All-American Girl Read Free Page B

of a French diplomat who lives down the street from us. We don’t know her name. We just call her the Bread Lady, because every three weeks or so she goes mental, I guess from missing her native country so much, and bakes about a hundred loaves of French bread, which she then sells from door to door in our neighborhood for fifty cents each. I am addicted to the Bread Lady’s baguettes. In fact, they are practically the only thing I will eat, besides hamburgers, as I dislike most fruits and all vegetables, as well as a wide variety of other food groups, such as fish and anything with garlic.
    The only person who ever comes to our door besides the Bread Lady is Jack. But we are not allowed to let Jack into the house when my parents or Theresa aren’t home. This is because of the time Jack shot out the windows of his dad’s Bethesda medical practice with his BB gun as a form of protest over Dr. Ryder’s prescribing medications that had been tested on animals. My parents positively refuse to see that Jack was forced to take this drastic action in order to get his father to pay attention to the fact that animals are being tortured. They seem to think he did it just for the fun of it, which is so obviously untrue. Jack never does things just for the fun of them. He is seriously trying to make this world a better place.
    Personally, I think the real reason Mom and Dad don’t want Jack in the house when they aren’t home is that they don’t want him and Lucy making out. Which is a valid concern, but they could just say so, instead of hiding behind the BB gun defense. It is highly unlikely Jack is ever going to shoot out OUR windows. My mom is fully on the side of the good guys, seeing as how she’s an attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency.
    â€œCome on, you guys,” Lucy whined from the backseat. “I’m going to be late for the game.”
    â€œAnd no drawing celebrities,” my mom called as Dad pulledaway, “until all your German homework is done!”
    Catherine and I watched them go, the sedan’s wheels scrunching on the dead leaves in the road.
    â€œI thought you weren’t allowed to draw celebrities anymore,” Catherine said as we turned the corner.
    Manet, spotting a squirrel across the street, dragged me to the curb, nearly giving me whiplash.
    â€œI can still draw celebrities,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over Manet’s hoarse barking. “I just can’t charge people for them.”
    â€œOh.” Catherine considered this. Then she asked, in a pleading tone, “Then would you PLEASE draw Heath for me? Just once more? I promise I’ll never ask again.”
    â€œI guess,” I said with a sigh, as if it were this very big pain in the neck for me.
    Except of course it wasn’t. Because when you love something, you want to do it all the time, even if no one is paying you for it.
    At least that’s how I felt about drawing.
    Until I met Susan Boone.
    Top ten reasons I wish I were Gwen Stefani, lead singer of the best ska band of all time, No Doubt:
10. Gwen can dye her hair whatever color she wants, even bright pink like she did for the Return of Saturn tour, and her parents don’t care, because they appreciate that she is an artist and must do these things as a form of creative expression. Mr. and Mrs. Stefani probably never threatened to cut off Gwen’s allowance the way my parents did that time I tried the thing with the Kool-Aid.
9. If Gwen chose to wear black every single day, people would just accept it as a sign of her great genius and no one would make ninja comments, like they do about me.
8. Gwen has her own place, and so her older siblings can’t come busting into her room whenever they want to, poking through her stuff and then telling their parents on her.
7. Gwen gets to write songs about her ex-boyfriends and sing them in front of everyone. I have never even had a boyfriend, so