One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies (10 page)

Love,

Liz

P.S. Cameron and Whip sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g …

We've in Dream Class

In our usual circle,
when suddenly the gong starts sounding.
Bong. Bong! BONG!
BONG!

All of the kids leap up
and rush across the room
to duck under their desks.

They grab hold of a desk leg with one hand,
and cover their necks with the other.
So
I
do, too.

But my heart's beating faster
than the wings of a hummingbird.
What's going
on
?

Is that nonstop bonging
a signal that we're about to be
attacked by a chemical weapon?

I glance up and notice Wyatt
trying to catch my eye from underneath his desk.
How can he think about
flirting
at a time like this?

Then
the gong stops ringing.
Just as suddenly as it began.

Everyone crawls out
from under the desks
and comes back to sit in the circle.

At which point, Feather commends us
for our quick response to “the crisis.”
The
crisis
?

I nudge Colette and whisper,
“Do you mind if I ask you
what the heck just happened?”

“Oh, that?” she says,
blinking her lavender eyes at me.
“That was just an earthquake drill.”

An
earthquake
drill?
Oh, Jesus … Give me a good
old-fashioned hurricane
any
day.

At least you know when
they're
coming.

I'm Heading into the Cafeteria

When for some unknown reason
Colette grabs my hand,
and leads me away from the throngs
to sit together on a bench by the pot garden.
Just the two of us.
Like I'm one of the inner circle or something.

And in two seconds flat, we're talking about sex.
She tells me that none of her friends are virgins.
“You're considered a freak around here
if you haven't lost your virginity
by the time you turn fifteen,” she says.
“They don't call it El Lay for nothing.”

She says she lost hers
with a mega-famous movie star's son.
She tells me the name of his father,
but makes me swear not to tell a soul.
She says they did it in his pool house during a party.
“It only took about a minute,” she says.
“It was over so fast it wasn't even funny.”

“Did you love him?” I ask.
She looks startled. “Yeah. I guess.
Yeah. Sure. Why else?” she says with a shrug.
Then, suddenly, she asks me how far
I've
gone.
Can she be trusted
with such highly classified information?

I take a deep breath.
Then I confess: “Only to second base.”
Her eyebrows shoot up.
“But when you did that improv,” she says,
“you seemed so … I don't know …
so … experienced.”

“Well, my boyfriend Ray wanted to go further,”
I tell her. “
Much
further.
But I guess I wasn't ready.”
I feel my face turn three shades of pink.
“Oh God,” I moan. “I feel so backward,
so completely infantile telling you that.”

But Colette just laughs.
“Don't be silly.
You're
not from El Lay.
Besides, take it from me:
You aren't missing a thing.”
“You're right,” I say. “I'm missing a
thingy
.”
And both of us crack up.

I hope she's wrong about sex, though.

Because If and When I Decide to Go All the Way

I don't want it to be like it was for Colette.
With somebody that she didn't even care about.
Just to get
rid
of her virginity.
Like it was dandruff, for chrissake,
and sex was
Head " Shoulders
.

I know this sounds incredibly lame,
but I don't want losing my virginity
to feel like I'm
losing
something.
I want it to feel like I'm
finding
something.
I want sex to be amazing.
I want it to be life-alteringly wonderful.
And I want it to happen with someone I love.

I love Ray.
I really do.
Only I don't know if I love him
enough
.

Oh, maybe I should just quit fighting it
and do it with him when he comes out at Thanksgiving.
But what if we do it and I don't like it?
What if we do it and I love it?
Won't that make it even harder
to be living so far away from him?

What if we do it and then he just dumps me?
Like my father did to my mother.

Mom used to say that I should wait until I was married.
But a fat lot of good that did
her
.

Dear Mom,

How we things in Kingdom Come? ☺ I just checked! my e-mail box. Except for-the usual “Returned mail: Host unknown” message (and one very tempting offer to have my penis enlarged) it was empty.
Again
. Obviously, I didn't expect
you
to write to me, but I hoped that Lizzie would. She hasn't e-mailed me for like four days. Has she forgotten all about me? I sure haven't forgotten about
her
.
Or
you. I've been thinking about you a lot lately, Mom. I've been thinking about how pissed I am at you. Pissed at you for dying. Pissed at you for leaving me. Pissed at you for wrecking my whole entire life.

In fact, I'm so pissed at you right now, that I'd be wishing you were dead, if you weren't dead already.

Love u 4 Ever (but
hate
you today),

Ruby

Weekends with Whip

Every Friday after school
Whip whisks me away
on yet another so-called “bonding trip.”

Last weekend,
we sailed to Catalina.
I practically puked my guts out.

The weekend before that,
he dragged me to Legoland in San Diego.
What was he
thinking
?

The weekend before that,
we stayed in a cabin in the middle of nowhere
at this place called Zaca Lake.
There were bugs there the size of watermelons.

And the weekend before that,
Whip took me to Las Vegas
to play tic-tac-toe with a live chicken.
Funsies.

Whip never asks me where
I
want to go.
He never asks me what
I
want to do.
He says he gets a kick out of surprising me.

Has he ever
stopped to think
that maybe I don't
like
surprises?

That maybe I'm tired of listening
to the story of his life?
And tired of all his nosy questions about mine?

Max says Whip's just trying to show me
how much he wants to get to know me.
But
I
say he's a decade and a half too late.

The Only Great Weekend I've Had Since I've Been Here

Was the one just after school first started,
when Whip had to go up to Vancouver
to reshoot the ending of
Severe Tire Damage
,
his latest piece of crap.

So Max and I got to hang out alone together.
I know he was only doing his job.
That Whip was paying him overtime to baby-sit me.
But Max never made me
feel
that way.
Not even for a second.

We just stayed around the house—
swimming, shooting hoops, listening to Eminem,
ordering in pizza and Chinese food,
telling each other bad jokes,
playing Scrabble, arm wrestling …

I loved every boring minute of it.

“You've Got Mail”

The little man sounds so happy for me.
And he should be:
there's finally an e-mail from Lizzie.

Finally.
After five whole days
of shameless neglect.

I practically inhale each word,
the lump that's lodged in my throat
expanding at an alarming rate.

First she apologizes
for not writing me sooner,
but she says her computer crashed

and she couldn't call me
since The Evil Stepmom wouldn't let her
because the phone bill's been astronomical.

Then she tells me all about this amazing party
she went to last night at David Schweitzer's.
About how absolutely everyone was there.

Including Ray.
And about how much fun they all had
bouncing in the moon bounce.

And about how Ray totally agreed with her that
it would have qualified as a peak experience,
if only I had been there, too.

Oh, Lizzie,
Lizulah, Lizorama,
I miss that raspy voice of yours.

And that funny rumbly laugh.
I've got to hear it.
Right now!

I grab the phone.
You'll still be up.
It's only ten o'clock.

I dial your number.
It rings.
You say, “Hello?”

But something's wrong.
You sound listless,
groggy

That's when I remember: it's one o'clock in the morning in Massachusetts.

I hang up without saying a word,
too embarrassed to admit
it was me that woke you.

Now I'm just sitting here, gritting my teeth,
wishing I could scream it all out,
like one of those howlers from my dream.

But the last thing I want
is Whip all over me,
asking me to tell him what the matter is.

So I keep a lid on it.

West Coast Blues

It just isn't fair
that Liz and Ray are there
while
I'm
stuck in L.A.,
day after sucky day.

It just isn't fair
that Liz and Ray are there,
having so much fun
while
I'm
having

none.

Well,
Almost
None

I
did
manage to have a little fun
on my walk home from school today.
I'd just passed by Hamburger Hamlet,
when I saw this Latino guy,
not much older than me,
selling maps to the movie stars' homes.

He didn't say anything.
Just smiled the saddest smile in the world
and held out one of the maps for me to see.
I asked him how many maps he had.
And then I bought
every single one of them.

The lights that switched on in the guy's eyes
told me I'd just made his day.
Maybe even his
week
.
I can do things like that now.
Because Whip gives me
an embarrassingly huge allowance.

I've always hated rich people.
Thought they were shallow
and stuck up
and snotty and spoiled.
Now I
am
a rich person.
How weird is
that
?

Not quite as weird as the fact
that
my
house is on the map!
And hey, I didn't know that we lived
six doors away from Kevin Spacey …
By the way, you don't happen to know
thirty-six people with a burning desire

to know where Mel Gibson lives, do you?

Hi Roobie,

It's me, Lizzie. And guess who's sitting here right next to me? R-A-Y!

Hey, Ruby Dooby.

That was Ray. But I shoved him out of the way because he's such a pitiful typist. It took him almost 5 minutes just to type those 3 words! Ray says to tell you that that's not even slightly true. He says to tell you that I'm just a pushy bi—Hey, wait a minute!

Anyhow, we're at my house working on this mega-dumb math project together. Ms. Welford says we have to take a small object and make an exact replica of it that's 14 times bigger than actual size. We chose a Tic Tac box. We've worked on this idiotic thing every day after school for a week now and we aren't even halfway through. Ray says to tell you, “This bites, babe.”And to complicate matters, The Evil Stepmom says she won't let me go to the Halloween dance next Saturday night unless we're finished by then. Ray says to tell you, “HELP!!!!!”

Loads of love from the Tic Tac Zombies

P.S. All your worries about You-know-who are unfounded. Trust me.

P.P.S. Ray's demanding to know who You-know-who is. But I'm refusing to tell him. I guess he'll just have to wonder, won't he?

Dear Lizziopolis,

I loved your e-mail. But next time e-mail me when Ray's not around, okay? So you can really fill me in. On everything. And please, don't mention You-know-who in front of him again! if he starts asking you a lot of questions, he may figure out how truly insecure I am about our relationship. Which would be deeply awful …

How's Project Tic Tac going? Will it be done in time for you to go to the dance? I sure hope so. Someone's got to keep me up to date on the continuing saga of Ray and Amber …

Love,

Ruby

P.S. I was walking home from school yesterday and I saw Queen Latifah on a skateboard. I swear to God!

Dear Rube,

Don't say I never did anything for you. The only reason I asked Ray to be my partner on this stupid project in the first place was to keep Amber from asking him. Which she obviously would have, if I hadn't beaten her to it.

But I had no idea how pathetic Ray is at math. I have to explain everything to him over and over again. I've been way internalizing my anger so that I don't cause permanent damage to his delicate male ego. But this project would be 14 times easier to do without him! You owe me one. Big time.

Grouchily yours,

Liz

P.S. I was walking home from school yesterday and I saw Bernie Glipman on a bench. I swear to God!

Halloween's Not Till Tomorrow

But apparently it's a Lakewood tradition
to celebrate a day ahead of time.
(A tradition no one bothered to inform
me
of.)

Absolutely
everyone's
in costume.
And I don't mean
the tacky kind you buy at Target.

These things look like they're on loan
from major motion picture studios.
Which is probably because—they
are
!

Colette says that her mother
is friends with the guy who owns
Miramax.

That's why they let her borrow
that shimmery dance costume
that Renée Zellweger wore in
Chicago
.

Wyatt says that his Uncle Jack
(by which I think he means Nicholson!)
pulled a few strings over at New Line Cinema.

That's how he got hold of that Frodo costume.
He says it's the actual one
Elijah Wood wore in
The Lord of the Rings
.