by Robin Palmer
Everyone knew that accusing someone of having lice was even worse than telling her she had B.O., or that her breath stank. Even if you were a ginormous star who had been an actress from the time you were six and got to ride in limousines and go to the MTV Movie Awards, you had to know that. And not only that, but Laurel Moses said it in front of my entire town. She may have been the most popular girl in the world, but she didn’t have the right to go around spreading lies and hurting people’s feelings. Because I totally DID NOT have lice. And to make it worse, now that my hat was off my head, anyone who wasn’t blind could see that I barely had any hair left!
Then Laurel yanked my hat off her head and threw it on the ground, where it landed in a puddle, and huffed, “I’m calling my agent!” before stomping off toward her trailer with the bald guy and nose-pierced girl trailing behind her. I thought Mr. Mickey Mouse would apologize to me, but he didn’t. Instead, he just ran after them, calling, “Laurel, honey, sweetie, just hold up a moment, okay?”
Having Laurel Moses accuse me of having lice wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was hearing the giggles that started when I squatted down to get my hat out of the puddle. Most people know what it’s like to feel their face get all hot when they get embarrassed, but very few people (other than bald men like my uncle Steve) know what it’s like to have their entire head feel like it’s on fire, which is what happened to me when everyone laughed at me. At first the giggles were on the quiet side, but then they got louder. The part that was even worse-than-the-worst-part was when, without even turning around, I could tell that the loudest laughs of them all were coming from Rachel and Missy. My exfriends. Whose giggles I would’ve recognized anywhere because that’s what happens when you’re friends with people since kindergarten.
So that’s why I hated Laurel Moses.
And that, if you asked me, was a perfectly acceptable reason.
chapter 3
Dear Dr. Maude,
My mom stepped out to go to the bathroom (this bra shopping thing is taking a lot longer than we expected). Even though I don’t know if you wrote back to my last e-mail because I can’t check my account on Mom’s phone, I thought I would just send you another one. If you haven’t written back yet with some advice, please, please, PLEASE do so now because I really need it.
Thanks very much.
yours truly,
Lucy B. Parker
When your mother has just told you she’s been dating your archenemy’s father, the good news is that you’re too shocked to keep being embarrassed about the fact that some total stranger who smells like egg salad and bad perfume has her hands inside what’s about to become your first bra.
In fact, I was so shocked, I couldn’t think of anything to say at all—which for someone whose “Additional Comments” section of her report card always says something like, “While Lucy’s running commentary is very entertaining, she would do well to learn to listen more and talk less,” is a big deal.
Luckily, I didn’t have to because, while I stood there shivering in my bra with the straps that were digging into my shoulders, Mom told me (and Barbara) the story of how she and Alan got together.
Obviously I knew that Mom knew Laurel, because she was tutoring her. A few days after the Hat Incident, Mom sat me down and said, “I know you’re not going to like the idea, but Donna at Two Cups of Joe gave Laurel Moses’s father my number because Laurel needs a tutor while she’s here, and he called and I said yes because he’s going to pay me three times my normal hourly rate.” Because she always had writer’s block and couldn’t finish her novel, the way Mom made money was by tutoring. I told her she was wrong—it wasn’t like I didn’t like the idea . . . I hated it—but she said that was too bad and that as long as she was paying for my Converses, I didn’t have a say in the matter. Usually, she had the kids she tutored come over to the house, but in this case she’d do it at the Hotel Northampton or in Laurel’s trailer on the set so that I didn’t have to cross paths with her, which made me feel a little bit better. Then Mom said that when she got her first check from Laurel’s father, she’d use part of it to buy me the Emily the Strange tote bag I had been begging her for from Faces, which made me feel a lot better.
I knew that if Marissa found out, she’d blab it to the entire school and kids would be coming up to me every day saying, “So what’s Laurel Moses really like?”—maybe even Rachel and Missy, because even though they had dumped me, they were huge fans and would have wanted to know stuff like whether Laurel Moses’s hair looked as good in person as it did on TV or whether it was all strawlike. And I wouldn’t be able to answer because (a) I wouldn’t have been anywhere near her and (b) the last thing I wanted was to be the center of attention again at school like I was the day after the Hat Incident. Thanks to Whitney Thomas’s super-fancy cell-phone camera and her Facebook page—there was a picture of me looking all bug-eyed and clutching at my head in hopes of hiding my almost-baldness, which was almost as bad as the Hat Incident itself. Mrs. Riley, our principal, made Whitney take it down the same day she’d posted it, but that didn’t happen until third period, after I had already run to the bathroom twice and locked myself in the handicapped stall to cry. And it didn’t stop David Murray from whispering, “So the B in Lucy B. Parker is for Baldy, huh?” when Mrs. Kline called me up to the board the next day to add 7¾ and 6⅞. (Which, BTW, I got wrong. I was bad enough at mixed fractions when things were going okay, let alone when I was totally humiliated.)
But because Marissa has this way of knowing when you’re keeping a secret and won’t leave you alone until you tell her what it is, I told her. And of course by the time school was out that day, everyone at Jefferson knew—even the eighth graders. I overheard one of them say, “Hey, that’s that bald sixth grader whose mother is Laurel Moses’s tutor,” as I walked to the bus.
Sure enough, after that, almost every day at least one kid, if not more, would ask me questions about Laurel—stuff like, “What’s her favorite candy?” and “Do you happen to know what her favorite Wii game is?”—even though I kept saying, “I have no idea because I’ve never been near her other than one time at the bookstore.” Rachel and Missy didn’t come up to me, but at one point during gym it looked like they were going to. That made me feel like I was going to throw up because I was both super-excited and super-scared at the same time, kind of like what happens when you ride a big roller coaster.
But if I did want to know anything about Laurel, I could’ve just asked Mom because from the very first day she tutored her it was like they were total BFFs. “Laurel has such a great sense of humor!” Mom said one night as we ate Indian food. “I can’t believe that Laurel is fluent in French!” she said the following week as we ate Mexican food. “I’m just so impressed by how polite and well mannered Laurel is!” she said as we ate Tibetan food the next week. Seriously, the way she talked about her you’d think she liked her more than me, her own daughter.
“Okay, I’m putting an embargo on this subject,” I said the next time she brought her up; in Costco, as I threw a jumbo box of Kotex Lightdays Pantiliners (105 count!) in the cart. Embargo was one of our vocab words that week, and it meant “a restraint or hindrance; prohibition,” or, in plain English, “Don’t bring it up again or ELSE.”
“Honey, I know you’re still upset about the hat,” Mom said as she took the pantiliners out and put them back on the shelf, “but I’m telling you, I think you’d really like her if you got to know her.”
“Well, I’m not going to get to know her,” I said, reaching for the box and throwing it back in again, “because I’m never going to be in the same room with her if I can help it.”
“You never know. You might be,” Mom said softly.
When you think about it, it’s a very weird comment. But that day, in the middle of Costco—my third favorite store after Target and H&M (how could a person not love a place where almost everything is king-size or a multipack?)—I was too busy thinking about all the things I would’
ve bought had I not recently spent all my saved-up allowance on the entire seven-book set of the Harry Potter series with the new covers.
It turned out that every time Laurel’s dad, Alan, would come to pick Laurel up at the end of tutoring, he and Mom would talk for a few minutes. At first it was just about Laurel and how she was doing in her schoolwork. (According to Mom, she was a great student, and even though she was technically in ninth grade, she was reading books that twelfth graders read. Of course she was—she was Laurel Moses, the most perfect girl in America!) But then the talks started to get longer and non-Laurel-related, and then one day Alan asked her if she’d be interested in having coffee sometime. And Mom said yes. They had such a nice time together they decided to do it a second time, and then a third time, and before they knew it they were having coffee almost every afternoon while I was at school and Laurel was shooting, talking about all sorts of stuff like movies and music and politics.
And then one Friday night when I was at Frankie’s Pizzeria with Dad and Sarah (because that’s how I spent my Friday nights now that I was no longer having sleepovers with Rachel and Missy—the one time I slept over Marissa’s she spent the whole night giving me a tour of her dollhouse and telling me the entire history of every single piece of furniture in it, and I swore to myself to never, EVER do that again), she went to dinner with him at Chez Maurice. Which just happened to have been voted the Most Romantic Restaurant in Northampton three years in a row by the Northampton Gazette.
“And that’s when our relationship moved to another level,” Mom said as she held out another bra for me to try on. Luckily, Barbara had left the dressing room midstory to go help someone who actually wanted a bra.
“What do you mean by that?” I demanded.
“Well, that’s when . . . he kissed me,” she replied.
“Okay, I SO do not need to know that!” I yelled as I yanked the straps over my shoulders. But even worse than the idea of my mom kissing someone other than my father (even though they were divorced) was the idea that I hadn’t known any of this. I wasn’t a good singer, or a good dancer because of the coordination problem, but if there’s one thing I’m great at, it’s overlistening and figuring out things my parents are trying to hide from me. For instance, when my parents sat me down the year before and said, “We have something we need to discuss with you,” I immediately said, “You’re getting divorced, aren’t you?” It totally shocked them because they thought they had been good about keeping it a secret. But when you wake up and find your father sleeping on the couch almost every night, you pretty much know something not so good is going on, even before trying to overlisten to their conversations.
“But why do you have to like him?” I asked as I adjusted my 34A boobs into the thing. “Why can’t you like Liam instead?” The whole B.O. didn’t seem so bad, not anymore. Plus, as far as I knew, he didn’t have any kids. Let alone famous ones.
“Because we have a lot of things in common,” Mom said as she stood back to get a look at me. “Oh honey . . . that looks so cute on you!” she said. Her eyes got all misty. “I can’t believe my jelly bean is old enough to be wearing a bra. How did this happen?”
I rolled my eyes. “Um, maybe because everyone on the Parker side of the family has big boobs?” It was true—even though Mom’s were on the smaller side, Dad’s sister Catherine’s were huge. If mine ended up as big as hers, I was going to get a breast reduction, which is this operation that Marissa’s mom got where they made them smaller. It really helped because before the operation she had such bad back problems she would have to stay in bed with a heating pad. “But you’re changing the subject,” I said.
“Well, first of all, he likes to do the New York Times crossword puzzle—”
“So? Dad does the crossword, too,” I said as she did something to make the bra tighter. “He can even do it in pen because he barely ever screws up. Ouch!” I yelped. “My circulation is being cut off!”
“Enough with the dramatics, Lucy,” Mom sighed as she moved the clasp to a different hook. “And we both like to play Scrabble—”
“Dad won first place in the Two Cups of Joe Scrabble tournament!” I retorted. I poked at my rib. “I think one of my ribs is broken.”
“Lucy,” Mom warned.
“Seriously. I think it is.”
“You’ll live,” she said. She held out her hand. “Take that off and give it to me so I can go pay,” she said.
I had to say, I was pretty impressed with how easily I unhooked the bra without even looking. That didn’t mean I was going to wear the thing on a regular basis. “I’m sorry, but just because you have two things in common doesn’t mean you should marry him!” I blurted out.
Mom took the bra from me. “Who said anything about marriage? Now we’re all going to dinner on Saturday, and that’s that. End of discussion,” she said firmly. She opened the dressing room door to leave, as I stood there almost completely naked for everyone to see my boobies or bosoms or breasts or whatever you wanted to call them.
“Fine,” I said. I knew not to say anything more than that. On their own, “that’s that” and “End of discussion” were bad enough, but both at the same time? Code for “If you bring it up again, no TV or Internet for two days.”
She held one of the bras up. “And you better not ‘forget’ to wear this when we go,” she warned.
I wondered if every girl’s mother could read their minds, or just mine.
chapter 4
Dear Dr. Maude,
I’m sure you have a lot of people who write you saying, “Dr. Maude, I have a HUGE problem and I really need advice,” but in my case, my problem really IS huge and I really DO need advice, which is why I was hoping you would’ve written me back by now.
We’re about to leave to go have dinner with Laurel and her father, and I really REALLY don’t want to go. Like to the point where I’d rather stay home and do my mixed-fractions homework, which, if you knew me, you’d know is one of the things I hate most in life. Anyway, I was going to say that you can’t call me on my cell phone because it was taken away from me after Mom got last month’s bill and saw that I had used it to text fifty-seven votes for the hairless Chihuahua on America’s Funniest Looking Pet, but I was thinking that maybe you could call her cell phone and ask to speak to me. You don’t even have to say it’s you—you can just say it’s “a friend,” and I’ll know who it is. Her number is 323-788-6868.
Thanks very much—I really appreciate it.
yours truly,
Lucy B. Parker
I wondered if, when introducing their daughter to the man she’s been dating in secret and his famous daughter, every girl’s mother says something really obvious like, “Lucy, this is Alan Moses and his daughter, Laurel.”
As if there was a chance I wouldn’t recognize Laurel Moses seeing that (a) she was the most famous teenager in America; (b) she was responsible for the most embarrassing moment of my life; and (c) all the other diners in Madame Wu’s were staring at her.
I wanted to say, “Yeah, so?” but instead I mumbled, “Nice to meet you,” because even though I often thought mean things, I very rarely said them out loud.
As I looked down at my boots, I noticed that Laurel was wearing boots, too. While mine were scuffed-up brown cowboy ones, hers were black and shiny with kind of high heels and probably cost like five hundred dollars. When Marissa had showed up at my house that afternoon to help me pick out an outfit (uninvited, I might add), I had told her that there was no way I was going out of my way to dress up for dinner (especially since her pick was this hideous pink dress stashed away in the back of my closet that Mom had made me wear to my cousin Mark’s high school graduation the spring before). But the truth was after she (finally) left, I took my time to put together what I though was a great outfit. I was wearing my BOYS ARE STUPID, THROW ROCKS AT THEM T-shirt, a camel-colored cardigan, a dark purple wool miniskirt from H&M, rainbow tights, my boots, and the lilac angora beret that Sarah had gotten me for my
birthday. And—after Mom had ordered me back upstairs—my bra (which was so itchy I almost got the calamine lotion out again). In fact, it was such a good outfit that I had decided I’d wear it for my seventh-grade picture (maybe minus the hat if my hair had grown out by then). The only part of the outfit that I planned to leave out for sure was the pimple to the left of my nose. I had woken up with it that morning, and, thanks to the fact that I couldn’t seem to stop touching it, it had gone from kind of big to ginormous.
Except now that I was standing in front of Laurel Moses—who, along with the boots, was wearing jeans (perfectly faded without any stains of any kind on them), a peach-colored silky shirt with cool butterfly sleeves that probably cost a thousand dollars, and no pimples—it no longer felt like such a good outfit. Instead, I felt like a box of crayons had exploded on my body.
“You, too,” Laurel said, sounding as excited about this dinner as I felt. In her case, I’m sure it was because she was mad that she was missing out on whatever it was that big stars did on Saturday nights, like huge parties with all-you-can-eat sushi. Maybe even with Jackson Barber, another teen star who all the magazines said was her boyfriend.
“It’s so great to meet you, Lucy!” Alan boomed as he thrust out his hand. “Your mom has told me so much about you!”
I guess I thought that with such a pretty and famous daughter, Alan would be really handsome, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t ugly or anything, just really normal looking, like a dentist or something. He had what Dad called a “receding hairline” (Dad, on the other hand, had so much hair that he wore it in a ponytail), glasses, and a semi-big nose. As I shook his hand, I tried to keep a poker face because his hand was really clammy. Like gross clammy. But I didn’t wipe it off on my skirt, even though I really wanted to.
“And I like your hat,” Alan said. He turned to Laurel. “Laurel, isn’t that a pretty hat?”