Dear Dr. Maude,

Okay, you are SO not going to believe the huge news that I have!!!

It turns out that Mom and Alan aren’t splitting up. Instead they’re finally getting married! Which means that in one month Laurel and I will OFFICIALLY be fristers. I’m excited about it for a bunch of reasons (getting to buy a new dress…wedding cake…getting to give the toast…no longer having to explain, “Well, we’re not officially fristers yet, but we will be once our parents get their act together and set a date”…wedding cake).

Last night before I went to bed, after getting yelled at by Mom for typing this on my iTouch when I was supposed to be sleeping, I thought about how freaked out I had been when Mom first told me she was dating Alan. You remember how worried I had been that Laurel was going to end up getting all the attention because she’s so famous and talented while I’m so normal and uncoordinated, right? Actually, you’d only know that if you had read my e-mails.

Anyway, that hasn’t happened. If anything, living with Laurel has been great because it’s showed me that just because someone’s life might look really awesome on the outside, you never know how they feel on the inside. Like the fact that Laurel gets very easily freaked out about things such as germs and messiness and tends to worry a lot.

And Alan is an awesome frather. (That’s friend + father instead of stepfather.) I mean, to organize a whole dance for me at home because he felt bad for me that my official local crush, Blair Lerner-Moskovitz, couldn’t go to the Sadie Hawkins one with me? That is soooo sweet. Even if his taste in music is kind of dorky (he played a song by these two old people Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand) and we ended up just going for ice cream instead.

Plus, guess what? Dad and Sarah and Ziggy get to come, too, because Dad’s performing the ceremony. I haven’t seen a lot of ministers in my life because my parents are Buddhists and are letting me choose my own religion, but I have seen a bunch of them on TV as I’ve flipped the channels to get to Animal Planet, and none of them had ponytails like Dad does. In fact, the ones who are Buddhist monks have shaved heads.

Okay, well, I’m going to go look at dresses on the Urban Outfitters website to wear to the wedding now.

yours truly,

Lucy B. Parker

In movies and TV shows, after someone announces they’re getting married, it seems like people go nuts and the speed revs up and everything gets super fast. Kind of like if you push the “4x” fast-forward button on the DVD remote control. Suddenly, all people can talk about is the wedding, which means all the other important things in life (i.e., the fact that you feel that your parents should really, really, REALLY let you get a kitten due to the fact that your cat that you take very good care of hates you) are put on hold.

But in the Parker-Moses family, the wedding was barely discussed. Well, at least by my mom. Which meant that she had all the time in the world to tell me yet again that no matter how many times I asked about the kitten, the answer was still no and that because Miss Piggy was family, she and I were going to have to use our conflict-resolution skills to work out whatever issues we were having. Which, if Miss Piggy had spoken English instead of Catese, may have worked, but she didn’t.

“Look at it this way,” I said to Mom as she and I made our way through Central Park during our IBS (IBS = Individual Bonding Session = something Alan had come up with when we blended our families) a few afternoons later after she picked me up at the Center for Creative Learning, my school on the Upper East Side. “Weddings are all about new beginnings and commitment. And what better way to celebrate a new beginning than committing to a cute baby kitten!”

Laurel had helped me come up with that the night before. When she suggested it, I was afraid that it sounded a little TV commercial-like (which is why I agreed that it was good that I was taking care of the speech). But it was better than what I was planning on saying, which was “The reason I want a kitten is because it really hurts my feelings to watch Miss Piggy act like some starstruck fan whenever she’s around Laurel.” Even though that was true.

Mom shook her head. “Nice try, but no.”

I sighed. “Fine. If you’re not going to let me get a kitten, will you at least let me go wedding dress shopping with you?” Unlike most women, Mom hated to shop. But the good news is that when she did go, and I went with her, she always let me get something, too. And there was a pair of polka-dot Converse hi-tops that had just come out that I really, really, really wanted and didn’t feel like waiting until Kwaanza for. (Because Mom was Buddhist, Alan was Jewish, and Laurel and I had been raised with no religion, in one of our family meetings about the holidays, we had taken a vote and decided we would celebrate a neutral holiday.)

She shook her head. “I’m not buying a wedding dress.”

“What are you talking about? You have to!”

“How come?” she asked.

I thought about it. Why was she asking me? I had never been married. “Well, because, it’s…the weddingly thing to do,” I finally said.

She turned to me. “Says who? Fashion designers and magazines who want to force women to spend their hard-earned money on overpriced garments for which they end up almost starving themselves to get into so that they can fulfill some fantasy that was thrust upon them in childhood by the fairy tales that were read to them about waiting around for a prince to come save them?”

Uh-oh. Mom had just stepped up on what Alan called her soapbox, which, because I had never seen one, I figured was something they used to have in the old days. While she may have been laid back, Mom was what my dad’s mom called a “feminist” (although the way she said it made it sound like it wasn’t a great thing to be). When it came to women’s rights, Mom tended to go on and on and her face got red as she talked.

“Mom, I’m twelve,” I replied. “And that’s a lot of syllables for me to take in when I haven’t had my after-school snack yet.”

She laughed and ruffled my brown hair. Which, thankfully, was on its way to medium-long-dom versus super-short-dom—something I feared would never happen after the Straightening Iron Incident before the start of sixth grade. I overshot the mark by holding the straightening iron on my pigtail too long in an attempt to get rid of my curls. “You’re right,” Mom said. “It’s just that I don’t want to make a big deal about this day. It’s like Valentine’s Day,” she explained. “I just never understood why you’re supposed to love someone more on that day versus the other 364. And a wedding is the same kind of thing.”

I guess she had a point, but hopefully she wouldn’t mind if I dressed up because I had found three really awesome dresses on the Urban Outfitters website the other night.

“As far as I’m concerned, everything’s just business as usual,” she said.

Well, it was business as usual until Marissa got involved by being all Marissaish and stirring things up. Marissa was a friend of mine from Northampton. I wasn’t sure who was more annoying: her or Alice.

It started the next afternoon, as we were having our weekly Triple S. Triple S stood for Skype Snack Session and was something that I had originally started with the actor Connor Forrester, whom I had met out in L.A. when I was there with Laurel. Much to everyone’s surprise (no one more than mine) I ended up having my first kiss with Connor. It wasn’t like we became all boyfriend/girlfriend after that, though. Super-cute teen superstar + me = weird combination. He was nice but a little too goofy for me, which was why we were just friends. That totally bummed Laurel out because Connor also happened to be her boyfriend Austin’s BFF. (“Two BFFs dating two BFFs?! How cute would that be?!” she cried.)

I didn’t even like Connor enough in that way to have him as my celebrity crush, let alone my long-distance/vacation one. Even though, given all the trouble I was having coming up with crush ideas, being able to use him in both categories would have been very helpful for the log.

When Marissa heard about the Triple S’s she did this whole “Ooh! Ooh! I loooooove that soooooo much!” thing before texting me five times a day saying, “I want to have a Triple S, too! Can we? Please? Please? Let me know IMMEDIATELY.” I ignored her for two days until I couldn’t take it anymore and finally caved and said yes.

With Connor the Triple S’s were fun (except when he played his guitar, which he liked to think he was really good at, but actually was not), as were the ones with Ziggy. You’d think that Skyping with a baby would be boring on account of the fact that they pretty much just lie there and try and eat their toes. Even though he couldn’t talk yet, I was pretty sure that from the little noises he made throughout our conversation Ziggy totally understood what I was saying.

But the Triple S’s with Marissa were beyond painful. Part of it was because she was a very loud eater, which meant that I could hear every crunch of every SunChip, her favorite snack (at least I couldn’t smell it, which was good seeing that she liked the French Onion flavor the best). And part of it was because every few minutes she would lean into the computer camera and yell, “YOU CAN REALLY SEE ME THROUGH THIS?” and I’d say, “Yes, Marissa, I can see you.” And then she’d yell, “AND YOU CAN HEAR ME, TOO? ARE YOU SURE? BECAUSE IF YOU WANT I CAN SPEAK LOUDER?” And I’d say, “That’s okay, Marissa. You don’t need to speak louder. In fact, you might want to speak a little softer so that I’m only a little deaf rather than completely.” And then she’d say, “WHAT DID YOU SAY? I CAN’T HEAR YOU. OMIGOD—DO YOU THINK I’M LOSING MY HEARING?” until I wrote on a piece of notebook paper Try unmuting the Mute button and held it up to the camera. And then sometimes, depending on what kind of mood I was in, I ended up “accidentally” disconnecting the Skype thing for a few minutes because a person can only deal with someone so annoying for so long.

“OMIGOD, I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE THEY FINALLY SET A DATE!” Marissa shrieked into the computer as she crunched on SunChips.

“Yup. They did,” I replied for like the tenth time as I turned the volume down so it was almost off.

“THAT IS SOOOOO COOL!” she shrieked again. She was so loud that Miss Piggy looked up from the floor where she was grooming herself and glared at the computer before hissing at me.

I looked at her. “What did I do?”

“You know, Lucy, I hate to point this out because it will probably hurt your feelings, but Miss Piggy never really liked you,” Marissa said. “Even before you moved in with Laurel and she started sleeping on Laurel’s bed because she wanted to, not because she was being forced to because the door was locked and she couldn’t get out—”

“Can we talk about something else?” I said.

“Sure. Let me think. Ummmmmmmmmmmm…”

I cringed. Marissa could draw an umm out for MINUTES.

She began to jump up and down in her chair. “Oh! Oh! I know!” she cried. “We can talk about me coming to the wedding!”

I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s family only.”

“But I’m kind of family,” she said. “You know, because I’m Ziggy’s babysitter.” I don’t know what my father had been thinking when he finally agreed to let Marissa watch Ziggy. He said that she was very good at the job because she really paid attention to Ziggy, unlike other babysitters who just zoned out in front of the TV and let the baby cry until a commercial. But, still, exposing Ziggy to that much annoying behavior at such an early age could cause permanent damage. “That makes us almost related,” she added.

Yeah, about as related as I was to Mr. Kim, the Korean guy who owned the deli down the street. “Nope. Mom’s being really strict about all this,” I replied. She really was. It was kind of weird.

“And there’s also the fact that I used to be your best friend before you moved away and Cass became my best friend,” she added. “By the way, I know we’ve never talked about this, but I hope me being best friends with her didn’t hurt your feelings too much. At one point Cass and I talked about maybe you joining us in BFFdom, but Cass didn’t think it was a good match.”

Okay, (a) Marissa and I were never best friends, even after my BFFs Rachel and Missy dumped me right before sixth grade started and she and I were the only ones in our class who didn’t have one and she kept nagging me about it every day. And (b) I had met this Cass person when I was back in Northampton over the summer and she was right—we were definitely not a match. I didn’t even want to be friends, let alone BFFs, with that girl.

Plus, the fact that she and Marissa had decided like five hours after meeting each other that they were BFFs (“It was like love at first sight—but with friendship!” Marissa had cried) seemed awfully fast to me. In fact, if Beatrice and I ever got around to writing the guide to BFFdom that we kept talking about, I was going to make sure to include something about how you had to be friends with someone for at least six weeks before having the BFF talk, which was the amount of time me and Beatrice had waited.

“So the ex-BFF thing also makes us kind of related,” Marissa said.

“Yeah, kind of but not really,” I replied. “Listen, Marissa, I hate to do this but I just remembered I have to go”— I looked around the room as I tried to come up with a good excuse until my eyes landed on Miss Piggy, who was still glaring at me. Although I was very careful not to actually discuss Operation New Kitten in front of her, it seemed to me that, recently, she had been giving me more dirty looks, which had led me to believe that she might be psychic —“feed Miss Piggy.”

“But Miss Piggy doesn’t get fed until eight,” Marissa said. “Remember? Because if you do it earlier, then she gets really bad gas and ends up farting all through dinner and then everyone loses their appetites?”

At that, I could have sworn that Miss Piggy raised her eyebrow at the computer. At least I wasn’t the only person she got annoyed with. I sighed. That’s what I got for lying to someone who had taken care of my cat whenever we were on vacation. “Right. Well, then I have to—”

“So has The Change started?” Marissa asked as I wracked my brain for a non-lie excuse.

“The what?”

“You know—The Change. The thing that happens in blended families after the wedding,” she replied. There’s a lot that Marissa says that you can’t believe because she has this way of always messing up the facts. (Marissa: “Did you know that an elephant is only pregnant for twenty-two days before she has the baby?!” Me: “Um, it’s twenty-two months, Marissa. Which makes it the longest gestation period for any mammal. I saw that special on Animal Planet, too.”) But because Marissa’s parents had gotten divorced a few years before mine and then her mom married this guy named Phil who spent most of his time sitting in a recliner drinking beer and watching TV, she had more experience with the blended family stuff than I did.

Marissa had been the one who had explained to me that when a parent was dating someone and they said, “Things are getting serious,” that meant it was only a matter of time before they became engaged to that person. Which was exactly what happened with Mom and Alan.

“But they haven’t gotten married yet.”

“Yeah, I know. But because Alan’s so organized I thought it may have started early.”

“Yeah, but what is it?” I asked as a family of Mexican jumping beans began to dance in my stomach. “You never mentioned this Change thing before.”

“I didn’t? Huh. That’s weird. I’m surprised. You know, “cause it’s such a big deal and all.”

The jumping beans turned into trapeze artists. I leaned in closer to the computer. “Marissa—what’s The Change?!” I panicked.

Marissa moved back. “Gosh, Lucy. You don’t have to yell.”

“Okay, sorry. But you need to tell me what The Change is!”

“And by the way, because we were once best friends, I feel like I can tell you this,” she went on. “You have something hanging from your nose. I don’t think it’s an actual booger, but it’s booger-like.”

I swiped at it. “Marissa, if you don’t tell me what The Change is right this second I’m going to have to—”

“Tell people that I stuff my bra?” she asked anxiously. “You wouldn’t do that, would you? Because that would be really mean. Plus, ever since I started using socks instead of toilet paper it looks a lot more real,” she babbled. “And when I use knee socks instead of peds, my boobs are almost as big as yours!”

I rolled my eyes. “No, Marissa. I won’t tell people you stuff your bra.” When it came to boob stuff, I was very sensitive to other people’s feelings on account of the fact that my mother was not and had no problem announcing in front of anyone how much mine had grown and how many times I had already outgrown my bras since getting my first one almost a year ago.

“Okay, good. Phew,” she sighed. “So what was it we were talking about?”

“We were talking about this Change thing!”

“Oh right.”

“So what is it?”

“What’s what?”

After I was done banging my head on the desk, I looked at her. “The. Change.”

Even Miss Piggy had stopped grooming herself and looked interested.

“Oh. The Change is when, after the wedding, everyone stops being on their best behavior and goes back to being who they really are,” she explained. “So parents stop treating all the kids equal and start choosing favorites. Like how, right after the wedding, both Phil and my mom started getting all ‘Marissa, why can’t you be more like your sister?’”

I didn’t say it, because it would have been mean, but Marissa would probably have a lot more friends if she had been more like her sister, on account of the fact that her sister is only slightly, rather than completely, annoying. “Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen here,” I said nervously. “I already had a conversation with my mom about that stuff back when we first moved here and she wasn’t paying attention to me and it got all figured out.”

Marissa shrugged. “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She looked at her watch. “I have to go. Week with Wendi is about to start.”

Week with Wendi was Marissa’s favorite show. In it, Wendi Wallerstein followed different celebrities around for a week so that the audience got to see what they were like in their real life. It was kind of like the Stars—They’re Just Like Us! part of US Weekly but in 3-D. Because everything that Wendi said sounded like it had an exclamation point after it, it made sense that Marissa liked it. I myself would have rather watched something on Animal Planet, or, even better, Hoarders.

“Okay. Bye,” I said glumly. I looked over at Miss Piggy. “Have you heard anything about this Change stuff?” I asked her.

All I got was a hiss in return.

I sighed. Now a new kitten—that would be one change I’d look forward to.

When I first found out that Dr. Maude and I were neighbors, I thought I was set for life. Not only would I be able to get free advice whenever I wanted, but I’d also get to walk her two dachshunds, Id and Ego, through Central Park because we lived right across the street from it. Unfortunately, I was wrong on both counts.

In the whole time I had lived there I hadn’t run into her once—not even on the days when I found myself right in front of her door even though we lived on different floors. (Beatrice called it stalking, but I liked to think of it as exploring my surroundings in case I was elected fire drill captain for the building.)

Which meant that when it came to asking for advice from a non-family–related adult, I went to Pete, my doorman. From the minute he had offered me Gummy Worms—my favorite candy—when I moved in, Pete had pretty much been my BFF, adult-wise. And because he had been a doorman for so long, Pete knew a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff. (“I’m a doorman—we know these things” was something he said about ten times a day.) He was also big on giving the advice to “just be yourself,” which, frankly, I wasn’t completely sold on because of the fact that it just seemed so…easy. Even though when I followed that advice—which usually didn’t happen until after I screwed things up by not being myself—everything seemed to work out.

Because he had been a doorman for so long, Pete had seen more than his share of people getting divorced and then remarried, so I figured that if anyone had witnessed The Change firsthand, it was him.

“Pete, I need to ask you something,” I said after I got down to the lobby and found him double-checking the FedEx and delivery log he kept of all the packages and dry cleaning that had arrived that day for the people in the building.

“And I need to ask you something,” he said, opening his desk drawer and taking out a package of Gummi Worms. “Worm?” he asked, holding them out.

I took a few and settled in on the couch. “Thanks. Okay, you go first.”

“So last night, on my way home, as I took the N train back into Astoria”—Astoria was in Queens, another borough of New York. I had taken the N there once, by mistake, when I had first moved here, and got totally lost. Thankfully, Laurel had come to rescue me because that’s where the studio was where she shot her TV show The World According to Madison Tennyson “—I was thinking—”

Uh-oh. I settled back into the couch. When Pete started thinking, he could go on for a very long time.

“—about how I’m not very happy that Blair Lerner-Moskovitz still hasn’t gotten it together and asked you to go do something after sending you that e-mail.”

I cringed. Because of the adult BFF thing, Pete pretty much knew everything about my life. Maybe it was time to rethink that. Especially because even with all his doorman knowledge, one thing he didn’t know was how to keep his voice down when talking about crushes. “Pete!” I cried.

“What? Am I talking too loud again about your crush on Blair Lerner-Moskovitz?” he asked in just as loud of a voice. So loud that snoopy old Mrs. McDonald from 8B turned around from the wall of mailboxes to see who the crusher was. According to Pete, Mrs. McDonald was very bad news. He couldn’t prove it, but he was pretty sure that it was her who had tried to sell our garbage to one of the gossip magazines that had a “Stars—Their Garbage Is Just Like Ours!” section so she could make some money.

“(A) yes. Yes you are,” I said. “And (b) it’s B.L.M., remember?”

“Right. B.L.M. for Blair Lerner-Moskovitz,” he said.

Yup. Definitely rethinking how much to share with Pete from now on. “And (c), no he has not. Not that I’ve thought about it all that much.” Okay, fine, that was a bit of a lie. The truth was that sometimes, right before I fell asleep, I’d pop up in bed and think: Wait a minute—after I asked Blair to the Sadie Hawkins dance and he couldn’t go, he said we’d go do something. But he still hasn’t asked me to do anything, even though I’ve now run into him five times at his apartment when I was hanging out with Beatrice.

Pete shook his head. “I might have to talk to that boy,” he said. “You don’t just send a girl an e-mail asking her to do something and then not follow through.”

“I know,” I agreed. “If only because it’ll give you bad karma.”

“And if you’re Blair Lerner-Moskovitz—sorry, I meant B.L.M—you really don’t do it.”

He was too nice to say anything mean, but I knew that Pete thought it was weird that of all the boys in the world, I had chosen Blair as my local crush. It wasn’t like I wanted to have a crush on a former president of the AV Club/current member of the Upper West Side Chess Club. But out of all the boys I knew, he was the most decent choice I could come up with.

“Can I talk about my thing now?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Sure.”

“Okay. So do you know anything about this thing called The Change?”

“You mean The Change that happens in blended families after the wedding happens and it’s all official?” he asked.

How was it that I was always the last one to know about these things?! “Yes. That Change.”

“Well, sure I do. I’m a doorman.”

“And is it really, really bad?” I asked anxiously.

“It can be,” I heard a familiar voice say behind me.

I jumped and turned around to see Blair standing there wearing a Lucky Charms T-shirt, crunching away on some pita chips. For someone who was kind of loud, he sure could sneak up without a sound. I wished he would wear a bell or something.

“You know Marc Whitby in 3E?” he asked. “The kid who goes to that special school in New Hampshire because he’s a pyro?”

I shrugged. “I think I was in the elevator with him once.” If it was the kid I was thinking of, he was really creepy. Like stringy-hair-talking-to-himself-under-his-breath creepy.

“Before his mother got remarried, he was at the top of his class at Horace Mann,” Blair said. Horace Mann was one of the many different private schools in New York. “And captain of the soccer team. And the lacrosse team.”

“He was?” When I saw him, he looked like he would’ve gotten winded just walking to the bathroom.

Blair nodded. “Yup. Rumor has it that when The Change happened, his mom stopped coming to all his games because she was too busy going to watch his stepsister ride horses.”

I knew his stepsister. She was this annoying girl named Taylor who was obsessed with all things horses and was in all these equestrian competitions. In fact, with her long face and buck teeth, she kind of looked like a horse.

“It was like as soon as the ink was dry on the marriage license, Marc just became…invisible,” Blair said.

I felt my stomach start to get wonky—was that what was going to happen? Sure, up until now Mom and Alan had done a good job at making me feel like I was just as important as Laurel even though I wasn’t famous. Was that all just an act? After things were officially official, was everyone going to start ignoring me? Laurel was already Miss Piggy’s favorite—was she going to become both Mom and Alan’s, too? I was so freaked out I couldn’t even think about the fact that yet again he hadn’t brought up getting together.

Just then my phone beeped with a text from Alan. LUCY—PLEASE REPORT TO THE LIVING ROOM ASAP FOR AN EMERGENCY FAMILY MEETING. THANK YOU. Uh-oh. All caps was never good, especially when they came from Alan.

OK, I texted back. Did you tell Laurel yet?

SHE’S ALREADY HERE, he wrote back.

That meant he had told her about the meeting first. If we were equal, he would’ve texted us both at the same time.

This was not good.

This meeting had a special guest star—Laurel’s publicist, Marci.

“Oh hiiiii, Lisa!” Marci said all fakely from the living room couch. According to Laurel, most everything about Marci was fake: her hair color, her nails…even her boobs. Just like when I had met her in Los Angeles, her shiny red hair was perfectly combed and she was wearing super-high heels. Even though she lived in L.A. and not New York City, she was dressed in all black, which, according to Pete, was the New Yorker’s uniform. (You only had to look at Beatrice to know that was true.)

“It’s Lucy,” I corrected. “Lisa” was what all the gossip columns had called me when they thought I was dating Connor Forrester.

“Oh right. Sorry,” she replied, flashing a very white smile. “Look at how…colorful you are.” She tried to make her voice sound like she thought that was a good thing, but I could tell from the way she cringed that she was anti-color. Which meant that she was anti-me because I was all about color and a big supporter of wearing as many different ones as possible at once. For instance, in the form of a purple corduroy miniskirt with a red angora sweater and rainbow tights and lilac Converse sneakers, like I was right then.

Picking up the gavel that Mom had bought him as a jokey anniversary gift but that he took very seriously, Alan pounded it on the coffee table. “I hereby call this Parker-Moses Family Meeting to order!” he called out. “Laurel, sweetie, can you sit up straight and look a little less blind?” he asked. “I know you’re just preparing for your role, but because you’re so good at it, it makes me nervous.”

She smiled. “You really think I look blind?”

“Very much so, honey,” Mom agreed with a smile.

A smile. Huh. That was very Change-like. Because the last conversation I had with Mom she hadn’t been smiling. She had been frowning—as she said, “Lucy Beth Parker, if you bring up that kitten idea one more time, I’m going to take away your DVR privileges. End of story.” (The use of my middle name was never good. And when paired with “end of story”? Even worse.)

“Oh totally,” said Marci. “Like I keep saying…hello, Academy Award!”

“An interesting opportunity has come up, but because it’s something that would affect the whole family, I wanted us to discuss it all together,” Alan said. “And now I turn the floor over to Marci. Please hold your questions until she’s finished.” He held out the gavel. “Would you like this?”

“I think I’m okay,” she replied. She flashed us another one of her white smiles. “Okay, so yesterday, I came up with this very, very cool idea.” Things were always “very, very” in Marci’s world. Usually very, very cool or very, very uncool. “Okay, so Laurel? Even though you haven’t started shooting the movie yet and Oscar nominations won’t be announced until a year from January, it’s very, very important that we get started on your campaign, like, immediately. And while I know that it’s always been very, very important to you to keep your personal and home life personal and…home life-like, I got to thinking that it could be very, very cool if you did a Week with Wendi.

When she heard that, Laurel didn’t look blind—she looked like she was about to die.

“You know, so that when Academy voters go to vote, they’ll remember seeing the show and feel as if they really know you as a person,” Marci went on.

Mom and Alan looked at each other. While Alan had one of his hopeful doesn’t-that-sound-GREAT? smiles on, Mom’s was more like I-think-I-just-ate-a-piece-of-bad-sushi. “So what you’re saying is that you want us to let this woman into our home and spend a week following us around?” she asked.

Even though Marci shook her head hard, her hair barely moved. “No, no, no!” she cried.

The color returned to Mom’s face. “Oh. Okay. So she’s just going to tape Laurel at the studio?”

“No. What I meant is that she’d follow the family around for three weeks!” Marci replied. “From now through the wedding!”

Now it was Laurel who looked like she was going to throw up. “Look, I know that there’s a few people out there who are interested in my life”—A few?! There were so many people interested that last time I Googled her, I counted 328 unofficial Laurel Moses websites—“but I highly doubt that if you asked Wendi Wallerstein if she wanted to spend three weeks following me around, she’d say yes.”

“Actually, I did ask her—well, I asked her executive producer, Camilla—and Wendi called me back herself while in the middle of her private Pilates session and said that she’d be honored to follow you and your family around before this monumental event.”

“I really don’t know why people are making such a big deal about this wedding,” Mom said with a nervous laugh. “In fact, it’s not even a wedding. It’s more like…a small gathering of our immediate family. And I can tell you right now—I think that following us around would be of very little interest to a TV audience.” Mom was a very private person. So private that she wouldn’t even watch any sort of reality show just out of principle because she thought that the fact that TV made celebrities out of regular people was not a good thing. She wouldn’t even watch Hoarders, which, if you asked me, was a total loss on her part because that show was the most awesome of all the reality shows.

Marci shrugged. “Small gathering, monumental event—same thing. Anyway,” she continued, “you know I don’t like to tell you what to do, Laurel, but as your publicist, with three years of top-notch experience at the hottest PR firm in all of Hollywood, I strongly believe you should do this.”

Laurel sighed. The only thing she wanted more than the NeatDesk, this digital filing scanner system we had seen advertised on TV one night, was an Oscar. She shook her head. “I don’t know. This is my family we’re talking about.”

One of the coolest things about Laurel was that while she accepted the fact that because she was so famous, there was a certain amount of living in the public eye she had to do, she tried to do that only when she was at work on her TV show or a movie or at a special event. When she was with us, her family, she was super low-key. And if we were all out, she wore a hat and sunglasses or a full-on disguise. We weren’t one of those families where everyone became famous just because we were the Frister or Parents Of the famous person. (“I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what exactly those Kardashian people have done to make them famous,” Mom was always saying.) We were just…normal. Well, normal other than the fact that we had a lot of family meetings and a binder full of official rules and regulations.

Laurel turned to us. “What do you guys think?”

“I’d be okay with it,” I piped up. “Well, I’d be okay with it as long as Wendi didn’t come into my room on the days when it wasn’t clean.” Which, pretty much, was all days other than the first hour after Mom had forced me to clean it. While I didn’t have a problem with things not being in their proper drawers, some people in America did.

Marci nodded. “I could totally put that in the contract, Lisa.”

“It’s Lucy,” Laurel corrected her.

“And I’m sure people would be very interested in seeing what went on during a well-run family meeting,” Alan added. “Who knows—maybe it would help other families get organized!”

Or, maybe when that part came on, they’d take a bathroom or snack break.

Still, Mom looked doubtful. And Laurel could tell. She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. The movie is important, but it’s not, like, everything to me.”

Because of the actress thing, Laurel was an excellent liar. But even someone who barely had any experience lying—like a nun or a priest—would have done a better job than she was right then.

“Laurel, you spend every moment that you’re not sleeping practicing your lines and pretending to be blind,” I said. “And, on the nights you wear your earphones and listen to the script on your iPod as you fall asleep, you’re even rehearsing in your sleep.”

“Okay, fine. So maybe this movie is the best role that’s ever been offered to me,” she admitted.

“Did I mention that the last four Best Actress winners all did a Week with Wendi at some point before they won?” Marci interrupted. “Because they did.”

“But, still,” Laurel went on, “having a camera crew follow you around for three weeks is a big deal. And I totally respect the fact that some people don’t like reality TV.”

She made sure not to look at Mom when she said that, but it was obvious that’s who she was talking about because none of us had problems with it. Even Alan liked watching reality TV. Especially the shows where someone went in and organized a person’s life after totally shaming them for being such a mess.

As respectful as Laurel was being, and as nice as my mother was, I knew my mom well enough to know that there was no way she would say yes to this. And I also knew her well enough to know that there’d be something about how the people who let their lives be televised were seriously hurting their karma.

She sighed. “It’s okay. I guess I could handle it for a few weeks.”

Wait a minute. Backspace. What? Who just said that? That was not my mother.

“Really? Are you sure?” Laurel asked anxiously.

“Honey, if you don’t want to do it, it’s completely okay,” Alan said.

Mom shrugged. “No, it’s fine.” She looked at Laurel and smiled. “I know what this would mean to Laurel.”

Another smile? It looked like Marissa was right. The wedding may not have happened yet, but already The Change was.

Laurel squealed and threw her arms around Mom’s neck, almost pushing her over. “But I just have one request,” Mom managed to get out.

“Anything!” Laurel squealed.

Mom looked at Marci. “I want Wendi focusing primarily on Laurel. Not the small gathering with immediate family that’s going to take place in a few weeks.”

“You mean the wedding,” Alan said.

Mom started to scratch at the inside of her left wrist, something that happened when she got nervous about something. “No, I mean the small gathering of immediate family. End of story.”

I watched as she itched some more.

“Faaaaabuuuulous,” purred Marci as she took out her cell phone. “I’ll let Wendi’s people know.

“So when would they start?” I asked, yanking at the ends of my hair in an attempt to make it grow faster so it looked long on camera.

“Probably tomorrow,” Marci replied.

At that, Mom didn’t look like she ate just one piece of bad sushi, but an entire meal.