Dear Dr. Maude,
I’m not sure what you’re doing two weeks from now, but if things keep going the way they are then I have a feeling the wedding won’t be happening. Which means I’ll be in town, rather than at the Black Horse Inn in Vermont. So maybe we can hang out and take your dachshunds, Id and Ego, for a walk in Central Park. Also, I don’t know if you like thrift stores and flea markets, but I’ve become an expert on the ones in New York, so I’d be happy to take you around to some. Oh, and in case you’re worried about there being bedbugs in the stuff they sell there, you don’t have to. I’ve bought a bunch of stuff, including cowboy boots, and I’ve never had a problem. Not even athlete’s foot.
I have a feeling that if you DID read my letters you might think that I tend to exaggerate on account of the fact that a lot of things end up working out in my life. Like, say, me and Laurel becoming friends despite the Hat Incident. Or me beating Cristina Pollock in the election. However, a lot of things DON’T work out for me. Like, say, me getting my period. Or stopping my boobs from growing.
Which is why I’m not kidding when I say that I don’t think this blended family thing is going to work. Mom walks around like she’s plugged into an electrical outlet; Laurel only talks to me in one-word sentences (can a sentence only be one word?); and Alan spends all his time online checking the extended forecast to monitor any upcoming snowstorms that might interfere with the wedding. I just want things to go back to how they were, you know?
Any advice on that?
yours truly,
Lucy B. Parker
Not knowing where else to turn, I decided to go to Northampton for advice. Not literally, but via Skype.
“I know you’re bored just lying there in your crib staring at the ceiling most of the day, Zig,” I said into the computer as Dr. Maude napped on my head, “but I have to tell you—I hope you’re not in too much of a hurry to grow up because sometimes it’s really not fun.”
Most people would say it was my imagination, but at that, Ziggy made a thumbs-down sign with his tiny left hand.
“Exactly,” I said. “But I have some news that might make you happy.”
At that, he turned his head and cocked it to the side. Maybe some people would’ve thought that was just a coincidence, but I knew better.
“The news is” —I leaned into the screen— “I might be coming to live with you.”
At that he squealed so loud, it almost burst my eardrums.
“Ouch.” I cringed. “Look, I know you’re excited, but the squealing thing is not cool, Ziggy. In fact, it’s really annoying. Did you pick that up from Marissa?” I demanded.
He giggled.
I sighed. “I knew I should have told Dad she wasn’t the right babysitter for you.”
Suddenly, Dad’s face filled the screen. Actually, his ponytail filled the screen. Even though he was a guy, he wasn’t very guy-like when it came to electronic stuff and never knew where to look on the webcam. “Lucy, what are you talking about you might be coming to live with us?”
I jumped. That was one of the problems with talking to a baby who didn’t know how to talk yet. They couldn’t say things like “Adult at ten o’clock.”
“Dad, you were overlistening!” I cried.
“No, I wasn’t,” he replied. “The door was open, and at the exact moment that I was walking by, I got a cramp in my leg and had to stop to massage it.”
I rolled my eyes. That was the oldest excuse in the book. When you were an expert overlistener like I was, you knew these things. “So how are you?” I asked, changing the subject. “Any interesting photo shoots lately? Ooh—did Mr. Campbell hire you again to do Sam dressed as Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer?!”
Dad was what they called a “fine art photographer”—meaning he took pictures of things that were sometimes so blurry you couldn’t even tell what they were (I’m not sure why that was considered art, but it was). Because people didn’t always want pictures of blurry objects, or hands, or the corner of a bridge that was blown up so big that you could no longer tell it was a bridge, he sometimes took family portraits to make extra money. And, around the holidays, he took pet portraits that people then used for their holiday cards, like Sam the Dalmatian as Rudolph. Those were my favorite. Back when I lived in Northampton I used to be Dad’s assistant for those shoots.
“Don’t change the subject,” he said as his nostrils filled the screen.
“Ew—Dad! Can you please move back?!” I cried.
As he moved the laptop back, I could finally see him normally. Ever since having Ziggy, he looked so…dad-like. Not Alan-dad-like, meaning bald with unfaded jeans that were too high at the waist and too short at the feet. But he had cut his hair a bit, so his ponytail wasn’t as long. He looked like a man trying to grow a ponytail rather than someone who had had one his whole life.
“Is this better?” he asked.
I nodded. “Hey, so how was that special you and Sarah were about to watch on the Discovery Channel the other night?” I asked, still trying to change the subject. “The one about how following an ayurvedic diet can help you live to 117?”
At that, Ziggy made a raspberry sound. I knew from Sarah that ayurveda was this Indian way of eating for your body type. And I also knew from her that according to the people who practiced it, pizza and ice cream weren’t considered good for anyone’s body type, which immediately made it something I wasn’t interested in hearing more about, even though Sarah thought I should follow it because it would help me with my oily skin.
“It was interesting,” he said. “But you’re still changing the subject.”
I took a deep breath. “Dad, this whole wedding thing is a total mess,” I blurted out. As I told him all about The Change, I felt my stomach begin to unknot. Maybe there was something to this whole communication thing my parents were so big on. I told him how Laurel and I were fighting; about the running tally I was keeping of how many times Mom called her “honey” and “sweetie” versus me (Laurel—22, me—19); and about how every time a person used the word wedding in front of Mom she got all freaked out and looked like she was going to throw up.
“Ah. So it’s happening again,” he said as he picked Ziggy up and started walking him around the room.
“What’s happening again?” I asked, confused.
Now that Ziggy was out of his cage—aka his crib—he kept lunging at the computer with his hands held out as if he wanted me to pick him up. And every time he did that, I found myself leaning forward to the computer screen with my arms flying out as if I was going to do it.
“Well, let’s just say your mother gets a little…uncomfortable when it comes to the c-word.”
“What’s the c-word?” I asked.
“Commitment,” he replied. “See, once she’s actually married, she’s fine. But that window in between the deciding to get married and the wedding can be a little…challenging for everyone around her.”
“By ‘challenging’, do you mean that she’s cranky and has no sense of humor and barely ever smiles?”
He nodded. “Yup. That would be what I’m talking about. Has she started eating sugar?”
I nodded, surprised. “Yeah.”
“What about soda? Has she started in on that?”
I thought about it. Now that he mentioned it…
“Back then she couldn’t stop downing root beer,” he went on.
Oh my God. There had been an empty bottle of root beer in the recycling can! I couldn’t believe my mother had been drinking soda. My entire life she had been going on and on about how it ruined the enamel on your teeth. Once, during the current events portion of one of our official family dinners, she had passed around an article about how when Coca-Cola was poured on the hood of a car, it ate away at the paint. (“If it can do that to a car, Lucy, just think of what it’s doing to the inside of your stomach.”) The only time I was allowed to drink soda (in front of them, at least) was very special occasions, like when they were about to tell me something that was going to change my life forever: they were getting divorced, they wanted us to move to New York, or they were about to have a new baby.
His face clouded over as he remembered the past. “It was bad, Lucy. Really bad. In fact, Deanna and I started talking about doing an intervention.”
Deanna was Mom’s BFF from Northampton. I knew from reality shows what interventions were. They were when you tried to get people to stop doing bad things, like drugs or hoarding. All the people who loved them—like their families and their BFFs—got together and surprised them and told them why what they were doing was so bad for them and they were going to die if they didn’t stop.
I couldn’t believe this was my mom he was talking about. “And then what happened?”
“Well, after the soda came the bad TV,” he replied. “She’d stay up until all hours of the night watching sitcoms, game shows…even infomercials.”
“But Mom barely ever watches TV,” I said. “She reads.” Mostly she liked magazines like The New Yorker, which had very tiny print and no pictures other than cartoons that only adults found funny.
He shook his head sadly. “Not back then,” he said. He sighed “I can still see it. All those piles of unread Newsweeks and Vanity Fairs. And when she did read, it was things like the National Enquirer.”
Okay, this was just weird. Mom hated those gossip magazines. Especially after we moved in with Laurel and she saw firsthand how they printed total lies, like how Laurel was actually an alien.
“Well, watch out for that,” he said. “That’s a sure sign she’s going to blow.”
Okay, this was not good. In fact, this was starting to sound very, very bad.
“But like I said, it’s only temporary.” He smiled. “I can tell you from experience, once the wedding’s over with, she’ll go back to being her old self.”
If we actually made it to the wedding.
“Think of it as a…growth opportunity,” he said with a smile.
I sighed. I had had so many growth opportunities over the last year I felt like I should have been seven feet tall instead of four feet eleven. “Dad?”
“Yeah?
I flopped back on the bed. “I wouldn’t mind staying this size for a while.”
He laughed again. “Yeah, well, I’m afraid that’s not an option.”
I sat up. “But what am I supposed to do about Laurel?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean it’s pretty obvious that she doesn’t want to be friends anymore, let alone fristers.”
“Lucy, this Change thing—it scares you a little, right?”
I crossed my arms and turned away from the computer. “I never said it scared me.”
At that, Ziggy let out another raspberry. It was crazy how smart he was for a baby. Forget about trying to pull the whole Santa Claus thing over on him in a few years.
“Okay, fine,” I said stubbornly. “So maybe it scares me a little bit.”
“Which makes complete sense,” Dad said. “seeing that you’re a human being and not a robot, and human beings are not huge fans of change. So if you’re scared, what makes you think that Laurel’s not scared, too, and that’s why she’s acting like this?”
“But Laurel’s not human,” I blurted out.
“She’s not?”
“Well, yes, she’s human, but it’s different for her.”
“How come?”
“Because she’s the most popular girl in the world!”
“Lucy, after everything you know about Laurel, is that what you really think?”
I sighed. “I guess not.”
The thing was, I didn’t know what I thought anymore. Everyone was acting so nutty around me that I couldn’t help being that way, too.
No one in the family was wild about the idea of Wendi and her crew showing up at the crack of dawn to film us getting ready for our day, but her hope was to get some footage of us “unplugged.” Laurel was already at the studio, so it was just Mom and Alan and me.
I was so tired that I poured orange juice on top of my cereal instead of milk. I had stayed up late spying on Mom, watching as she sat on the couch late into the night downing fistfuls of Reese’s Pieces while watching Celebrity Rehab Top Model Search and flipping through In Touch with Style.
“I hate to eat and run,” Mom said as she finished off a Skinny Cow mint ice cream sandwich. For breakfast. (Even I didn’t do that.) “But I really need to get through the episodes of Shipwrecked! I DVRed. The finale is tonight and I want to be all caught up.”
Okay, not good. Shipwrecked! was the lowest of the low when it came to reality programs. They took a group of people and put them on a fancy boat only to then sail them into a storm somewhere until they got shipwrecked and were forced to live on a desert island for one month, with weekly weigh-ins. There were contests about who could make the most creative meals out of berries and plants, and who made the best outfits out of stuff they found washed up on shore. Even Alice, who loved reality programs (the cheesier the better), didn’t watch that one.
“Honey, what are you doing watching Shipwrecked!?” asked Alan, baffled.
Mom reached into her back pocket and took out a York Peppermint Pattie and unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth. Again, even I tended to stay away from chocolate until at least nine a.m. “What’s wrong with Shipwrecked!?” she asked defensively. “You know, Alan, there’s more to life than just news programs and documentaries about World War Two.”
“I know that, honey, it’s just that it’s so not…you,” he replied. “And what are you doing eating junk food?”
“Why is everyone getting on me about what I’m eating?” she cried. “I’m allowing myself a little treat—is that really so bad? So what if I have to fit into a dress in”—she looked at her watch—“six days, twenty-two hours, and forty-three seconds. It’ll be fine!” she cried. “Or you know what? Maybe it won’t be fine and I’ll just wear…a caftan!” She shoved another pattie in her mouth. “Maybe you should try eating some junk food once in a while,” Mom went on. “Maybe it would help with that little scheduling problem of yours.”
“Scheduling problem? It’s not a problem,” Alan said. “It’s…a lifestyle choice.” His faced dropped. “I thought you liked it.”
Mom snorted. “I think the ‘choice’ part was gone a long time ago.”
“Someone in this family has to be a little organized and come up with a schedule,” Alan said. “Otherwise, we’d be living in complete…chaos.”
“Oh, so what you’re saying is that I’m not organized at all?” Mom demanded.
“If we’re talking about the fact that every time we try and leave it takes an extra three to five minutes because you can’t find your keys even though the first thing I did when you moved in was put up a little hook by the door with a sign that says ‘Rebecca’s Keys,’ then, yes, I’m saying that maybe that’s something you want to look at,” he snapped.
“You know, back in Northampton, there was no hook and I got through life just fine!” Mom cried.
Wendi turned to Nikko. “Please tell me you’re getting this,” she whispered.
He nodded. “Oh yeah.”
“I didn’t realize you were so much happier in Northampton,” Alan said.
“I didn’t say I was happier in Northampton,” Mom corrected.
“Well, you sure are acting like it lately!” Alan said angrily.
Okay, whoa. Alan barely ever got angry. Nervous, yes. Stressed out, absolutely. But angry?
“And you sure do sound angry!” Mom retorted.
“Maybe I am, too,” she snapped back.
He stood up. “Maybe this breakfast should be adjourned so everyone can take a time-out!”
“Maybe that’s a good idea!” she agreed, standing up as well.
“Fine!” he said, stomping toward his office.
“I was going to say that first,” she said, stomping toward the bedroom.
That left me and Dr. Maude (lapping up the orange juice left in my cereal bowl) sitting at the table with a very surprised TV crew.
“So, ah, I could go get my advice notebook and read you guys some more advice, if you want,” I said, trying to save what seemed to be a completely unsavable situation.
From the way the crew started to pack up their stuff, I was going to take it as a no.
“Or not,” I said as they left the room.
“I don’t know why we’re even bothering to do this,” I said to Blair that afternoon as we sat in his room while he pushed a lot of buttons on his computer that took the photo files I had sent him and started to make them into a slide show.
“How about…because slide shows don’t just magi-cally appear?” he asked. “Especially ones that resemble award-winning music videos.”
I rolled my eyes as I reached for one of the fried plantains that I had smuggled out of my apartment. I was always telling Rose that they were so good she totally could’ve opened a store, or at least one of those food trucks, and sold them all over Manhattan. “You know what I mean. Because this whole wedding might not even happen after this morning!”
He shook his head. “You girls. You’re such…drama queens.”
“I am not!” I cried. “Alice is, and my friend Marissa definitely is, but I’m like the opposite of one.”
“Oh yeah? Then how come you’re all Oh no! This wedding is totally not going to happen and Laurel hates me and my life is over!” he cried in a very high-pitched, very non-me voice.
“Well, all of that is true,” I said calmly.
Now he was the one who rolled his eyes. “I rest my case.” He pointed to a picture on the screen of Laurel and me from our day at the Holyoke Mall when we had played The World’s Ugliest Outfit. “This sure doesn’t look like two people who hate each other,” he said.
He clicked on another photo, this one taken in one of our IBSs to the Target in Riverdale, which was way up on the 1 train in the Bronx. “She sure doesn’t look like she hates you here.”
I smiled sadly as I looked at the way she had her arms thrown around my neck and was leaning in to plant a big kiss on my cheek. “Of course she doesn’t,” I said. “That’s because I had just showed her Target’s Merona line. They have awesome stuff.” I thought it was pretty cool that a huge star like Laurel, who could afford anything she wanted (even though she was always being given free clothes by the biggest designers anyway), now preferred clothes from Target.
Blair wrinkled his nose. “You girls and your clothes. I will never understand that.”
I shrugged. “What? It’s like the female equivalent to computer stuff.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “Look, here’s the deal—sometimes you just have be the bigger person—”
Again with this bigger person stuff?!
“—and just suck it up because some people are, you know, not as cool as you,” he went on. “Believe me, I have to do that all the time.”
“How can you say Laurel’s not cool?” I asked. “She’s on the top of every cool list in every magazine.”
He shrugged. “So?” He looked down at the ground. “She’s not as cool as you.”
Although it took everything in me, I managed to keep my jaw semi-shut even though it wanted to flap open really, really wide. Had Blair Lerner-Moskovitz just said that I, Lucy B. Parker, was cooler than Laurel Moses? I almost asked him to repeat it but stopped myself.
“I’m sure Laurel’s somewhat cool or else you wouldn’t have pictures like this,” he said, pointing to one of us on a red carpet.
I smiled. “That was from a movie premiere in L.A.” I left out the part that it also happened to be the night I had my first kiss, with Connor Forrester, in the parking lot of a hamburger place.
He squinted. “Why are you wearing that weird-looking scarf on your head?”
“It’s a turban,” I replied. “They happen to be very hip in some fashion circles.” I also left out the part that I had had to borrow it from Lady Countess Annabel Ashcroft de Winter von Taxi, a famous actress, because she turned my hair blue as she was helping me get dressed.
“Whatever,” he said. “But even if Laurel’s famous and has her own TV show, that doesn’t mean she’s any better than you. She’s just a human being.”
Had he been talking to my dad or what?
“So what you’re saying is that I should go apologize even though I didn’t do anything?” I asked.
“I’m not saying you should apologize,” he said, “I’m just saying that maybe if you just go in and talk to her like things are normal, then they can be again.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“What do you have to lose?” he asked. “It’s not like your way is working.”
He did have a point.
It was a good thing that Blair had said that he wasn’t going to help me until I at least went up and gave it a try, because when I did get back up to Laurel’s room, she needed some serious help.
“So Laurel,” Wendi was saying as she clicked and clacked her way across Laurel’s floor, “are there any.…regrets about becoming famous as such a young age?”
I could see Laurel sit up straighter. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you know, when you’re famous, it takes away any ability to be a normal person.”
Uh-oh. Laurel had a lot of issues about missing out on being a normal person. Just recently she had gone on this normal-person kick and insisted on doing all these normal-person things like go to American Girl Place. Which, when you’re a huge star instead of a normal person, means you get mobbed by crowds and the manager gets mad because a lot of dolls end up getting beheaded in the process.
Laurel shrugged. “I don’t know. I like to think I’m pretty normal.” She sat up straighter. “I’ve been to American Girl Place and everything,” she said proudly.
I cringed. She had just admitted that on national television? Seriously?
“Oh. How cute,” Wendi said. “But even when you’re around other kids your age don’t you always feel like…I don’t know…there’s a pane of glass between you and them?”
I could see Laurel’s bottom lip begin to jiggle a bit. “No.”
“Really? You don’t feel as if…I don’t know…as glamorous as all the premieres and award shows may be, at the end of the day, when you get into your bed to go to sleep, you’re acutely aware that although you may play a regular girl on TV, you’re just…not normal?”
With that, Wendi got what she wanted because Laurel’s eyes began to get misty. At the moment, she didn’t look like a superstar, or a know-it-all older sister, or even like some midlevel popular girl in some junior high in Illinois. She looked like I had felt on my first day of school in New York when I was the New Girl and didn’t have anyone to sit with at lunch. Or the day when my ex-BFFs Rachel and Missy dumped me right before sixth grade started. Which is to say, she looked totally and completely…alone.
It was so hard to watch that it almost made me cry, too. Sure, we hadn’t been getting along lately, but for better or worse, Laurel was and always would be my frister—whether our parents got married or not. And the number one rule for fristers is that they stand up for each other—even when they’re technically kind-of, sort-of in a fight.
“She is, too!” I cried, barging into the room. “Maybe she’s on the super-organized end of the normal scale, but speaking as someone who is abnormally normal, I promise you—Laurel Moses is definitely more normal than superstarry.”
Laurel turned to me. “You really think so?” she asked shyly.
“Totally,” I replied. I turned back to Wendi. “Cristina Pollock is more superstarry than Laurel!” I blurted.
“Who’s Cristina Pollock?” Wendi asked.
Whoops. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. “She’s um…actually, maybe you can cut that last line…anyway, who she is is not important. What is important is that Laurel is funny and nice and likes to shop at Target and eats the frosting off her cupcakes before taking a bite of the actual cake part—just like any normal girl,” I said. “And to say that she’s not normal would be a total lie, which means you might get sued.”
At the word sued, Camilla tapped Wendi on the shoulder. “Let’s move on from this particular topic, shall we?”
Wendi stepped in front of the camera and leaned into it. “As you’ll remember, the last few days have been fraught with tension here in the Parker-Moses house—especially between superstar Laurel Moses and her soon-to-be official stepsister, Lucy Parker—”
“Excuse me,” I called out. “But (a) it’s Lucy B. Parker, and (b) we prefer the term frister, not stepsister”— I turned to Laurel— “Unless something’s changed that I don’t know about and you’d rather be stepsisters.”
“Why would you say that?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I never thought anything changed,” she replied. “I thought you thought something had changed.”
“That’s because I thought you thought something had changed!” I cried. “It’s just that you were saying I was messy, and then you told the story about the Hat Incident—”
“I told it because I thought it was funny. And because it shows how far we’ve come since the first time we met,” she replied. “It’s not like I told it to embarrass you.”
“Well, that’s how it felt,” I said. “And then you got all weird when these guys were talking to me about my advice notebook.”
She looked down at the floor. “I know I did,” she said quietly. “I guess I was…I don’t know…a little jealous.”
“Jealous? Of what?”
She shrugged. “That you were getting all the attention.” She looked up at me. “I sat there listening to you, and I realized how great you are. And it made me feel so…average.”
“Average?!” I cried. “Laurel, you’re the most famous girl in the entire world!”
“What about all that stuff you said about her being normal?” Nikko asked.
“She is, but you can be normal and famous at the same time,” I replied.
He thought about it. “I guess you can.”
“Actually, this week she’s not the most famous girl in the world,” Wendi corrected. “This week that four-year-old girl who fell down the well and was trapped there for three days is. She’s on the cover of all the magazines.” She snapped her fingers. “Charles, make a note for me to get in touch with that girl’s parents and see if we can book her for a show.”
“Well, the other fifty-one weeks of the year she is,” I said. I turned back to Laurel. “Laurel, you’re totally not average. Even if you weren’t famous, you wouldn’t be average. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re too…weird to be average.”
“Really?” she asked hopefully.
I nodded.
“And then I got mad at myself for feeling jealous because I know that you have to deal with me being in the spotlight all the time.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but it’s okay. I’ve gotten used to it by now.” Sometimes it’s not until words leave your mouth that you realize how you really feel about something. The truth was, being the frister of the most famous girl in the world was okay, and I had gotten used to it. Mostly because I knew from living with Laurel that no matter how put together someone looked on the outside (or how clean their room was), that wasn’t necessarily who they were on the inside. On the inside, they could be scared and lonely. And once you realized that about people, suddenly there was nothing to be nervous about. Like them getting all the attention while you were left behind.
Laurel reached for my hand. “Can I say something? I know it’s going to sound really lame and dorky, but I don’t care.”
“I think you’re the superstar in the family. Not me,” she said. “And not just because you give great advice, or wear lots of color. It’s because—”
I sighed. “Let me guess. It’s my all-around…Lucyness.”
She nodded.
My Lucyness was something that Mom had brought up a few months back when I was talking to her about being afraid that now that we had moved in with Alan and Laurel, she was going to end up loving Laurel more than me. (Which, with the amount of honeys and sweeties Laurel was getting, might actually be the case.) Even after asking Mom to explain it to me a bunch of times, I still wasn’t sure what it meant, but apparently it had to do with everything that made me me. Like my love of color. And my sneaker and hat collections. And my logs. Even the stuff that I wasn’t proud of and thought was embarrassing, like my coordination issue and my bloversharing problem—those, too, were part of my Lucyness. Not only were they part of it, but according to Mom, they were some of the best parts because they made me human.
Personally, I found the whole being-human thing very embarrassing at times, but the truth was when other people were being human, that’s when I felt closest to them and loved them the most. Like how Laurel was admitting that she was worried that she was average. That was totally human, because I worried about that exact same thing. And when she said it, my chest got warm, around where my heart was, and it made me feel really close to her.
Wendi shoved her face in front of the camera. “People, what you are witnessing is not scripted like other quote-unquote reality shows out there,” she whispered. “This is real. This is from the heart.” She grabbed both of us and pulled us toward her, hugging us tight. “This is two fristers bonding.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I never had a sister,” she sniffed. “I always wanted one. Instead I grew up an only child—”
Nikko looked down at the camera. “Uh-oh—I think the battery’s running low. I’m going to have to turn this off for a second. Sorry,” he announced, winking at me and Laurel.
Laurel and I looked at each other and giggled. It was nice to have someone to exchange looks with again.
Now that Laurel and I were back on track, I had one more thing I needed to do before I could get back to my toast: Get Mom and Alan back to their we-get-along-so-well-that-at-times-it-can-be-nauseating-to-all-who-have-to-watch-it state.
Which was why I called an emergency family meeting.
As I stood in front of the family (and TV crew), I took a deep breath. Could I do this? Could I get Mom to stop eating all the candy in sight and Mom and Alan to stop fighting so that things could go back to normal?
“You can do this, Lucy,” Laurel whispered, reaching up and squeezing my hand. “I know you can.”
That’s something that happened with fristers—you became a little bit psychic around them. I smiled at her as I squeezed back. Maybe my parents were about to get divorced before they even got married, but even if that happened, I’d always have Laurel, because fristers were forever.
I marched over and stood in front of Mom and Alan, who were sitting on the couch with their arms crossed in front of their chests. “Okay, you guys. The reason I’ve called an emergency family meeting is because this wedding thing has gotten completely out of control.” As Mom opened her mouth, I put my hand up. “Yes. I said wedding. Because that’s what it is. Not a nice party. Not a gathering of immediate family. It’s a wedding. Where two people promise to do their best to stick together through thick and thin.”
I heard a sniffle behind me. “Oh, that’s such a lovely way of putting it,” Wendi whispered.
“Even if the other person sometimes annoys them with agendas and lists,” I went on.
“Well, I know how that feels,” Mom said.
I turned to her. “Or with the fact that they lose their keys all the time and freak out and get all snappy.”
“I think we all know how that feels,” Alan replied.
“Mom, when I was talking to Dad the other day, he mentioned that you had a little bit of trouble with the c-word.”
“What’s the c-word?” Alan asked.
“Commitment,” I replied.
As soon as the word left my mouth, Mom looked like she was melting into her seat. It was like watching the Wicked Witch of the West being doused with water.
“He said that right before you guys got married, you were doing this same sort of thing,” I explained. “The junk food…the bad TV…the soda—”
Alan turned to Mom. “There’s been soda involved?”
She shrugged. “Maybe a little soda.” When she saw Laurel’s right eyebrow go up, she sighed. “Okay, fine. A lot. There’s been a lot of soda.” She sighed again. “Okay, fine, before my first wedding, I guess I got a little…nervous. And the food and the TV and the soda…that was just all stuff to, you know, calm me down.”
“But soda has caffeine in it,” Laurel said. “Wouldn’t that make you more nervous?”
“That’s a very good point,” I agreed.
“Well, yes, but when you’re in that much of a state, you’re really not thinking about that sort of thing,” Mom said.
“But why were you nervous?” asked Laurel.
Mom shrugged. “I don’t know. Because getting married is so…permanent.”
“Actually, it’s not,” Nikko said. “My mom’s been married and divorced four times.”
“The only thing really permanent is death,” Laurel added.
“Except if you’re a Buddhist,” I corrected.
“Are you saying you don’t want to get married?” Alan asked anxiously.
She grabbed his hand. “No! Of course not!” she cried. “Honey, there’s nothing I want more than to marry you.” She looked at the three of us sheepishly. “I guess I’ve been a little hard to live with lately, huh?”
“A little?” I asked.
“Okay. A lot,” Mom replied. “I’m sorry, you guys. I really am.” Her eyes got all wet and she turned to Alan. “Alan Edward Moses, if you’re not busy this weekend, would you consider going to a wedding with me?”
Now his eyes got all misty. “I would love nothing more,” he said with a smile.
As they kissed, Laurel and I looked away.
“I guess things are officially back to normal,” I whispered to Laurel.