Over the Top

by Alison Hughes

Arrgghh. Lines. They’re called lines. My brain obviously knew this but blanked out at the crucial moment.

  “Oh, well,” he laughed. Either he was amazingly easygoing and didn’t notice how awkward this conversation was, or he was phenomenally kind and was just taking pity on the weird girl. “Just gotta practice. One line at a time, right? Well, I gotta go. Oh, I’ll see you at the—” his eyes opened wide and he stopped “—at rehearsals,” he said hastily, pushing up his glasses. “I’ll see you at rehearsals.”

  And he turned and practically ran away. Maybe, I thought unhappily, he just realized how hopelessly awkward I was, or he just didn’t want to talk to me anymore, or he didn’t want other people to see us talking together, or he saw what was supposed to be a quick, two-sentence chat turning into a longer, more awkward conversation.

  None of those were good options. I wanted to sink through the floor.

  Anyway, it was a complete and total relief when school was finally over for the week. Our pink castle had never looked so good. Mom hadn’t booked me for any parties this weekend, probably because she knew I was still “crabby” about last weekend’s mermaid fiasco. I didn’t even have any homework.

  Our first rehearsal for the play was on Monday, so I did have that to worry about, but maybe I could reserve all day Sunday for worrying and nail biting, and just chill Friday night and Saturday. I thought of how soothing it would be to write in the gazebo, with just the trees for company. They sometimes whisper, but trees never stare.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked when I came downstairs after dumping my backpack in my room and changing into my oldest, most comfortable sweats. Dad was looking in the cupboards and Hero was doing homework at the pink counter, sitting at a stool and swinging his legs.

  “Doing a party,” said Dad. “Engagement or something. I can’t remember.”

  “Maybe it’s that horrible promposal party,” I said. “Did you guys hear about that one?” I told them about it and was glad to hear they thought it was as awful as I had.

  “I would hate that,” said Hero. “And I like parties.”

  “Yikes. That would have made me run a mile back in the day,” Dad said. “Anyway, I’m making spaghetti.” He stirred some sauce in a pot. “Then I thought the three of us might go play badminton tonight. You guys versus your old dad. Like old times.”

  “I’m in,” said Hero quickly, shooting a look at me. “Sounds like fun, huh Deev?”

  “I don’t really feel like going out,” I said. “Besides, where would we even play badminton around here?” We used to play badminton at the open gym nights at our old school. Epic, loud, thrashing battles that left all of us sweaty and breathless.

  “Looked into it, and there’s a big rec center pretty close. Ten-minute drive. Please? I haven’t had much time with you guys lately.”

  “C’mon, Deev,” Hero pleaded, “we’re so close to kicking Dad’s butt! And it’s Friday—he’s probably tired and worn out from the week. It’ll be an easy win. Pleeeease?”

  “Okay, okay,” I laughed. “But I’m pretty tired, too.” I thought about how this rec center was close. Only ten minutes away. Close might not be a good thing. Close might mean that kids from school hang out there on a Friday night. Another reminder I was spending my weekend with my little brother and parents. Sigh. “Really tired. Maybe just a quick game.”

  Dad looked so relieved that I was glad I agreed to go. He must have been worrying about me more than I realized.

  Both of us were worriers, built to brace for the worst. It was exhausting. Mom and Hero were different. They just sailed through life with a smile on their faces, expecting wonderful things to happen. And they usually did.

  I looked over at Hero. He was spinning on the counter stool, his head lolling back. Then he stopped suddenly and peered in the oven.

  “Yum, garlic bread,” he said happily.

  Totally worry-free.

  CHAPTER 14

  A Totally Unexpected Total Disaster

  Wow, this is absolutely nothing like our old school’s gym,” I said as we pulled up to the huge rec center. “Other than maybe that they’re both technically buildings.”

  “Nice. I like it. Pretty glitzy and new, huh?” said Hero.

  “Maybe it won’t have quite as many dust bunnies to slip on as Elmwood’s gym,” Dad said.

  “Lots of people here. Lots and lots,” I murmured. The parking lot was packed, and a steady stream of people were coming and going from the building. I was beginning to wish I had stayed at home.

  “It’ll be fine,” said Hero. “A place this size, they’ve probably got, like, four gyms.” He gave me a quick look. “It’s gonna be so fun!”

  Dad pulled out his phone and punched out a text. “Sorry—work. Okay, aaand done. Pitter, patter, let’s get at ’er.”

  Walking into the busy, brightly lit building, I wished I’d worn my newer, less comfortable sweats. The crowd seemed to be mostly families and older people, but still—people. People with eyes, people who judged you. I caught glimpses of a few kids my age and was pretty sure a couple of them went to my school. I smoothed my hand over my hair.

  “So let’s get—” I choked back the rest of the sentence, which was “this over with,” and substituted “cracking,” which was a lame Dad-word like “scoot” or “shebang,” but whatever.

  Looking around idly, I suddenly froze. I saw a boy run in the front doors and down the hall to the right of the front desk. I didn’t see his face, but I could have sworn it was Spencer. Same hair, same running hunch I’d studied during the recess soccer games while pretending to read my book under the recess tree. I only caught a glimpse, though, like a one-and-a-half second glance. I was probably wrong. Please let me be wrong, I thought.

  I felt a little guilty about squirming in embarrassment at the thought of anybody at my school seeing us. But let’s be honest: it wasn’t exactly the coolest of Friday-night activities to be teamed up with your little brother to play your Dad in badminton. Especially the way we played. There was usually a lot of yelling and thrashing and flailing around in our games (mostly by me, but still). I looked down and noticed Dad was wearing his ancient, “lucky” bright blue and neon-orange badminton shoes. Great, just great.

  Why couldn’t there ever be a situation, really any situation, where I looked cool? Like, for example, maybe riding a horse. People always looked impressive on a horse. Or laughing in the middle of a group of friends at the mall. Or talking on a rose-gold cellphone in a perfect outfit while flipping my perfect hair. Or being interviewed on the news for rescuing somebody from a disaster (flood? tornado?). Any non-humiliating, non-embarrassing, very cool situation. I wasn’t picky.

  “Down thataway to the gym,” said Dad, pointing with his racquet down the same hallway potential-Spencer just ran down.

  Please don’t let Spencer and a group of guys be in the gym. I remembered that Spencer’s friend Jeremy played basketball. The memory of that conversation came flooding back like the voice of doom. What if they all hung out on Friday nights shooting hoops?

  Oh please, no.

  “Wait. Dad, don’t we have to pay?” I asked, stalling. “I mean we can’t just walk in without paying. So let’s just get in line like everybody else, right?”

  “Already got a membership,” said Dad, dashing my hopes of a long wait in the entrance lineup, which might even have been so long that we’d pack it in and go home. “Let’s go.” He and Hero walked quickly through the main foyer over to the hallway. I hung back.

  “Jeez, sometime this century, Deev,” complained ’Ro. “Come on.”

  There was no sign of Spencer down the hall, so I relaxed a bit.

  “I think it’s in here,” said Dad, pulling open a door on his left.

  “I don’t think so, Dad—it’s totally dark. Why would a gym be dark?” My eye fell on the little rectangular plaque beside the door. It said PARTY ROOM 2.

  I had a momentary thrill of pure terror.

  Party Room?

&nbs
p; Oh dear god, no…

  But there was no time to do anything or say anything, let alone turn and sprint back down the hall. It all happened so fast. The door opened to the blackness, then Dad reached out and snapped on the lights.

  “SURPRISE!!” The room erupted with the sound of what seemed like hundreds of people yelling and blowing noisemakers. A few nearby people threw glittery confetti. Lights flashed from a phone camera.

  “Whaa—” I stumbled backward into Dad. Hero grabbed my hand and dragged me into the room. A blaring “Happy Birthday” started up from the sound system.

  “Haha! It’s your birthday party, Deev!” screamed Hero above all the noise. “A week early! Haha—gotcha! Total surprise! You never suspected a thing.” He and Dad high-fived.

  No, ’Ro, I really, really didn’t suspect a thing, up until that last split-second. I didn’t suspect this even a little, tiny bit. Not after I told Mom specifically and repeatedly and in great detail how I absolutely, positively did not want even a small party, let alone a Times-Square-on-New-Year’s-Eve-level party. No, probably stupidly, this party actually did come as a total surprise.

  I looked around at all the kids in the room. Most of them had gone back to talking or running around.

  I didn’t trust my voice to speak. I looked over at Dad. He smiled anxiously down at me.

  “Surprised? Happy?”

  Happy? Happy? My first thought was not, strangely, one of total betrayal: that he knew about this party and lied to me to get me to come. That was bad enough. No, my first thought was way lamer. It was: He knew about this massive party and let me wear my OLDEST SWEATS. How could he?

  “I—I—”

  Mom ran over and practically tackled me in a giant bear-hug.

  “Mom, what—why—”

  “At a loss for words? That’s always a good sign of a proper surprise!” Mom looked absolutely elated. Music started blaring from the sound system, and a DJ in sunglasses announced: “This one’s for Deeeee-va,” and gave me two thumbs-up. Bewildered, I gave him a weak smile and a thumbs-up back. I was grateful for the music. It would have been horrific to have total silence, everyone staring and hearing Mom gushing.

  Mom gestured to the crowd. She raised her voice above the music.

  “We invited the whole sixth grade from your school! Five classes! Happy birthday, Princess! You said you didn’t want to have a house party, and I totally understood that. So I thought this would be a better idea. More public, less private! Isn’t it fun?”

  I looked down at her with a frozen smile on my face.

  “Fun,” I repeated. It was more of an incredulous question, but Mom took it as an exclamation.

  “Good! That’s the birthday girl spirit!” she said. She gave my arm an excited, painful little squeeze. “Let’s go mingle!”

  That awful, guilty feeling of helplessly almost hating your parent and knowing they don’t have a clue at all.

  CHAPTER 15

  DIVAPALOOZA!

  C’mon,” shouted Mom above the music. She grabbed my hand. “Let me show you the stations!”

  Stations? What on earth…

  She dragged me into the crowded room. It was enormous, decorated with hundreds of bobbing gold balloons and crisscrossed with silver streamers. There was a banner spanning most of the high ceiling, with the word DIVAPALOOZA! spelled out in huge black letters, outlined in tons of gold and silver sequins, glittering in the strobe lights as the banner waved.

  “Kept the color scheme to gold and silver!” Mom yelled into my ear. “Classy! Grown-up!”

  I stared at the banner. DIVAPALOOZA! If I ever live this down, it will be a total and utter miracle. It will take some sort of national-level disaster to make other kids forget about this one.

  My stomach felt tight and my hands were ice-cold. This was a miscalculation of sixth grade on an epic scale, with me as the guinea pig. Mom and Dad (mostly Mom, I’m betting) threw this party because they know how socially inept I am. I wasn’t making friends, so they thought they’d introduce me to all these kids in my new school, and let’s be honest, hoped the party would impress them. They were trying to show them how much fun I am, how party-worthy I am.

  No, Mom. No, Dad. What everyone will think is very different from that. Were you ever in sixth grade? Best-case scenario is that everyone will think I’m this completely spoiled brat who demanded an over-the-top Beyoncé-level birthday party. The middle-case scenario is that they’ll think the new kid has a loud, tacky, and pushy family. But the rock-bottom, very worst-case scenario is that they’ll think the new girl is such a loser that her family needs to buy her friends.

  There was no good angle on DIVAPALOOZA!

  I feverishly made a mental note to Google “homeschooling” when I got back to our house.

  Mom dragged me through the noisy crowd. I reached back and ripped the elastic from my ponytail, and let my hair shield my burning face. There were a few sort-of familiar faces—kids from my class, kids I’d seen at the auditions for the play or in the field or in the halls, but most of them were total strangers.

  I hung back, but who knew Mom’s little hand could have such a wicked-strong death-grip? Couldn’t squirm out of that one. It was as if she sensed I wanted to run to the nearest bathroom and lock the door. She led me around tables with vases of fake flowers and foot-long candy skewers, silently pointing them out, grinning, and giving me the thumbs-up sign.

  I finally understood what she meant by “stations” when we got to the far side of the room.

  “I couldn’t decide which to do, so we did them all!” shouted Mom.

  First up was the Krazy Karaoke booth, where a boy I’d never even seen before belted out songs the DJ was playing into a very loud microphone while busting out some totally lame dance moves. He and his friends were having a great time, apparently, judging from the scream-laughing.

  “Woo-hoo,” shouted Mom. “He’s good.” The microphone did that high-pitched scream mics sometimes do, and we covered our ears and ran on.

  The Dandy, Dandy Cotton Candy Shoppe was next, where a man with a big cotton candy machine whirled out huge swirls of pink and blue.

  “One for the birthday girl, Ted!” yelled Mom. The man smiled and passed a pink cotton candy to us over the heads of a lineup of kids. I saw their faces. Everybody resents somebody who butts in line, even if she is the birthday girl, the Diva of this Palooza.

  At the ’Stache Station, there were dozens of fake mustaches, beards, and eyeglasses. Huge wooden panels had been painted with headless characters (a business suit, a clown, a doctor, a baby, an astronaut, etc.) where kids could take a picture with their head on top. Get it? You’re a big baby, but you have a mustache! How weirdly, randomly fun! I guess it wasn’t totally lame because a group of kids was there, trying on mustaches and taking selfies. But I think they were doing it sarcastically, in a way that made fun of it. One of the kids was in my class. I think her name is Alexandra, but she was looking the other way.

  The DJ was screaming something into the mic about a “prize scramble.” He pulled out a bucket and started throwing handfuls of little objects into the shrieking crowd. One of them hit me on the side of the head. It was a small deck of cards. It dropped to the ground, two girls lunged for it in a scuffling match, and one of them ran off, holding it high in the air.

  “Isn’t that fun?” Mom yelled, laughing as she watched a group of kids tussling for the loot on the floor.

  “Not really,” I muttered. “Hey, whoa, that one was close. That guy almost got kicked in the head!”

  Mom wasn’t listening to me.

  “Don’t worry, kids,” she shouted. “More party scrambles to come! And if you don’t get anything, there are loot bags to take home!”

  I wondered, with a sick feeling, how much Mom and Dad had spent on this party.

  There was a whole gallery of games: tossing beanbags into a giant gorilla’s mouth (The Great Gorilla Gobbler), a timed basketball shot game that you played against an opponent
(Shootout Showdown), a golf ball putting station (Par-T-Putt), a grab-a-stuffie machine (Stuffie Snatcheroo), and a balloon-animal making station (McSqueakz Balloonz).

  “I really wanted to have a dunk tank,” shouted Mom above the music, which had started up again, “but can you believe they said no? Water! Might ruin the laminate. And there was good old Dad—all set to be the dunkee!”

  Two girls from my class ran by with little stuffies. They accidentally bumped into me and shouted, “Sorry.” They saw my face and yelled, “Hey, happy birthday, Diva!”

  “Thanks,” I yelled back. “Total surprise! I had nooo idea!”

  I don’t think they heard me, but I thought I better get that out there right off the bat. I knew nothing about this wedding-sized party. That was true. The girls pointed to their ears like they couldn’t hear me, but even so, somehow I felt a little better. They looked like they were having a good time. They even gave me little waves as they ran off.

  Mom pulled me over to the photo booth. There were trunks full of costumes, tables lined with hats and costume jewelry and long feather boas.

  “Isn’t this super-fun?” she yelled.

  The booth was packed. Even a group of moms were glamming it up with the boas and taking selfies.

  Mom stopped, shouting excitedly with the other moms. Before I turned away she’d grabbed a boa and was right in there posing for pictures with the rest of them.

  Seeing my chance, I slipped quickly away into the crowd. I kept my head down as I passed by the balloon volleyball court but glanced around to see if maybe I could find anybody I knew.

  Uh-oh. There were some people I knew. Miranda and Miko’s group was standing against the far wall. Kallie was pulling candy off a skewer and dropping the ones she didn’t like on the floor. Miranda and two other girls were doing what I guessed were ballet-style leaps and twirls, and Miko was texting.

  I turned with the urgent instinct of an animal running from predators and smacked right into a group of boys.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, but none of them even turned around.