Confessions of a Hater

by Caprice Crane

  Don’t get a “tramp stamp” or a “skank flank.” Stay classy.

  To that end, don’t get a Chinese symbol tattoo. No matter what your Chinese symbol tattoo says, I’m going to assume the translation is either: “Please think I’m cool” or “The tattoo artist told me this symbol means ‘warrior’ but it actually means ‘gullible shithead.’”

  This one was funny because Noel did get a tattoo during her senior year. My mom saw it and freaked out. I don’t think my dad ever found out. She’d written down part of a lyric from her favorite song by Paramore and had it tattooed on the inside of her wrist in her own handwriting: Shine brighter. I guess some stuff I didn’t know about had gone down, because she didn’t really get into trouble once my mom got past the initial shock.

  Fake it ’til you make it. Confidence is king. Act “as if.”

  I knew this one would definitely come in handy. The power of persuasion is a hell of a thing. Take Kim Kardashian—not that she’s a role model (at all)—but before she was a huge megastar, she was just a girl who got peed on in a sex tape with Brandy’s rapper brother. (Gross much?) But she went about her business, acting like she was somebody, and next thing you knew, she was. To this day I don’t know why she’s still famous, but there she is with her other talentless sisters on the cover of the tabloids every other week. And those girls didn’t even get peed on! (Well, at least not on video.)

  I looked at the clothes just sitting there in that box … waiting to be given away to complete strangers, and thought, funny how she’d never let me borrow anything of hers to wear but once she grew sick of them … it still wasn’t okay for me to wear them. Well … what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.…

  I pulled out a pair of Seven jeans from the box. They were a little tight, but I figured I could skip the mac ’n’ cheese for a few weeks. Her black Repetto flats? I always knew Noel and I were the same size. I slid into the ballet flats like they were Cinderella’s slippers. Perfect.

  I turned my attention back to the journal. Some of her scrawl was about the exterior:

  If you can see VPL before you leave the house, then don’t leave the house.

  Perfect a “pretty cry face” just in case of an emergency—nobody likes an ugly crier.

  Don’t ever wear pants with a word written across your ass. It’s not attractive on anyone.

  There were tips about behavior and mannerisms:

  Don’t giggle when a guy makes a dumb joke. You’re making it too easy and lowering the bar. Let them earn your laughs. And that goes triple for “everything else.”

  Don’t make YouTube videos of you and your friends dancing and lip-syncing to some song. At best, your only viewers will be creepy old men. At worst, you’ll go viral and become a meme. No.

  Don’t fake an accent. They’re like fake boobs. They draw unwanted attention and are hard to maintain. Leave that to the pros. (I’m looking at you, Madonna.)

  I agreed with her on all three counts. And by the way, on the subject of fake boobs? I’d known girls in high school who’d already gotten them! Really? Plastic surgery in high school? Aren’t you scared you’ll keep growing and then your surgery won’t match the rest of you? You’ll look like a Picasso. And for the record, I’m pretty sure he hated women. A nose over here, an eyeball over there. Thank God he had a paintbrush, or who knows, he could have been a serial killer, murdering women and cutting them up to rearrange their faces! Yeesh!

  Don’t tag your boyfriend in every single Facebook status. We remember that you know each other.

  No sexting and definitely no naked pictures to your boyfriend’s cell phone. Eventually, the whole school will see them and you’ll be “that girl.” Also? It’s child pornography.

  Some of her rules were downright ridiculous:

  Don’t eat garlic or onions around cute guys. Or any guys. Or girls. Ever.

  But could all of it be my ticket to the new me? (And I’m sorry, but onions aren’t all bad. And garlic? Who doesn’t love garlic? Besides vampires.)

  I found myself opening iTunes and downloading music that Noel liked, songs I’d told her sucked, bands I hated on principle. I was going to open my mind and see if she wasn’t so wrong after all.

  Dinner that night was my first foray into “fitting a four.” That was not one of Noel’s little rules, per se, but the only way I’d really be able to wear my new wardrobe would be to get down to Noel’s size. Easier said than done. I knew I was a six—a healthy six at that—and honestly, I was pretty okay with my body, but if I was going to wear Noel’s clothes, I was going to have to make some adjustments.

  “Why aren’t you eating your potatoes?” my mom asked.

  “I’m just not feeling like potatoes.”

  “Are you feeling like po-TAH-toes?” my dad jumped in.

  “Oh my God, could you be more corny?” I asked.

  “I could, in fact,” he said. “Wanna see?”

  “No, Dad. Please, spare us.”

  “You love those potatoes,” my mom pushed. “I made them with sour cream, chives and garlic.”

  Garlic. The diary flashed in my head: no onions, no garlic. Ever.

  “Noel never ate garlic,” I said.

  “Noel never ate white food,” my dad said. He twirled his index finger in a circular motion next to his ear, and out of the side of his mouth he added, “Noel was a little cuckoo.”

  “Nick!” my mom said, eyebrow cocked; that was never a good sign. In eyebrow language that meant she was either on to your ruse or you were misbehaving.

  “What?” He winked at me. “I’m just saying.”

  “That’s a cute top on you,” Mom said, changing the subject.

  “Thanks,” I said, not wanting to mention that I’d just stolen it from the Goodwill box.

  “Is it new?”

  “Kinda,” I said.

  “Well, I like it,” she said.

  I wondered if she’d notice that all of my clothes seemed new or if (and at what point) she’d notice I’d scavenged Noel’s castoffs. Then I worried for a minute about the fact that she liked it. After all, one of Noel’s rules was:

  When clothes shopping with Mom, always be sure to buy the one outfit she hates the most. There’s a reason there’s a thing called “mom jeans,” and it’s not to be forgotten.

  “Can I be excused?” I asked. Before they could say anything about me finishing my dinner, I added, “I really need to pack.”

  In truth, I was just dying to try on more of Noel’s clothes. They totally bought it and I was back upstairs in record time, spinning in front of the mirror in Noel’s hippie Joie blouse. I was in love. (With the shirt.) The skinny jeans I paired with it? A little too skinny for my taste (ahem, my legs), but no matter—there were two other pairs and I knew one was destined to fit better.

  I spent the rest of the night rummaging through Noel’s stuff, trying things on and separating everything into piles. By the time I was done I had a whole new wardrobe—I even replaced some of the stuff I took from Noel’s boxes with stuff of mine so I wouldn’t be shortchanging the donation box. I mean, quality-wise, yes—I’m totally shortchanging the donation box—but in quantity, it about evens out. (And I don’t mean to be rude, but are the people shopping at Goodwill really going to turn down a lightly used blouse for $4.99 just because it isn’t quite couture?)

  And, hey, she’s my sister. I figured that if I don’t get someone who has my back and gives me advice and keeps my secrets and does all that “sister” stuff, the least I can get is some hand-me-down clothes and some sisterly advice in the form of one misplaced (and perhaps forgotten) diary.

  Yes, I knew that reading her diary was totally uncool, but it’s not like I was using this stuff against her … I was using it for good. I was using it to help myself.

  Packing was somehow less of a chore once I had my new wardrobe in place. Same with the stress about moving. And when I got a pre-move haircut and tried on a “new” outfit the next night, when I looked at myself in the
mirror I was considerably less bummed and more excited about the possibilities—especially since my mom also took me to get contacts so I wouldn’t be going to my new school as Nerdy McFourEyes. Not that glasses are so terrible. I mean, hipsters wear them these days without even having any lenses in them. (Another phenom I do not get. In fact I’m pretty sure hipsters are the way they are because their “skinny jeans” are cutting off all the circulation to their brains.) But I looked way better in contacts and for once I just wanted to be normal. Relatively. At least appearance-wise. The truth is, I did like my glasses. They were like an outward badge for brains. I’ll never forget (mostly because it was immortalized) the one day in Spanish class when Lisa Myers tossed that old adage at me, “Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and without missing a beat I responded, “That may be so, but we pass all our classes.” That quote ended up in the yearbook—attributed to me. Nerd Burn at its best. But still, I knew it would be nice to not be automatically classified as a bookworm or worse based on a pair of dumb prescription glasses. Which gave me an idea …

  I took my old Paul Frank skull-and-crossbones lunchbox off the top shelf above my dresser and placed my glasses in it for safekeeping. Then I added the Hanky Panky underwear I was wearing when that idiot Jemma made a spectacle of me (and them) at school. I was making a time capsule. Not necessarily to remind myself “what it was like,” but more as a symbolic effort to bury my old self in order to start fresh.

  Into the donation bin went my old iPod Shuffle. (What were you thinking, not even allowing us to select tracks, Steve Jobs? But you were a genius. RIP.) With it went the music that was technically the soundtrack to my miserable life. I’m not saying I didn’t still like some of the songs on there, but I had the ones I liked on my updated iPod, and it seemed fitting for this relic to be part of the package.

  I also wrote a letter to my future self, detailing why I was making these changes at the time of this move. Finally, I tossed in this year’s class photo. I looked like I was about to say something in the picture—which I was, I was asking if I could move the hair out of my eye—but flash went the camera, and there I was in the yearbook with my left eye partially covered with a growing-out chunk of my unfortunate bangs experiment, my mouth open in the “can” part of “can I move my hair” and looking like a total idiot.

  Par for my course. My old course.

  By the time we moved, I was barely recognizable. New clothes, new haircut (subtle layers—no bangs), new me. Transformation complete.

  But the stars look very different today …

  —DAVID BOWIE

  “Space Oddity”

  CHAPTER

  3

  The thing that made everything simultaneously seem both real and unreal was the presence of palm trees. I’d seen them on TV and in movies my whole life, but for whatever reason, they were ingrained in my head as part of some fantasy world. Their sudden introduction to my reality made everything seem that much more surreal. The palm trees lined the streets, towering and stately, like the backdrop of a movie—a movie that was now my reality. All that was missing was the beach, the Hollywood sign, and perhaps a stray movie star walking with her Starbucks cup and her boyfriend du jour.

  Moving into a new house is exciting and chaotic and frustrating and scary. Sure there’s fresh paint and wide-open space and new opportunities to decorate according to your new life, your new plan and, in my case, a new you. But it’s also completely unfamiliar. You can’t sleepwalk to the fridge in the dark without tripping over a box or walking into a wall that didn’t exist in your old house. You can’t look at a closet and know that on the back of that door is a penciled-in measuring stick with a series of marks that indicate your height over the years. (With all the pounds I’d dropped on my new diet, I should have been pencil-marking my circumference.) You can’t know exactly where to go for whatever you need because there isn’t a place for that yet. It feels almost like you’re house-sitting for someone else, but for some reason all of your stuff came with you. It’s bizarre.

  The day our belongings arrived was eventful, to say the least. Mom and I rushed out to meet the movers when the truck pulled into the driveway, and our next-door neighbors were just returning from the grocery store at the same time. We hadn’t had a chance to meet yet.

  A woman who looked about my mom’s age waved and called out, “Hey there! Hang on, we’ll be over in a minute!”

  My mom waved back, but I was more distracted by the boy tagging along behind the woman, who looked, luckily enough, to be about my age. He was pretty cute even from a distance, and I was eager to show off my improving figure—slimming just the right way in some places, expanding quite impressively in others—and improving the way Noel’s clothes were hanging off it. Well, both eager and scared to death.

  The neighbors came over after putting away their groceries, and we immediately learned that a) they were the Kellars and b) the boy was definitely cute—maybe a little short, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  And I’d been begging for a long, long time.

  Next to the moving truck, the moms introduced each other, the cute boy lurking behind his mom, me lurking behind mine, stealing glances as discreetly as I could.

  Mrs. Kellar turned to me. “What grade are you in?”

  “Tenth,” I said. “Well … going to be.”

  She perked up. “Andy too! How fantastic. Andy, come say hello.”

  Embarrassment, party of two, your table’s ready.

  The old insecurities popped up as usual. I was afraid he’d have a miserable look on his face—Gawd, Mom, why are you forcing me to talk to this loser—but he smiled kinda sweetly. Suddenly, he was easily twice as cute.

  “Hey,” Andy said. His mom shot him a glare, and he continued, “Um, nice to meet you.”

  “You too,” I said with a smile, albeit a carefully practiced smile, one I’d been working on in the mirror probably too much, like Robert De Niro in that Taxi Driver movie I sneaked out of Dad’s DVD collection one time. Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?

  And I was talking to this cute boy, my smile avoiding the ever-deadly TMG. That stood for Too Much Gums, another gem from Noel’s diary:

  Don’t smile like a lunatic. Have some self-control. Girls who smile all gummy look too eager, too excited.

  See also: That shit cray!

  I’d always been envious of Noel’s better smile, and I was already aware of my gum situation, thus the hours in the mirror that would get me institutionalized if my parents decided to install a secret camera in my room. (Now, that’s a creepy thought.) I try to be aware of my smile, but the problems come on the rare but wonderful-because-they’re-rare occasions when I’m actually happy. How backward and unfair is that? And PS, how can you be real if you can’t even flash an authentic smile? I guess you’re only allowed to finally be genuine once you’ve snagged the boy. You trick them by luring them into your gumless trap and then once they’ve fallen head over heels in love with you, you unleash the gums. And then you can smile wide and not even worry if there’s spinach in your teeth or whether your nose is 100 percent guaranteed booger-free … well actually, you always hope you’re booger-free, but spinach is forgivable and it’s nice to have someone who will point that stuff out to you and … what was I doing again?

  “So you’re going to West Hollywood?”

  Oh, right … Andy.

  He was talking about my new school, West Hollywood High.

  “Yeah. You go there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any suggestions? Tips? Warnings? Knowledge is power.”

  “Is that like a PSA?” he asked, as he inspected the right heel of his sneaker. The gum on his shoe was even more interesting than me. Remember the diary.

  “Sounds like one, but no, I think it’s a Baconism.”

  “Baconism? As in Kevin?”

  “As in Francis. Philosopher.”

  Oh, hell. I’m nerding him out. I need to save this, fast.


  Him: Empty stare.

  Me: “Anyway, bacon is bacon.”

  That’s your save? Bacon is bacon? What does that even mean?

  Him: Arched eyebrow.

  Me: “Um, I’m sure Francis Bacon and Kevin Bacon are somehow separated by six degrees anyway. Most everyone else is and they even have the same last name.”

  This is not Noel-approved conversation. Stop moving, mouth!

  Him: Slight grin, but is he laughing with me or at me?

  Me: “Riveting topic, eh? Catch that ‘eh’? There’s another bacon: Canadian.”

  Andy chuckled, a good sign. “Okay, well … If you take algebra with Mrs. Coletti, don’t get caught staring at her mustache. She’s sensitive about it.”

  “Understood.”

  “I’m serious. You try not to look, but your eyes will get drawn in. It’s like a tractor beam.”

  “What’s a tractor beam?” I asked.

  The incredulous look he tossed my way was priceless. “You know, a tractor beam. Star Wars?”

  Now it was my turn to stare blankly.

  “The Millennium Falcon gets drawn into the Death Star with a tractor beam? No?”

  I gave him a slight shrug and a weak, entirely gumless smile.

  He smiled softly, humanely. “Never mind.”

  “Phew. For a second there I was feeling bad about the Francis Bacon stuff, but you totally out-nerded me.”

  That got a smile. He did have a nice smile.

  “Out-nerded you? I was talking about the Millennium Falcon. It’s Star Wars. It’s one of the biggest movies of all time. Not to mention a ship that helped bring down the Empire and made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs … Okay, yeah, maybe that was a little nerdy.”