My First Love and Other Disasters Read Online Free PDF Page B

I actually have nothing to wear. Sure there’s a lot of bulk in my closet but it’s all horrendous. Like for example, the navy dress. I can’t imagine why I was so crazy to buy it, it’s positively disgusting and I look like a giant baby doll in it. My knit skirt hangs down half a mile longer in the back than in the front, and my red dressy sweater itches. Most of my clothes are just nowhere, full of lumps and bumps in all the wrong places, and I’m really in the mood to make a big thing about my wardrobe with my mother, but the plain fact is I can’t risk angering her tonight of all nights. She absolutely has to let me go to Fire Island. Period.
    I kind of have it worked out in my mind how to do it.We’re going to this terrific little restaurant in the Village called Trattoria da Alfredo. The food is out of sight, but the best part about it is that it’s very small and sort of quiet. A perfect place to put the squeeze on somebody. I know just how it’s going to happen. I start asking them about the mother’s helper job, and they’re not hot for the idea but I keep at it, and then my father says to lower our voices and we start to whisper louder, and then people start to turn around. You know how adults get very patient with kids when other people are listening? I mean, they just can’t say, “I said no, and I don’t want to hear anymore,” like they do at home. They have to pretend to listen and consider it and then give a reasonable answer. I really have them with their backs to the wall, I hope. I’m preparing for an all-out blitz tonight, the kind that takes everyone’s appetite away (except, of course, Nina, who could eat through an earthquake).

Five
    It happens exactly like I said only a little different. First thing my father says is “No, and I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
    Of course this is a very bad start, but I push on. I give them the business about how I’m fifteen and they still treat me like a baby. That’s an old argument so they know how to answer that easily. Even I know how to answer that. All you say is, “When you can’t take no for an answer, that’s acting like a baby so we treat you like one.”
    Then I give them the business about how every other girl in the entire high school is going to be a mother’s helper this summer and before they can say anything I rattle off six names ending with Laura Wolfe, the only one I absolutely know is going to.
    Up to now the toad has been gorging on fettucine. Now suddenly she zeroes in to destroy my life. “Uh-uh,” says Nina, “Laura Wolfe is going on a camping trip with her parents.”
    â€œShe is not, smarty, she’s going to be a mother’s helper for the Kramers out in East Hampton, so there.” I could kill her, I swear it.
    â€œUh-uh.” She shakes her dumb head, and the strings of the fettucine hanging out of her mouth swing back and forth.
    â€œShe is so!”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œIs so, creep!”
    â€œMom!”
    â€œJerk.”
    â€œThat’s enough!” hisses my father. “I don’t care what Laura Wolfe or anyone else is doing with her summer.”
    â€œBut she is, Daddy,” I insist. “I know because she said . . .”
    â€œWell, she isn’t anymore because her sister, Linda, is in my class, and she said . . .”
    â€œDid you hear your father?” Now my mother’s in it. And suddenly the couples at the next table are all dying to hear about Laura Wolfe. “And, Nina, for God’s sake, swallow that food. How many times do I have to tell you not to eat spaghetti with half of it hanging down to your chin!”
    â€œI can’t help it,” she whines, “it just slips out.”
    â€œRoll it on the spoon the way I showed you,” my father tells her.
    â€œI did.”
    â€œIf you did it properly it wouldn’t