But now all I wanted was to get out of there. “Hmm, so you guys want to come to New York ...”

  They nodded. “We were thinking maybe Columbus Day weekend, because we have that Monday off,” Rachel said. “Do you happen to know if Connor will be there?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. He might.”

  “Really?!” they squealed.

  “But if he was,” I continued, “I’m not sure he’d be all that into hanging out with you guys.”

  Their smiles fell at the same exact time. Maybe it was the completely-joined-at-the-hip, never-apart thing.

  “See, once when we were Triple S’ing,” I said, “Connor told me that the number one thing he hates more than anything—even more than undercooked French fries—are Mean People.” Okay, so maybe we hadn’t actually ever had that particular conversation, but I felt like I knew him well enough to know that if I had called him right then and said, “Hey, Connor
—by any chance do you hate Mean People?” he would’ve said, “Oh yeah. Totally, dude. Who doesn’t?”

  I stood up. “And the fact that you guys could treat me the way that you did, and then a year later pretend to be all nice and say that you missed me, when really you just want to hang out with famous people?” I shook my head. “That’s pretty much the official definition of a Mean Person.”

  Wait a minute ... This never happened. I, Lucy B. Parker, had just totally stood up for myself in the moment, in front of the actual people who needed to be stood up to, and not three weeks after the fact, alone, in front of my bedroom mirror!

  I gathered up my stuff. “So while it was nice seeing you, I’m gonna go now.”

  “Wait a second,” Rachel sputtered. “Are you turning down our offer to be friends again?”

  “And did you just call us Mean People ... to our faces?” Missy added.

  “Let me think about that for a second,” I said. “Yup. I’m pretty sure I did.”

  At the same moment, their mouths turned into little O’s, which, now that Rachel’s braces were gone, were also identical.

  I flashed them a smile. “See you around,” I said as I started walking away. I stopped and turned around. “Oh, and by the way? The Pink Lemonade and Wild Raspberry Lip Smackers you guys bought? I happen to know from experience that there are way better flavors than those.”

  I began walking again, and thankfully managed to make it to the door without my coordination issue flaring up. But once outside, I felt like I was going to faint. When you’re not used to standing up for yourself, it can make you very light-headed and dizzy. I tried to get my breathing back to normal and reached into my tote bag for my advice notebook.

  “When you have the chance to stand up to a Mean Person, do it. If only to see the dumb expression on their face when you do,” I wrote. “And then RUN—as fast as possible.”

  Which is exactly what I did.

  chapter 3

  Dear Dr. Maude,

  You’re not going to believe this, but I, Lucy B. Parker, stood up to Rachel and Missy, my two ex-BFFs who dumped me last year. IN PERSON. It was beyond awesome. Sure, I was scared, but now I feel really great.

  Well, I felt great. Then I got back to Dad’s and had to listen to more talk about Ziggy. Even our alone time together at the Pioneer Valley flea market was spent talking about him. Mom says I should have had a Conversation-with-a-capital-C with him about the whole thing so we could discuss my feelings. But as far as I’m concerned, he’s the adult, and therefore he should know better. Plus, I’m kind of sick of discussing my feelings.

  Getting back to the Rachel/Missy thing for a second, though. It got me thinking more about Laurel’s suggestion from the other day that I run for class president in the fall so I can do my part to end Mean People–ism and dork discrimination.

  After the year I just had—with the move, and the new school, and the new family—I was looking forward to just finally relaxing, but I don’t know . . . maybe I should think more about it.

  Mom just pulled up to pick me up for the trip back to New York, so I have to go. I’ll let you know what I decide.

  yours truly,

  Lucy B. Parker

  Because there was a lot of traffic, I had six hours instead of four and a half to think about the running-for-president thing. By hour five, I still wasn’t convinced. But after we stopped for gas and I went into the mini-mart and saw two teenage boys snickering as an old man had trouble grabbing a bag of potato chips off the display because his hand wouldn’t stop shaking (I finally grabbed it for him), I realized Mean People weren’t just in New York City. Or Northampton. They were everywhere. Laurel was right—the problem had to be stopped. And if I was a good person—and wanted to help my karma—I’d do my part to help.

  As we got back into the car, I got excited that I’d finally have something exciting to share at our family dinner that night. When you live with someone whose news is along the lines of “I’ve been invited to the president’s daughter’s birthday party” and “They want me to sing at the Grammys ... for the third year in a row,” things like “I got an 82 on my math quiz” and “I went to Claire’s and bought a headband” are a little on the boring side.

  After the World News segment of the dinner, which was the part where Alan handed out photocopies of the top news stories of the day from The New York Times, I cleared my throat. “I’m still not one hundred percent sure, but I’m THINKING of running for class president when school starts,” I announced.

  Except that’s not what Mom, Alan, and Laurel heard. What they heard was “I’m TOTALLY, DEFINITELY running for class president when school starts.” Then they totally freaked out—especially Laurel, who screamed so loud you would’ve thought she was auditioning for a horror movie.

  “Oh Lucy! This is such fabulous news!” Alan said excitedly after we had all made sure we hadn’t gone deaf. “This is going to look so great on your college applications—”

  “College applications?” I asked, confused. “But I’m just going into seventh grade.”

  “Yes, but you can never start beefing up your extracurricular activities too early,” he replied. “No Ivy League school is going to even look at you if they don’t see that you’re well rounded. Do they have a debate club at the Center?” he asked. “Colleges love debaters. And you’d be great at it. Or what about Model UN? That would be even better! But even if you don’t get around to that, class president carries a lot of weight—”

  “But I’m not sure yet that I’m definitely running,” I corrected him. “I said I was thinking about it. School hasn’t even started yet.” I looked over at Mom. She was always going on about how Alan tended to get overexcited about things. She’d help me out here, right?

  “Sweetie, I’m so glad to see you really getting involved in your new school!” she bubbled. “You know, all the books talk about how when girls hit a certain age, their self-esteem levels drop and that’s when they begin to defer to men, which is something that they then spend their entire adulthood recovering from, but when you’re class president, you’ll be way ahead of the curve!”

  What was she talking about? “But I didn’t say I was doing it for sure,” I said again. “I said I was thinking about it.” I turned to Laurel. “Can you believe how they’re so not listening to me?” I whispered. “Help me out here. Please.”

  But she wasn’t listening, either. Instead, she had grabbed for one of the many little pads of paper and pens that Alan insisted be kept around the apartment so that we could write down important things that shouldn’t be forgotten. “Okay, the first thing we have to do is put together a calendar so that we can come up with a schedule,” she announced as she scribbled away. “Luckily, Office Depot sent me one of those giant wall ones with my last order ... I guess they do that when you spend over five hundred dollars—” Laurel was majorly into organization.

  “Wait a minute—” I said.

  But she, like everyone else, continued to ignore me. “And then we’re going to need a bunch of file folders,” she went on. “Good thing I just got a new label maker. Because we’ll need folders for stuff like POTENTIAL CAMPAIGN SLOGANS and MATERIAL FOR SPEECHES. Oh, and OUTFITS WORN WHILE CAMPAIGNING—you don’t want to repeat yourself.”

  I looked down at my cat, Miss Piggy, who was in her usual position of lying near my feet in hopes of snagging some falling food. Which, because of my coordination issue, happened at least twice a meal. Although she didn’t like me, the way she was purring so loud made me think that even she thought this campaign thing was a good idea.

  Laurel put down the pen and grabbed my arm. “Omigod, I’m so excited you decided to take my advice and do this!” she squealed. “It’s going to be so fun to be your campaign manager!”

  I had never said anything about her being my campaign manager!

  In fact, one of the things I had been thinking about during the ride home was that, if I did run (and I wasn’t even sure of that), it was r
eally important to me that Laurel’s involvement be more on the bubble-letterson-posters and baking side (she was really awesome at bubble letters, and her brownies were delicious), and NOT on the public Laurel-Moses-Superstar side. Because as much as I loved Laurel, if I was going to run, it needed to be as me, Lucy B. Parker.

  Not Lucy-B.-Parker-Laurel-Moses’s-Non-Famous-Frister.

  As my family began to chatter about my campaign as if I wasn’t even in the room—the one for the election I wasn’t even sure I was going to be running in—I slumped down in my chair and sighed.

  Why was this already beginning to feel like a big mistake?

  Even though I still had another week before school started and I would have to officially decide whether or not to run, my family kept going on and on about it like it was a done deal. Sure, I was excited when Mom said that I could buy a bunch of new outfits for the campaign, but what if I didn’t end up running? Would I still be able to keep the clothes?

  Every two seconds Laurel was texting me with new ideas. Her latest one was that she’d come to school with me one day and help hand out pencils that said “Vote for Me—Lucy B.!” In fact, she had already found a site online that would make them really cheap. It was a good idea—or would be, if, you know, she wasn’t the most famous girl in America. But she was, and that meant that the kids at school who took the pencils would be taking them not because they wanted a good reminder of who to vote for on election day, but because they wanted to meet Laurel.

  I needed some advice. And because Dr. Maude wasn’t getting back to me, I decided to go to the secondbest advice giver I knew: Pete, my doorman. He hadn’t finished college, but according to him, he had a Ph.D. in Life. Which, also according to him, was the best training a person could get.

  “Okay, so if I’m hearing you correctly,” he said after I was done telling him my problem, “what you’re saying is that you don’t want Laurel involved with your campaign.”