Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

by Dyan Sheldon

  A few more curls slapped against me. Carla was rolling her eyes.

  “You know,” moaned Carla, “it takes a thief to know how a thief thinks…” You could almost hear her start to purr. “Just as it takes a low-life to know how a low-life feels.”

  Alma, Tina and Marcia all collapsed in hysterics.

  I could have turned around and said something. You know, something subtle but apt. Like, “Well then, it is amazing that you didn’t get the part, isn’t it?” But I didn’t. To answer would be to play right into Carla’s game. To ignore her and act as though I hadn’t heard what she said would drive her nuts.

  I raised my juice container over the table. “Let’s toast,” I said loudly to Ella. “After all, this is really a celebratory lunch, isn’t it?”

  Ella’s expression was about as celebratory as a death mask, but she nodded and held up her stainless-steel thermos.

  “To Pygmalion!” I cried gaily.

  “To Pygmalion,” muttered Ella. And immediately afterwards and much louder she said, “So, what do you think of all the rumours?”

  Despite the shocking initial disinterest of everyone at Deadwood High School in the death of a legend, there were now more rumours about Sidartha going around than Carla Santini had teeth.

  The reason the band split up was because Bryan Jeffries, the drummer, was a drug addict.

  No, it was because Jon Waldaski, the bass player, was dying of AIDS.

  Because Steve Maya, the lead guitarist, was an alcoholic.

  Because Stu Wolff was an alcoholic and/or a drug addict.

  Because Stu Wolff wanted to change his image.

  Because Stu and Steve did nothing but fight because Stu stole Steve’s girlfriend.

  Because Stu and Steve did nothing but fight because Stu wouldn’t let Steve play his songs in the band.

  Because Bryan attacked Jon with a snare drum.

  Because Stu broke Bryan’s jaw.

  Because Jon was suing the others for not giving him credit for songs that were his.

  Blahblahblah…

  “I can’t believe Bryan’s into drugs,” I said. “Stu wouldn’t tolerate it. He has too much integrity.” It went without saying that despite the historical connection between genius and mind-altering substances, we had dismissed the accusations of drug addiction against Stu automatically. Not only did he have integrity, he was passionate about his music. There was no way he would risk it for some superficial thrill.

  Ella started arranging the plastic containers in an orderly line. She’s not related to Marilyn Gerard for nothing.

  “Maybe he didn’t know at first,” said Ella. “Maybe he only just found out.”

  I opened my beat-up Zorro lunch box. I bought it in a junk store on the Lower East Side. I’ve always loved Zorro. I guess it’s the cape.

  “He’s too smart.” I took out the chunk of cheese and the apple I’d packed before I raced from the house. “He’d have noticed right away.”

  “Well, maybe they have creative differences,” said Ella, opening each container in turn.

  I wiped the clay from my apple. Everything in our house is covered with clay. It’s what you call an occupational hazard. “I think it’s much more likely to be personality clashes. From what I’ve read, Steve can be really selfish and bossy.”

  It was at that point that Carla Santini more or less joined our conversation.

  “Did I tell you?” she shouted. “My father just called me on my mobile to tell me what he found out about Sidartha.”

  Carla’s father is a phenomenally successful media lawyer who knows everybody who’s been famous for even fifteen seconds. He dines with movie stars. He gets drunk with famous musicians. He plays golf with producers, directors and television personalities. When she was six, Marlon Brando took Carla Santini on his knee and kissed the top of her head. She has a photo to prove it.

  “You’re kidding!” shrieked Alma. “You mean your dad talked to Stu?” She sounded as if she were reading her lines from a cue card.

  The air itself quivered with the shaking of Carla’s head.

  “Stu told my father that he’s really angry about all the rumours that have been circulating about them,” blared Carla. “He hates the way the press always misrepresents things.”

  The disciples all murmured sympathetically – as though they cared what the press did.

  “So guess what they’re going to do?” squealed Carla, loudly enough to get a response from the house across the street. She paused dramatically.

  My curiosity was greater than my disdain for anything Carla Santini might have to say. I leaned back in my seat just a tiny bit. Was she going to say that Sidartha wasn’t disbanding after all?

  When not even Alma hazarded a guess, Carla took a deep, meaningful breath. “They’re going to have a big farewell concert at Madison Square Garden to say goodbye to all their friends and fans.” If anyone else in the universe had made that announcement, she would have sounded excited; Carla sounded as though it had been her idea.

  Alma, Tina and Marcia all started to sigh and screech, but Carla wasn’t finished yet.

  “And guess what else?” she demanded.

  I swear to God that the three of them gasped. “What?”

  “My father already has seats in the press box.”

  Alma, Tina and Marcia all went off like smoke alarms, but I didn’t blink. So this was Carla’s revenge. She didn’t even like Sidartha that much. She just wanted to get even with me.

  “But that’s not the best part,” said Carla once the noise had died down. “There’s going to be an absolutely mega party afterwards for all their closest friends.” If I’d had a pair of scissors on me, I think I would have turned around and cut off her hair. “And guess who already has an invitation?”

  I don’t know why I did it. I really and truly don’t. It wasn’t like I planned it or anything. But the smug triumph in Carla Santini’s voice really annoyed me.

  I turned my head so that I was officially part of the conversation.

  “It just so happens that Ella and I do,” I said sweetly.

  Carla Santini’s eyes locked with mine.

  “Oh, really?” Smug triumph now had a companion: sarcasm. Carla didn’t believe me. Which meant that no one else did either.

  I, however, was cool and unruffled; I was self-possessed. Ignoring the horrified expression on Ella’s face, I met Carla’s eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Really.”

  There were a few darting glances and smirks around the table. Carla caught them all. A smile slipped over her face like a snake through water.

  “And just how did you manage that?” she asked.

  “The same way you did,” I immediately answered. “Through parental connections.”

  “Connections?” Carla made a sound that would have been a snort if a pig and not a perfect person were making it. “What connections do you have, except to the phone?”

  To be a truly great thespian you have to be able to do more than act from a script. You have to be able to improvise. I improvised.

  “My mother got them. Marsh Foreman bought a piece from her in the summer. I met him when he came to pick it up. He remembered that I liked Sidartha, so he gave my mother two invitations.”

  This wasn’t technically true, of course, but it was definitely possible. Marsh Foreman was Sidartha’s manager. It stood to reason that he had money to spend on handcrafted goods. Lots of rich people bought my mother’s stuff. Why shouldn’t Marsh Foreman be one of them?

  Carla arched one eyebrow. “Your mother must be some potter.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “She is.” I laughed as if suddenly understanding something – something too silly for words. “Oh, you think she makes bowls and plates and stuff like that…” Bowls and plates and stuff like that are what my mother does make, but there are lots of other potters who aren’t obsessed with use and function. “Oh, no, my mother makes things like six-foot fish in suits. In fact, the piece that Marsh F
oreman bought was a badger, a racoon and a fox playing Monopoly.” I smiled. “He put it in his garden.”

  ME AND MY BIG MOUTH

  Carla’s announcement lifted my soul to the heavens themselves. All was not lost, after all. Sidartha was having one last concert! Now Ella and I had the chance to see them at their very very best in a concert that would be part of the rock legend for centuries to come. Decades from now, Ella and I would be telling our grandchildren how we were at Sidartha’s farewell gig – how we’d even gone to the party afterwards and met Stu Wolff.

  Ella, however, had a slightly different take on things.

  “I really can’t believe you sometimes, Lola,” said Ella. She dumped a bag of crisps into a shining dark blue bowl. No clay dust or outrageous colours here. Mrs Gerard was at her cooking class, or pushing a book trolley around the hospital, or something like that, so Ella was fixing our snack for a change. “I really can’t. What exactly do you think is wrong with you?”

  “You’re over-reacting,” I said with my usual reasonable calm. I helped myself to a crisp. “I’m sure you would have said the exact same thing if you’d been me.”

  Hand-reared by Marilyn Gerard, Colonel in the war against dirt and disorder, Ella automatically brushed my crumbs from the counter.

  “If I were you I wouldn’t know any better, would I?” she asked. “I’d be crazy enough to tell Carla Santini that Marsh Foreman had invited me to the Sidartha goodbye party.”

  I flashed her one of my peppiest smiles.

  “Be fair,” I begged. “I told her you were invited, too.”

  Ella gave me a long, hard look. She sighed. “Have you really gone insane?” she asked quietly. “What were you thinking of? Doesn’t your brain ever get in touch with your mouth?”

  “I was thinking what a pain in the neck Carla is, that’s what I was thinking of,” I replied honestly. “It drives me nuts the way she’s always tossing her hair around and smiling. She acts like she’s visiting royalty and the rest of us are just a bunch of lepers.”

  Ella put the juice on the counter. “OK, so Carla Santini has insurmountable ego problems. That’s beside the point.”

  I slapped the gleaming marble top with my hand. “I disagree. That’s exactly the point, in my humble opinion. If Princess Carla didn’t start practically every sentence she utters with ‘I this…’ or ‘My that…’ I would never have opened my mouth.”

  And maybe if Carla had bothered to congratulate me on being Eliza instead of threatening my life.

  Ella side-stepped my irrefutable argument.

  “But you did open your mouth,” said Ella. “I tried to tell you that if Carla says she’s going to put you in your place, she means it. And what do you do? You open your enormous mouth, that’s what you do.” She shook with frustration. “You handed her exactly what she needs to humiliate and ridicule you for the rest of your life.” She scowled. “And me, too, probably.”

  Ruminating, I bit into another crisp. “I don’t know about that…” I said slowly. “I mean, it depends, doesn’t it?”

  Ella handed me a glass. “Depends on what? Whether or not someone drops a gold record on her head at the party and she develops amnesia?”

  I stared at the glass for a minute. I was used to fingerprints on my glasses. This one sparkled the way they do in dishwasher advertisements.

  “Well…” I said at last. “It kind of depends on whether we go or not, doesn’t it?”

  Ella spilled grape juice all over the counter.

  “On whether we go or not?” she shrieked. She was so upset that she wasn’t even mopping up the juice. She was just standing there, staring at me in stupefied horror. “What do you mean? We’re not going to the Sidartha party, Lola. This may have slipped your mind, but we haven’t exactly been invited.”

  I waved this objection aside. “You don’t have to be invited to a party like that,” I assured her. “You just crash. There are people in New York who never go out unless it’s to crash some celebrity bash.”

  “Well, I’m not from New York,” said Ella between clenched teeth. “And anyway, my mother would never let me go to a party like that, even if it were being held next door, and you know it. Not without her. Are you planning to take my mother with us?”

  What a thought! Mrs Gerard stopped listening to music when the Beatles broke up. And although I’m pretty sure that she must have had a youth, I’m also pretty sure that it wasn’t what you’d call wild unless you were comparing it with the life of a drop of paint. I’d rather have taken the Pope on my honeymoon than taken Mrs Gerard to the Sidartha party.

  “We can work around your mother,” I informed Ella. “She doesn’t have to know.”

  “Are you kidding?” Ella’s voice was unnervingly shrill. “There’s no way on earth you and I are going to sneak into the city for a concert without my mother finding out. Never mind going to a party afterwards. My mother wants to know where I am every minute of the day and night.”

  Unfortunately, there was a certain amount of truth in this. Mrs Gerard does everything but make Ella punch in and out on a time clock. It isn’t that she doesn’t trust her – Ella is an incredibly trustworthy teenager if you ask me – it’s that she worries about her all the time. If Ella’s ten minutes late getting home, her mother will be at the door before she turns in the front path. My mother might worry about me if she knew I was out on a motorcycle with someone for whom speed limits are merely suggestions, but otherwise she’s too busy worrying about a trillion other things to time my comings and goings. This, however, was not the moment to start agreeing with Ella.

  “How do you know she’d find out?” I demanded. “There must be at least a dozen ways we could manage to go into the city and stay out the entire night without her ever finding out. All we have to do is figure out what they are.”

  Ella gaped. “Tell me the truth, Lola. Are you on drugs?”

  I laughed. A person could never get away with taking drugs in my house. My mother can just look at me and know if I’m about to get my period or not.

  I scattered some more crumbs around. “I will be if I don’t get to that concert.”

  Ella stared at the puddle of juice on the counter with sightless eyes. “Maybe you should just let Carla have this,” she said. “You know … you got the lead. Let her have the party and everything.”

  Let her have the party and everything? I could hardly believe my ears. How could Ella suggest that we just give up like that? Carla Santini may think that she’s God, but that doesn’t make me Jesus. “You’re the one who’s on drugs,” I retaliated. “A few minutes ago you said I’d already given her the weapon she needed to humiliate and ridicule us for the rest of our lives, and now you want me to load her weapon and pull the trigger.”

  Ella turned her attention from the spreading purple stain to me. “But that’s exactly what you are doing. If you’d kept quiet and let her lord the concert over us for a few years she’d have been happy. Now she’s not going to rest till the whole school knows that we don’t really have invitations.”

  “Exactly!” I was practically shrieking with emotion. “That’s why we have to go.” I held my head high. “It’s a matter of pride.”

  Ella sighed with exasperation. “Pride goeth before a fall…” she muttered.

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” said I. I picked up another crisp. “I refuse to give in. There’s no way I’m handing Carla a consolation prize.”

  “It wouldn’t be a consolation prize.” Ella’s eyes were back on the juice. “It’d be more like … like a…”

  I leaned closer to her. “Like a what?”

  Ella shrugged. “Like an offering to unfriendly spirits so they leave you alone.”

  “Doodeedoodeedoodeedoodee… What is this?” I joked. “The Twilight Zone?”

  Ella looked at me, but she wasn’t smiling.

  “You don’t know Carla the way I do,” said Ella in total seriousness. “You weren’t here when she was after Kali Simpson.”


  “Who’s Kali Simpson?”

  Ella shrugged again. “She was just this girl who used to go to Dellwood. But she and Carla had a fight about something and Carla decided to destroy her.”

  “You’re making me tremble.” I trembled.

  “You wouldn’t be so flippant if you’d seen the way she treated Kali,” said Ella. “She stopped talking to her and everyone else stopped, too. Any time Kali was around she’d start badmouthing her and the disciples would all laugh. She made up all these lies and spread them around the school – you know, that Kali was shoplifting … that Kali was having sex with half the boys in school … that her mother was an alcoholic…” It was Ella’s turn to tremble, but she wasn’t acting. “It was really horrible. The only person who really stuck by Kali was Sam Creek, and even he couldn’t help her in the end.”

  Sam Creek, Deadwood’s token bad boy, is also its other great Independent. With his black leather jacket, his Celtic tattoo, his beaded dreads, his multitude of earrings and his attitude, Sam Creek is the antithesis of Carla Santini. He is also the only guy who doesn’t worship her.

  “So what happened?” I asked. “Did Carla turn Kali into a frog?”

  Ella gave me a “don’t-start” look.

  “The Simpsons moved, that’s what happened.” Ella stared into my eyes. “Kali couldn’t take it.”

  I raised my chin. “Well, I can.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Ella. “But Carla’s only been playing with you so far. She didn’t really think you were a threat before. But now – if she wants to, Lola, she can really make your life hell.”

  “I’m not afraid of Carla Santini,” I said, chin still in its give-me-your-best-shot position. I believe it’s important in life not to be afraid of anyone or anything, not even a bad review. “She’s a teenage girl, for heaven’s sake, Ella, not Lady Macbeth. There’s no way I’m going to let Carla Santini keep me away from the Sidartha concert.”

  “Have you listened to one word I’ve said?” asked Ella. She shook her head in a kind of dumbfounded way. “You know,” she sighed, “sometimes I can’t tell whether you’re just stubborn or if you’re stupid, too.”