Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

Ella has a way of just staring at you as though she hasn’t heard the question. It means that she’s thinking of something diplomatic to say.

“My mother likes you,” she mumbled after several seconds. “She thinks you’re very – interesting.”

But I wasn’t going to let Ella slide out of this so easily. I’m like a finely tuned instrument when it comes to reading between the lines – as a great actor should be. I’d heard the pause between “very” and “interesting”. Besides, honesty is important in real friendships.

“And I think Hitler was interesting,” I retorted. “But that doesn’t mean I like him.”

Ella laughed. Sometimes I worry that she may grow up to have a laugh like her mother’s.

“Stop exaggerating, will you? My mother doesn’t think you’re anything like Hitler.”

“But she doesn’t like me,” I persisted. I gave Ella a deep, searching look. The kind of look Hamlet was always giving his mother. “I can tell.”

Ella made a face. “She likes you fine.” Ella made another face. “She just thinks you’re a little … well … you know … strange…”

I didn’t want to hurt Ella’s feelings – after all, she is related to them – so I didn’t say that I, personally, think both Mrs and Mr Gerard are strange. They’re so perfect they might be aliens masquerading in human form.

“And she worries that I don’t see as much of my old friends – you know, since you and I started hanging out.”

Ella’s “old friends”, such as they’d been, were Carla Santini. Carla and Ella – and all Carla’s crowd – live in Woodford. Woodford is a “private community” – it says so outside the electric security gate. Woodford has mega- expensive houses, rolling lawns, shady streets, and its own leisure centre. I’d never even heard of a “private community” before I moved to Deadwood. A “private community” means you aren’t supposed to go there unless you live there, are visiting someone by invitation, or are delivering something to someone who does live there, and that there’s a guard at the gate to make sure that all riff-raff is kept beyond the fortress walls. According to Ella, she and Carla were pretty close in elementary and middle school – when they took dance and music lessons together and went to each other’s parties – but that all changed when they hit high school. It was then that Carla began to blossom and Ella didn’t. Carla more or less dumped the quiet and slightly dull Ella and started gathering a more glamorous retinue around her. They were still friendly, of course, as girls whose parents play bridge and tennis and golf together would be, but they weren’t exactly twin souls. How could they be? Carla doesn’t have a soul.

“Pardon me, Ms Gerard,” I said, in a fruity English accent, “but I thought you said that you hardly ever saw Carla. I thought you said that you’d drifted apart.”

Ella shrugged. “Yeah, we have. But my mother doesn’t know that.”

I pursed my lips. “What you’re really saying,” I said, “is that your mother doesn’t like me because I’m not like Carla Santini.”

Most of the mothers in Deadwood – and all of the mothers in the private community of Woodford – want their daughters to be like Carla Santini; most of the teachers wish all their students could be like Carla Santini; most of the girls in school wish they could be Carla Santini, even the girls she treats the worst; and as for the boys – except for Sam Creek, who seems totally impervious to the Santini charms – any one of them would sell his soul for the chance of getting his tongue into Carla Santini’s mouth.

Ella rolled her eyes. “Oh, please… Will you stop with the Carla Santini obsession for a few minutes?” She pursed her lips, looking at me as though she were wondering how honest she could really risk being. “The thing is…” she went on, slowly and carefully choosing her words.

“The thing is that I’m not your mother’s idea of a suitable companion for you.” Mrs Gerard wants Ella to hang out with other well-off, middle-class kids who will all go to the same good colleges and eventually have the same narcotic if perfect lives as their parents. She doesn’t want her only offspring running around with someone who has the soul and passion of a gipsy and lives in an old house without a microwave.

“Actually,” said Ella, her eyes on the thick white carpet, “it’s more your mother than you that my mother doesn’t think is suitable.”

I gazed at her incredulously.

“My mother?” Thinking my mother isn’t suitable is like thinking Santa Claus is a highwayman. My mother is eminently suitable – in an ordinary way. “Not suitable for what?”

Ella squirmed uncomfortably. “It’s not big things…” she mumbled, still studying the two-inch pile. “I mean, remember when they met at Parents’ Night?”

I nodded my head very slowly. My mother hadn’t really said anything about it, just that she’d met the Gerards.

“Yeah…”

Ella squirmed some more. “Well, apparently your mother was wearing filthy old overalls and she had chopsticks in her hair.”

“My mother often has chopsticks in her hair,” I answered a little shortly. Because she can never find a hair clip. “And if she was in her work clothes it was because she didn’t have time to change.”

“You don’t have to get defensive with me,” said Ella. “I’m just telling you what my mother said.”

“But it’s ridiculous. What difference does it make what she had in her hair?”

“I know it doesn’t matter,” said Ella. “But my parents pay attention to stuff like that. They’re old-fashioned.”

“Old-fashioned? Ella, they’d have to be time travellers from the Victorian era to get upset about a pair of chopsticks.”

Ella stopped studying the carpet and turned her attention to the CD player. “Forget it,” she said. “It isn’t important.”

“What do you mean it isn’t important?” I threw myself in front of her. “This is the woman who gave me life we’re talking about. Whose milk fed my fragile body, whose blood flows through my veins. Of course it’s important. What else does your mother have against Karen?”

Ella smiled wryly. “Well, that’s one thing.”

“What is?”

“That she lets you call her Karen. My mother doesn’t like that. She thinks it’s disrespectful.”

“What else?” I pushed. “There has to be more than that.”

Ella sighed. She was no match for me in this kind of thing, and she knew it.

“Well, if you must know, Lola, neither of my parents is too happy about the fact that your mother has three children and no husband.”

To her credit, Ella was looking pretty embarrassed.

I was simply stupefied. “What?”

Ella shrugged helplessly.

“I do know this is practically the twenty-first century and everything, but my folks really are old-fashioned. At least about stuff like that they are. They think single mothers are a threat to society.”

Well, you can see their point, can’t you? I mean, what hope is there for our culture when a mother lets her sixteen-year-old daughter call her by her first name, wears chopsticks to hold up her hair, and lives without a husband? The barbarians are practically battering down the gates.

I was really interested now. I’d never seen my mother as a social outcast before. It was an idea I could warm to.

“You’ve got to be joking,” I said, even though I knew that she wasn’t. “And anyway, single-motherhood is a transitory state. I mean, Karen used to be a married mother. It could happen again.”

It was Ella’s turn to look shocked.

“Your mother was married?” She couldn’t have sounded more amazed if she’d just learned my mother used to date the President.

“Of course she was,” I reassured her. “Twice.”

“Twice?” Ella frowned. “But I thought you said you were a love child.”

I had said I was a love child. I remembered it clearly – now that Ella had reminded me. The truth, that my father, whom I visit at least twice a month, lives in New York and draws pictures of adorable bears and rabbits for a living, is pretty dull. I thought saying I was a love child made me seem more of a tragic, romantic figure. This happens now and then. When you’re as creative and imaginative as I am, it can be difficult to keep track of your