by Robin Palmer
Before Laurel and I could figure out what to do to stop Mom and Alan from breaking up, there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Laurel called out. “Wait…I mean…come in,” she said in a depressed, just-found-out-she’s-blind voice. She turned to me. “How was that?”
As I gave her a thumbs-up, Alan poked his head in. “Sorry for the short notice, but I wanted to let you girls know there will be an emergency Parker-Moses Family Meeting at seven p.m. tonight. I’ll send out an Outlook invite as well so it’s synced on your computer devices.”
Laurel and I looked at each, panicked. The breakup was happening even faster than we had thought.
“And Brian and Sarah will be joining us via Skype, so we’ll be starting right on the dot.”
We looked at each other again, even more freaked out. My dad and his girlfriend, Sarah, were included in this? Probably to talk about me moving back to Northampton.
This was not good.
“You did what?!” Laurel gasped after Alan and Mom told us the big news.
“We set a date for the wedding,” Alan replied. “A month from Saturday at the Black Horse Inn in Cabot Village, Vermont.”
“Population two hundred thirty-nine,” Mom added excitedly. “And home of the world-famous Cabot Creamery.”
“Supposedly their cheddar cheese is out of this world,” Alan said.
“It’s about six hours from here,” Mom added.
“Six hours and ten minutes,” Alan corrected. “Or 329.38 miles, however you want to look at it.”
“Wait a minute—so you’re not breaking up?” I asked.
“What?” Mom asked, confused.
“Nothing. Forget it,” I said.
“Oh, that’s terrific!” Dad cried from through the computer. “We’re so happy for you.”
Thinking I heard a sniffle, I squinted and leaned into the computer. “Dad, are you crying?” I asked.
He wiped his eyes. “Yes. They’re tears of joy, Lucy.”
While I knew I was lucky to have parents who very rarely yelled at me, the fact that my dad wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to cry in front of people was a little bit weird.
“And, Brian, we have a favor we’d like to ask you,” Mom said.
“We were wondering if you’d officiate at the ceremony,” Alan continued.
“Really?” Dad asked. About a year before he had become an ordained minister through the Internet so he could perform the wedding for Sarah’s friends Seth and Marc. It seemed a little strange that for $39.95 anyone could do it, but seeing that it came with a certificate and everything, I guess it was official.
As Mom and Alan nodded, more tears came. “I’d be honored,” Dad said.
Obviously, I was glad that Mom and Alan weren’t breaking up for a bunch of reasons—one of them being that I still hadn’t fully recovered from the packing and unpacking that came with the move from Northampton to Manhattan. But I had to say the fact that my mother was asking my father to handle the wedding ceremony to her new husband was just plain weird. Although, given my family, “weird” was the new normal.
As I watched Mom beam at Alan, though, I forgave her for any weirdness. The truth was that as organized and nervous as Alan could be, I had never seen her so happy. They loved each other a lot, but not in the totally crazy way that the people on the telenovela that I liked to watch with our housekeeper, Rose, after school. (Rose was from Jamaica, and she didn’t speak Spanish, either. But once you watched the shows for a while, it was easy enough to catch on. Basically, they all had the same things as American soap operas: people falling in love with people who were already married to someone else and people coming back from the dead.) As Mom once put it, she and Alan were “best friends who enjoyed kissing each other.”
This is going to be fantastic!” Sarah said. “Hey, I know a shaman up in that area. Maybe he could come and do some sort of blessing.” In addition to being a yoga teacher, Sarah was into all sorts of crazy stuff like blessing and using sticky essential oils to cure everything from backaches to period cramps. (When mine finally came, I guess I’d give that a try.) “He’s great with that kind of thing. Except you have to supply your own birds’ beaks and stuff like that. Or maybe my mom could come from Arizona!”
Uh-oh. I had met Sarah’s mom at Ziggy’s baby shower and she was bonkers. We’re talking the-woman-thought-her-house-had-been-hit-with-a-spaceship kind of bonkers.
Mom and Alan looked at each other nervously. “Uh, that’s interesting, Sarah,” Mom said. “Why don’t we talk about that some other time?”
Like, say, never.
“I can’t believe you finally agreed on a place,” Laurel said.
“Neither can we,” Mom replied.
While Mom and Alan had a lot in common—such as the fact that they both loved movies directed by some guy named Woody Allen—they were also very different in a lot of ways. Like the fact that Mom enjoyed hikes and nature while Alan got totally freaked out if there was a fly in the apartment. It was bad enough when they had been trying to pick a place to go for their one-year anniversary (and even worse when I got involved and almost totally screwed it up), but the whole where-to-get-married thing had been a nightmare.
“I think the Black Horse Inn will be perfect,” Alan said. “It’s very pretty and has a country feel, but according to the brochures, you can still get cell phone reception and the New York Times. Plus, I checked the Old Farmer’s Almanac, and even though we’ll be into November, there’s no snow in the forecast for that weekend.”
“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.
Well, at least until I finally got my period.
“There’s something we wanted to ask you girls, though—” Alan said.
“—we wanted to know if you would give the toast at the reception,” Mom finished.
Mom and Alan did that a lot—finished each other’s sentences. I wondered if that was something that all couples did and if I ever had a boyfriend, if I’d end up doing that, too. (I actually hoped I wouldn’t. Because if I could finish his sentences, that would mean I’d know what he was thinking, which, frankly, would be pretty boring. Except around the holidays or my birthday when I could psychically tell what he was getting me for a gift.) Sarah did that to Dad a lot, too. But she also did that me, so in that case it was just an annoying interrupting habit thing versus a couple thing.
Laurel and I looked at each other and smiled. That would be awesome. Ever since becoming class president I had gotten a lot more comfortable with public speaking. Like to the point where I no longer had to use the tricks Laurel had taught me about imagining people in their underwear in order to take away my nerves.
Although I had to admit I was a little worried that if Laurel and I were going to give a toast together, she might end up hogging the whole thing. For the most part she was super generous (when she shared the swag from the kind of goodie bags she got from the parties she went to, it was along the lines of designer jeans and Ugg boots rather than glitter pens and SweeTart
s). But sometimes when it came to stuff in front of an audience, she couldn’t stop the performer in her from coming out. Like when we ended up at a karaoke place during our first group date with Mom and Alan and she went to town signing “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera complete with hair flips as if she was a special guest judge on The Voice or something. (As for me, I sang The Beatles’ “Let It Be,” complete with microphone feedback and my mother having to help me out because I’m pretty much tone-deaf.)
“That’s so nice of you to ask us,” Laurel said. “But I think Lucy should do it herself.”
I looked at her. “You do?”
She nodded. “Yeah. You’re really the writer in the family.”
I smiled. With all the hundreds of scripts she had read over the years, that was a big compliment coming from her. And with all the experience I was getting with my advice column, I was getting pretty good at coming up with clever things to say without her help.
“Of course, I can look it over for spelling and grammatical errors,” she added.
Of course she could. And of course she would. Laurel may have been on the Best Dressed Teen lists of every magazine and dating Austin Mackenzie, her male equivalent in the teen heartthrob department, but what most people didn’t know was that if there was an Academy Award for Most Organized and a Total Stickler for Things Being Just So, Laurel would’ve won it hands down. I, on the other hand, was a little (okay, a lot) on the less-organized side—and that included not running spell-check when I wrote something.
“That would be great,” I replied with a smile.
When Laurel and I had first met, I was afraid that the fact that we were so different was going to be a huge problem, but it actually had turned out to be a really good thing.
If anyone had told me a year earlier that I would be living in New York City, with the most famous girl in the world, about to write a toast to read on the day that she and I officially became fristers, I never would’ve believed it.
But I was. And I had to say, other than the fact that my boobs wouldn’t stop growing and my period still hadn’t gotten here, my life was pretty awesome.
Dear Dr. Maude,
Okay, you are SO not going to believe the huge news that I have!!!
It turns out that Mom and Alan aren’t splitting up. Instead they’re finally getting married! Which means that in one month Laurel and I will OFFICIALLY be fristers. I’m excited about it for a bunch of reasons (getting to buy a new dress…wedding cake…getting to give the toast…no longer having to explain, “Well, we’re not officially fristers yet, but we will be once our parents get their act together and set a date”…wedding cake).
Last night before I went to bed, after getting yelled at by Mom for typing this on my iTouch when I was supposed to be sleeping, I thought about how freaked out I had been when Mom first told me she was dating Alan. You remember how worried I had been that Laurel was going to end up getting all the attention because she’s so famous and talented while I’m so normal and uncoordinated, right? Actually, you’d only know that if you had read my e-mails.
Anyway, that hasn’t happened. If anything, living with Laurel has been great because it’s showed me that just because someone’s life might look really awesome on the outside, you never know how they feel on the inside. Like the fact that Laurel gets very easily freaked out about things such as germs and messiness and tends to worry a lot.
And Alan is an awesome frather. (That’s friend + father instead of stepfather.) I mean, to organize a whole dance for me at home because he felt bad for me that my official local crush, Blair Lerner-Moskovitz, couldn’t go to the Sadie Hawkins one with me? That is soooo sweet. Even if his taste in music is kind of dorky (he played a song by these two old people Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand) and we ended up just going for ice cream instead.
Plus, guess what? Dad and Sarah and Ziggy get to come, too, because Dad’s performing the ceremony. I haven’t seen a lot of ministers in my life because my parents are Buddhists and are letting me choose my own religion, but I have seen a bunch of them on TV as I’ve flipped the channels to get to Animal Planet, and none of them had ponytails like Dad does. In fact, the ones who are Buddhist monks have shaved heads.
Okay, well, I’m going to go look at dresses on the Urban Outfitters website to wear to the wedding now.
yours truly,
Lucy B. Parker
In movies and TV shows, after someone announces they’re getting married, it seems like people go nuts and the speed revs up and everything gets super fast. Kind of like if you push the “4x” fast-forward button on the DVD remote control. Suddenly, all people can talk about is the wedding, which means all the other important things in life (i.e., the fact that you feel that your parents should really, really, REALLY let you get a kitten due to the fact that your cat that you take very good care of hates you) are put on hold.
But in the Parker-Moses family, the wedding was barely discussed. Well, at least by my mom. Which meant that she had all the time in the world to tell me yet again that no matter how many times I asked about the kitten, the answer was still no and that because Miss Piggy was family, she and I were going to have to use our conflict-resolution skills to work out whatever issues we were having. Which, if Miss Piggy had spoken English instead of Catese, may have worked, but she didn’t.
“Look at it this way,” I said to Mom as she and I made our way through Central Park during our IBS (IBS = Individual Bonding Session = something Alan had come up with when we blended our families) a few afternoons later after she picked me up at the Center for Creative Learning, my school on the Upper East Side. “Weddings are all about new beginnings and commitment. And what better way to celebrate a new beginning than committing to a cute baby kitten!”
Laurel had helped me come up with that the night before. When she suggested it, I was afraid that it sounded a little TV commercial-like (which is why I agreed that it was good that I was taking care of the speech). But it was better than what I was planning on saying, which was “The reason I want a kitten is because it really hurts my feelings to watch Miss Piggy act like some starstruck fan whenever she’s around Laurel.” Even though that was true.
Mom shook her head. “Nice try, but no.”
I sighed. “Fine. If you’re not going to let me get a kitten, will you at least let me go wedding dress shopping with you?” Unlike most women, Mom hated to shop. But the good news is that when she did go, and I went with her, she always let me get something, too. And there was a pair of polka-dot Converse hi-tops that had just come out that I really, really, really wanted and didn’t feel like waiting until Kwaanza for. (Because Mom was Buddhist, Alan was Jewish, and Laurel and I had been raised with no religion, in one of our family meetings about the holidays, we had taken a vote and decided we would celebrate a neutral holiday.)
She shook her head. “I’m not buying a wedding dress.”
“What are you talking about? You have to!”
“How come?” she asked.
I thought about it. Why was she asking me? I had never been married. “Well, because, it’s…the weddingly thing to do,” I finally said.
She turned to me. “Says who? Fashion designers and magazines who want to force women to spend their hard-earned money on overpriced garments for which they end up almost starving themselves to get into so that they can fulfill some fantasy that was thrust upon them in childhood by the fairy tales that were read to them about waiting around for a prince to come save them?”
Uh-oh. Mom had just stepped up on what Alan called her soapbox, which, because I had never seen one, I figured was something they used to have in the old days. While she may have been laid back, Mom was what my dad’s mom called a “feminist” (although the way she said it made it sound like it wasn’t a great thing to be). When it came to women’s rights, Mom tended to go on and on and her face got red as she talked.
“Mom, I’m twelve,” I replied. “And that’s a lot of syllables for me to take in when
I haven’t had my after-school snack yet.”
She laughed and ruffled my brown hair. Which, thankfully, was on its way to medium-long-dom versus super-short-dom—something I feared would never happen after the Straightening Iron Incident before the start of sixth grade. I overshot the mark by holding the straightening iron on my pigtail too long in an attempt to get rid of my curls. “You’re right,” Mom said. “It’s just that I don’t want to make a big deal about this day. It’s like Valentine’s Day,” she explained. “I just never understood why you’re supposed to love someone more on that day versus the other 364. And a wedding is the same kind of thing.”
I guess she had a point, but hopefully she wouldn’t mind if I dressed up because I had found three really awesome dresses on the Urban Outfitters website the other night.
“As far as I’m concerned, everything’s just business as usual,” she said.
Well, it was business as usual until Marissa got involved by being all Marissaish and stirring things up. Marissa was a friend of mine from Northampton. I wasn’t sure who was more annoying: her or Alice.
It started the next afternoon, as we were having our weekly Triple S. Triple S stood for Skype Snack Session and was something that I had originally started with the actor Connor Forrester, whom I had met out in L.A. when I was there with Laurel. Much to everyone’s surprise (no one more than mine) I ended up having my first kiss with Connor. It wasn’t like we became all boyfriend/girlfriend after that, though. Super-cute teen superstar + me = weird combination. He was nice but a little too goofy for me, which was why we were just friends. That totally bummed Laurel out because Connor also happened to be her boyfriend Austin’s BFF. (“Two BFFs dating two BFFs?! How cute would that be?!” she cried.)