Take My Advice

by Robin Palmer

  I’m not exactly sure what my type is, but I think it’s more of someone like Blair. You know, a little messy. Cute but not super-cute. Someone who likes interesting snack foods such as fried Oreos.

  But before I go study, I needed to let you know that I’m not going to be able to write to you anymore. It’s not because I finally realized that me being your most loyal fan ever means nothing to you and you’re never going to write me back. And it’s not that when I stop to think about it, you show 7 of the Top 10 Warning Signs That Someone Is Not a Good Friend thing that you have on your website.

  Nope—the real reason is . . . well, actually, I can’t tell you the reason because it’s a huge secret, and even though you probably wouldn’t tell anyone because that would mean first READING MY E-MAIL, Beatrice thinks it’s smart if I don’t tell anyone outside of my immediate family about this. (When I say “this,” I mean the thing I don’t feel comfortable telling you about.) Just so you know, it’s not like what I’m doing is illegal or anything like that. In fact, if it works out, I’ll be helping a ton of people. They just won’t actually know I’m helping them because of the whole secret part of it all.

  So I just wanted to say that it’s been nice writing to you. The funny thing is that I sure could use some advice about this thing I can’t tell you about. Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to come up with some myself.

  Oh—but if you wanted to give me advice about the thing with Alan and how he’s disappointed in me as a daughter because I don’t have any hobbies and will therefore not be going to college, I think that would be okay. You know, seeing that all that happened before this new thing. Especially because I’m having trouble getting advice from anyone else.

  Well, thanks for everything. I’m not sure what the “everything” is, seeing that you never actually did anything, but it sounds like the kind of thing you say to someone in a final e-mail.

  yours truly,

  Lucy B. Parker

  P.S. Just in case you’re worried that I might go ask Dr. Dave for advice on this secret issue, I’m not going to.

  * * *

  I guess I could’ve talked to Mom about the Alan stuff, but I was afraid she’d get all freaked out and insist on an EPMFM (Emergency Parker-Moses Family Meeting) and tell Alan how I was feeling, right in front of me. And talking to Laurel about it wouldn’t work because she’d (a) say it wasn’t true, and then (b) run and tell him in hopes of helping but, really, would just make it worse.

  There was Dad, but asking your dad for advice about your other dad felt weird, too. What if he got all mad at Alan? Or jealous that I cared so much about what Alan thought? Now that I had two families, I understood why some of my friends with blended families had stomach problems. Having to worry about the feelings of not just one family, but two (or in the case of Haley Jenkins, whose parents had each been remarried, three) dealing with so many people was stressful.

  Which is why I decided the only person I could trust with this particular issue was Ziggy. At only a month old he couldn’t respond with words yet, but I knew him well enough to be able to know what his various squawks and mewls meant.

  When I texted Dad and Sarah to say that I needed an emergency Skype session with Ziggy, even though it was right before his nap time, they weren’t thrilled. Which I didn’t understand since Sarah, as a yoga person, was always going on about how we should all just go with the flow and let the Universe do its thing. Plus, because he was a baby, he slept a lot, so I didn’t think it was that big of a deal if I borrowed him for fifteen minutes.

  After I begged a little more and said how it would go a long way in helping me bond with him, they said yes. When Dad connected us and I appeared on the screen and started yelling, “Hi Ziggy! Look over here! It’s Lucy! Your sister!” I swear that not only did he smile but the noise that came out of his mouth sounded very much like “Hiiii.” After Dad shot some video of Ziggy and me talking (I made him swear not to post it on Facebook because of a zittage issue on my part), I asked him if he could please give us some alone time. From the look on Dad’s face I could see that he was disappointed. But because, like Alan, he was big on everyone having individual bonding time, he agreed.

  “Hey, Ziggy, how are you?” I yelled when we were alone. Dad said it wasn’t necessary for me to do that—that an inside voice was just fine—but between the Skype thing, and the fact that Ziggy’s ears were the size of small apple slices, I didn’t want to risk him not hearing what I was saying. I knew him well enough to know that the “Ahhhh” that came out of his tiny mouth was Babyese for “Other than the fact that my mom’s being annoying because she wants to put this sticky, gunky essential oil on me that’s supposed to prevent teething pain even though I’m nowhere near that yet, I’m fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I yelled. “So listen—I know that because you’ve only been alive for forty-two days, you don’t have a ton of life experience, but I was wondering if I could run something by you.”

  It would have been obvious to anyone who had ever passed a hearing test that his “Ghhheeee” definitely meant “Sure. Because you’re such an awesome older sister, I’d be happy to help you out any way I can.”

  “Great. Thanks. So here’s the deal—” I yelled.

  “Lucy, inside voice, please,” I heard Dad yell from outside the door.

  “Dad! You’re overlistening!” I yelled. “This is private—between me and Ziggy!” I had to admit, if anyone had told me just two months before that I’d actually want to talk to my baby brother and think his name was cute rather than embarrassing, I would’ve thought they were nuts.

  I was ashamed to admit it now, but back when Dad had told me that he and Sarah were pregnant, I wasn’t very excited. In fact, I was very worried that he’d become Dad’s favorite kid and I’d be left behind. But like Dad had said, when your family gets bigger, your heart has this way of stretching to make room for all the new people in your life. Kind of like my old teacher Mrs. Kline’s elastic-waist pants.

  “Okay, okay, I’m going,” Dad said.

  I waited a moment. “I can still hear you breathing!” I yelled. Actually, I couldn’t, but that was how Mom busted me all the time so I figured I’d give it a try.

  “Like I said, I’m going.” This time I heard him walk away.

  If he were still overlistening, Dad would’ve said it was a gas bubble, but I swear Ziggy was laughing. I leaned in closer to the screen. “Okay. That’s better. So here’s the deal, Zig. I was thinking that because you were born into a family where your dad is a Buddhist and believes in reincarnation, because you’re the most recently reincarnated out of all of us, you probably have the most life experience and therefore you’re the smartest.”

  He made a pffffft-sounding sound, which I took to mean, “You got that right.”

  I nodded. “That’s what I thought. Okay, so this is my problem—”

  The eee-ohh that came out of his little mouth definitely meant “You do? But you don’t deserve to have any problems. You’re my super-cool older sister!”

  I shrugged. “I know. I agree that it’s not fair, but what are you going to do. So the problem is this.” I took a deep breath and told him everything. About the hobby issues. About the fact that even though Alan was nice to me, I still felt like I was disappointing him. And, of course, about the Sadie Hawkins dance. I hadn’t realized how much I needed to get off my chest.

  Even though Ziggy didn’t say anything, just knowing he was listening made me feel better. Plus, because he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t say annoying things like “Oh Lucy—don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

  “So what do you think, Zig?” I asked after I had spewed everything and caught my breath. “Any advice on how I should handle this?”

  Unfortunately, all I got in response was tiny little baby snores that sounded a little like Miss Piggy’s.

  “Ziggy? Are you sleeping?”

  More snores.

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed. I wish I had known
at exactly what point he had fallen asleep, but it wasn’t like he could tell me. I leaned in closer. “Are you SURE you’re sleeping?” I yelled.

  This time he responded with a little fart.

  I sighed. “Okay. Well, thanks for listening. To however much you heard before you conked out.”

  So much for that plan.

  Laurel was actually the one who came up with the solution to the hobby issue the next day. It was the day of the Plagiarizing Incident. According to Beatrice, the Plagiarizing Incident was the most drama that had happened at the Center since anyone could remember.

  I had to say, it was nice that, finally, there was an Incident-with-a-capital-I that didn’t have to do with me. After the Straightening Iron Incident (where I burned off one of my pigtails because I had thought leaving it on for a half hour was a good idea), the Hat Incident (the first time I met Laurel, when the director of her movie took my hat off my head, exposing my super-short haircut, which made me look like an egghead), the Poster Incident (when Cristina Pollock put up very unflattering pictures of me during the election), I had had enough Incidents to last me for my entire life.

  I knew from a vocab test the year before that plagiarism meant “the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own work,” but I had never known anyone who had actually ever committed it. It was one thing to give a report and say, “According to the World Encyclopedia . . .” and then go on and read three pages from it, which is what Alex Campbell did during his report on Zimbabwe last year. But to pass off stuff as your own? And then when people say, “Wow—this is really great. You’re so talented!” and you just sit there and are all “Aww, gee, thanks”? That’s just wrong.

  If the person who had been caught plagiarizing was someone like Martin Van Oy (he was one of those kids with what Alan called “behavioral problems,” which, for some reason, he always said in a whisper, like he did when he mentioned the word cancer) or Nick Costas (another nonsharp tool in the shed), that would’ve been one thing. But the fact that it was Susan Milken was a total scandal.

  Susan was one of those kids who, if you couldn’t get close enough to hear her breathing and smell her tuna-fish breath, you’d swear she was a robot. Not only did she always raise her hand in class and wait to be called on, but she never ran in the halls, not even on Taco Tuesdays, which was the best lunch of the week. And, when it came to being organized, she was almost as bad as Laurel. Different-colored folders for each subject, with color-coordinated notebooks, pens, and pencils. She was also the girl who wrote the advice column for the Center for Creative Learning News, which was the very uncreative name of our school newspaper (as class president, I was trying to get that changed).

  Obviously, I knew what good advice sounded like from all my Dr. Maude watching, and Susan’s was not good. According to Beatrice, it was very bourgeois. Not only did a lot of Susan’s responses make no sense in terms of the question being asked—stuff in the vein of “Don’t go counting your chickens before they hatch” (We lived in New York City. Not a lot of chickens being grown)—but for a while she was on a rhyming kick. (“Like a tree, you will see, what will be, when you say ‘Hey—this is me!’”)

  After people complained about the rhyming thing, a weird thing happened. Instead of boring questions like “Dear Susan: My piano teacher lives in Tribeca, near the Franklin Street stop. But I live all the way up on 88th and Riverside. So when going down there, is it better to just get on the 1 train at 86th St. and hope that I get a seat so I don’t have to stand the whole time because it’s a long trip? Or do I get on the 1 and take it to 72nd and switch to the 2 or 3 and take it to 14th and then switch BACK to the 1 to go to Franklin?” suddenly the questions got really good. Like “Dear Susan: I’m totally freaking out because this morning when I woke up, I realized that my BFF and I have completely grown apart, and without even knowing it I’ve become BFFs with someone else, but I don’t know how to tell my old BFF that she’s no longer my BFF without hurting her feelings. Help!”

  And instead of some dumb answer like “The early bird always catches the worm” Susan answered it with a snappy, funny response, like the ones in the advice columns in Laurel’s favorite magazines were written.

  Which, thanks to Maysun Rogaway, we now knew was because they were the questions and answers from the magazine advice columns!

  The day before when Maysun was home sick with the flu, she came across this site called AlbertaAdolescents.com. While the site itself was pretty boring—with articles like “How to Prevent Frostbite” (apparently Alberta, which is in Canada, gets very cold)—when she clicked around she discovered the Advice by Amelia section. The whole time she was reading it, she kept feeling like she had seen the questions and answers. Later on in the day, after watching a few movies on cable and making her dog stay still when she put sunglasses on her so she could take some pictures and upload them on Facebook, the question/answer thing was still bothering her. Which was why she said she took the elevator all the way down to the basement of her building to where the recyclables were to find the most recent copy of the Center for Creative Learning News. Thankfully, because she had just thrown it out the night before, it was not only still there but nothing gross had spilled on it. And that was how she was able to find out Susan had just cut and pasted Amelia’s questions and answers and used them in her column. Like not-even-bothering-to-change-a-single-word cut and paste.

  Because this was such huge news, it wasn’t like Maysun could wait until she was back at school the next day to tell people what happened. Which is why she texted her BFF Lilly to tell her the news. And even though we’re not supposed to use our electronic devices during school hours (a rule that, of course, Susan always followed), Lilly was always going to the girls’ room with hers.

  By lunch, everyone in the whole school had heard about the Plagiarizing Incident, including Dr. Rem-Wall. So no one was surprised when, right after lunch, our teacher Mr. Eglington (aka Mr. Eagle Eye) announced that Susan was to report to the office immediately. When she came back to class a half hour later, with her eyes so puffy they were just slits, and picked up her color-coded stuff and left the room again, it was obvious she was in big trouble.

  It was such a big scandal that Dr. Rem-Wall ended up calling an emergency school-wide assembly to talk about plagiarism and morals and integrity, which was a little boring, although the fact that I had my Cookie Dough Lip Smacker with me helped. Plus, we got to miss algebra, which was just fine with me.

  “Wait a minute— I have the best idea!” Laurel exclaimed as we walked around Central Park after school as part of her workout. She was up for this movie based on a true story about an Olympic skier from Germany who ended up bashing into a tree and going blind. But because most Olympic skiers weren’t the string beans Laurel was, she had asked me to be her trainer. Which, luckily, just meant walking with her. Because she was my frister and I loved her, I of course agreed to do it. Only after she offered to pay me ten bucks a walk, which, as far as I was concerned, was a real bargain (seeing that I once heard Mom say to Alan when I was overlistening that the hundred dollars an hour Laurel’s real trainer charged was “highway robbery”).

  “What is it?” I asked warily. A lot of the time her ideas were much better suited for a TV episode than real life.

  “You should take over the advice column!” she said.

  Like, say, that one. “What?!”

  “You said everyone was really impressed with the advice you gave them at lunch the other day about the dance,” she replied.

  “That’s because they’re my friends,” I said. “It’s easy to give advice to people you love. ’Cause even if it backfires, they can’t get that mad at you.”

  “So? As you’re coming up with advice, you can just pretend the person you’re writing to is your friend.”

  I gave her a doubtful look. “Like how I was supposed to pretend everyone was in their underwear when I was g
iving my speech during the election? All that did was gross me out.”

  “Come on, Lucy—between everything you’ve learned from Dr. Maude, and your advice notebook, you’d be great at it!” she cried as she gracefully dodged a guy on a bike. I, however, being ungraceful, ended up twisting my ankle a little. For real this time. Although it hurt, it would help me in my I-can’t-go-to-the-dance argument.

  Laurel pointed at my tote bag, which, in addition to maxi- and minipads, and the crush and period logs, held my advice notebook. “I bet out of the first five pages alone, you’d have enough advice for an entire month’s worth of columns!”

  “I don’t know,” I said, doubtfully. “I don’t think a class president is able to have that position. It’s sort of like a whatdoyoucallit.”

  “Conflict of interest?” she asked. She reached into her bag and took out her copy of the official by-laws. Laurel didn’t even go to my school, but because of her official presidential frister status and her love of order, she kept a copy of the by-laws on her at all times so she could help out whenever she could. She skimmed the pages and shook her head. “Nope. It doesn’t say anything in here about the president not being allowed to work on the school paper.”

  I sighed. Sometimes I hated the fact that she was so organized. “Well, even so, it would be weird. I wouldn’t want people thinking they had to take my advice just because I’m president,” I said, hobbling to keep up with her.

  Laurel stopped walking and turned to me. “Then the class president doesn’t have to do it. You could write the column under a pseudonym.”

  Huh. That could be interesting. A pseudonym was a fake name you used when you were trying to hide your identity, like how Laurel used the name Jane Austen at hotels so there weren’t ten million fans camped out in the lobby waiting for her. Coming up with the fake name would be almost as fun as writing the column. But still. “I really appreciate your confidence in me,” I said. “A lot. But the truth is . . .” I shook my head. “Forget it.”