The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter (8 page)

“Six weeks,” Grandma said, hugging me to her side.

She kissed the top of my head and then hugged my mom and dad. And then Willy tried to hug me, but I put my hands up and gave him a stop sign. “I only hug my family members.”

“Bessica,” Grandma scolded.

“I am very upset. I am not in the mood to hug strangers.”

My mom came and stood next to me. “Willy isn’t a stranger.”

I clucked my tongue. It was almost like Willy had brainwashed her.

And then it happened. Grandma got into the motor home and waved to me and Willy got into the motor home and waved to me, and they pulled out of the driveway. I’d thought I hated looking at the motor home parked in my driveway. But I hated watching that motor home pull out of my driveway a whole lot more.

“I’ll miss you, Bessica!” Grandma called from her window as they rattled down the road.

“Wow,” Dad said. “I bet they have the time of their lives.”

And I thought that was a pretty stupid thing to say. Because there was no way that Grandma was going to have the time of her life with Willy.

“Maybe you should call Sylvie,” my mom said.

I shook my head. “We’re not talking.”

“Don’t you think it’s time that you made up?”

I rolled my eyes. My mom was so naïve. Did she think that all it took to make up was a phone call? Because I didn’t think that.

Then I sat down in the grass and started ripping it out.

“Bessica, tearing apart the lawn is not a solution to your problems,” my mom said.

“Actually, if you want to move over by the sidewalk you could pull out some of the crabgrass,” my dad said.

“Bleh!” I said. Then I fell back into the grass and stared directly at the sun and waited to go blind.

“Come inside,” my mom said. “We’ve got a surprise for you.”

I closed my eyes, but I could still see the sun. “Every surprise I’ve gotten this month has been terrible.”

“You’ll like this one. A lot!” my mom said.

When I opened my eyes, my mom had her hand out to help me up and my dad was in the garage digging through his tools. I trudged back to the house and sat at the kitchen table and waited for my surprise.

“Is it a dog?” I asked. Because I thought that might actually make me feel better.

“No. When did you start wanting a dog?” my mother asked.

I shrugged. “Five minutes ago.”

My mother set a wrapped package on the table. I picked it up and tore off the paper.

“It’s a cell phone!” my mom cheered.

Looking at my brand-new cell phone bummed me out. Because if I’d gotten it at the beginning of summer, I would have had people to call, like Sylvie. But getting it now just reminded me that I didn’t have any friends and that Grandma had abandoned me.

“Since Grandma took the cell phone, I figured you’d need your own.”

I lifted up the box and turned it over. I guess it looked cool. But it was hard to feel excited.

“Who are you going to call first?” my mom asked.

I could feel my eyes getting a little watery. And I think my mom noticed this.

“I know. I know. Let’s charge it up and then you can call me,” she said.

“But we’re talking right now.”

“It will give you a chance to use it,” she said.

Then my dad came inside. “Trimmed the crabgrass.” Then he glanced at me and my phone. “Neat!”

“Yeah.”

“Who are you going to call first?” my dad asked.

“Mom,” I said. Then I held back a sniffle.

Mom and Dad looked at each other and then Mom came and sat down next to me, and Dad went back to the garage.

“I have another surprise for you,” she said.

“Is Sylvie coming to North?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Have you switched me to South?”

“Honey, as soon as I found out about Sylvie’s switch, I called the school, but they said it was impossible to make any changes.”

“Impossible,” I mumbled.

“I know you’re worried about making friends on Monday, so I set up a lunch date for you tomorrow.”

I looked up in panic. “Is it with the odor girl from the library?”

“Labels are mean. Stop that. No. I didn’t invite your library friend.”

“Is Mrs. Chico coming?” I joked.

“No.”

I got very delusional and excited. “Sylvie?” I asked. “Sylvie is coming over for lunch?”

My mother shook her head. “I was trying to let you iron that one out. Do you want my help?”

“No,” I said, putting my head down next to the table’s overflowing fruit bowl. “Just tell me who I have to eat lunch with.”

My mother smiled. “Marci and Vicki Docker.”

“Who?” I had never heard of these people.

“The Docker twins.”

I pulled a green grape from the bowl and rolled it around under my pointer finger. “How do you know them?”

“Marci got a stress fracture in her foot. She’s a cheerleader. We fitted her for orthotics. She’s delightful! She and her sister Vicki go to your middle school. Vicki is the mascot.”

“They let a girl be the mascot?”

“It’s the twenty-first century, Bessica. Girls can be anything they want to be.”

“I know that. But didn’t Dad say that the new mascot was going to be a bear or a wolf? Those seem like boy beasts.”

“Vicki was a bee.”

I guess it couldn’t hurt to know a cheerleader and a mascot. But, even though we were fighting and no longer on speaking terms, I would have preferred to be eating pizza with Sylvie. I let out a big sigh of disappointment.

“I can’t believe you’re not more excited about this. I’ll make you a pizza. It’ll be like a party!”

I tried not to gag when my mom said this, because it was pretty obvious to me that it was not going to be like a party at all.

“Why aren’t you smiling? In two days you’re going to be in middle school. Aren’t you curious about what to expect?” My mother was trying too hard. Her excitement didn’t sound genuine. It sounded desperate.

“I expect to feel sad and lonely and terrible and come home with a mountain of homework strapped to my back.”

“I think talking to Marci and Vicki will alleviate a lot of this emotional baggage.”

“Whatever,” I said. Then I stood up and walked to the basement stairs.

“Where are you going?” my mom asked.

“To Grandma’s room so I can be stabbed by her absence a little bit more,” I said.

And my mom didn’t object to this. When I got to Grandma’s room, it felt so empty. She’d taken all the sheets off her bed and some of her drawers were completely cleaned out. She’d even taken her slippers. I sat at her desk and stared at her computer. Then I turned it on and logged into her E-Date Me Today account. I couldn’t believe it! There were over fifty emails in her inbox.

It was such a bummer that she was on the road. I wanted to open up the emails and read them and maybe write back to all the men who owned boats. But that felt wrong. Because changing Grandma’s account to find a new boyfriend felt like it was only a little wrong. Sending messages to these potential boyfriends and pretending to
be
Grandma would almost feel like a crime.

I turned off the computer and crawled onto her bed. Then I stared at the emptiness again. The closet. The drawers. She’d even taken down her terrible movie picture of Ace Drummond in
Squadron of Doom
, leaving her big white wall blanker than blank. That was when it hit me that I could not live with things the way they were. I needed Willy out of the picture. So I turned on Grandma’s computer and went back into her E-Date Me Today account.

I started to click the messages open. The men who sent
pictures all looked great! Some of them wore cowboy hats. Some of them wore baseball caps. And some of them were bald, so I deleted those. Willy had hair and I felt like I had to replace him with another guy with hair. It didn’t take me long before I spotted some good ones. Gary in Montana owned a ranch. Jim in Utah was a retired fireman. This was fantastic news. Because I knew that Grandma would love to date a hero!

So even though it was the wrong thing to do, I decided to write to some of these potential boyfriends so they wouldn’t lose interest. I tried to make Grandma sound as interesting and single as possible.

Hi, Jim! Thanks for writing. I’m off exploring caves at the moment, but will be back soon. I would love to learn more about you. Please send more pictures. When I get back, maybe we can get sandwiches
.

I didn’t have all the time in the world. So I only responded to twenty-seven emails. And I didn’t always suggest getting sandwiches. Sometimes I suggested getting together for pie. When I was finished I went upstairs and curled up on my own bed.

Then I flipped open my phone. A cartoon polar bear danced on a small chunk of ice. I’d solved one problem in my life, but I still had others. I closed my phone. Then I opened it again. Right at that moment, I wanted to call Sylvie more than I’d ever wanted to do anything. I dialed her phone number digit by digit. But instead of pressing the Send button, I pressed Cancel. I felt tears slip out of my eyes. My throat had a lump in it so big that it felt like it had closed off my throat.

Even though I wanted to call Sylvie, there was no way I would ever do that. Because she hurt me so much when she said she wanted to go to South and be brand new without me. She hurt me worse than anybody had ever hurt me in my life. And I wanted her to try to fix it. I wanted
her
to reach out to
me
. And if that meant waiting for a couple of weeks, I was willing to wait.

Tears kept slipping down my face. And even though I shouldn’t have wished for this, I secretly hoped that Sylvie felt this way too. I hoped she was sad and miserable and lonely and crying on a bed in her house. I hoped that by not calling her, I was hurting her as much as she’d hurt me.

efore the Docker twins arrived, I decided to play with my hair and also pick out a brand-new outfit to wear. I wanted to test-run some of my wardrobe. I picked a lavender shirt with glitter around the collar, and a pair of jeans. I also put on my new shoes and selected the detachable lavender tongues. When I came out to the kitchen for lunch, my mother looked thrilled.

“You look fantastic! And I like your school spirit!”

I looked down at myself. I didn’t know what about me suggested school spirit.

“All that purple!” my mother said.

“This is lavender,” I corrected her.

Then my mom winked at me and the doorbell rang and I sat down and prepared to meet the twins. When they rounded the corner into my kitchen, it was just like I expected. I felt like I was meeting the same person twice, except one of them was wearing a bunch of bracelets.

“I’m Marci,” the first one said. She lifted up her hand and waved, her bracelets jingling around her arm.

“I’m Vicki,” the second one said in the exact same voice. She did not wave. They both had matching brown bobs with bangs and pink lipstick, and they wore shorts that showed off their long tan legs. Just by the way they entered my kitchen, I could tell they were popular.

“I’m Bessica,” I said. “My mom made this pizza.”

Then I pointed to the pepperoni pizza on the table. Both Marci and Vicki sat right down.

“Are you nervous?” Marci asked.

I didn’t really think that was a good opening question. “I’m okay,” I said.

“Oh,” Marci cooed. “You sound nervous. You shouldn’t be. We’re going to tell you the inside scoop about everything.”

“Totally,” Vicki said.

“Great!” my mom said. She put a pile of napkins down on the table and then gestured to the window. “I’ll be outside doing yard work. Yell if you need anything.”

When the back door slammed shut, Marci’s eyes lit up and she grabbed the pizza slice with the most pepperoni on it.

“We’ll tell you all the stuff you need to know,” Vicki said.

“We’ll probably tell you some stuff that you don’t need to know, too,” Marci said, laughing. “Like, at lunch, avoid the Crispito.”

Vicki nodded enthusiastically, making her hair bounce off her shoulders. “It tastes like donkey.”

“And avoid the Idaho Haystack and the churro,” Marci added. She stuck out her tongue and let it hang there.