Bitch Is the New Black Read Online Free PDF

duplicated with someone else. The new Jocelyn (whoever that might be) would do, because Jocelyn was just the new somebody else and so on and so on—a fun-house mirror of best friends. This was during my “me” phase—do phases last twenty-seven years?—so every one of our moves meant just one thing to me. Well, a few things: new stuff, new Jocelyns, new pets, a new car, definitely a new school, and, of course, the new Helena.
    Supposedly she chose Lancaster because months before I’d put in a special request for a house with stairs and snow, so in mumbo-jumbled reverse psychology terminology the uprooting of our lives for the fifty-thousandth time was really all my decision. ME! Permission to start decades of self-fascination? Granted.
    There were three other black kids in our row of town houses. Frances was like the manager of our apartment home community or something. We were living the high life—hello, stairs—and as far as I could tell, we were now not only rich but also famous. Or at least I was. I made sure everyone saw me skating in the backyard parking lot with my new purple Barbie skates, not noticing they were on the wrong feet until Frances pointed it out; that everyone saw me scooting fluently on my pink-tasseled Snoopy scooter, which I'd been prescribed due to my bike-riding phobia; that everyone knew I had a snapping turtle named Tyrone, but not that I tortured him with sharpened pencils.
    Existing exclusively in my own head, I collected best friends like My Little Ponies but was happiest alone. Common household items were my real friends—black markers, fingernail files, hairbrushes, red plastic cups, left shoes, bitten-off pencil erasers, power cords, matted toothbrushes, untwisted paper clips. They were all characters in my inanimate soaps. Why should I buy you Barbies when you’d rather play with school supplies? “The Numbers” was one melodrama mentally rewound so often I’m surprised the tape kept working. See, 3 and 4 were the elderly parents of 5, who was good and sweet and desperately in love with 6, the innocent beauty who herself was in love with 7 and never realized her secret power over 9, the billionaire brat who was betrothed to 8, who, of course, kept herself busy plotting against 6 and lusting after 7. I can’t remember what 1 and 2 did. Directed, probably.
    There was this one time when Frances, anticipating an early start the next morning, trusted me to get myself up and ready for school. A second-grader reading on a fourth-grade level, I awoke feeling so over it. What was all the fuss about? I’d be fine. Picked out a white sundress paired with purple snow boots because it was January.
    This was also the same day I “forgot” to wear panties. Flowy dress, meet the wind. Wind, meet my tiny bare ass cheeks. Why six-year-old me decided to go grade-school commando escapesme. If I had to guess, somehow underwear seemed unnecessary. When I met up with the kids that lived a few doors down to walk to school, nobody said nothing.
    It was as if I’d been dressing like a Russian child prostitute all my life. School pictures were that day. The A’s, being down in front, were given the star treatment, totally unmissable. Unfortunately, sitting Indian-style, so was my hoo-ha. Mrs. What’s-her-guts couldn’t wait to dime me out to Frances. Jerk. Apparently there was a seasonally appropriate pink sweat suit waiting blatantly on the downstairs couch that I’d completely missed in my rush to be grown.
    Mrs. What’s-her-guts, stool pigeon that she was, had a bunch more to report: I’d been cheating on our class book assignment for months—tracing my mother’s signature on the “how many pages I read today” thingy she sent home every week. Plus, I frequently erased myself from the chalkboard reserved for naughty names; plus, I cheated at Heads Up Seven Up; plus, I was sneaking unauthorized Sprite into