Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

do you think is wrong with you?”

“You’re over-reacting,” I said with my usual reasonable calm. I helped myself to a crisp. “I’m sure you would have said the exact same thing if you’d been me.”

Hand-reared by Marilyn Gerard, Colonel in the war against dirt and disorder, Ella automatically brushed my crumbs from the counter.

“If I were you I wouldn’t know any better, would I?” she asked. “I’d be crazy enough to tell Carla Santini that Marsh Foreman had invited me to the Sidartha goodbye party.”

I flashed her one of my peppiest smiles.

“Be fair,” I begged. “I told her you were invited, too.”

Ella gave me a long, hard look. She sighed. “Have you really gone insane?” she asked quietly. “What were you thinking of? Doesn’t your brain ever get in touch with your mouth?”

“I was thinking what a pain in the neck Carla is, that’s what I was thinking of,” I replied honestly. “It drives me nuts the way she’s always tossing her hair around and smiling. She acts like she’s visiting royalty and the rest of us are just a bunch of lepers.”

Ella put the juice on the counter. “OK, so Carla Santini has insurmountable ego problems. That’s beside the point.”

I slapped the gleaming marble top with my hand. “I disagree. That’s exactly the point, in my humble opinion. If Princess Carla didn’t start practically every sentence she utters with ‘I this…’ or ‘My that…’ I would never have opened my mouth.”

And maybe if Carla had bothered to congratulate me on being Eliza instead of threatening my life.

Ella side-stepped my irrefutable argument.

“But you did open your mouth,” said Ella. “I tried to tell you that if Carla says she’s going to put you in your place, she means it. And what do you do? You open your enormous mouth, that’s what you do.” She shook with frustration. “You handed her exactly what she needs to humiliate and ridicule you for the rest of your life.” She scowled. “And me, too, probably.”

Ruminating, I bit into another crisp. “I don’t know about that…” I said slowly. “I mean, it depends, doesn’t it?”

Ella handed me a glass. “Depends on what? Whether or not someone drops a gold record on her head at the party and she develops amnesia?”

I stared at the glass for a minute. I was used to fingerprints on my glasses. This one sparkled the way they do in dishwasher advertisements.

“Well…” I said at last. “It kind of depends on whether we go or not, doesn’t it?”

Ella spilled grape juice all over the counter.

“On whether we go or not?” she shrieked. She was so upset that she wasn’t even mopping up the juice. She was just standing there, staring at me in stupefied horror. “What do you mean? We’re not going to the Sidartha party, Lola. This may have slipped your mind, but we haven’t exactly been invited.”

I waved this objection aside. “You don’t have to be invited to a party like that,” I assured her. “You just crash. There are people in New York who never go out unless it’s to crash some celebrity bash.”

“Well, I’m not from New York,” said Ella between clenched teeth. “And anyway, my mother would never let me go to a party like that, even if it were being held next door, and you know it. Not without her. Are you planning to take my mother with us?”

What a thought! Mrs Gerard stopped listening to music when the Beatles broke up. And although I’m pretty sure that she must have had a youth, I’m also pretty sure that it wasn’t what you’d call wild unless you were comparing it with the life of a drop of paint. I’d rather have taken the Pope on my honeymoon than taken Mrs Gerard to the Sidartha party.

“We can work around your mother,” I informed Ella. “She doesn’t have to know.”

“Are you kidding?” Ella’s voice was unnervingly shrill. “There’s no way on earth you and I are going to sneak into the city for a concert without my mother finding out. Never mind going to a party afterwards. My mother wants to know where I am every minute of the day and night.”

Unfortunately, there was a certain amount of truth in this. Mrs Gerard does everything but make Ella punch in and out on a time clock. It isn’t that she doesn’t trust her – Ella is an incredibly trustworthy teenager if you ask me – it’s that she worries about her all the time. If Ella’s ten minutes late getting home, her mother will be at the door before she turns in the front path. My mother might worry about me if she knew I was out on a motorcycle with someone for whom speed limits are merely suggestions, but otherwise she’s too busy worrying about a trillion other things to time my comings and goings. This, however, was not the moment to start agreeing with Ella.

“How do you know she’d find out?” I demanded. “There must be at least a dozen ways we could manage to go into the city and stay out the entire night without her ever finding out. All we have to do is figure out what they are.”

Ella gaped. “Tell me the truth, Lola. Are you on drugs?”

I laughed. A person could never get away with taking drugs in my house. My mother can just look at me and know if I’m about to get my period or not.

I scattered some more crumbs around. “I will be if I don’t get to that concert.”

Ella stared at the puddle of juice on the counter with sightless eyes. “Maybe you should just let Carla have this,” she said. “You know … you got the lead. Let her have the party and everything.”

Let her have the party and everything? I could hardly believe my ears. How could Ella suggest that we just give up like that? Carla Santini may think that she’s God, but that doesn’t make me Jesus. “You’re the one who’s on drugs,” I retaliated. “A few minutes ago you said I’d already given her the weapon she needed to humiliate and ridicule us for the rest of our lives, and now you want me to load her weapon and pull the trigger.”

Ella turned her attention from the spreading purple stain to me. “But that’s exactly what you are doing. If you’d kept quiet and let her lord the concert over us for a few years she’d have been happy. Now she’s not going to rest till the whole school knows that we don’t really have invitations.”

“Exactly!” I was practically shrieking with emotion. “That’s why we have to go.” I held my head high. “It’s a matter of pride.”

Ella sighed with exasperation. “Pride goeth before a fall…” she muttered.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” said I. I picked up another crisp. “I refuse to give in. There’s no way I’m handing Carla a consolation prize.”

“It wouldn’t be a consolation prize.” Ella’s eyes were back on the juice. “It’d be more like … like a…”

I leaned closer to her. “Like a what?”

Ella shrugged. “Like an offering to unfriendly spirits so they leave you alone.”

“Doodeedoodeedoodeedoodee… What is this?” I joked. “The Twilight Zone?”

Ella looked at me, but she wasn’t smiling.

“You don’t know Carla the way I do,” said Ella in total seriousness. “You weren’t here when she was after Kali Simpson.”

“Who’s Kali Simpson?”

Ella shrugged again. “She was just this girl who used to go to Dellwood. But she and Carla had a fight about something and Carla decided to destroy her.”

“You’re making me tremble.” I trembled.

“You wouldn’t be so flippant if you’d seen the way she treated Kali,” said Ella. “She stopped talking to her and everyone else stopped, too. Any time Kali was around she’d start badmouthing her and the disciples would all laugh. She made up all these lies and spread them around the school – you know, that Kali was shoplifting … that Kali was having sex with half the boys in school … that her mother was an alcoholic…” It was Ella’s turn to tremble, but she wasn’t acting. “It was really horrible. The only person who really stuck by Kali was Sam Creek, and even he couldn’t help her in the end.”

Sam Creek, Deadwood’s token bad boy, is also its other great Independent. With his black leather jacket, his Celtic tattoo, his beaded dreads, his multitude of earrings and his attitude, Sam Creek is the antithesis of Carla Santini. He is also the only guy who doesn’t worship her.

“So what happened?” I asked. “Did Carla turn Kali into a frog?”