by Robin Palmer
“Well, it’s—” Mom began to say.
“Oh my God!” I gasped, pulling my purple knit newsboy cap down farther on my head in order to try to hide as two girls walked into the store. It was Lisa Silfen and Shelly Powell—the two most popular girls in the seventh grade. It wasn’t like I knew them personally, on account of the fact that you had to be pretty popular yourself in order for the older popular kids to talk to you, but they definitely knew who I was because of the Hat Incident.
“What is it, dear?” asked Barbara loudly. “Am I pulling the tape measure too tight around your bosoms?”
Even though I didn’t dare look over at the girls, I could hear one of them laugh. When I got to school tomorrow, I was going to ask Mr. Mackey, the science teacher, if you could actually die of embarrassment. That is, I’d ask him if it didn’t happen to me before that.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” Mom asked in her loud voice. “Your face is all red. Are you okay?” She felt my forehead. “Do you think you’re coming down with something?”
“Can we just leave?” I whispered between gritted teeth.
“What, sweetie?” Mom said. “I can’t understand you.”
“I was right—34A!” Barbara announced. She flashed me a smile. “I knew that just by looking at you!” She turned to Mom. “This one’s going to be very bosomy when she gets older, though. Believe me, when you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you know these things.”
If no one had died of embarrassment before this moment, I was pretty sure I was about to be the first one.
Barbara clapped her hands. “Okay, into the dressing room!” she ordered.
I think I ran faster than I ever had in my entire life. And for someone who hates exercise so much that she carries around a note that says, “Please excuse Lucy B. Parker from gym today on account of the fact that she is menstruating,” that was saying a lot. (When Marissa helped me write the note, and before she forged Mom’s signature by studying her real signature from a field-trip permission slip, she said that “menstruating” was better than “has her period” because it made it sound more official.) Luckily, when I peered out, I saw Lisa and Shelly leaving. If they had come into the dressing room area to try on bras as well, I definitely would have had to die.
Instead, Mom and Barbara came in, which was almost as in bad. Then they both came into the actual dressing room, which was even worse.
“What are you doing?” I asked them.
“Well, we have to make sure your bosoms are properly supported in the brassiere, dear,” said Barbara, who was stinking up the whole room with her perfume.
“Take off your shirt, honey,” said Mom.
I crossed my arms over my chest. Yup, this was definitely the most embarrassing moment of my life. Even worse than the Hat Incident.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m your mother, and I said so,” she replied firmly. “And because if you do, I’ll take you to H&M after this and let you get a hat.”
As I took off my shirt, I closed my eyes and kept them closed the entire time. It was bad enough that my mother could see my bare boobs, but a complete stranger who wasn’t even a doctor was looking at them, too?!
Barbara must have been psychic because right then she said, “There’s no need to be embarrassed, dear—I’ve seen more boobies in my life than you’d ever imagine!”
I cringed. Bosoms, boobies—why could she just call them boobs?! Or at least just breasts, like Ms. DeMarco, my health teacher, did?
“Now in you go,” she said, holding out the bra.
I shoved my arms in it. “Okay, it fits—can we just buy it and get out of here?” I asked as she fastened it in the back.
“Now you have to position yourself in it,” Barbara explained. “So reach in and lift your bosoms up—”
Could this get any worse? But I knew that if I didn’t do it myself, she’d probably reach in and do it, which would be just beyond awful. “So who is this guy you’ve been going out with?” I asked as I did what I was told. I still couldn’t believe Mom had been hiding all this from me. Or that she had been able to hide it from me, because I’m really good at figuring that stuff out. Since the divorce, she said she didn’t want to date and instead had been spending all her time writing her novel. But that hadn’t been going so well because she had what she calls “writer’s block,” where basically she does anything but write—like polish her nails or organize her sock drawer.
“It’s . . . Alan Moses,” she finally said.
Now I understood why she had hidden it from me. “You’ve been going out with Laurel Moses’s father?!” I yelled. “After everything I went through with the Hat Incident?!”
Barbara was so startled she let the bra strap snap me so hard on the shoulder I yelped. “Laurel Moses, from The World According to Madison Tennyson?” she gasped. “My granddaughter and I just love that show!” Laurel Moses was one of the most famous people in the world. Even though she was only fourteen and her TV series was on Kidz TV, adults knew who she was because she sang and acted in movies, too.
Yeah, most people loved her, but me, Lucy B. Parker? I hated her.
chapter 2
Dear Dr. Maude,
I am using my mom’s iPhone to type this, so there might be some typos. I know you haven’t written back to my other e-mail yet, but I just had to write to you because I just got some AWFUL, AWFUL news. It’s too long of a story to type on an iPhone, but I just found out that my MOTHER has, without me knowing it, been dating Laurel Moses’s FATHER.
Yes, THE Laurel Moses, the famous superstar, who you might actually know personally because Marissa says all famous people know each other.
I can’t go into it now, but Laurel is the person behind the Hat Incident and one of the main reasons why my life is so horrible at the moment. And now I have to sit through dinner with her as well? I’m sure you agree that that’s JUST TOTALLY NOT FAIR.
If you have any advice as to what to do after finding out that your mother has been dating the father of your archenemy, I’d really appreciate it.
yours truly,
Lucy B. Parker
Dad says that hate is a very strong word and that if you can use strongly dislike that’s a lot better because it will help your karma, which is something that the Buddhists—which is the religion he and Mom practice—believes in. It’s not the kind of religion where you go to church or temple on a weekly basis—it’s more about sitting on a pillow on the floor with your eyes closed and meditating (which, according to him, means trying not to think). Anyway, Dad says that when someone makes you mad or annoys you, you should put yourself in her shoes and try to think about why she might be acting that way, but because Laurel is like the most popular person in the world, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to wear her shoes. Especially because I doubt she wears Converses—she probably wears super-expensive high heels, which are something I will never wear in my life. I’m what Dad calls coordination-challenged.
But sometimes hate is the only word for what you feel, and if you had been totally humiliated in front of the entire town where you had lived for all of your twelve years on the planet, you’d probably hate the person responsible for that, too.
But before there was the Hat Incident, there was the Straightening Iron Incident, which is why I had to start wearing hats in the first place.
What happened was that I thought it would be a good idea to start sixth grade with a more grown-up look—especially since, when Rachel and Missy called me to friend-dump me, they said the main reason was that they thought I was sort of tomboyish because I had no interest in wearing a bra, wore Converses almost every day (unless I was wearing flip-flops in the summer), didn’t have any interest in makeup, and didn’t have a crush on anyone. I tried to tell them that (a) not only were those really stupid reasons to dump someone, especially because all the reality shows on MTV make it seem like if you have a crush, and that crush turns into your boyfriend, you end up
spending most of your time crying instead of having fun—especially when he breaks up with you, but (b) I never went anywhere without my Smith’s Rosebud Salve Strawberry Lip Balm, which, while not exactly a lipstick, did make my lips look a little more pink, not to mention smells really good, and that was kind of like wearing makeup. But they dumped me anyway. And then I cried so hard for so long and got such a bad headache that I had to take two of Mom’s Advil.
So the day after they dumped me—two days before school started—I decided that maybe if I used Mom’s straightening iron and got rid of my frizzy-not-curly brown curls, maybe they’d change their minds and like me again. Mom was at her writer’s group that afternoon, so she wasn’t around to show me how to use it. But if she had been, she probably would’ve told me that putting the iron around my entire left pigtail and leaving it there for an entire half-hour episode of Animal Police 911 wasn’t a smart thing to do. See, I figured the longer I kept it there, the straighter it would get. But that’s not what happened. What happened was I ended up burning the pigtail so badly that most of it just crumbled and fell off. The good news is that I didn’t bother trying to iron the other one, so only half my hair was gone instead of all of it. The bad news was that I looked lopsided, like the papier-mâché Easter egg I made in first grade that Mom keeps on what I call her “Ugly Things Lucy Has Made in School over the Years but I Love Them Anyway” shelf in her office in the attic.
When Mom came home, she freaked out and immediately drove me over to Deanna’s house so she could fix my hair, because Deanna’s a hairdresser, with her own salon and everything. The problem was, she had to cut it really, really short, which left me looking like a giant egg with ears, which is why I wore my Boston Red Sox cap on the first day of school and have been wearing hats every day since. At first no one said anything, because it’s not like wearing a hat is all that weird, especially a Red Sox cap because we live in Massachusetts. But when a person wears a hat every single day—and not just baseball caps, but purple knit newsboy caps and red cowboy hats and black berets (according to Mom, they’re very French, and she would know because she lived in Paris for a while during college)—then other people start to talk. All these rumors started about why I was wearing hats—things like I was so upset when Rachel and Missy friend-dumped me that I shaved off all my hair, or I had cancer and had lost it all because of chemotherapy, like Michael Duarte’s mother—but whenever someone asked, I just shrugged and said, “I just like wearing hats.” It wasn’t a total lie, although on Indian summer days my head did get pretty sweaty.
Marissa was totally annoying about the whole thing and kept saying, “Pleasepleaseplease, just tell me the real reason you wear hats. Because we’re BFFs; you can tell me and I won’t tell ANYONE, I SWEAR!” That wasn’t true for two reasons: (a) Marissa has the biggest mouth in all of Jefferson Middle School and probably couldn’t keep a secret even if someone offered her a million dollars, and (b) we’re totally not BFFs and never will be. I told her that second part—not the “never will be” part, because that would’ve been really mean. But I did say that you had to be friends with someone for a pretty long time before you could officially call her your BFF, and that ever since being dumped, I didn’t have any BFFs.
Anyway, on the day of the Hat Incident, back in November, I was walking down State Street after my dental cleaning with my red velvet cupcake (my favorite food in the world) from Sweet Lady Jane when a stuffed-up voice behind me yelled, “Lucy! Hey, Lucy! Wait up!” I turned around to see Marissa running toward me, pumping her arms like she was running the six-hundred-yard dash. Because Marissa has Ronald McDonald red hair and was wearing a hot pink down jacket with a fake leopard fur collar, you couldn’t miss her.
“Omigod, omigod!” she panted when she caught up with me. “I’m so glad I found you because you’re never, ever, ever going to believe who’s inside the Tattered Cover right this very second.”
The Tattered Cover was one of the many bookstores in the area. “People who want to buy books?” I said.
“No. Laurel. Moses,” she announced, her voice quivering.
I didn’t watch Laurel’s show a lot because it happened to be on at the same time as The Real Tenth Graders of New Jersey, but in the episodes I had seen (before I hated her, obviously) I actually thought she was a good actress, and I even laughed out loud a few times. Especially in the scenes where Madison—the character she plays—dressed up in different disguises to stalk whatever boy she had a crush on that week. That’s what the show is about—a girl who’s boy-crazy.
Marissa, on the other hand, was completely obsessed with Laurel. Not only had she seen every episode of the show, but she owned every one of Laurel’s movies on DVD (there were five), and every time a new online fan club was started, she signed up for it. Plus, she wore her Madison Tennyson T-shirt to school, which is a total fourth-grade thing to do.
The reason Laurel Moses was in Northampton was because she was shooting a movie about a girl in the old days who pretends to be a boy so she can play football. If you asked me, it sounded like a really boring movie, and I thought that before the Hat Incident even happened. Although rumor had it that Laurel had been in town for a week already, no one had seen her—not even Marissa, who had been hanging out outside the Hotel Northampton every day after school like a total stalker.
I don’t know what I expected a movie set to be like, but this one sure was boring. Just a bunch of wires and trucks and people sitting around doing nothing except talking on cell phones or texting. Or, in the case of one guy, picking his nose when he thought no one was looking. But when the door of one of the RV trailers down the street opened and three people walked out, all the movie people started buzzing around.
Marissa started rocking back and forth. “Ohhh myyyy God,” she moaned. Could she be more embarrassing? I took a step away from her, hoping no one would think I was with her. “There she is!” she screeched.
In between a bald guy who was messing with her hair and a nose-pierced woman was Laurel Moses. On TV she always dressed in cool clothes, with her long blonde hair looking super-pretty and straight (I wondered if she had to use a straightening iron or if hers was just naturally like that), but that day it was in braids and she was wearing overalls. She looked like one of Marissa’s American Girl dolls (I would’ve said that before I hated her). Once she got in front of the bookstore, a guy wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, jeans, and red Converse high-tops came rushing toward her and kissed her on both cheeks as he said, “Laurel! Dude! You look a-maz-ing!”
It was then that all the trouble started.
Because after he was done saying hello to her, he started freaking out about the fact that she didn’t have a hat, saying things like, “I cannot shoot this scene without her wearing the hat! The hat is a character!” It’s not like they taught us about movies in school (I wish they had because it would’ve been a lot more interesting than mixed fractions), but I knew enough to know that a hat couldn’t be a character because it didn’t talk, so I had no idea what this guy was going on about. Then this lady came running out of one of the RVs carrying a bunch of hats, but every time she held one up for him to see, he shook his head really hard. He was being such a jerk that the lady started to cry while Laurel just stood there staring at the ground. I happened to have some tissues in my jacket pocket (even though it had been four months since the friend-dumping, sometimes I still got really upset about it and would start to cry) and was thinking about whether I should cross the street and offer the woman one, when Mr. Mickey Mouse stopped yelling at her and pointed in my direction and yelled, “You in the hat!”
I looked around, but no one else was wearing a hat. When he said, “Yeah, you in the red-and-black-plaid newsboy cap. Get over here!” I definitely knew he meant me. Everyone was looking at me, and I thought about turning around and running as fast as I could, but then I realized that having people say, “Lucy B. Parker ran away from the movie set,” would be just as bad as, “Lucy B. Parker smells li
ke a sweaty sneaker.” As I crossed the street, I hoped that no one could see that my teeth were chattering, which they tend to do when I’m nervous. But then they really started getting loud when the guy reached over and yanked my hat right off my head in front of half of Northampton. Okay, maybe not half, but, still, there were a lot of people there. It was just as embarrassing if not more than having to take my shirt off in the dressing room in front of Mom and Barbara from Barbara’s Bra World, but I didn’t know that yet, seeing as that wouldn’t happen for another two months. But I did know that it was so embarrassing that I was afraid it had brought on my period, which is why I was very glad I was wearing a maxipad.
Then, to make things twenty times worse, as I was standing there clutching at my egg-looking head in hopes that all the people staring at me with their mouths in the shape of Cheerios wouldn’t actually notice that my head looked like an egg (including Rachel and Missy), I heard Marissa yell, “Holy moly! Now I know why you wouldn’t show me your haircut!” It’s things like that that explain why no one wants to be Marissa’s friend.
Okay, so Laurel Moses wasn’t the one who actually took my hat off my head, but what she did was way worse. When Mr. Mickey Mouse put the hat on her head, she started freaking out and batting it away like it was a bird that had just pooped on her and said, “Eww! Get that thing off me right now!”
Thing?! It wasn’t a thing. It was my hat. Maybe it hadn’t cost a hundred dollars, but it wasn’t like I had gotten it for fifty cents at Goodwill. It was from H&M and it cost $14.98, which isn’t exactly cheap.
Mr. Mickey Mouse started to explain to her that this was exactly the kind of a hat that a girl in 1957 who was trying to disguise herself as a boy in order to get on the football team would wear, but she cut him off and said the thing that totally made me hate her:
She said, “But what if there’s lice in it?”
I couldn’t believe it.