PAMELA DENNIS aka MOM, mother, accomplice: I hadn’t thought of any of Avery’s boyfriends as a problem, per se, as her grades held steady, but even I could see that they were taking up an awful lot of time. Besides, when Paul proposed a family trip to a dude ranch, I thought it sounded like a real hoot! I couldn’t even remember a time Paul had spent that much time away from the office.
DAD: Little Lazy River Dude Ranch has excellent Wi-Fi and cell service. I set up a satellite office and kept Dennis, Godfrey & Markham running like a well-oiled machine.
AVERY: When Dad told me we were spending the whole summer on a family trip, I thought he’d lost it. What happened to all of those extracurriculars and internships I needed for my college application? But when Dad told me we were spending the summer in Texas, I knew he’d lost it.
DAD: I’d tried to keep Avery busy over the years with extracurricular activities; colleges do look at all of that when making their decisions. But don’t count out old Dad. I might seem crazy. But it’s crazy like a fox.
Editor’s Note: What does crazy like a fox even mean? I asked Hutch if foxes had a tendency toward mental illness, and his answer was an emphatic no.
KRISSY VALDEZ, Managing Director of Little Lazy River Dude Ranch: There is technically no age limit in our Big Buckaroo program. I’d say the vast majority of families show up with kids under twelve. Usually, our Big Buckaroos top out around thirteen. But every once in a while, we’ll get an outlier.
AVERY: Dad signed up me for ranch camp. For babies. On the surface of the sun.
COCO: While I was decorating my intern desk at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston, the first postcard arrived from Avery. On the front was a picture of the most adorable little blond boy riding the cutest, fattest pony I’d ever seen. On the back, all it said was “SEND HELP.”
MOM: Little Lazy River Dude Ranch has so many wonderful activities, for both parents and children. On our very first day, I signed Paul and myself up for the Cactus Talk, the Nature Walk, and Watercolor Class. Avery was enrolled in Big Buckaroos with the rest of the big kids.
AVERY: I’d like to think that Mom was ignorant of the fact that she sent me to horseback riding camp with a bunch of tweens. Dad, however, knew exactly what he was doing.
DAD: Oh, I was proud of myself, all right. Thought I’d solved Avery’s dating problem by cutting her off at the source. How was she going to find a date when she was spending every day surrounded by middle schoolers?
AVERY: It was humiliating. There were twelve of us Big Buckaroos, and the next oldest one was a thirteen-year-old named Kyra, who was more than willing to be my new BFF. Riding around all day in the summer heat of Texas was exactly the nightmare it sounded like. I smelled like a horse and I couldn’t stop sweating. I felt like our counselor, Miss Molly, was laughing at me the whole time. I was ninety-nine percent sure she was only a year or two older than me.
DAD: One week went by with no boyfriend. Then two. Then three. It was the longest stretch I could remember Avery being single. My plan had worked. Sure, she was grumpy and the horse stench coming off her was appalling, but she was plowing her way through that summer reading list.
AVERY: Dad had bested me. I resigned myself to a summer of French-braiding Kyra’s hair and bonding with my horse, Li’l Chunk. And then Miss Molly broke her arm, and everything changed.
KRISSY: Molly’s great with our Big Buckaroos, but she’s also a barrel racer, which is a bit of a liability. She’s usually flawless, but she was working with a new, young horse who took the third barrel turn a bit too fast and started to slide trip. Molly came right off. She was lucky the horse didn’t crush her; she just landed funny. But I knew Molly couldn’t handle those Big Buckaroos with only one arm. Luckily, my nephew was able to come in from Waco and help out.
Editor’s Note: Barrel racing is a rodeo sport in which you ride a horse around a bunch of barrels as fast as you possibly can, for no apparent reason except that it sounds like a great way to break your neck.
DAD: I had thought we were safe. But it never occurred to me that something might happen that would prevent Miss Molly from finishing out the summer with the Big Buckaroos. I let my guard down—I only walked Avery to Big Buckaroos on the first day when I met Miss Molly. I never should have assumed things would stay the same. So I blithely continued on, identifying cacti and painting sunsets like an imbecile, completely unaware that Avery had started a new relationship with someone I didn’t even know existed.
AVERY: His name was Jackson, and he was a cowboy. A legit, walking, talking, roping, riding, desert-air-breathing, dusty cowboy.
JACKSON VALDEZ, legit cowboy, rising junior at Baylor University: When Aunt Krissy asked me to take over Big Buckaroos, I wasn’t thrilled. I’d already been asked to leave Little Buckaroos last summer for not being sympathetic enough when one of the Buckaroos took a tumble off of his pony. Figured I was better off away from Little Lazy River. But then Aunt Krissy offered to almost double what I was making busing tables, and I agreed. Sure got a surprise when I saw the biggest Buckaroo.
AVERY: It was like something out of a movie. The door to the Big Buckaroos cabin blew open, and in came a tumbleweed. Then a man, silhouetted by the rising sun. His jeans and boots were perfectly worn, and the faint coat of dust only added to his allure. He looked up at me from under the brim of his cowboy hat, and our eyes met.
HUTCH: I had heard the story of Avery and the Cowboy when we came back to school junior year. I didn’t think most of it was true then, and I don’t think most of it is true now.
COCO: Avery’s dad had taken away her phone. But the next postcard I got said “SEXY COWBOY!!!!!” on the flip side of the picture of a baby wearing a cowboy hat, so I knew things had taken a turn for the better.
HUTCH: Do I believe that Avery dated some guy named Jackson who liked horses? Yes. Do I believe he was preceded by tumbleweeds everywhere he went? No. No, I do not.
JACKSON: I’d been expecting the usual bunch of whining, sniffling toddlers, complaining about the heat and the horses being mean. Instead, I saw a blond angel in denim.
AVERY: He called me darlin’. Seriously. “What’s your name, darlin’?” was the first thing he ever said. I had resigned myself to a summer free from boys, and then he appeared! Not just a boy, but a cowboy! It’s not like I had a lot of competition, being surrounded by tweens, but I was still nervous. I couldn’t blow my one chance. Luckily, he seemed just as happy to see me as I was to see him.
JACKSON: Big Buckaroos always do the first ride of the day early in the morning, after breakfast, before it gets too hot. I got all the kids on their horses, but once I saw that Avery had been riding Li’l Chunk, I asked if she’d rather try a real horse.
AVERY: What I honestly wanted was to ride on the horse with Jackson, like we were in a movie. But that seemed forward and also codependent. So I bid adieu to Li’l Chunk, and Jackson lifted me up and onto the saddle of a beautiful horse. We rode off into the desert next to each other, trailed by a dozen little kids who were only kind of ruining the moment.
JACKSON: Riding double on a horse isn’t recommended. Not good for the horse. But I liked riding next to Avery anyway. Her seat wasn’t half-bad for someone who’d just started. And her seat wasn’t half-bad either, if you know what I mean.
Editor’s Note: Ewwwww, WHAT?!? I did not remember him being kind of gross and cheesy like this!!! I think I was blinded by his scruff.
HUTCH: That seat comment was the last straw. Time to wrap up this one and move on to the next.
AVERY: Jackson and I spent the summer horseback riding next to each other and holding hands and making out, and even though I never, ever stopped sweating, it was still pretty magical. We broke up because I went back to school, because duh. It was just a summer thing.
HUTCH: I feel like “just a summer thing” could have described a lot of AD’s relationships—and not just the ones that took place in the summer. Maybe all of AD’s relationships had end
ed because she was never fully in them, not with her whole self. Excuse me if I sound corny, but she never put all of her heart in them.
AVERY: I think Hutch had inadvertently stumbled across the reason my relationships didn’t last—because my heart wasn’t in them. I was a frosty, unlovable ice queen, incapable of love. I should just build a giant snowman and lock myself in an ice castle and let Coco go off and marry Kristoff.
HUTCH: I’ve gotten to know AD pretty well over the past four years, and she has a remarkable capacity for love. It’s obvious in everything she does, from the way she treats her friends and talks about her parents and even takes care of that cat of hers. AD’s relationships didn’t end because she can’t love—that’s ridiculous. They ended because she simply hadn’t found the right person. The statistical probability of finding your soul mate, if that’s a concept you believe in, is so infinitesimally low it should be called a statistical improbability. The odds of that soul mate being someone you met in middle school, or high school, are lower still. Maybe we’d been asking ourselves the wrong question. It seemed like it would have been far more unusual if one of AD’s relationships had lasted through the prom.
Editor’s Note: “A remarkable capacity for love”?! I … oh, Hutch.
DAD: Avery introduced us to Jackson on our final night at Little Lazy River, during which there was a big formal farewell dinner in the mess hall. Was I surprised? Of course! She’d been dating this kid for two months and I’d never even seen him before. I had been well and truly bamboozled. But Avery had finished her whole summer reading list and booked herself on three college tours back home in California, so there was really nothing I could complain about. I resigned myself to the fact that Avery’s social calendar would continue on as the paragon of insanity it had always been. I guess boys hadn’t been the distraction I thought they were. If anything’s distracting, it’s all those apps. The only form of social media I endorse is LinkedIn. Everything else is superfluous nonsense.
HUTCH: AD’s summer spree of vacation boyfriends in cinematic destinations continued. Maybe this section could be looked at as a deprivation experiment. In a dating desert, AD chose the only available option. Who was surprised? No one. She’s like one of those plants that grows up through even the tiniest crack in the sidewalk. The will to date is strong in this one. Or was strong, I guess, since AD was done with dating. I still couldn’t quite believe it. Well, I believed it, since I’d never known AD to back down from anything she’d set her mind to, but why, of all the times to be done with dating, did she have to pick right now?
Editor’s Note: ??? I had no idea why Hutch had an opinion on the timing of my ban on boys, but when I asked him, he got defensive and said, “If you’re really serious about this project, shouldn’t you be creating a bar graph right now?” and then that turned into a whole thing because this project in no way lends itself to a bar graph and then I forgot what we were talking about.
Editor’s Note: Names have been changed to protect the anonymity of a certain someone, and to comply with the nondisclosure agreement I signed last year. “Jake’s” manager didn’t want him to answer any of my questions, even when I promised that the only person who would see this was Ms. Segerson and I’d never ever sell it to Us Weekly, no matter how much money they offered me. But he finally agreed to let me ask my questions on the condition that I would refer to his client only as Jake Doe.
COCO: When Avery busts a slump, she busts it hard. First, there was the cowboy. Then, there was the movie star. After sophomore year’s epic fail, junior year was like Avery’s equivalent of 1961—well, if JFK had only established the Peace Corps and not gotten embroiled in the Bay of Pigs.
BIZZY STANHOPE: I think reports of Jake Doe’s “celebrity” have been wildly exaggerated. Jake Doe is not a movie star. He’s on a TV show that’s not even that popular. Or good. Like I guess some people know who he is, but most people would probably be like, “Jake who?”
NATALIE WAGNER, random freshman, Skyward superfan: OMG, Skyward is my favorite, favorite, favorite show of all time. It is literally the best thing on television. I never, ever miss an episode.
HUTCH: Would I classify Skyward as science fiction? Maybe in the very broadest sense of the term. But only if I had to. If someone was pointing a phaser at me.
MICHAEL FEELEY, definitely not a Skyward fan: Oh, sure, I know someone who actually watches Skyward. Liam is obsessed with it. It’s mortifying. That’s a show for twelve-year-old girls.
LIAM PADALECKI, definitely a closet Skyward fan: Oh, man, I don’t watch that much Skyward! I watched it like one time. But I don’t think it’s fair that Michael and Hutch and Alex always judge it based solely on the admittedly limited merit of the pilot. Name one show that had a good pilot. Well, except you can’t say Firefly. But that doesn’t count, because that show is perfect. And also Fox didn’t air the episodes in order, so who can really say what the pilot was?
Editor’s Note: Hutch felt very strongly that I clarify that “Serenity” is the pilot episode of Firefly, and it’s actually kind of hard to follow because it drops you into the universe without explaining very much. So although it is vastly enjoyable when rewatching, and gives us our first great Wash moment, whatever that means, it is by no means a perfect pilot. You’re welcome for this extremely necessary tangent, Ms. Segerson. I’m sure you really needed to know this.
NATALIE: Skyward takes place in a postapocalyptic dystopic future world where the government controls everything we do. Except there is one boy who will not be controlled. Nobody knows where he came from—he just fell out of the sky totally naked one day, covered in tattoos of numbers that no one knows what they mean. His name is Sky, and he will bring down the government by any means necessary—even if he has to break his own heart to do it. Because he fell in love with the daughter of the government leader. That part’s important, too.
LIAM: I mean, there is no comparison between season one and season two. Season two is infinitely better. It’s like watching two different shows! And those guys still won’t give it a chance. Plus, Emma Rajpur, who plays the love interest, is insanely hot. And a total boss. I saw her speak on a panel at Comic-Con last year and every answer had the crowd on its feet.
Editor’s Note: Here is where I had my wonderful, brilliant, amazing, beautiful idea that I thought might go toward erasing some of my karmic debt from being such a jerk to Liam in sixth grade.
HUTCH: Skyward is what would happen if someone put a bunch of different novels, movies, and TV shows in a blender and repackaged whatever got spit out with the new teen beat flavor of the month. It’s hard to believe it’s been on the air for four years. You’d think Sky would have taken down the government by now. Guess he’s not quite the alien superspy everyone thinks he is.
NATALIE: But the best, best, best part about Skyward is Jake Doe. Jake plays Sky, and he is so incredibly crazy hot it’s almost unbelievable. I have a poster of him taped up in my locker. I’ve had a poster of him taped up in my locker every year since the show premiered. I was only in middle school when Avery dated Jake Doe, but I still saw him. I saw him pick her up after school one day, and he’s actually even hotter in person, if you can believe it. Shorter than I thought he’d be, but hotter, too.
COCO: I don’t want you to go into this thinking that Avery stalked Jake Doe or anything like that. No, the way she met him was pure dumb luck. Well, the locations manager for Skwyard, and pure dumb luck.
JAKE DOE, semi-famous TV actor, ex-boyfriend: Our locations manager had this super-specific vision for when Sky’s memories are implanted with a false vision of an alternate life of privilege in a society much closer to our current, present-day one, where he’s just a typical teenager. Basically, they wanted to find a fancy private school, but for whatever reason, none of the million private schools in LA were good enough. At the time, I was whining like crazy about having to drive out to San Anselmo, but it turned out to be totally worth it.
COCO: Nobody
knew Skyward was filming at our school. I guess the administration was worried that whatever Skyward superfans went to San Anselmo would swarm the set and throw their panties at Jake Doe or whatever.
NATALIE: I think it was the meanest thing ever that the school didn’t tell us Skyward was filming there. It would have been a dream come true to see Jake Doe bring Skyward to life! I’ve never forgiven Principal Patel for keeping all of us from that, and I never will.
PRINCIPAL PATEL: Normally, I wouldn’t condone use of school grounds as a film set, but the Skyward producers offered a very generous contribution toward the capital campaign for the new performing arts center. Fortunately, as they were equally concerned with keeping Jake Doe’s whereabouts private, it was relatively easy to keep the entire situation quiet. Well, until Avery Dennis started dating Jake Doe. Has the school been used as a location since? Oh, absolutely not. Yet another addendum to the handbook we owe to Avery Dennis. I prefer my students to be in the news only for academic achievements.
JAKE: We were filming on a Saturday, so the school was pretty empty. It was supposed to be an alternate reality, except they wanted the hallways to look abandoned? I don’t know, man, sometimes I don’t understand these scripts either. I was leaning against the building by the track, looking out dramatically into the middle distance, which is something Sky does a lot on the show. All of a sudden, this blond blur came sprinting out of nowhere, running full tilt at me.
AVERY: It was the first weekend of the school year, and I had to get into that building.
JAKE: I thought it was a stalker. I’ve never had anything too scary happen, but a girl went after my face with a Sharpie once. Wanted to mark me as hers. But I heard one of the guys on Adam’s Fall had a similar incident, except with a razor. A female fan didn’t like that he grew a beard for season two, and she decided to try to take matters into her own hands. So it could have been a lot worse.
It's Not Me, It's You Page 14