How to Be Popular Read Free

to just mosey on out in front of a moving crosstown bus, I realized my parents are insane and not to be trusted under any circumstances.
    And I was only seven .
    This realization was cemented as I entered pubertyand my parents began to say things to me like, “Look, we’ve never been the parent of a teenage girl before. We don’t know if we’re doing the right thing. But we’re doing the best we can.” This is not something you want to hear from your parents under any circumstances. You want to feel like your parents are in control, that they know what they’re doing.
    Yeah. With my parents? Not so much.
    The worst was the summer between sixth and seventh grades, when they made me go to Girl Scout Camp. All I wanted to do was stay home and work in the store. I am not what you’d call a big fan of nature, being basically a human chigger-and-mosquito magnet.
    Then, to make matters worse, I found out Lauren Moffat was going to be one of my cabin mates. When I very calmly and maturely told the head counselor that this wouldn’t work because of Lauren’s extreme hatred of me, thanks to the Super Big Gulp incident, the camp counselor lady said, all heartily, “Oh, we’ll see about that,” and my mom actually APOLOGIZED for me, saying I have a hard time making friends.
    “We’ll change that,” the counselor lady said, all confidently. And made me stay in Lauren’s cabin.
    Until two days later when I hadn’t eaten a thing—too nauseated—or gone to the bathroom—since every time I tried to go, Lauren or another one of her “bunk” mates appeared outside the outhouse-style toilet and hissed, “Hey…don’t pull a Steph in there.”
    That was when the counselor moved me to a cabinwith other rejects such as myself, and I ended up having a passably good time.
    Obviously, given the above—I’m not even including the fact that my mom knows next to nothing about bookkeeping or accounting and yet owns her own business, or that my father thinks there is a huge market out there somewhere for his unpublished book series about an Indiana high school basketball coach who solves crimes—my parents are not to be trusted.
    Nor are they to be told anything personal involving my life, except on a need-to-know basis.
    “No, no parties, Mrs. Landry,” was how Jason replied to my mom’s question about our evening plans. I’ve been coaching him as to how to handle my parents, because Jason’s grandma is marrying my mom’s dad, which makes him my mom’s stepcousin. I think. “We’re just going to drive up and down Main Street.”
    He said it like it was nothing— I think we’re just going to drive up and down Main Street . But it was far from nothing. Because Jason is the first one of us to have gotten his own car—he’d been saving up all summer to buy his grandmother’s housekeeper’s 1974 BMW 2002tii—and this is the first Saturday night he’s had possession of it.
    It will also be the first Saturday night in our combined histories that Jason, Becca, and I do not spend lying in the grass stargazing on The Hill, or sitting on The Wall outside the Penguin, which is where everyone in our town—who does not have access to a car—sits on Saturday night, watching the rich kids (the ones who gotcars for their sixteenth birthdays, as opposed to iBooks, like the rest of us) cruise up and down Main Street, the cleverly named main drag through downtown Bloomville.
    Main Street starts at Bloomville Creek Park—where Grandpa’s observatory is almost finished being constructed—and goes in this straight line past all the chain stores, which managed to drive the locally owned clothing shops out of business (the same way Mom thinks the Super Sav-Mart and its massively discounted book department is going to shut us down), up to the courthouse. The courthouse—a large limestone building with a white dome that has a spire sticking through the middle of it with a weather vane shaped like a fish on the tip, although no one