Dear Dr. Maude,

I know that the last few (okay, more like twenty) e-mails I’ve written you, I’ve sometimes (okay, a lot of times) ended up mentioning the fact that you never write me back. Well, the reason I’m writing to you today is to tell you that when I say that, it’s only because my teacher Mr. Eglington is always on us to “state the facts in a clear and concise manner” and that just happens to be a fact. But, the other day when I was watching this show on Animal Planet about female animals that completely IGNORE their babies—not even FEEDING them, which means that some surrogate animal has to do it or else they DIE OF STARVATION—for some weird reason it reminded me of you.

I started to worry that maybe the reason you haven’t written me back is because you think when I say stuff like that—you know, the fact that I’ve been writing to you for more than a year and haven’t gotten a SINGLE response—it’s because I’m trying to make you feel guilty. But that is so not true. Like I said, I’m just stating the facts in a clear and concise manner. And, well, unfortunately, that’s a fact.

Like I’ve ALSO said a bunch of times before, I wasn’t going to write to you anymore—especially not to ask you for advice—but now that I’ve gotten this far, I should probably just go ahead and do it this one last time. So my problem is this: Mom and Alan have been acting VERY weird the last few weeks. We’re talking lots-of-conversations-behind-closed-doors-in-such-soft-voices-that-even-expert-overlisteners-like-myself-can’t-overlisten. (As I’ve told you before, overlistening is not the same as eavesdropping. It’s different.) And lots of closing their laptops very quickly whenever Laurel and I happen to walk by them. And lots of Mom, who’s usually in a very good mood because she’s a Buddhist, acting a little cranky. She even ended up gong to her shrink twice in one week instead of her usual one time.

Laurel and I have tried to figure it out, but so far we haven’t been able to come up with anything other than maybe they’re breaking up. There’s no real reason why we think that would happen, except the fact that Laurel did a movie once where she played the daughter of a couple who was about to get divorced and they acted like this right before they told her.

I guess because we’re a family that’s so big on communicating, we could just call an emergency Parker-Moses Family Meeting and ask them what the heck is going on, but I’m afraid to do that. Because what if they ARE breaking up? Laurel and I have already decided that if that’s the case, we’re going to continue to be best friends and fristers anyway.

Obviously, this is a very important matter, so even though you’ve ignored all my other e-mails, if you could answer this one, I would appreciate it. Seeing that it’s a life-and-death thing. Well, not a death thing exactly, but you know what I mean.

Thanks very much.

yours truly,

Lucy B. Parker

“Maybe your mom is pregnant and that’s why she’s so cranky. According to one of my moms, pregnancy is like PMS times a hundred,” my non-frister BFF Beatrice said as we ate lunch in Arizona the next day. Well, the area of the cafeteria that, if it were a map of the United States, would be Arizona. Becoming class president hadn’t made me so popular that I had moved to Kansas (the state that was smack in the middle of the country and where the super-popular kids, like Cristina Pollock, sat), but at least I wasn’t in Alaska anymore. Although the looks on our Colorado and Utah neighbors’ faces once they got a whiff of Beatrice’s sardine sandwich made it seem like they wished we were.

I shook my head as I swallowed a bite of my peanut butter and honey sandwich. It may have made my mouth stick together, but at least it didn’t reek. “No. She’s too old,” I sighed. “Plus, whenever I ask that, she pats her stomach and says, ‘This store is closed.’”

After Sarah got pregnant with Ziggy, my biggest fear was that Mom was going to go ahead and have a baby, too. That was back when I didn’t really like babies because I had never held one before and I was afraid I’d drop them. But once Ziggy was born, I discovered I had this crazy baby-whispering talent where I could make them stop crying the minute I picked them up. Because I wasn’t good at singing or anything coordination-oriented, I considered the baby-whispering thing my second official talent after advice giving (I had a column in the school paper). Which is why I decided I wouldn’t have been all that upset if Mom did get pregnant.

“Oh! Oh! I know!” gasped Alice, my next non-frister BFF after Beatrice. As she bounced up and down in her chair, a meatball fell out of her sub and rolled off the table, just missing my next, next non-frister BFF Malia’s leg. Because Alice was what Alan called “an overexcitable type,” she could be very dangerous to eat with. “Whoops. Sorry,” she said to Malia. “Wait a second—what was I just saying?” she asked after she picked up the meatball.

“You were saying ‘Oh! Oh! I know!’” Malia replied in a very Alice-sounding voice. Although she was much more into drawing (with two parents who were artists, she had been lucky enough to inherit that talent from them), I was always telling her that she should try out for the school play because she was great at acting.

“Oh right,” Alice said. After pushing her tray into the middle of the table, she began to bounce up and down again. “Oh! Oh! I know!” she gasped as Beatrice rolled her eyes and shook her head. As a born and bred New Yorker, Beatrice had no problem saying what was on her mind at all times—even if it was just with her expressions. When we were first becoming friends it was a little intimidating, but after we had known each other a while, I realized that someone saying “You have a booger hanging from your nose” was a lot more helpful than someone who was so afraid of hurting your feelings that she let you walk into the cafeteria like that.

“What?” I asked.

“What what?” Alice replied, confused.

This time I was the one who rolled my eyes. Partly because, after eight months of living in Manhattan, I was on my way to becoming a New Yorker. And partly because you had to be like a nun or a super-duper mellow yoga person to not get annoyed with Alice. “We were talking about my mom, and why she might be cranky, and you said ‘Oh! Oh! I know!’ in a way that made it seem like you knew.”

“Oh right. Now I remember,” she said. “What I was going to say was maybe your mom is really a spy. From, like, Russia or something. And she didn’t mean to fall in love with Alan but she did. And once the president of Russia found out he got really mad and now she’s not allowed to go back there or else they’ll kill her.

This time even Malia—who was pretty much the nicest person I had ever met— rolled her eyes.

“Okay, (a) my mother isn’t a Russian spy—”

“How do you know?” Alice interrupted. “She could be. Just because she speaks perfect English and doesn’t have an accent doesn’t mean anything. Spies are expert actors. In fact, maybe that’s why she started going out with Alan—so she could learn acting tips from Laurel.”

I shook my head. “You know what? That’s just so crazy I’m not even going to go to (b),” I said.

Beatrice patted my hand. “Don’t worry, Lucy—if they do split up and you have to move back to Northampton, we’ll come visit you.”

“Sure,” Alice said. “We won’t forget about you like that girl what’s-her-name who moved away before fifth grade.” She turned to Beatrice. “What was her name again? The really nice one who wore headgear at night?”

Beatrice shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

I hadn’t even thought about that part. If Mom and Alan split up, would we move back to Northampton? Granted Dad and Ziggy and Sarah were there, but I felt like New York was my home now. Plus, I had only recently stopped being the New Girl. I wasn’t ready to become a What’s-Her-Name again.

“Okay, this is not good,” I said.

“I have an idea,” Malia said. “If you were giving yourself advice about this situation, what would you tell yourself?”

I thought about it. Advice was definitely something I knew about. After the original advice columnist for our school newspaper got fired for plagiarism, I ended up taking over the job, and it turned out I had a real knack for it. So much so that when the trial period was over, Dr. Remington-Wallace, our principal, extended my contract. Although I had been using the pseudonym of “Annie” at first, I decided to come out and let everyone know it was me, mostly because as class president I felt that keeping my identity secret, while not exactly a lie, wasn’t the best example to put out there.

“I would tell myself…that this is not good,” I replied.

“But you can’t move!” Laurel cried that night from her bed before dinner after I told her about the conversation at lunch.

“It’s not like I want to!” I cried back as I paced around her very neat, not-a-thing-out-of-place bedroom. I tried to ignore the fact that my ten-year-old cat, Miss Piggy, was curled up in Laurel’s lap, purring so loud they probably heard it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean in France. Or at least a few floors down in Beatrice’s apartment.

Even though I was the one who fed Miss Piggy and scooped her litter box and cleaned up her yakked-up hairballs and gave her Greenie treats, she had never really liked me. And when Laurel had come into the picture? Forget it. Suddenly, she started sleeping in Laurel’s room (I had to lock my door to get Miss Piggy to stay in mine) and cuddling with her. (When I tried to force her to cuddle, all I got were hisses and scratches.)

That was why a few months earlier I had launched Operation New Kitten in order to get a pet that I could train to actually like me. As if to try and make me feel worse, Miss Piggy burrowed down deeper into Laurel’s lap and began to make biscuits on her legs. Although Mom said that cats didn’t know how to give dirty looks, Miss Piggy sure did. And she also knew how to smile. Well, at Laurel.

I stopped pacing. “Wow. You really do look blind,” I said, impressed.

Laurel focused her eyes. “I do?! Thanks,” she said with a smile before she unfocused them again.

Ever since Laurel had signed on to do this new movie called Life Is What Happens When You’re Making Other Plans she had been obsessed with getting into character, which explained why she looked blind. According to her agent, Marv, and her publicist, Marci, Laurel was going to win an Academy Award for the movie. Even though it hadn’t even started shooting (not until next spring) they were all very sure about this fact.

When I first started living with Laurel, I had loved reading her scripts. Not only were they interesting, but I was super flattered that she cared about my opinion. But because she was offered like five movies a week, and the scripts were over a hundred pages, that was a lot of reading—even for someone like me who enjoyed reading. So now I only read the ones that she was seriously considering.

I loved Life (it got tiring saying Life Is What Happens When You’re Making Other Plans) right away. First of all, it was based on a quote by John Lennon, my favorite Beatle. (The exact quote was “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” which is even more exhausting to say.) But even if had had a different title, I still would’ve liked it. By the time I was done reading it, I had laughed and cried so many different times I felt like I needed a nap.

The movie was about was this girl named Jenny who goes blind and, instead of being sad about it, decides to make a list of one hundred things she wants to do before she dies and then sets out to do them all. In the end, she gets an eye transplant and can see again, so while it’s sad for a lot of the movie, it ends up being happy on account of the fact that people in Hollywood are really big on happy endings. Although I didn’t like Laurel’s publicist, Marci, because she had gotten mad at me on the set of Laurel’s movie in L.A. after I had mistakenly talked to a reporter who I didn’t know was a reporter, I had to agree with her when she said that it was one of the best scripts she’d ever read.

“But the Oscars won’t be half as great if you’re not sitting next to me,” Laurel said. “Plus, if you move, you’ll have to find a whole new official local crush.”

Oh no. I hadn’t even thought about that. I sighed. This whole Three-Crush Rule was a major pain in the butt. When Beatrice and I became friends, she had informed me that it was common knowledge that everyone had to have three: a local one; a long distance/vacation one; and a celebrity one. Although we didn’t have this back in Northampton, apparently this was a well-known fact in New York. So well known that, according to Malia, they even knew about it in Italy, which is where she lived before moving to New York and replacing me as the New Girl. That’s why I had decided it was log-worthy and had become the Keeper of the Crushes with my official log called “The Official Crush Log of the Girls at the Center for Creative Learning in New York, NY.” (I had another log as well—“The Official Period Log of the Girls at the Center for Creative Learning in New York, NY,” which, sadly, my name had yet to be entered in.)

Frankly, I didn’t know what the big deal about boys was. It wasn’t like you could go do fun stuff with crushes like you did with your friends such as play TWUO (The World’s Ugliest Outfit). Plus, even the really cute ones who showered on a daily basis gave off this funky boy smell that was a mix of chicken noodle soup and wet socks.

That being said, because of all the pressure being put on me to come up with my picks, I had recently decided on Beatrice’s brother, Blair, as my local crush. Although he played chess, talked with his mouth full, and had food stains on his clothes, the fact that he lived only a few floors below me in our apartment building made him extremely local. I had even gone as far as to ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance that my school recently had (the girls had to ask the boys, which was awful). He couldn’t go, but he had said in an e-mail to me that we’d go do something some other time. Which I was still waiting for.

Before Laurel and I could figure out what to do to stop Mom and Alan from breaking up, there was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” Laurel called out. “Wait…I mean…come in,” she said in a depressed, just-found-out-she’s-blind voice. She turned to me. “How was that?”

As I gave her a thumbs-up, Alan poked his head in. “Sorry for the short notice, but I wanted to let you girls know there will be an emergency Parker-Moses Family Meeting at seven p.m. tonight. I’ll send out an Outlook invite as well so it’s synced on your computer devices.”

Laurel and I looked at each, panicked. The breakup was happening even faster than we had thought.

“And Brian and Sarah will be joining us via Skype, so we’ll be starting right on the dot.”

We looked at each other again, even more freaked out. My dad and his girlfriend, Sarah, were included in this? Probably to talk about me moving back to Northampton.

This was not good.

“You did what?!” Laurel gasped after Alan and Mom told us the big news.

“We set a date for the wedding,” Alan replied. “A month from Saturday at the Black Horse Inn in Cabot Village, Vermont.”

“Population two hundred thirty-nine,” Mom added excitedly. “And home of the world-famous Cabot Creamery.”

“Supposedly their cheddar cheese is out of this world,” Alan said.

“It’s about six hours from here,” Mom added.

“Six hours and ten minutes,” Alan corrected. “Or 329.38 miles, however you want to look at it.”

“Wait a minute—so you’re not breaking up?” I asked.

“What?” Mom asked, confused.

“Nothing. Forget it,” I said.

“Oh, that’s terrific!” Dad cried from through the computer. “We’re so happy for you.”

Thinking I heard a sniffle, I squinted and leaned into the computer. “Dad, are you crying?” I asked.

He wiped his eyes. “Yes. They’re tears of joy, Lucy.”

While I knew I was lucky to have parents who very rarely yelled at me, the fact that my dad wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to cry in front of people was a little bit weird.

“And, Brian, we have a favor we’d like to ask you,” Mom said.

“We were wondering if you’d officiate at the ceremony,” Alan continued.

“Really?” Dad asked. About a year before he had become an ordained minister through the Internet so he could perform the wedding for Sarah’s friends Seth and Marc. It seemed a little strange that for $39.95 anyone could do it, but seeing that it came with a certificate and everything, I guess it was official.

As Mom and Alan nodded, more tears came. “I’d be honored,” Dad said.

Obviously, I was glad that Mom and Alan weren’t breaking up for a bunch of reasons—one of them being that I still hadn’t fully recovered from the packing and unpacking that came with the move from Northampton to Manhattan. But I had to say the fact that my mother was asking my father to handle the wedding ceremony to her new husband was just plain weird. Although, given my family, “weird” was the new normal.

As I watched Mom beam at Alan, though, I forgave her for any weirdness. The truth was that as organized and nervous as Alan could be, I had never seen her so happy. They loved each other a lot, but not in the totally crazy way that the people on the telenovela that I liked to watch with our housekeeper, Rose, after school. (Rose was from Jamaica, and she didn’t speak Spanish, either. But once you watched the shows for a while, it was easy enough to catch on. Basically, they all had the same things as American soap operas: people falling in love with people who were already married to someone else and people coming back from the dead.) As Mom once put it, she and Alan were “best friends who enjoyed kissing each other.”

This is going to be fantastic!” Sarah said. “Hey, I know a shaman up in that area. Maybe he could come and do some sort of blessing.” In addition to being a yoga teacher, Sarah was into all sorts of crazy stuff like blessing and using sticky essential oils to cure everything from backaches to period cramps. (When mine finally came, I guess I’d give that a try.) “He’s great with that kind of thing. Except you have to supply your own birds’ beaks and stuff like that. Or maybe my mom could come from Arizona!”

Uh-oh. I had met Sarah’s mom at Ziggy’s baby shower and she was bonkers. We’re talking the-woman-thought-her-house-had-been-hit-with-a-spaceship kind of bonkers.

Mom and Alan looked at each other nervously. “Uh, that’s interesting, Sarah,” Mom said. “Why don’t we talk about that some other time?”

Like, say, never.

“I can’t believe you finally agreed on a place,” Laurel said.

“Neither can we,” Mom replied.

While Mom and Alan had a lot in common—such as the fact that they both loved movies directed by some guy named Woody Allen—they were also very different in a lot of ways. Like the fact that Mom enjoyed hikes and nature while Alan got totally freaked out if there was a fly in the apartment. It was bad enough when they had been trying to pick a place to go for their one-year anniversary (and even worse when I got involved and almost totally screwed it up), but the whole where-to-get-married thing had been a nightmare.

“I think the Black Horse Inn will be perfect,” Alan said. “It’s very pretty and has a country feel, but according to the brochures, you can still get cell phone reception and the New York Times. Plus, I checked the Old Farmer’s Almanac, and even though we’ll be into November, there’s no snow in the forecast for that weekend.”

“But how are you going to plan a whole wedding in a month?” Laurel asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “The women on all those reality shows about weddings take like a year to plan theirs.”

“Not to mention they have a lot of meltdowns and scream at people,” Laurel added.

Mom shrugged. “There’s really nothing to plan. It’s just going to be the six of us—well, seven, including Ziggy. Very low-key. I mean, it’s not like I’m really the wedding type.” That was true. Mom was so laid-back that sometimes as a joke, Alan would grab her wrist and hold it and say he was feeling for a pulse. “Other than the fact that after I’m going to have to start checking the ‘married’ box again on questionnaires, it’s just going to be like any other day.”

I looked at Laurel and put my arm around her shoulder. “Except that’ll be the day that Laurel and I become official fristers.”

She smiled as she put her arm around mine.

Which, as far as I was concerned, would be the most awesome day of my life.

Well, at least until I finally got my period.

“There’s something we wanted to ask you girls, though—” Alan said.

“—we wanted to know if you would give the toast at the reception,” Mom finished.

Mom and Alan did that a lot—finished each other’s sentences. I wondered if that was something that all couples did and if I ever had a boyfriend, if I’d end up doing that, too. (I actually hoped I wouldn’t. Because if I could finish his sentences, that would mean I’d know what he was thinking, which, frankly, would be pretty boring. Except around the holidays or my birthday when I could psychically tell what he was getting me for a gift.) Sarah did that to Dad a lot, too. But she also did that me, so in that case it was just an annoying interrupting habit thing versus a couple thing.

Laurel and I looked at each other and smiled. That would be awesome. Ever since becoming class president I had gotten a lot more comfortable with public speaking. Like to the point where I no longer had to use the tricks Laurel had taught me about imagining people in their underwear in order to take away my nerves.

Although I had to admit I was a little worried that if Laurel and I were going to give a toast together, she might end up hogging the whole thing. For the most part she was super generous (when she shared the swag from the kind of goodie bags she got from the parties she went to, it was along the lines of designer jeans and Ugg boots rather than glitter pens and SweeTarts). But sometimes when it came to stuff in front of an audience, she couldn’t stop the performer in her from coming out. Like when we ended up at a karaoke place during our first group date with Mom and Alan and she went to town signing “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera complete with hair flips as if she was a special guest judge on The Voice or something. (As for me, I sang The Beatles’ “Let It Be,” complete with microphone feedback and my mother having to help me out because I’m pretty much tone-deaf.)

“That’s so nice of you to ask us,” Laurel said. “But I think Lucy should do it herself.”

I looked at her. “You do?”

She nodded. “Yeah. You’re really the writer in the family.”

I smiled. With all the hundreds of scripts she had read over the years, that was a big compliment coming from her. And with all the experience I was getting with my advice column, I was getting pretty good at coming up with clever things to say without her help.

“Of course, I can look it over for spelling and grammatical errors,” she added.

Of course she could. And of course she would. Laurel may have been on the Best Dressed Teen lists of every magazine and dating Austin Mackenzie, her male equivalent in the teen heartthrob department, but what most people didn’t know was that if there was an Academy Award for Most Organized and a Total Stickler for Things Being Just So, Laurel would’ve won it hands down. I, on the other hand, was a little (okay, a lot) on the less-organized side—and that included not running spell-check when I wrote something.

“That would be great,” I replied with a smile.

When Laurel and I had first met, I was afraid that the fact that we were so different was going to be a huge problem, but it actually had turned out to be a really good thing.

If anyone had told me a year earlier that I would be living in New York City, with the most famous girl in the world, about to write a toast to read on the day that she and I officially became fristers, I never would’ve believed it.

But I was. And I had to say, other than the fact that my boobs wouldn’t stop growing and my period still hadn’t gotten here, my life was pretty awesome.