by Robin Palmer
When I walked out into the kitchen the next day to find that Rose had brought me some fried plantains (I had never had them before we moved to New York, but they had quickly become one of my favorites), it seemed my run of good luck was continuing. And the fact that Beatrice and I were forced to take the bus to school because I had us running late due to an outfit change (I thought my Angry Little Girls Team Garlic T-shirt was really funny, but when I got down to the lobby, Beatrice said that it might turn off voters who didn’t like garlic) and the bus pulled right up was another good sign. But if you’re running for class president and you notice that an awful lot of people are staring at you in the morning before you even make it inside your school? That’s not good. And if kids start to point and whisper when you do make it inside? That’s even worse. Add some giggles to that? You know there’s a problem.
And if you’re walking down the hall with your friends and see a group of kids gathered together really laughing at you? And when you make your way through, you see that what they’re laughing at is a blown-up-toposter-size photo taken the year before on a movie set in Northampton, Massachusetts, of your egg-lookingbecause-of-a-Straightening-Iron-Incident head? That problem is BIG. Especially if, written underneath it in huge letters, it says, IS THIS WHO YOU WANT AS CLASS PRESIDENT?
“OMIGOD—Lucy, is that picture of the almost-bald girl you?!” Alice yelled. The minute she said that, anyone in the hall who hadn’t been gathered around the poster walked over to see what she was looking at.
“What ... where did ... how the heck ... ?” I sputtered. This couldn’t be happening. I had spent almost an entire year trying to erase the Hat Incident from my memory. And now not only was it back, it was poster-size!
“Like it?” I heard Cristina Pollock’s snotty voice say from behind me. “I think you look soooo cute. Kind of like that creature in that old movie E.T.”
Everyone started to laugh. I whipped around, swiping at the tears that had immediately formed. One of the only good things about moving and being the New Girl in a new school was that I had finally been able to leave the Hat Incident behind. At least I had, until now. “Where did you get that?” I demanded.
She shrugged. “I have my ways,” she said as she kept walking, flipping her long blonde hair over her shoulder. Although it would have given me seriously bad karma, if I had had a pair of scissors in my tote bag, I totally would’ve chopped off her hair right then and there. Let her experience what it’s like to have to wear hats every day for months until a hairdresser-to-the-stars fixes it so that you look halfway normal again.
Beatrice shook her head. “This is beyond low. Even for her.” As I rummaged in my bag for a tissue, she patted my arm. “I’m so sorry, Lucy,” she said. “But try to look at the bright side.”
I turned to her. “The bright side? There’s a bright side to having the world seeing me looking like a human egg?!”
She shrugged. “Sure. It means she knows you’re gaining on her. If she wasn’t worried that you had a decent chance of winning, she never would’ve gone to all this effort,” she said. “Believe me, if I know anything about Cristina after having been best friends with her, it’s that she’s one of the laziest people in the world. And this took a lot of effort.”
Any other time that would’ve made me feel better, but right then? Not so much. But before I could run off to the bathroom to cry in peace, there was a tap on my shoulder. “Lucy? You want a piece of this?” a boy whispered.
I turned around to find Quentin Fox, one of the geekier gamers, holding out a pack of Eclipse Winterfrost gum. Even though I got a little nervous talking to him sometimes because he had a lazy eye, which meant that I was never sure where to look, he was really nice. “It’s pretty strong,” he said. “Sometimes if I forget to brush my teeth before I leave my apartment in the morning, it does the trick and I’m safe.” He breathed into the palm of his hand and wrinkled his nose. “Well, most of the time I am.”
Huh? I breathed into my own palm. My breath was fine. “Thanks, Quentin, but why would I need gum?”
“Because of what it says on the poster of you and Connor Forrester down the hall,” he replied.
My eyes widened. What poster of Connor and me down the hall?
Monica Barron, a member of the drama club who knew every single word to every song from the musical Annie, joined us. “If it makes you feel any better, I think Cristina’s totally wrong—it doesn’t look like he’s pulling away from you because your breath stinks.”
I sprinted down the hall so fast you would’ve thought I was a person who actually liked gym. Right next to the cafeteria, there it was: that picture that some dumb paparazzo had taken of Connor Forrester and me on the red carpet at a movie premiere in L.A. back in June that had ended up on the Internet and in the gossip magazines. Okay, yes, it did look like he was pulling away as I leaned forward. But that was only because he was about to sneeze and was being polite so he didn’t get germs all over me.
Underneath the picture, in very large bubble letters, it said, DO YOU REALLY WANT A PRESIDENT WITH BAD BREATH? IF NOT, VOTE FOR ME, CRISTINA POLLOCK—BECAUSE I BRUSH AFTER EVERY MEAL AND SNACK! The whole thing totally wasn’t fair! I brushed my teeth a lot, too. At least twice a day. Maybe if I was really tired I would skip the nighttime brush, but I definitely did it at least once a day.
“Like it?” smirked Cristina. She turned to the crowd. “I’d like to invite you all to see my latest video!” she announced. “We’ll be screening it in the library before homeroom starts!”
I paled as I turned to Beatrice. “Latest video? How many of these things do we have to make?” Hanging out with Blair hadn’t been that bad, but it’s not like I wanted to do more of it. While he went to a different school, he knew enough kids at ours that he’d definitely hear about what I was now calling the Poster Incident.
Beatrice reached in her bag for the rules and regulations, which, because we had spent so much time looking at them, were now dog-eared and smudged. “It doesn’t say,” she replied as she scanned them. “And because it doesn’t say, I guess you can make as many as you want.”
We began to follow everyone into the library. Although I had zero interest in watching Cristina flip her hair around on screen, at least it would take the attention off me. Except if the video happened to be about me. Which it was.
When you’re a “Person of,” like I was (that’s when you’re somehow connected to a Famous Person, such as a Daughter of, or a Mother of, or—in my case—a Frister of), one of the side effects is that it makes you famous by accident, even if that’s the last thing you want. And it also makes it so that anyone—including Mean People—can go on the Internet and find pictures of you, and articles that have untrue information about you.
All of that is bad enough, but when it’s strung together into a three-minute video, which, if it had a title, would be called The Uncut Blooper Version of Lucy B. Parker’s Most Embarrassing Moments, it’s beyond horrible. Photos where it looked like I was picking my nose (I wasn’t), spilling something on myself (I was), or preparing to throw up (I wasn’t, but I sure wanted to at that moment) flashed by. As kids howled with laughter, I just stood there, unable to move.
I looked like a complete dork. The girl up on the screen wasn’t someone you’d want as your president. She was someone you’d want around just so you could laugh at her behind her back. Maybe if I was really presidential, I would have stood up and given some big speech about how wrong all of this was.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
Instead, I somehow managed to unglue my feet from the floor so I could run to the girls’ room and burst into tears. It wasn’t a very presidential-like thing to do, but I couldn’t help it. Neither was going to the school nurse and telling her that I was pretty sure I was coming down with a very contagious disease and she needed to call my mother and let me go home. Luckily (or unluckily) for me, by that time even the faculty had seen the posters, so she felt bad for me and didn’t give me a h
ard time. Mom didn’t, either, after I gulped the story out to her in between sniffles.
“I knew I never should have listened to Laurel when she brought up the running-for-president thing,” I said to her in between bites of my frozen peanut butter hot chocolate at lunch later.
Usually I wasn’t allowed to have dessertlike things in the middle of the day, unless it was a special occasion. But luckily, I had a mother who knew that having your life completely ruined forever was just as important as a birthday. “In fact, this is where the whole dumb thing happened! Because she had been DD’d by the hostess!”
“What’s DD again?” Mom asked.
“Dork discrimination,” I replied.
“Oh, right. But honey, you can’t let one bad day in your campaign ruin the whole thing—”
“Mom, please don’t give me the speech about the river flowing—”
“I’m not going to. What Cristina Pollock did to you was awful. Like a ten on the scale of Mean People behavior. But for you to give up now would be to go against everything you’ve been talking about during your campaign.”
I shook my head as I scraped the last of the frozen peanut butter from the side of the bowl. “Nice try, Mom, but the kids at the Center are going to have to watch someone else be made a fool of. I’m done.”
After school, Beatrice, Alice, and Malia showed up to try to convince me I wasn’t, in fact, done.
“Look, I really appreciate all the work you guys have put into this,” I said from my bed, which I had immediately crawled into as soon as Mom and I got home from lunch. “But I just can’t do it.” I shook my head. “Today, it’s pictures blown up to poster-size. What’s it going to be tomorrow?”
“Tuesday?” Alice asked.
“No. I mean, what will she stoop to doing then? Reading aloud from my diary?
“You didn’t tell me you started keeping a diary!” Alice said. “Plus, how would she get it?”
I sighed. “Alice, I don’t have one. I was just trying to make a point. All I’m saying is that with her, there’s no telling what can happen.” I turned. “Malia, because you’re the new New Girl, you probably understand a lot better than these guys will. I’m sick of standing out. I just want to blend into the crowd for once.”
Alice nodded. “It’s a good thing your hair grew back,’cause I bet you really stood out after the Hat Incident.”
“Look, Alice, I know you’re trying to help—” I started to say.
“But you’re actually not,” Beatrice said.
It may have seemed mean of Beatrice and me to say that, but Alice had lived in New York her whole life. She knew it was just standard tell-it-like-it-is New York–ese and therefore didn’t get upset. Plus, we didn’t say it meanly. “But what about all those art supplies we bought at the stationery store yesterday to make more posters?” Alice asked.
“And the second button maker?” Malia added.
“And the fact that we just spent money from our campaign fund so we could pay my cousin Mark in Hot Tamales for updating LucyB4Prez.com?” Beatrice asked.
“Lucy, someone has to stop Cristina,” said Alice.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but someone else is going to have to do it,” I said. “I’m retiring from my career in politics.”
“But it hasn’t actually started yet,” said Malia.
“Yeah, well, it’s an early, early retirement,” I replied as I slid farther beneath the covers and started to pull them up over my head.
“But you were going to save the world,” Alice said quietly. “You were going to make it a better, safer place for all the dorks.”
“For everyone who has been teased because they’re a little bit different,” Malia said.
“For those who don’t quite fit in, no matter how hard they try,” Beatrice added.
I pulled the covers down a bit so I could get a peek at their faces before quickly pulling them up again. It was too sad. It was like the Petco adoption area and Rescue Pets 911 times a hundred. “I’m sorry, guys. I tried,” I said from underneath the covers. “I really did.”
When no one said anything, I peeked out again. Which, the moment I did, I wish I hadn’t.
Because the only thing worse than having a poster-size photo of your egghead splashed across the school walls is the sight of your friends looking at you with total disappointment in their eyes.
chapter 8
Dear Dr. Maude,
After I tell you what happened yesterday, you probably won’t want to be friends with me anymore, so I just wanted to say it’s been really nice knowing you. Even if you didn’t answer any of my e-mails. Not even ONE.
It’s kind of a long story, so I won’t go into all of it now. Especially because every time I think about it—which is a lot—I burst into tears, and now my eyes are so swollen I can’t see that well. The only good news is that I’m such a mess that even Miss Piggy feels bad for me. To the point where she let me hug her for an entire thirty-five seconds (I timed it) until she started hissing and trying to bite me.
Anyway, what it comes down to is, I have to drop out of the election. I haven’t officially dropped out yet, because Mom let me stay home from school again today. Usually she has what she calls “zero tolerance” for my trying to get out of going to school, but this time she’s being cool about it. But when I finally do go back to school—which I’m hoping won’t be for another month—then I will officially drop out. By then the election will be over because voting is next Monday, but I think it’s important to do things officially, you know?
The reason that I have to drop out is because Cristina Pollock is a horrible human being who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Even if it means ruining other people’s lives forever by showing photos of them where they look like eggheads.
But you want to know the worst part of all this, Dr. Maude? Even worse than knowing that all that time I spent practicing my “President Lucy B. Parker” signature was a complete waste of time, not to mention ink and paper? The worst part is seeing how disappointed my friends, and Mom, and Dad, and Alan, and Pete are in me. They don’t actually say, “Wow, Lucy, I’m really disappointed in you” out loud, because they know if they did, I’d probably burst into tears, but I can feel it.
Luckily Laurel’s been in Miami for some Save-the-Something-or-Other event, so I haven’t had to deal with her reaction, too. If she didn’t already think I’m a total loser (which I’m pretty sure she does), this would be the thing that did it. It’s a good thing we’re still not really talking because every time I just THINK about the idea of telling her what happened, I get so embarrassed that I pull the covers up over my head. Even if no one’s in the room other than Miss Piggy.
Okay, well, it’s time to get back to that. You’d think that because that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing the last two days I’d be bored with it by now, but I’m not. Plus, when you’re not around other human beings, you don’t have to worry about the fact that your hair is all greasy because you’re too upset to wash it. Like I said, I totally don’t blame you if you don’t write me back. I wouldn’t write me back, either.
I’m not even going to bother asking for advice because my life is so ruined, nothing could possibly make it better.
yours truly,
Lucy B. Parker
The thing about staying in bed pretty much nonstop for almost twenty-four hours is that your body gets all achy. And you get REALLY hungry because you’re so bored. Which is why, after I sent the e-mail to Dr. Maude, I went to the kitchen in search of snacks.
Unfortunately, because of the boredom, I had eaten all the good snack stuff by that point and was now down to stuff like disgusting sunflower seeds.
I was in the middle of mixing them with the tiny bit of peanut butter that was left over from my earlier peanut-butter-and-Skittles snack when I heard the front door open.
“Oh great,” I sighed. Mom and Alan were at therapy (separately, because their joint therapy session was on Fridays). They would
n’t be back for half an hour. And Rose was in Jamaica visiting her family. So that meant Laurel was home.
And because one of the OCD things that she did as soon as she got home was to immediately wash her hands in the kitchen because that’s where the extrasuper-germ-killing antibacterial soap was kept, I could forget about crawling back under the covers without her seeing me.
“Hi,” she said a little-bit-cold-but-not-entirely-frozen as she walked in and headed over to the sink.
“Hi,” I mumbled, cringing as I looked down at Mom’s old holey Smith College sweatshirt that I had managed to save from the Goodwill pile when she was first becoming the new New York version of herself.
She sniffed. “What’s that smell?”
I lifted up my sweatshirt and sniffed. “Me,” I said glumly. “I didn’t have time to shower today.” Because I was busy hiding under my covers.
When she was done washing her hands, she looked up at me. Her eyes widened. “Are you sick? You look awful! And the baby shower is this weekend—you can’t go if you’re sick!”
Right. The baby shower. Which, in light of everything that was going on, I wasn’t letting myself think about because then I’d get only more depressed. I shook my head, afraid to open my mouth. The last thing I needed was to start to cry in front of her.
“Wait, it’s only two o’clock. Why are you home from school?”
“I ... there ...” As much as I tried to stop it, I could feel my eyes start to fill.
She hurried over and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Lucy, tell me what’s wrong!” she said, concerned.
I looked at her looking at me, all caring and big frister–like, not moving away from me even though I could tell by that point that I really did smell. The tears in my eyes began to plop down on my sweatshirt. Which I knew would make it smell even worse. “There was ... an ... an incident at school,” I finally wailed.