“What do you mean?”
She chewed the side of one cheek, then moved over to chew the other. At last she said, “I shouldn’t really discuss it.”
“Why not?”
“Because … I just shouldn’t. Besides, I can tell there are things you don’t feel comfortable discussing with me … .”
We stared at each other a moment, neither of us saying a word. Finally I looked down and whispered, “When Chet and I were fixing up the yard, I told him how we didn’t own the house and about Uncle David. He must have told the rest of the family, because the day before the Loskis’ dinner party I overheard Bryce and his friend making cracks about Uncle David at school. I was furious, but I didn’t want you to know because you’d think they were only inviting us over because they felt sorry for us.” I looked at her and said, “You just seemed so happy about being invited for dinner.” Then I realized something. “And you know, you’ve seemed happier ever since.”
She held my hand and smiled. “I have a lot to be happy about.” Then she sighed and said, “And I already knew they knew about Uncle David. It was fine that you talked about him. He’s not a secret or anything.”
I sat up a little. “Wait … how did you know?”
“Patsy told me.”
I blinked at her. “She did? Before the dinner?”
“No, no. After.” She hesitated, then said, “Patsy’s been over several times this week. She’s … she’s going through a very rough time.”
“How come?”
Mom let out a deep breath and said, “I think you’re mature enough to keep this inside these four walls, and I’m only telling you because … because I think it’s relevant.”
I held my breath and waited.
“Patsy and Rick have been having ferocious fights lately.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Loski? What about?”
Mom sighed. “About everything, it seems.”
“I don’t understand.”
Very quietly my mother said, “For the first time in her life, Patsy is seeing her husband for what he is. It’s twenty years and two children late, but that’s what she’s doing.” She gave me a sad smile. “Patsy seems to be going through the same thing you are.”
The phone rang and Mom said, “Let me get that, okay? Your dad said he’d call if he was working overtime, and that’s probably him.”
While she was gone, I remembered what Chet had said about someone he knew who had never learned to look beneath the surface. Had he been talking about his own daughter? And how could this happen to her after twenty years of marriage?
When my mother came back, I absently asked, “Is Dad working late?”
“That wasn’t Dad, sweetheart. It was Bryce.”
I sat straight up. “Now he’s calling? I have lived across the street from him for six years and he’s never once called me! Is he doing this because he’s jealous?”
“Jealous? Of whom?”
So I gave her the blow-by-blow, beginning with Mrs. Stueby, going clear through Darla, the auction, the furball fight, and ending with Bryce trying to kiss me in front of everybody.
She clapped her hands and positively giggled.
“Mom, it’s not funny!”
She tried to straighten up. “I know, sweetheart, I know.”
“I don’t want to wind up like Mrs. Loski!”
“You don’t have to marry the boy, Julianna. Why don’t you just listen to what he has to say? He sounded desperate to talk to you.”
“What could he possibly have to say? He’s already tried to blame Garrett for what he said about Uncle David, and I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. He’s lied to me, he hasn’t stood up for me … he’s … he’s nobody that I want to like. I just need some time to get over all those years of having liked him.”
Mom sat there for the longest time, biting her cheek. Then she said, “People do change, you know. Maybe he’s had some revelations lately, too. And frankly, any boy who tries to kiss a girl in front of a room full of other kids does not sound like a coward to me.” She stroked my hair and whispered, “Maybe there’s more to Bryce Loski than you know.”
Then she left me alone with my thoughts.
My mother knew I needed time to think, but Bryce wouldn’t leave me alone. He kept calling on the phone and knocking on the door. He even snuck around the house and tapped on my window! Every time I turned around, there he was, pestering me.
I wanted to be able to water the yard in peace. I wanted not to have to avoid him at school or have Darla run block for me. Why didn’t he understand that I wasn’t interested in what he had to say? What could he possibly have to say?
Was it so much to ask just to be left alone?
Then this afternoon I was reading a book in the front room with the curtains drawn, hiding from him as I had all week, when I heard a noise in the yard. I peeked outside and there was Bryce, walking across my grass. Stomping all over my grass! And he was carrying a spade! What was he planning to do with that?
I flew off the couch and yanked open the door and ran right into my father. “Stop him!” I cried.
“Calm down, Julianna,” he said, and eased me back inside. “I gave him permission.”
“Permission! Permission to do what?” I flew back to the window. “He’s digging a hole.”
“That’s right. I told him he could.”
“But why?”
“I think the boy has a very good idea, that’s why.”
“But—”
“It’s not going to kill your grass, Julianna. Just let him do what he’s come to do.”
“But what is it? What’s he doing?”
“Watch. You’ll figure it out.”
It was torture seeing him dig up my grass. The hole he was making was enormous! How could my father let him do this to my yard?
Bryce knew I was there, too, because he looked at me once and nodded. No smile, no wave, just a nod.
He dragged over some potting soil, pierced the bag with the spade, and shoveled dirt into the hole. Then he disappeared. And when he came back, he wrestled a big burlapped root ball across the lawn, the branches of a plant rustling back and forth as he moved.
My dad joined me on the couch and peeked out the window, too.
“A tree?” I whispered. “He’s planting a tree?”
“I’d help him, but he says he has to do this himself.”
“Is it a … ” The words stuck in my throat.
I didn’t really need to ask, though, and he knew he didn’t need to answer. I could tell from the shape of the leaves, from the texture of the trunk. This was a sycamore tree.
I flipped around on the couch and just sat.
A sycamore tree.
Bryce finished planting the tree, watered it, cleaned everything up, and then went home. And I just sat there, not knowing what to do.
I’ve been sitting here for hours now, just staring out the window at the tree. It may be little now, but it’ll grow, day by day. And a hundred years from now it’ll reach clear over the rooftops. It’ll be miles in the air! Already I can tell—it’s going to be an amazing, magnificent tree.
And I can’t help wondering, a hundred years from now will a kid climb it the way I climbed the one up on Collier Street? Will she see the things I did? Will she feel the way I did?
Will it change her life the way it changed mine?
I also can’t stop wondering about Bryce. What has he been trying to tell me? What’s he thinking about?
I know he’s home because he looks out his window from time to time. A little while ago he put his hand up and waved. And I couldn’t help it—I gave a little wave back.
So maybe I should go over there and thank him for the tree. Maybe we could sit on the porch and talk. It just occurred to me that in all the years we’ve known each other, we’ve never done that. Never really talked.
Maybe my mother’s right. Maybe there is more to Bryce Loski than I know.
Maybe it’s time to meet him in the proper li
ght.
A CONVERSATION WITH
WENDELIN VAN DRAANEN ABOUT FLIPPED
Q: Can you talk about your inspirations for writing Flipped? Did you have some unrequited crushes of your own? Or have annoying people crushing on you?
A: I was like young Juli, with a massive crush on the neighbor boy, and like young Juli, I’m sure I was incredibly annoying. But being a high school teacher was the real inspiration for writing Flipped. I’d see students with mondo crushes and want to say to the girls, “Oh, honey, he is so not worth it,” or to the guys, “She may be hot, but that’s all she’s got,” but of course I’m their teacher and there’s no way they can imagine that I know how they feel. So I wrote Flipped as a way of talking to teens about seeing others for who they are instead of what they look like. I wish I’d found a book like it when I was growing up. It would have helped me a lot.
Q: It’s great to hear the story from both Bryce’s and Juli’s point of view—was it your plan from the beginning to tell this in alternating chapters?
A: My plan was two viewpoints, but originally I envisioned the book to be one that had two sides—Bryce’s side and Juli’s side—where you would have to flip the book over to read the other point of view and the sections would meet in the middle. I love the symbolism of this, but when it came down to it, the storytelling was better served by having alternating chapters.
Q: Have you ever raised chicks? Are you a climber of trees? Do you play in a band with a continually changing name?! All the details in the book are so vivid—are they drawn from your own life?
A: No, yes, and, uh … yeah. Although the band has never had a name that had anything to do with leg lifting. Writing is a combination of experiences and research, and the whole chick thing took a lot of research. Climbing the tree? That was very natural to write about. Skyler’s garage? Piece of cake.
Q: Do you have any plans to write a sequel to Flipped?
A: I’ve had a lot of requests for a sequel, but I think it’s the wrong thing to do. My purpose for this book is to get the reader to think about what they would want for themselves in a relationship. If I write a sequel and show what happens to Bryce and Juli, then that’s answering the question for them. What I tell fans is to put themselves into Bryce’s or Juli’s shoes and live their life in a way that would make for the future they would want.
Q: I know fans have written to you complaining that Juli and Bryce don’t kiss at the end of the book. Why did you make that choice?
A: Because the whole point of the book is that true love is anchored in knowing and respecting the person. And although Juli and Bryce are finally starting to see each other for who they are, this process takes time. I love the open-ended optimism of Flipped, but I do understand that my readers wanted to see kissing, so I dedicated my next romantic comedy—Confessions of a Serial Kisser—to fans of Flipped. You wanted kissing? You got kissing! And although, as in Flipped, the premise seems simple, Confessions has a lot going on “beneath the surface.” It may be wrapped in humor and kissing, but it’s really a story about finding yourself and the healing power of forgiveness.
HERE’S A SNEAK PEEK
AT ANOTHER GREAT ROMANCE
FROM WENDELIN VAN DRAANEN
Excerpt from Confessions of a Serial Kisser copyright © 2008
by Wendelin Van Draanen Parsons.
All rights reserved.
1
Dirty Laundry
MY NAME IS EVANGELINE BIANCA LOGAN, and I am a serial kisser.
I haven’t always been a serial kisser. There was a time not that long ago when I had next to no kissing experience. It’s interesting how things can change so fast—how you can go from being sixteen with very few lip-locking credentials to being barely seventeen and a certified serial kisser.
It all started one day with dirty laundry.
At least that’s what I trace it back to.
My mother had said, “Evangeline, please. I could really use some help around the house.” She’d looked so tired, and what with homework and the amount of time I’d been wasting at Groove Records looking through old LPs and CDs, I had been slacking. Especially compared to the hours she’d been working.
So after school the next day I kicked into gear. I had the condo to myself because Mom was working her usual eleven A.M. to eight P.M. shift, and since my taste in music is old blues and classic rock (probably thanks to being bombarded with it since my early days in the womb), I selected an Aerosmith greatest hits CD and cranked it up.
I made the kitchen spotless during “Mama Kin,” “Dream On,” “Same Old Song and Dance,” and “Seasons of Wither,” sang along with “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion” while I cleaned the bathroom, then tidied the bedrooms through “Last Child” and “Back in the Saddle.”
It was during the pulsing beat of “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” that I began my fateful search for wayward laundry.
Laundry at the Logan girls’ residence isn’t found in hampers. It’s found on the floor, draped over chairs, putrefying in boxes and baskets … it’s anywhere my mom and I want to dump it. And in my rocked-out state I was checking for laundry in places I’d never looked before. Like on her closet floor, behind and between the big packing boxes that still serve as my mother’s dresser, and then under my mother’s bed. It was there that I discovered one dusty sock and a whole library of books.
Not just random books, either.
Romance books.
At first all I could do was gawk at the covers. I’d seen these kinds of books at the grocery store, but they were so obviously stupid and trashy that I wouldn’t be caught dead actually looking at one.
But now here I was with a whole library of trash in front of me and no worries that someone might spot me.
So as strains of “Angel” began playing, I looked!
I checked out all the covers, then started reading the blurbs on the backs. Aerosmith eventually quit playing, but I didn’t even notice. I was skimming pages, laughing at the ridiculous, flowery prose, my jaw literally dropping as I read (in great detail) how one book’s chisel-chested man and his luscious lady “joined souls in sublime adoration.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d found. Couldn’t believe my mother! While I was slogging through The Last of the Mohicans and The Red Badge of Courage for my insane literature teacher, Miss Ryder, my mother was reading books with bare-chested men and swooning women? Miss Ryder would have an English-lit fit over these books, and for once I’d agree with her!
But for each book I put down, I picked up another. And another. And another. Why, I don’t know. Was I looking for more soul joining? I don’t think so. Something to hold over my mother’s head? She didn’t need any more ravaging. I think it was more that I was still in shock over my mom being a closet romance freak.
But after ten pages out of the middle of a book called A Crimson Kiss, something weird happened: I actually kind of cared about Delilah, the woman that the story was about.
I read some more out of the middle, but since I didn’t get why Delilah was in her predicament, I went back to the beginning to figure it out.
I have no idea where the time went. I was carried away by the story, swept into the swirl of romance, racing hearts, anticipation, and love. They were things that were missing in my real life. After six months of watching my parents’ marriage implode, I found it hard to believe in true love.
But inside the pages of this book my parents’ problems vanished. It was just Delilah and her hero, Grayson—a man whose kiss would save her from her heartache and make her feel alive.
Love felt possible.
One kiss—the right kiss—could conquer all!
So I read on, devouring the book until I was jolted back to reality by my mother jangling through the front door.
Busted!
In my panic, it didn’t even occur to me that she was really the one busted. I just shoved her books back under her bed and escaped to my room with A Crimson Kiss.
2
OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS I read every book in my mother’s sub-mattress library including a self-help book on finding your inner power and another one titled A Call to Action on how to take charge of your life. (Books she’d gotten, no doubt, to help her get over my two-timing dad.)
But it was A Crimson Kiss that I kept going back to. It was A Crimson Kiss that I read and reread. The other romance novels didn’t have any layers to them; no real guts. It was like pop versus rock. Some people like the pure tones of pop, but to me it’s just gloss. There’s nothing behind it. Give me the heart-wrenching gritty guts of blues or rock any day.
Not that A Crimson Kiss was written in a gritty way, but it sure was heart-wrenching. And the kissing was incredibly passionate! I dreamed scenes from it at night, waking some mornings still feeling the breathless transcendence of a perfectly delivered kiss.
Once I was fully awake, though, reality would strike.
It was just a dream.
Just a romantic fantasy.
Then one morning, I found a book on the kitchen table beside an empty bowl. (A bowl with telltale signs of midnight bingeing on chocolate ice cream.) The book was splayed open, spine up, and the title was Welcome to a Better Life.
I looked it over as I ate my usual before-school bowl of cereal (in this case, Cheerios). The section titles were things like: “Re-envision Your Life!”; “The Time Is NOW!”; “The Change Is Yours to Make!”; “Living Your Best Life!”; “See It, Be It!”; “What Are You Waiting For?”; “Shift Your Paradigm!”; and “Four Steps to Living Your Fantasy!”
Four steps to living my fantasy?
This I had to see.
Too many anecdotes and testimonials later, the author finally put forth step number one:
Define Your Fantasy.
Okaaaaay.
I poured myself a second bowl of Cheerios and defined my fantasy:
I wanted love. A love like Grayson and Delilah’s.
But something about that felt wrong. It was too heavy. Too serious.
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