by Robin Palmer
It was nice to see her smile. “Really?”
I nodded. It felt good to ask Ashley if she wanted to hang out. She was on the quiet side, and didn’t have too many friends, which was something I knew about. Not the quiet part, but the not-so-many-friends part.
“Okay,” she said.
I smiled back. “Cool.”
It was the least I could do for giving her advice that didn’t work out. Even if there was nothing in the column that said that the advice had to work. In fact, if I continued with it, I was going to ask Dr. Rem-Wall if she could put something in that said Note to readers: Annie does not and cannot promise your life will work out even if you take her advice. “I guess I’ll go to lunch now,” I said as I reached into my other pocket and pulled out some more tissues. “Here,” I said, handing them to her. “In case you need them for later.”
She took them. “Thanks. For everything. I’m still not sure what that Ashleyness thing means, but you’re pretty good with this advice stuff.”
I smiled. “I’ll Facebook you about the movie thing,” I said as I walked out.
I spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about the Ashley/Noah thing. During history, I came up with a great idea. An idea so great that it would make it that Ashley wouldn’t be able to go to the movies with me. Because she’d be at the dance instead.
“Hey Noah—wait up!” I called as school let out later that day. Because of his cast, he couldn’t walk very fast. A good thing for someone like me, who hated anything gym-like, which, as far as I was concerned, walking fast was.
“What is it?” he asked suspiciously as I caught up with him.
I shrugged. “Nothing. I just thought it would be nice to walk home together,” I panted. “You know, get to know each other.”
“But I thought you lived over on Central Park West?” he said as we walked west toward Riverside Drive in the opposite direction from my apartment.
“Oh, I do,” I replied. “But sometimes I walk this way. For the exercise.” It wasn’t a total lie. I mean, maybe I’d find out that I actually liked walking for exercise. But probably not. “So I was wondering . . . are you going to the Sadie Hawkins dance?” I blurted out. My original plan was to be all smooth about the whole thing and kind of ease into it—some small talk, some taking my own advice and asking him questions about himself—but then I realized that if I did that, it would (a) make it a very long walk, and (b) I would miss Dr. Maude’s show because I had forgotten to TiVo it. And with the way things were going, I couldn’t afford to miss a single episode.
He stopped walking. “Are you asking me to the dance, too? Is that why you were so weird in science?”
“What? No!” I cried. “I was just . . . taking a poll. And you were the next person on the poll.” I had to admit that while I was very impressed with my ability to come up with believable-sounding things on the spot, I was a little nervous about how good I was getting at lying. What if I turned into Stacey Manderson, this girl in the eighth grade who lied so much she was sent away to some special boarding school where there wasn’t one TV in the entire place? “It’s research. For student council.”
“Well, I had wanted to go, but then I got some really bad advice from that Annie girl in the paper, which screwed it all up. I hope she gets fired,” he grumbled. “Maybe I could sue her,” he added. Like Cristina, Noah’s dad was a lawyer, too.
My eyes widened. Talk about people hating on you. “What happened?” I asked.
“She told me to keep yelling how much I wanted to go in front of the person I wanted to go with.”
“She didn’t use the word yelling,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”
I shrugged. “I read it in the column this morning.”
He stopped walking. “But it wasn’t in the column.”
He was right. Because I wasn’t as popular as Dr. Maude (yet), what happened was that I answered all the letters and sent back responses, and then depending on how much space was available in the paper that week, a bunch of them got printed. But no matter what, everyone got an answer.
I stopped, too. “Okay, listen. I’m about to tell you something I don’t tell a lot of people. And if you repeat it, I’ll have to . . .” I tried to think of something that would really scare him. “Well, I’m not exactly sure what I’ll have to do, but it won’t be good.”
“You’ll have to lock me in a small cell and let water drip so that I slowly start to go crazy until I tell you that, yes, okay, I’ll spill all the government secrets I know?” he asked excitedly.
“Sure.” I shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t like to talk about it too much, but the truth is . . .” I sighed. “I’m psychic. And that’s how I knew.”
“You’re not psychic,” he scoffed.
“I am, too!” I cried. “And that’s how I know that Annie also told you that you should bring up the America’s Worst Dancers thing only if you actually watched it. Otherwise, you’d be lying, which would give you bad karma.”
“She did say that!” he exclaimed.
“See? I told you. Look, whether I’m psychic or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is that, if you ask me, that sounds like really good advice. I mean, if it were me, I’d totally follow it.”
“Then you’d be dumb. Because you want to know what the person who I was asking for advice about did?” he demanded.
I cringed. Actually, I didn’t, but I was too far into this thing now to walk away. Plus, my lack-of-direction issues had kicked up, and if I did walk away, chances were it would be in the wrong direction, and then not only would I miss Dr. Maude, but I’d also miss Dr. Dave. “I guess so,” I said.
“She said ‘Are you deaf in one ear like Alice Mosher? Because you talk really loud. I think you need to get your hearing checked.’ And then she asked someone else right in front of me!”
I cringed. “Oh. That’s not good.” I brightened. “But, hey, look at it this way—at least you found out right away that Romy’s not very nice, rather than having to spend a whole evening with her.”
“How’d you know it was Romy?” he demanded.
“Obviously, it’s the psychic thing,” I replied nervously. “Anyway, not only did you find out she wasn’t nice, but now you can go with someone who is nice. And lucky for you, I just happen to know someone who would be a great match for you. Because of the psychic thing.”
“Who?”
“Ashley.”
“Ashley who?”
“Your lab partner.”
“The girl with the blonde hair?”
I nodded.
“So that’s her name. You know, she asked me to the dance in class,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. People were always giving me grief for not choosing a local crush (or a long-distance/vacation one, or a celebrity one), but as far as I was concerned, why would I bother when all a crush did was make you miserable? I mean, to spend all your time thinking about someone—even going as far as to write a letter to a famous advice columnist about the person (fine—maybe not famous-famous, like known to the world, but famous at the Center for Creative Learning)—only to then find out that not only was that person not thinking back about you, but he didn’t even know your name? That sounded about as fun as having the old woman at Orchard Corset yell at you that if you kept slumping, your boobies were going to end up on your knees when you were her age.
If Dad were there, he’d tell me it wasn’t nice to make what he called “sweeping generalizations,” which is when you grouped an entire group of people together and said something not so nice about them, such as “All boys are dumb,” but in this case, I’m sorry, all boys were dumb.
I shrugged. “My psychicness told me that she would be a good person for you to go to the dance with,” I said. “Because of how nice she is.”
“She is?”
“Oh yeah,” I replied. “I mean, I can understand why you might not know that, on account of the fact that she’s on the quiet side, and the fact
that you don’t know her name, even though you do experiments together, but, yes, she’s really nice.” Boy, I hoped that was true, or else I was making an even bigger mess than I had already. Seeing that the only time I had spent with Ashley had been in the bathroom that afternoon—where I did most of the talking and she did most of the crying—I couldn’t be positive about the nice thing. “She’s just shy. Which is another reason why you should go with her,” I added. “I know it might seem hard to believe, but I’m shy, too,” I admitted.
“You are?”
I nodded. “Yeah. And as a shy person, I’m here to tell you that sometimes we end up missing out on things in life because we’re so afraid of people saying no to us shy people that we just don’t ask.”
Noah looked completely confused. Not that I blamed him. I was starting to confuse myself. “Look, all I’m saying is that if Ashley asked you to the dance,” I went on, “you might want to reconsider going with her.”
“I don’t know . . .” he said, doubtfully. “She seems kind of . . . quiet.”
“Well, yeah, but that might not be such a bad thing,” I replied. “You know how a lot of people—especially girls—go on and on about themselves and you can’t even get a word in edgewise?” I asked. “Well, she doesn’t do that. She’s a very curious person, so she likes to hear people talk about themselves. In fact, you could probably talk about yourself all night and she wouldn’t mind.”
“Huh. That sounds like it could be cool,” he replied. He nodded. “Okay. I guess now that Romy’s not going to ask me, maybe I could go with—what’s her name again?” he asked.
Whether it was a “gross generalization” or not, I was going to say it again: boys were dumb. “It’s Ashley,” I replied.
He nodded. “Yeah. Her. I’ll tell her tomorrow in class.”
I so deserved some huge medal for saving this one. As we got to Broadway, I stopped. “I’m going to turn here and go home now,” I said. Now that I had kind-of-sort-of saved the day I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible so I wouldn’t end up getting myself in more trouble.
“Okay. See you tomorrow,” he said. “And thanks for the advice.”
“Anytime,” I replied.
While walking down Broadway and turning onto Seventy-second Street so I could stop at Buttercup Bakery (if saving the day wasn’t a good excuse for a cupcake, I didn’t know what was), I thought about adding “matchmaker” to my list of hobbies, if just one item on the list (advice giving) could be considered “a list.” Sure, maybe my hobbies weren’t the regular ones that kids my age had, but at least they had to do with helping people. Kind of like if I had volunteered to read to people at a nursing home, which is something that Alice’s mother made her do after she got grounded for texting during church. Well, she did it until the old people—even the ones who were almost deaf and had to wear hearing aids—complained that her loud talking was hurting their ears and the woman who ran the place fired her.
As I paid for my red velvet cupcake (not as good as the ones at Billy’s Bakery downtown, but a billion times better than the ones at Crumbs), my phone buzzed with a text. I asked Chris to the dance—and he said yes! Beatrice had written. I think the being nice part really helped . I smiled. I was happy for her. Some of my advice may have backfired, but some of it did work out.
But that meant all my friends were going, and I wasn’t.
All because I couldn’t seem to take my—or anyone else’s—advice and just get up the guts to (a) tell my BFF I had an official crush on her brother, and then (b) ask him to a dance.
Dear Dr. Maude,
I just wanted to let you know that in case you were worried about me because of my last e-mail (if you never bothered to look at it, it was the one that said “Dear Dr. Maude, Just in case you were wondering, this advice thing has gotten completely out of control. Like so out of control that I can’t even go into it at the moment. Yours truly, Lucy B. Parker), I’m okay. At least PHYSICALLY.
Nonphysically, things are not so good. As you know, there are a lot of things I’m not so good at. Like things that you need coordination for. Or a good singing voice. Or an empty stomach. So when I found out I actually had some talent when it came to this advice thing, I got excited. Especially the other day when Alan told me he was proud of me. But now I have to admit I’m not so excited about it. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but sometimes the whole advice thing blows up in your face, and then you have to work really, really hard to try and fix things. Actually, now that I think about it, you HAVE had the blowing-up-in-your-face experience—when that crazy woman from Alaska managed to get past the security guards and came on stage and started screaming about how you had ruined her marriage because you had told her husband that anyone who had more than three cats was officially crazy. And then she threw a bucket of red paint on you. And now that I think about it, there’s something on your website that says that you refuse to discuss that incident and will end all interviews if anyone dares to bring it up. So you can forget I mentioned it.
I was able to help some kids at school who had asked for advice about the dance, but I still haven’t come up with a solution as to what to do about the fact that my parents both took my advice and have now planned two different vacations. I think I’d like to take a break from the advice business for a while and just go back to being an average girl who has no hobbies and probably won’t get into college. (Although, according to Pete, there’s a lid for every pot. Usually, he says that when talking about people finding someone to marry, but he says it works with colleges, too.)
I’d ask for some advice about how to fix things, but at this point I’m not sure even you can help me.
yours truly,
Lucy B. Parker
* * *
There may not have been any amount of advice that could help me—especially as it got closer to Mom and Alan’s anniversary, and I still hadn’t figured out a way to fix things—but because I still had my job, I had to give advice to other people. It was weird how, while I couldn’t help myself, I was great when it came to other people.
Just that morning a letter had been printed where I—I mean, Annie—had been asked what the proper name was for the stepbrother of your stepsister of your stepbrother. Technically, the person who wrote it wasn’t asking for advice, but I answered it anyway because I thought it was both (a) interesting and (b) important, due to the fact that so many kids in our school had blended families. It took me a while, but I finally settled on “tribrother,” because “tri” means three and this person was three people removed.
At lunch, as I was walking through the cafeteria to my table in Alaska, I heard Sarah Langdon say to Stacy Woo, “My tribrother’s going to be spending Thanksgiving with his trimother and bifather.” (“Bi” means two removed, like bicycle, which has two wheels, instead of a tricycle, which has three.)
That made me feel good at school, but by the time I got home I was back to not really feeling it. “Why am I even bothering to do this?” I asked Laurel. I sat on the couch with my laptop logging on to my [email protected] account while she practiced some tai chi moves from a book. She was taking lessons, though her first class wasn’t for two months because she was too busy with the TV show and all her other Regular Girl activities to fit it in before then. I kept trying to tell her that the CPR class, while a good thing to do, wasn’t exactly something that most Regular Girls did, but she was really enjoying it. She had been on me to take CPR with her, but once I reminded her about my coordination problem, she agreed that maybe we should find some other non-lifesaving Regular Girl activity to do together (coordination problems + trying to save someone’s life = might end up seriously hurting if not killing them). I said that if there was a cupcake-making class, I’d be interested in that one, but so far we hadn’t found one.
“Don’t people realize that even if you give them the best advice in the world, at the end of the day, life is just one big problem after that next?” I asked. “O
h wait. That’s just my life.”
“Oh, come on, Lucy,” Laurel said as she balanced on her right leg while crouching down and sweeping her arms back and forth as if she was cleaning a window. How did people do that balancing thing without falling flat on their faces? And how was she so good at it her first time ever doing it? “It’s not that bad. So you don’t have the guts to tell Beatrice you have a crush on Blair and then ask him to the dance. Or to ruin Dad and Rebecca’s one-year anniversary by telling them that the advice you gave each of them made it so that everything got screwed up—”
I looked at her. “Okay, you’re not helping.”
“Wait. I’m not done! What I was going to say was that I probably wouldn’t have the guts to do those things, either.”
“But what about that whole ‘heroes are heroes because they do things even when they’re afraid’ speech you gave me last month when I was running for president?” I asked.
“Huh. I forgot about that.”
As my e-mail account loaded, I paled. “Three hundred twenty-six messages?!” I yelped.
Laurel hopped over—gracefully. “Whoops. I guess that interview I did for youngmademoiselle.com ran already. I knew there was something I forgot to mention to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when the writer asked me what great new things I had come across lately, I told her there was this awesome advice column called ‘Ask Annie,’ and then I may have, I don’t know, mentioned the e-mail address?” she said.
“Laurel, it’s an advice column for my school paper!” I said. “Not for”—I scrolled through the e-mails—“kids in Athens, Greece or”—I scrolled some more—“St. Petersburg, Russia!”
“But you’re so good at this stuff!” she cried. “People around the world should be able to benefit from it! Plus, if I were your publicist, I’d tell you that it’s totally un-PC to discriminate against people from other countries.”
“Look, you know I love people from other countries. And food—I’m a huge fan of food from other countries, like falafel and pizza—but if I hand these in to be printed in the column, they’re going to know that these kids don’t go to the Center,” I said.