Parties & Potions #4 Read Online Free PDF Page B

good.”

The Freshman Fiasco
     
    “I love your new shirt,” my BFF, Tammy, tells me as we walk into the JFK auditorium for the welcome assembly. “When did you get it?”
    “Hello! Last week. I was with you!”
    Her face squishes with confusion. “That’s not the shirt you bought with me. That one was red. Yours is blue.”
    Whoops. “Oh, yeah, I, uh, forgot. I exchanged it for another color.”
    “I like it,” she says.
    “Are you sure? ’Cause it looked pretty funky in white, too. And red. And gold.”
    “Too late now.”
    Or not. I could always slip into the bathroom before the bell. Although Tammy might worry she was having some sort of color-activated stroke.
    The second we enter the auditorium, my Raf-radar goes on. Where is he? Where is that Shmoopie? Shmoopoo? Poo poo?
    Tee hee, I said “poo.”
    Must get a grip! I have to act mature now that I have a boyfriend.
    How I love to say that. A boyfriend. Or as they say in French, which, according to my schedule, I have second period, mon amour. My love. Are you supposed to tell your boyfriend you love him after only a month? Or should you wait for him to say it first? I wish there were a high school boyfriend manual I could check. I bet that would be covered in chapter one.
    Is that him? Nope. There? Nope. Wait, there he is, there he is! He’s sitting in the right-hand corner of the auditorium with a group of his friends.
    Yes!
    Why doesn’t he look up? Shouldn’t he have Rachel-radar? I should zap up a spell for that. Meanwhile, should I go up to him? Is that stalkerish? I mean, we’ve seen each other practically every day since camp ended. But does that mean we’re supposed to sit side by side for orientation? Do boyfriends and girlfriends have to sit together?
    That would be covered in chapter two.
    What do I do, what do I do? Sit with him or no? I look down at my shoes. I look up at the ceiling. Hello, halogen lights. I look back down. My neck hurts. What if the transition from summer boyfriend to school boyfriend is too weird for him? I’ve seen Grease. I don’t want to have to ask him what happened to the Danny Zuko I met at the beach. Not that I met Raf at the beach.
    A Pink Ladies jacket would be cool, though.
    “There’s Raf,” Tammy says, opening her hand and pointing, which is the scuba signal for “let’s go that way” Tammy learned to scuba dive last year and occasionally likes to communicate by underwater mime. I don’t mind. If I ever fell into the ocean, at least I’d know how to tell people I was drowning.
    “Really?” I say, feigning ignorance. “Where?”
    “You’re such a liar. You spotted him the second you walked in.”
    I laugh. She totally knows me. Except for the witch part. “Should we go over? I don’t want to be a stalker.”
    “He’s your boyfriend. You can’t stalk your boyfriend. I’m sure he wants to sit with you.”
    Tammy has a very mature outlook on boyfriends, mostly because hers, Bosh, is very mature. He’s a college freshman. He’s off at Penn, but they talk and text like ten times a day.
    Tammy is pretty mature about everything. Not much fazes her. Her relationships. Her friendships. Her two step-moms. Yup, she has two. Her dad is remarried, and her mom is remarried—to another woman. And they all get along. They went on a joint vacation over the summer. A cruise. How crazy is that? My parents would never go on a joint summer vacation. I mean, they did when they were married, obviously, but they wouldn’t now.
    We used to drive to Stowe for the weekend to go skiing. Those car rides were insanely long, but fun in a singing-along-to-Broadway-show-tunes-and-playing-geography kind of way.
    And then we would all share a hotel room, and we’d laugh at my dad ’cause he slept with socks on.
    Imagine the four of us—no, make that seven (the four of us plus Lex, my mom’s boyfriend; Prissy, my stepsister; and my pregnant stepmom)—going on a cruise together now. Not. I can’t even picture the