HUTCH: I don’t think we even need to get into this breakup. Seems pretty obvious to me: Avery dates her idea of an Italian boy cliché, Fabrizio dates his idea of a California girl cliché, they spend a “magical” summer together straight out of a Disney Channel original movie, then Avery dumps him and comes back home to America. How’d I do?
Editor’s Note: It was like Hutch had been right there on the shores of Riomaggiore with us.
FABRIZIO: As our beautiful summer drew to a close, I told Avery my love could cross an ocean! Non c’e problema! But no, she would not hear of it. “Long distance is the wrong distance,” she told me. This phrase, I had not heard it before. But it was sharp as daggers on my ears.
HUTCH: I was ready to wrap this up. This guy’s voice was like “daggers on my ears.”
FABRIZIO: I cried many, many tears. I did love again, of course! Ma certamente! But no one was like my Avery. How do I feel? I am not bitter toward her! Never! I love always our memories of our wonderful summer. If only I could see her again! But she lives on happily, forever in my heart. Che peccato.
HUTCH: Che peccato? Please. It was time to wrap this nonsense up. We had learned absolutely nothing, except that foreign accents make even normally rational, stable girls lose their minds.
Editor’s Note: I think we also learned that Hutch has a bizarre vendetta against Vespa-life. That boy doesn’t deserve to eat pizza. Moving on.
AVERY: There is nothing worse than when real life intervenes in the middle of your extremely important research project—which is also, let’s not forget, a school assignment and a requirement for graduation. But when I became head of the Prom Committee, that was not a responsibility I undertook lightly. It was a sacred calling. And I vowed on the very day I was sworn into office that all things must cede to prom.
COCO: We actually didn’t have a Prom Committee meeting scheduled, which was weird. Everything had pretty much been finalized—I didn’t think we had anything left to do but set up the venue on the big night. So I thought something might be wrong. But when we walked into Ms. Segerson’s room for Prom Committee, and Bizzy Stanhope was sitting in Avery’s seat, I knew something was wrong.
MS. SEGERSON: Yes, I let the Prom Committee use my room on the days when it’s not occupied by the school newspaper. This isn’t a tacit approval of prom as an institution. This is a testament to how stubborn Avery is.
Editor’s Note: Thank you, Ms. Segerson. I love you, too.
BIZZY STANHOPE: Yes, I had called this emergency meeting of the Prom Committee. Which is why it only made sense that I would sit in the chair of power.
TAMSIN BREWER, best friend of known beelzebufo Bizzy Stanhope: Bizzy sat in that chair like she was born to sit in it, which she totally was. Everyone knew Bizzy should have been head of the Prom Committee. Everyone talked about it, like, all the time.
COCO: The only people who ever talked about Bizzy being head of the Prom Committee were Tamsin and Bizzy. They would whisper furiously about that nonsense idea until Avery silenced them with a look. Pathetic. The only thing worse than insubordination is cowardly insubordination.
Editor’s Note: I would have guessed that was a JFK quote—but it turns out that little gem was pure Coco.
BIZZY: Avery was always late. It was completely unprofessional.
COCO: Avery was only late sometimes. And she always had a legitimate excuse.
AVERY: First of all, it is impossible to be late to a meeting you didn’t even know was happening until after it started. Secondly, the fact that Bizzy had called said meeting was a f lagrant slap in the face of my authority. And when I walked in and saw her sitting in my chair—my chair, mind you!—I was livid.
MS. SEGERSON: The chair in question is actually my chair. Avery somehow convinced me that it was “integral to her authority” that she sit in it. I have an exercise ball I try to sit on after school while grading papers anyway. It’s hard to find the time to work out during the school year.
COCO: Bizzy slunk out of the power chair the minute Avery fixed her with a glare. Cowardly insubordination at its worst. Bizzy’s attempt to take over this meeting was a total Bay of Pigs, except I wasn’t entirely sure who Castro was in this situation, because as much as I hate to admit it, that wasn’t Kennedy’s finest hour.
AVERY: “Get on with it,” I growled at Bizzy’s stupid fake-blond head as I resumed my place of pride at the head of the classroom.
BIZZY: Avery is beyond rude. None of the Dennises have any manners. There was an incident involving her father and my father on the squash court that could not bear repetition in polite company. Every Dennis in Marin County was banned from the club—in perpetuity.
PAUL DENNIS aka DAD, father, rage-fueled squash player: Don’t you dare mention the name Ted Stanhope, Avery! You know that man is persona non grata in this house! All I wanted was a competitive game of squash, and instead I have to hear baseless accusations and incessant complaints about how hard it is to steam-clean glitter out of wall-to-wall wool carpeting. And don’t get me started on that horrible club and its stringent destruction-of-property policies. If their boilerplate hadn’t been so airtight, Dennis, Godfrey & Markham would have sued the khakis off of them.
Editor’s Note: To quote a great philosopher: “Never got caught; they take me to the back and pat me.”
HUTCH: The more I learned about AD’s parents, the more I understood her.
BIZZY: But I brushed aside Avery’s rudeness and got right down to business, like the true professional I am. See? This is exactly why I should have been head of the Prom Committee.
TAMSIN: Bizzy gave me the signal and I started pushing all of the boxes out of the back of the room and into the center of our Prom Committee circle.
AVERY: I didn’t have time for Bizzy’s box-based theatrics. I leapt out of my chair, grabbed a pair of scissors off of Ms. Segerson’s desk, and cut the box open. Inside, there was a truly horrifying sight. Nothing but hundreds and thousands of brown latex balloons. Brown. Latex. Balloons.
COCO: Avery asked if all of the boxes were filled with brown balloons. Bizzy nodded grimly, but there was something weird about it. Like she was pretending to be grim, but not actually grim. I was in Acting 3 with Bizzy last year, so I know all her theatrical tricks. She was doing the same face she did during her Linda Loman monologue from Death of a Salesman.
TAMSIN: Yeah, it was my job to order the decorations. Which, honestly, was not the job I wanted, but whatever. I told Avery I was sorry, but I’d ordered the wrong thing. Oh, and I’d spent our whole decorations budget on the balloons. So we didn’t have any money left to get anything else.
COCO: Did I suspect sabotage? Absolutely. Immediately. It was painfully obvious that Tamsin was just the front for Bizzy’s evil machinations. I wish I could say I didn’t believe that Bizzy could stoop so low, but she absolutely would. She would gladly ruin her own prom in order to make Avery look bad. And as much as I truly, deeply dislike Bizzy Stanhope and her lunch-shaming ways, that made me feel kind of sad for her. I couldn’t imagine how awful it would be to go through life ruining your own happiness just to make someone else a little unhappier than you are.
AVERY: I had given Tamsin Brewer one job. One. Job. How could she possibly have screwed this up?! Nobody was that dumb!
TAMSIN: I just got, like, confused by the order numbers. There were so many rows and rows of tiny numbers. It’s hard. All numbers look the same to me.
AVERY: Tamsin’s “confused by the order numbers” excuse was not an excuse at all. I hadn’t even ordered any balloons! It’s not like I requested Radiant Orchid balloons and she’d ordered four dozen in Umber instead! These balloons had come out of nowhere! How could she have gotten nothing but brown balloons?
TAMSIN: I didn’t just get brown balloons. I also got one special one that was a little yellow Minion, like from that movie. Just because I thought he was so cute! I was gonna tie him onto my chair so everybody knew that was where I was sittin
g, and then we could take pictures together, and I could give him little hugs if I felt sad.
Editor’s Note: Obviously, I shouldn’t have given Tamsin Brewer any jobs. At this point, I wasn’t even sure how she’d made it through high school.
COCO: So here was the situation: We had a thousand hideous brown balloons, and one Minion balloon, but maybe no one but Tamsin was allowed to touch it? It was unclear. I’m not saying that I wanted to touch the Minion balloon, but I maybe would have taken a picture with it.
AVERY: Don’t even get me started on that stupid Minion balloon. If that tiny yellow nightmare dared show his face at prom, I would stab him in his dumb Mylar face.
COCO: When Avery started threatening to stab cartoon characters, I knew things were bad. Really bad. She had once described the Minions to me as “surprisingly cute—especially the little one.” And now she wanted to murder them in balloon form?!
AVERY: Oh, I knew Bizzy was behind it. It was very obvious, from her poorly executed fake sad face and smirk of triumph when she thought nobody was looking. But I am always looking, Bizzy. I AM ALWAYS LOOKING.
BIZZY: I was just as shocked as everyone else was. But mostly, I felt bad for poor Tamsin! It was an honest mistake. No one should be shamed for making a very understandable, totally honest mistake. Avery was being completely unforgiving. Again, this is another reason why I should have been head of the Prom Committee. I am way more charitable.
AVERY: We were completely screwed. The prom theme was Midnight in Paris, not Starbucks at Dawn! I had ruined prom. This was how I would go down in history—“Avery Dennis, the girl who ruined San Anselmo Prep’s senior prom.” They would probably reprint the yearbook so my senior superlative would read Prom Ruiner instead of Most Likely to Take Over the World. Or maybe they’d just burn a hole in the yearbook where my picture used to be! I’d deserve it!
COCO: We thought that was it. Like, what could be worse than a billion brown balloons? But then Bizzy dropped an even bigger bomb.
AVERY: “Oh,” Bizzy said super casually as she examined her scarily sharp manicured nails—seriously, I think she files them into points—“there’s a teensy little problem with the venue.”
COCO: “What’s the problem?” Avery snarled, and never had someone been more deserving of a snarl than Bizzy Stanhope.
AVERY: “They double-booked it,” Bizzy said coolly, like she didn’t hear my heart drop out of my chest and fall onto the floor.
COCO: Bizzy said, “Sorry,” but she didn’t sound sorry at all.
BIZZY: It’s not my fault that Daddy needed the event space on the exact same night the San Anselmo Prep senior prom just happened to be. What’s more important, a corporate merger or a high school dance?
AVERY: I couldn’t believe Bizzy. She only had one job to do. One job! The entire reason she was on Prom Committee was because she had secured the venue, except it turned out, the venue wasn’t secured at all! In fact, it was nonexistent! There was no venue. Ergo, there was no prom. I had failed as head of the Prom Committee in a way no Prom Committee head had ever failed before. This was worse than when the senior class of 1999 missed out on the obvious opportunity to theme the prom Let’s Party Like It’s 1999. For the first time since San Anselmo Prep had opened its doors in 1925, there would be no senior prom. And that was all my fault.
COCO: It was absolutely not Avery’s fault at all! The only people who were at fault were evil Bizzy Stanhope and her henchman Tamsin.
AVERY: What was I going to do? Move the prom to the gym? With my luck, there was probably a volleyball tournament in there that night. Move the prom to the parking lot? I couldn’t think of anywhere to move the prom that didn’t fall far short of spectacular, and I knew Bizzy would waste no time telling everyone exactly whose fault it was that we were dancing in a parking lot full of brown balloons.
BIZZY: Listen. Any good head of the Prom Committee would have secured a backup venue. Prom was almost definitely canceled, or if it happened, it would be somewhere completely tragic. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the things people would say about the formerly golden Avery Dennis and how royally she had screwed up.
AVERY: There was no hope. This would go down in history as the saddest San Anselmo Prep senior prom of all time, and that would be my legacy. People would speak of me in hushed tones for decades to come, like some kind of San Anselmo urban legend.
HUTCH: Avery can be dramatic over the little things—like if the cafeteria doesn’t do French Fry Friday, or if she thinks one knee sock is sagging in an unflattering way, or when someone dares to eat raw onions on his cheeseburger, which is a basic human right—but she usually keeps a pretty level head in the face of an actual crisis. You should have seen her spring into action when it looked like Cressida Schrobenhauser-Clonan’s team was going to overtake ours on the leaderboard at the Science Olympiad. This is why when she was panicking, actually panicking, about the prom, I knew we had surpassed crisis and shot straight into catastrophe.
AVERY: When Hutch told me he thought he could help, I didn’t know what to think. How could he possibly save the prom? And why would James “Hutch” Hutcherson, avowed prom hater, even want to save the prom? It made absolutely no sense. But I felt like I had no other choice but to place my faith in Hutch. My normally unlimited resourcefulness had abandoned me. I couldn’t think of a single thing that could save us from this decorative debacle or a single place we could hold the prom that wasn’t tarred in asphalt. I had to accept whatever lifeline I was offered. Even if it came from a scientist who hated dancing.
HUTCH: I had an idea. It was sort of crazy. And it might not have worked. And I definitely had to make some phone calls. And I was worried, beyond worried, that it wouldn’t live up to AD’s extremely high standards. I had heard AD talk about prom nearly every single day for the past four years. I knew I had to try to save it for her. But I was also terrified that in my attempts to save it, I might ruin prom. But that was a risk I had to take. Like the great Ray Bradbury once said, “Living at risk is jumping off a cliff and building wings on your way down.” And I was going to do everything I could to build Avery wings.
Editor’s Note: !!!!!?!?!?!!!!! From whence this POETRY, Hutch?
AVERY: There was no time to wallow in the unmitigated disaster that was the senior prom. I had to leave it in Hutch’s capable hands, trust that he had a miracle up his sleeve, and press on. Prom was only two days away, I had all of my boyfriends from sophomore through senior year to get through, and I still didn’t have any answers. The project was nowhere near finished, and I felt no closer to reaching enlightenment or understanding!
HUTCH: I had a lot of people to convince and favors to call in if I was going to pull this off. But I couldn’t resist weighing in on this particular ex-boyfriend.
COCO: Welcome to Avery’s Sophomore Slump.
HUTCH: Is Tripp Gomez-Parker worse than Sean Graney? No, no, I don’t think so. Tripp isn’t exactly the brightest crayon in the box, but at least he has a neck.
COCO: I know what you’re thinking: “Coco, how could you call Tripp Avery’s Sophomore Slump? You are literally taking him to the prom in like forty-eight hours.” And you would be right about that! But you would only ask that question if you’d never seen him dance. The man is like Channing Tatum in a San Anselmo Prep uniform. And a slightly less muscular body.
TRIPP GOMEZ-PARKER, ex-boyfriend, lacrosse player, surprisingly proficient dancer: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Everyone likes to make a big deal about my dancing, but I swear, man, it is no big deal. Dancing is definitely not, like, my thing. My thing is lacrosse. If I even have a thing. Do I have a thing? I don’t know, man. How would I describe myself in three words? One: male. Two: awesome. Three: lacrosse player.
Editor’s Note: Oh, boy.
CRESSIDA SCHROBENHAUSER-CLONAN, lab partner of T. Gomez-Parker: Tripp Gomez-Parker has been a carbuncle on my sterling GPA all year. I can obviously carry his deadweight and still beat out Hutcherson to become val
edictorian, but it’s been slightly more challenging than it otherwise would have been. So maybe I should thank Tripp for keeping things interesting. And for finally learning not to eat erasers.
TRIPP: Hold up—Cressida said what? Man, I only ate an eraser one time! And it was shaped like a tiny watermelon. Probable cause, yo! There’s a reason erasers should be shaped like erasers.
HUTCH: There is no way Cressida is beating me for valedictorian. She’d best be writing her salutation right now.
CRESSIDA: Obviously, if Hutch and I had been allies instead of enemies, there was no telling how high our GPAs could have climbed. If only Avery Dennis hadn’t kept us apart … well. A lot of things might have happened.
Editor’s Note: OMG, obsessed much, Cressida? If I’d known she was that desperate to be Hutch’s lab partner … well, I still probably wouldn’t have given him up, honestly.
COCO: I love talking about when Avery and Tripp dated. She is constantly trying to talk me out of taking him to prom, and this is literally the only thing that will shut her up! After all, Tripp and I are most emphatically not dating. He is not my boyfriend. We are not a couple. We are going to the prom together, and that is absolutely it. So if anyone deserves to be teased about her relationship with Tripp—even a former one—it’s Avery.
TRIPP: When Avery started asking me all these questions about sophomore year, I started getting mad nervous. But she promised—pinky-promised—that no one but her and Ms. Segerson would ever read this thing.
HUTCH: When AD told me I couldn’t listen in on her conversation with Tripp, I was confused. But then I remembered that she didn’t know that I know … you know what? Never mind. I respected her space and headed off to try to save the prom. Man, that’s not something I ever thought I’d say.
Editor’s Note: Mysterious much, Hutch? Whatever, I needed his help.
COCO: No, I wasn’t there when Avery and Tripp started dating. That’s weird, right? She just walked into school one day and boom, she was Tripp’s girlfriend.
It's Not Me, It's You Page 11