Vote for Me!

by Robin Palmer

  “See, that’s part of the problem!” I cried. “People keep talking about ‘my’ campaign, but I haven’t even decided for sure that I’m going to do it!”

  “Oh, you’re doing it,” Pete said, in his I’m-a-doormanso-I-know-everything voice.

  “How do you know?” I demanded.

  He shrugged. “I’m a doorman. We know these things.” As he gave one of his longer sighs, I plopped down on the couch next to his desk. Long sighs = lectures = you wanted to be comfortable while having to sit through them. “Look, Lucy—we all have our callings. Laurel? Hers is to entertain people around the world. Mine? Doorman,” he explained. “Yours? To stick up for all the kids at your school who need to be stuck up for and show that Cristina Pollock twerp what’s what.”

  “Yeah, well, what if I don’t want to answer the call?” I asked. “What if I just let it go to voice mail?”

  He shrugged. “It just keeps calling back until you do. “Believe me, I’m a doorman—”

  “And you know about this stuff,” I finished.

  “And as for Laurel, she just wants to help,” he went on. “You know, because she loves you and all that.”

  “So I’ll let her help,” I said. “But with things like ... I don’t know ... making files. And baking. And labeling things. Not with signed autographed pictures of herself wearing a GOT LUCY B. PARKER AS YOUR PRESIDENT? T-shirt.”

  “Look, Lucy, I know you probably won’t believe me when I say this, but I have a theory.”

  I looked at my watch. When Pete got into one of his theories, he could go on forever, which meant I might miss It’s Me or the Ferret on Animal Planet.

  “And the theory is this,” he continued. “I think that if Laurel wasn’t Laurel Moses, I think she’d be considered one of those . . . whatchamacallits ... deeks.”

  “Huh?”

  “Deeks. The thing you say people get discriminated against for.”

  “You mean dork?” I asked. “You think Laurel is a dork?”

  He looked around the lobby. “Shh. Keep your voice down.” Luckily, the only person there was Mr. Grossman and his basset hound, Snoopy, and I knew from trying to have a conversation with Mr. Grossman in the elevator about how cute Snoopy’s long ears were that he was very hard of hearing. “No, I don’t think Laurel is a dork. But I think that if she was a regular girl going to regular school, some people might think she had some habits that were kind of ... deeklike.”

  “It’s dork,” I corrected again. Although deek was a good word. Sort of a combination of geek and dork. In fact, it was so good, maybe I could submit it to urbandictionary.com. I had already written them to see if I could get overlistening and bloversharing put in there, but hadn’t heard back yet. “You mean the way she loves office supply catalogs almost as much as fashion magazines?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “And the way that she separates all her food on her plate and none of the different piles can touch and then she takes one bite from one, and then one from another?”

  “Yeah. That kind of stuff,” he replied. “Now me, I have no problem with that stuff, but some people, you know, they might think that’s a little strange.”

  Some people? She was my best friend and frister, and I thought it was strange. But I could see what Pete was getting at.

  “So you winning this election,” Pete went on, “is not just about you giving a voice to the kids at school. It’s about her, too.”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Let me put it this way: What if, instead of being your famous frister, she was just your regular frister, and Mean People like Cristina were teasing her, what would you do?” Pete asked.

  “That’s easy. I’d stick up for her,” I replied.

  He nodded. “So just think of the kids at school as being your fristers and frothers. And if she wants to help because, whether she realizes it or not, this is kind of about her, too, why not let her? It’s what happens after you win that’s important.”

  I sighed. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”

  “Good. So you’ll do it?” he asked excitedly.

  “I don’t know. I have to discuss it with my advisers,” I said.

  Meaning Beatrice and Alice. The good news was that because they knew what Cristina was capable of, they’d agree that the idea of my running was a setup for a seriously miserable school year.

  On the way to the elevator I texted them about it. By the time I got back up to my apartment on the twentyfirst floor, they had both responded. In all caps Alice had written OMG OMG OMG I LOVE LOVE LOVE THAT IDEA!!!!!!! Although I found the way she used nine million exclamation marks annoying, it was better than having to listen to her squeal. Beatrice’s “Huh. I like it” meant she also thought it was a good idea. Although right after that, she wrote that she’d be sure to give a really awesome speech at my funeral if, for some reason, I ended up mysteriously dying during the campaign thanks to Cristina.

  What I ended up deciding was that I had to get through the first day of school first. See what Cristina was like. Maybe spending the entire summer at her family’s house on Martha’s Vineyard had somehow made her a nice person. I know if I had gotten to do that rather than going to museums with Mom, I’d be in a good mood. But I wasn’t making any decisions about the campaign until then.

  Except for one. The time had come to tell Laurel to cut it out with the posters and the binders and the T-shirts and the mugs. I sat in my room, sifting through all my possible first-day-of-school outfits from the ginormous lump of clothes on my bed, and tried to figure out how to best approach the situation with Laurel. In the nicest way possible, I was going to have to say, “Listen, Laurel, as grateful as I am that you want to help, I need you to butt out already.”

  Just as I was about to go to her room to do it, she burst into mine.

  “You’re not going to believe what I just did!” she squealed.

  “Laurel, look, I’m super-thankful for all your help with the campaign, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I really need you to stop helping,” I blurted nervously. “Because if I end up doing this, then I want to do it as Lucy-B.-Parker-myself rather than Lucy-B.-Parker-Laurel-Moses’s-little-frister, okay?” I waited for more blurting to come out of my mouth, but nothing happened. Okay, so that wasn’t too bad. I hadn’t said anything particularly mean. What a relief. “See, the thing of it, you’re just too famous to help,” I blurted.

  Uh-oh. From the way her eyes got all teary, and her bottom lip started to move back and forth like there was a Mexican jumping bean sewn into it, that part may have been on the mean side.

  “Laurel, that’s not what I meant,” I quickly said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out like that—” Oh, this was really not good. Stupid bloversharing.

  “No, I get it,” she said with a little sniffle. Great. Sniffling was just two seconds away from full-blown crying. And up until this election stuff we had been getting along so well lately. “It’s just that ... I just wish you had said something a little earlier!” she wailed as she burst into tears.

  I could understand being upset, but bursting into tears? That seemed a little on the dramatic side. Even if you were an actress.

  “Because after what I’m about to tell you,” she hiccupped, “you’re probably not going to be happy.”

  Uh-oh. I didn’t like the sound of this. “Like how not happy are we talking about?” I asked.

  “Like very, very, VERY not happy,” she confessed. “See, I did something that, when I think about it, I probably should’ve run by you first—”

  Before she could go on, my phone and e-mail blinged at the same exact time. I looked at my phone. I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WENT AHEAD AND ANNOUNCED YOUR CAMPAIGN!!!! read a text from Beatrice. I THOUGHT WE HAD DECIDED YOU WERE GOING TO WAIT!!

  Oh no.

  “See, what I wanted to tell you—” she went on.

  Just then, from over on my desk, my laptop blinged again. And again. And again.

  Unlike Laurel
, who sometimes got two hundred e-mails a day, I was lucky if I broke ten. And most of them were from bakeries around New York City because I was on all the mailing lists. I walked over to my desk and clicked on my in-box. It was filled with notifications of comments on my Facebook page. When I logged in and saw what was going on, my legs got so rubbery I had to grab on to my desk chair.

  “How did people find out I was thinking of running against Cristina?! School hasn’t even STARTED!” I cried. I read some more. “Wait a minute—they think I’m DEFINITELY running!”

  “Okay, well, the reason for that is because—” Laurel said nervously.

  “I’m going to kill Alice!” I cried, clicking onto her page. “I knew I shouldn’t have told her about this yet.”

  “Actually, I don’t think Alice is the one you should be mad at ... See, what happened was—”

  I scanned Alice’s Facebook page. But instead of a status update like “Alice is excited that her friend Lucy B. Parker is running for class president,” she had one of her usual dumb status updates: “Alice is bored.” (She usually switched off among “Alice is bored,” “Alice is hungry,” and “Alice is excited for this week’s episode of Prom Queen Princesses.”) “Okay, what is going on here?” I cried. “If Alice didn’t blab it, how did all these people find out about this?”

  Laurel cringed as she took a deep breath. “I ... kind of, sort of put it as my Facebook update,” she blurted out.

  “You WHAT?!” I yelled as I began to pace.

  She nodded. “And ... I tweeted about it.”

  I paced faster. Could this get any worse?

  “And ... I wrote a blog entry about it,” she continued. “You know, about how you’re going to fight to end dork discrimination and to get rid of Mean People.”

  Yes. Yes, it could get worse. I stopped pacing. “But Laurel—that wasn’t your news to report!” I cried. “It was mine!”

  “I’m just so proud of you!” she cried. “I guess I just wanted everyone to know what an amazing frister I have. I’d never have the guts to do something like this.”

  “And who says that I do?!” I demanded. “And, even more than that, what if I don’t want to?” I asked. “What if I just want to have a school year where everything is normal for once? Where I’m just part of the crowd instead of the New Girl, or Period Girl, or a famous superstar’s younger frister? Why can’t I just be Lucy B. Parker?! Is that too much to ask?!”

  “I was just trying to help,” she said quietly.

  “I’ll tell you how you can help—by butting out!” I snapped.

  She stood up and stomped toward the door. “Fine. I’ll do that then,” she snapped back.

  “Good.”

  The second she was gone, I immediately felt bad. I knew she was trying to help, but I hadn’t asked for help. And this was not helping.

  I sat down on my bed to think. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe it wasn’t as big of a deal as I was making it out to be. Maybe Cristina would think the idea of me running against her was ... a good thing. You know, because no one else had even dared to do so for the last three years except for some boy from Singapore who knew nothing about the popularity food chain. (Needless to say, he lost. Badly.) Maybe I’d run, and if I won, after I gave my acceptance speech, I’d turn to Laurel and say “Boy, am I glad you talked me into running for president. This is the best thing that ever happened to me in my entire life!”

  I walked over to my desk, and looked at my Facebook page again. Underneath the comments that said things like, “Hey, Parker—haven’t you heard that class president is Cristina Pollock’s job?” and “You’re either really brave ... or really stupid!,” another one popped up.

  From Cristina.

  “You do realize war has just been declared, right?”

  I could feel myself start to sweat.

  Another comment popped up.

  “And you are so dead.”

  Okay, I was right. I wasn’t overreacting after all. It wasn’t a big deal—it was a HUGE deal.

  chapter 4

  Dear Dr. Maude,

  Sorry if there are any typos in this e-mail, but I’m writing it at 1:15 a.m. in the morning on my iTouch from underneath my covers.

  Things are NOT good at the moment. It’s kind of a long story, so I won’t go into all of it now, but there are three main points to it. The first is that Laurel went ahead and told the entire world that I’m running against Cristina for class president.

  The second is that since Cristina would be considered part of the entire world, that means she now knows. And she’s not happy about it. Beatrice says it’s a free country, and anyone can run for president. But she also says that I should make sure I don’t delete Cristina’s Facebook comments about how I’m going to regret this so that I have them as evidence in case anything mysterious happens to me, which is a trick she learned from the TV show Law & Order.

  But the third—and most important—point is that after I found out about the Facebook Incident, I got really mad at Laurel. Like to the point where we haven’t said a word to each other since then. Not at dinner. Or during Family TV Time. We didn’t even talk when she knocked on my door and threw that purple Indian-looking shirt of hers with the cool embroidery that I love so much at me because she had promised me I could wear it tomorrow on the first day of school. (BTW? As much as I want to, I’m not going to.)

  I talked to Mom about the whole thing, and she says that I’m overreacting and that Laurel’s just trying to help, but Dr. Maude, it’s not just the Facebook Incident that’s got me mad. It’s ALL of it. It’s the fact that I feel that no one bothers to listen to me. Do you think that’s because I’m the youngest? Do ALL kids who are the youngest have it this bad?

  I know you know that my big fear when Mom fell in love with Alan was that because Laurel is so famous, I’d totally disappear and stop being Lucy B. Parker and instead be Lucy-Laurel’s-less-pretty-untalented-younger-stepsister. And you also know that, luckily, that didn’t really end up happening. Well, that is, UNTIL NOW. Which is why I’m so upset.

  I felt like Mom was all on Laurel’s side. (Do you find that happens a lot? That a lot of the time parents are overly nice to the kid who is not their birth kid in order to make that kid like them more? Because that’s sure been my experience.) So I called Dad to see what he had to say about the whole thing. Yeah, well, THAT was a HUGE mistake. As we were talking, I could hear the clicking of computer keys, and when I said, “Dad, are you typing on the computer instead of listening to this very important, very dramatic thing that happened to me this afternoon?” you know what he said? He said, “Uh, yes. Sorry about that, Lucy. I’ll stop now. I was just looking at changing tables on the Babies R Us website. But now I’m going to give you my undivided attention.”

  As if I really WANTED it after that. And then my finger accidentally happened to push the End button on my phone. (Okay, fine, maybe not accidentally.)

  This is all too much drama for me. I know some kids like drama (like, say, kids in the drama club), but I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, I’m perfectly happy letting Laurel be the dramatic one in the family. Which makes sense, seeing that she’s an actress and all.

  I guess I should try and go to sleep now.

  Wish me luck in not getting killed tomorrow.

  yours truly,

  Lucy B. Parker

  “Good morning, Miss Piggy,” I said when I walked into the kitchen the next morning and found Laurel dividing the fruit from the nuts in her granola. “Miss Piggy, don’t you just hate it when people don’t accept your apology?” Once, when I was mad at Mom back in Northampton, I had spoken to her through Miss Piggy, and it had worked really well.

  Laurel looked up and glared at me. “Miss Piggy, can you tell whoever just said that that texts do not count as official apologies? Especially if it’s worded like the one I got last night.”

  I glared back. “Miss Piggy, I don’t know about you, but I think that a text that says ‘Fine. Maybe I could’ve
handled that better but, still, you’re totally the one who started all this’ is a perfectly good apology. But I guess some people don’t think that they did anything wrong to begin with.”

  “Someone already said she was sorry to someone else’s face, Miss Piggy!” she cried. “But apparently, that person didn’t think that was good enough. And then she had to go all Brianna Machado on her.”

  I gasped. “Miss Piggy, can you please tell the person who just said that that I am so not like Brianna!” Brianna Machado was this new character on Laurel’s show who was her archrival and a total nightmare. She was always pitching fits and having meltdowns. You’d think viewers would hate her, but actually, they couldn’t get enough of her, which didn’t make Laurel all that happy. Especially because she said that Harlee Huntley, the actress who played her, was like that in real life, too.

  Laurel just shrugged and went back to dividing up her granola.

  “Okay, you know what, Miss Piggy?” I said. “Someone hereby takes back her kind-of, sort-of apology! And doesn’t really care if someone else is mad at her or not.”

  I stomped out of the kitchen. When I got back to my room and closed the door, I burst into tears. Laurel and I had had little fights before, but this was different.

  This was serious.

  “Look at it this way,” Beatrice said brightly as we walked to school later on. “Instead of worrying about the election, now you can spend all your time worrying about whether your mom and Alan are going to have to split up!” As always, Beatrice was wearing her usual uniform of all black—this time a black miniskirt, a short-sleeved button-down shirt, and black Converses. (I got to take credit for getting her into sneakers.) Plus, she had a jet-black bob, which made her even more New York-y-looking.

  I, on the other hand, was wearing a lilac minidress with brown cowboy boots and a red beret. I figured all the color might make me seem braver than I actually felt. Not to mention take away some of the sadness about my fight with Laurel. “What? Who said anything about their splitting up?” I asked nervously.