Top 8 (2 page)

the8rgrrl
Have a good spring break, Madison. Don't forget to run your lines for
Dane.
I'm off-book already. It's an understudy's job…

Brian (not Ed) McMahon
Mad, it was awesome that you came to my party on Saturday. Just don't post any more pics in your album, okay? I'm kinda in trouble about it, and I don't need proof on the interwebs.

Kittson
For the last time, Madison, the prom theme is NOT going to be “Prom It Like It's Hot.” As prom chairperson, I have to say that your unwillingness to compromise on a theme has been very distressing. We're reconvening the Tuesday after spring break to lock down a theme. If you can't attend, you're off the committee. Sorry!

Vote4Connor!
Okay, Madison, I'm conceding the election. I guess you won. But the recount was necessary in order to move forward. And I thought now that we aren't competitors, you might want to go out sometime. I hadn't realized you were going out with what's-his-face. So never mind.

ginger_snap
Hey Mad, I just finished the sketches for your costumes! They're going to look gr8!!

JimmynLiz
Have fun on spring break, Mads! We'll miss you!

JimmynLiz
That was both of us.

pizzadude
Have a rocking SB. It'll be nice not to get any requests for pineapple pizza for a few weeks. ;)

Bonjour, Lisse!
Au revoir, mon amie! Je me souviendrai de toi!

Shy Time
Travel safe! And don't forget that you can't bring anything liquid on the plane or they throw it out or arrest you or something. I'll miss you!

Justin
Have a great trip, Madison. I'll miss you. — Justin

RueRue
Don't forget: Postcards for your BFF (me). Sunscreen. Memory cards. Souvenirs for your BFF. To call me when you get back!

“We're home!” my mother announced cheerfully as our SUV passed the town sign:
WELCOME TO PUTNAM, CONNECTICUT. SETTLED
1655.
HOME OF THE FIGHTING PILGRIMS
.

We were still twenty minutes away from our house, but after two weeks away — two weeks away on a
boat
— I appreciated the sentiment. We had gone on a family trip to the Galápagos Islands, in Ecuador, for spring break.

I'll admit, when my parents first told me where we were going, I had been a little startled. I mean, Ecuador? For spring break? Who spends spring break in
Ecuador
? Besides, I mean, the Ecuadorians. Who live there.

But the islands were amazing — they're completely uninhabited by people, and were made famous when Darwin went down there and discovered the thing
about the parrots' beaks that made him realize that evolution, you know, existed.

We'd stayed on a small ship with about twenty other people — including a kind-of cute guy my age — sailing to the islands during the day and exploring them, taking lots of pictures of all the animals, and then going back to the boat to have bad food and sleep.

The animals didn't have any fear, so you could get really close to the penguins, sea lions, and tortoises. All that had been pretty cool.

But.

I'd had to spend the trip in close proximity to my thirteen-year-old Demon Spawn brother, Travis, who at the moment was repeatedly kicking my ankle.

“Thank God we're home,” I said, kicking him back, as I stared out the window at the spring flowers bursting into bloom all over the hillsides.

“Didn't you have fun, Madison?” my mother asked as she turned around in the passenger seat to look at me. My father took this opportunity to change the radio station from my mother's financial channel back to the sports report.

“Sean!” my mother said, turning around.

“Laura, I have to hear the scores,” my father said. “Travis!” he yelled to my brother, who had not lifted his head from his PSP the entire hour-long ride back from JFK. “Write these down, okay?”

“I can't hear you, Dad,” Travis said, obviously lying. Because he had to have heard the question, right?

“Well, I have to hear the stock report,” my mother said, reaching to change the station back. “Trav, write down how the Dow did today, okay?”

“
Well
,” I said loudly to remind my mother that she had in fact asked me a question, “I thought the Galápagos were nice, but —”

“But she missed her
boyfriend
,” Travis singsonged. When both my parents turned around to stare at him — causing the driver in the left lane to swerve suddenly — he seemed to realize that his ruse of being temporarily deafened by his headphones had been foiled. “Crud,” he muttered.

“Travis, the Dow —”

“The Braves score —”

“I missed my
friends
,” I corrected my brother. But as my parents were back to fighting over the radio and not listening to me, I made a face at him and turned back toward the window. I was counting the minutes until we were home…where my laptop and cell, my connections to the outside world, waited.

I hadn't been online in two weeks, and I'd had enough of this involuntary Amish-ness. The only internet connection on the ship was through an ancient computer, and they had charged for internet access. A dollar a
minute! And this wouldn't have been that bad, except that it took at least five minutes for the stone-age modem to connect in the first place. And since neither of my parents' BlackBerries had worked, I was SOL in terms of the internet.

The Demon Spawn — no offense to my parents — had surprised me by spending most of his free time in the internet room, angering all the businesspeople who actually had important deals to make, while he was probably just playing fantasy baseball. And since Travis had always hoarded his money like Scrooge, I'd been surprised that he'd been willing to spend so much of it on the World's Slowest Internet.

I might have paid to go online, too, if I hadn't had to buy souvenirs for my friends. But the ones I'd picked out were perfect. I'd gotten a bobble-head Charles Darwin for my best friend, Ruth Miller, a
J'Adore Ecuador!
tote for my Francophile friend Lisa Feldman, and a plush Galápagos bird, the blue-footed booby, for my friend Schuyler Watson.

The present that I'd agonized over the most was for Justin Williamson, my boyfriend of seventeen days (not counting the fourteen days of spring break). I'd finally decided on a pair of carved sea tortoises. I figured we'd each take one, since tortoises mate for life. And I just knew that Justin would understand the implications
of this, even though we hadn't yet. Mated, that is. Anyway, I was glad I'd bought the souvenirs rather than spending the $60 it would have taken for me to have checked my e-mail.

As my parents finally reached a truce and turned off the radio, we pulled into our long, winding driveway.

“Finally!” Travis yelled, for once echoing my feelings completely.

“Are you carsick, sweetie?” my mother asked.

“Yeah, Trav,” I said. “Is oo sickie?”

“No,” he muttered. “Just sick of you.”

“Likewise,” I said, giving him a shove he totally deserved.

“Mom!” the Demon Spawn yelled.

“Kids!” she said as we pulled into the garage. “I certainly hope you'll be better behaved at dinner tomorrow night.”

Which was totally random. Like there was something special about tomorrow night? Like we could behave however we wanted at dinner tonight? But my mother was the CFO of Pilgrim Bank, and so a lot of the time she was just out of it, thinking about how the
baht
was doing, or operating on two hours of sleep because she had to get up at 3
A.M
. to deal with the Tokyo markets.

“Sure,” I said, getting out of the car, grabbing my purse, and heading toward the house. “No problem.”

“And don't forget your suitcase,” she called as I headed up the steps to the door, where my father had just finished disabling the alarm.

The suitcase could wait. I had to check my voice mail, my Gmail, my school e-mail, and most important of all, my Friendverse profile.

Friendverse was crucial. Friendverse was the new black, according to Lisa. Everyone I knew had been on it since the beginning of the school year. Before that, everyone had been on Facebook, and before
that
, everyone had been on MySpace. I'd heard rumors that the next site was going to be even better than Friendverse, but since it was called Zyzzx, and nobody knew how to pronounce it, not many people were talking about it yet. But for now, Friendverse was a necessity.

Plus, I knew if I stalled long enough, my father would bring my suitcase up for me. He was the head sportswriter for the
Putnam Post
and spent most of his time at home, writing in his office. I knew the sight of my abandoned suitcase would get to him. He saw the home as his domain — or gridiron, as he called it.

It was only in first grade or something that I realized that most other kids' dads weren't home all day, making them peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and telling them all about the '34 Giants lineup.

Which was too bad for them, in my opinion. My dad made — and still makes — a mean PB&B.

“Madison, suitcase!” my father yelled at me as I stepped inside, my mother behind me. I heard the phone ring, and my mother hurried to answer it.

“Later, okay?” I said, one foot on the stairs. I had a profile to check!

My father shook his head. “I'll help you carry it, Madison, but I'm not doing it for you.”

Damn. That had been my plan.

“And I'd recommend now,” he said. “Unless you want your brother going through it…again.”

That was all I needed to hear. After last year's trip to Spain, I'd left my suitcase in the hall for a little bit — okay, two weeks. But whatever, it had been heavy. And I was just taking out what I needed, to lighten it up enough to carry it upstairs to my room. That was when Travis went through it, stole my bra, and used it in his seventh grade art project, “Ground Control to Major Travis,” as the base for the space station or whatever it was supposed to be. And his art teacher hadn't realized that there was a
bra
in his student's project — a stolen bra, at that — and it had gone onto a state festival and won third place.

And of course all of Travis's friends knew that it was my (admittedly somewhat padded) bra that was currently on display in Putnam Middle School's trophy case. This had made me particularly popular whenever I had to pick Travis up after school.

I grabbed my suitcase by the top, and my dad picked up the bottom. I could hear my mom continuing to talk animatedly on the phone in the kitchen, with the low buzz of the stock report in the background.

“Oof,” my father said, stumbling under the suitcase's weight. “What's in here? You know we weren't supposed to bring any rocks out of the country.”

“Just souvenirs and stuff,” I said as we hauled it up, stair by stair.

“Can you believe your mother?” my dad asked as we paused to take a breather. “We just left these people, and she wants to have dinner with them tomorrow night?”

“Yeah,” I agreed absently. My thoughts were on my laptop, and how long it would be before I could have my hands on it again.

“I mean, is it too much to ask that we stop hanging out with these people and listening to their interminable golfing stories?”

I had no idea what my dad was talking about, but I really didn't care. The sooner we got the suitcase up to my room, the sooner I could go online, turn my cell on, and reconnect with the outside world again.

“There,” my dad said, dragging the suitcase the last few feet, dropping it onto my carpet, and clutching his back. “That probably made my chiropractor very rich.”

“Oh,” Travis said, appearing in my doorway, looking disappointed. “I didn't realize you would have brought your suitcase up already. I wanted to, um, help.”

“Out!” I yelled at him.

“Don't yell at your brother,” my dad said absently, doing back-stretching exercises and therefore missing the incredibly rude gesture Travis made at me as he left. Like I was supposed to
let
him continue to use my lingerie in his art projects? Um, no. I don't think so.

As my father hobbled off in search of a heating pad, I closed the door behind him, looked around and smiled. I was home.

It had taken about three years, but I'd finally gotten my room the way I wanted it. This was after many arguments with my mother, who kept wanting her decorator to “do something in neutrals.” But I'd prevailed, and now it was perfect. Pink and green, with one whole wall in cork, making it into a huge bulletin board. The room was a little messy, but I could always find what I needed, so I really didn't understand what Gabby, who cleaned for us, was always complaining about.

On my desk were stacks of college catalogs—my mother was pushing for Vassar, and my dad wanted me to go to Michigan, but I had a feeling only because he wanted good seats to home games — and my piles of unfinished homework.

There were also towering stacks of paperback mysteries — Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett. My English teacher, Mr. Underwood, had been assigning them all semester, and to my surprise, I'd really gotten into them.

My walls were covered with posters from the productions I'd been in at Putnam High School. There were the normal ones:
The Seagull
(sophomore year, my first lead. I'd gotten the part of Nina after a grueling audition process against Sarah Donner; she'd ended up understudying me),
Wait Until Dark
(last winter, I'd beaten out Sarah for Susy, the lead. Things had gone so disastrously during the last performance that I tried not to think about it too much),
Noises Off!
(this past fall; I'd lost out on Belinda, the part I really wanted, to Sarah, and had ended up playing Brooke, who spends most of the play in her underwear), and
Romeo and Juliet
(sophomore year winter; I'd played Juliet, Sarah had understudied).

Then there were the posters for the yearly musical, which was always an original adaptation: freshman year's
Frankly, Anne…The Musical Diary of Anne Frank
and last year's
Willy! Death of a Musical Salesman
. As I spotted my script of this year's production —
Great Dane: The Musical Tragedy of Hamlet
— lying on my bed, I felt suddenly guilty that I'd forgotten to bring it on the trip with me. We were supposed to be off-book when we came back, and I knew that Sarah — who was understudying
me again — would be such a pain to deal with if I went up on a line.

My bulletin-wall was covered with pictures of me and my friends: Ruth and me in third grade (the year I moved to Putnam from Boston and we became best friends), then Ruth and I dressed up at this year's Winter Dance. There were pics of me, Schuyler, and Ruth looking bored at the French Appreciation lecture that Lisa had dragged us to last month; Shy and Ruth wearing their MAD FOR MAD FOR SECRETARY buttons from last month's election; Lisa and her boyfriend, Dave Gold, making faces at the camera; the class couple, Jimmy Arnett and Liz Franklin, with their arms around each other (as usual); a series of increasingly crooked shots from my lab partner Brian McMahon's last party; and the front page of the
Putnam Pilgrim
that showed the results of the ridiculous recount that Connor Atkins had demanded when I beat him — twice — for senior class secretary.

On my bedside table, there was a stack of newly developed pictures, the ones taken at the Spring Carnival just before I'd left, all of me and Justin, looking so cute together. And sure, in a lot of the pictures, Justin seemed to be blinking or looking the wrong way, but I didn't care. He still looked completely adorable.