Surviving Valencia Read Online Free PDF

tummy hurts,” she murmured.
    “Should we try out the makeup?” I asked. It was the last thing I wanted to do, to open it all and share it with them, but I was desperate.
    Jenny perked up a little at that. “Sure.” Without hesitating she reached right into the stash I had arranged in front of me on the floor and grabbed a package of Cover Girl eye shadow. She tore it open and dug the fresh little pad of the applicator into the sparkly, chalky blue compartment of shadow.
    “Heather, come here,” she said, pulling her true friend down from the recliner. She filled in the area from Heather’s eyelashes to eyebrows with a thick smear of blue. I watched as she dipped the applicator again, this time into the sable brown, and made up Heather’s other eye.
    “You look just like a rock star! You look like Cyndi Lauper!” They went running to the bathroom to look. I followed them, sick to my stomach over my new eye shadow’s speedy turn from pristine to ruined.
    “Doesn’t she look exactly like Cyndi Lauper?” Jenny squealed. No, she did not at all look like Cyndi Lauper. The very comparison made my nostrils flare in disgust. Big boned Heather with her crooked teeth and hairy little mustache on her upper lip. I shrugged. This was the point where I could either go along with them and watch all my new makeup be destroyed, or save the makeup and have them think I was boring, as usual.
    “I don’t really feel like playing this. Should we keep watching Mr. Mom ?” I asked.
    “Do my lips in purple!” said Heather, ignoring me. Jenny ran back into the TV room and scooped up the rest of my birthday gifts. She returned to the bathroom, grinning, and carelessly tore open my purple sparkly Cover Girl lipstick, letting the cardboard backing float down and land in the toilet bowl. I just watched. I hated them and I hated myself.
    I grabbed the raspberry crème blush, the one article she had missed in her haste, and headed upstairs to my bedroom. The party was in full swing, spilling over from inside to outside and room to room. I caught a glimpse of Valencia’s friend Naomi Shelton, looking woozy and sitting on my Uncle Ted’s lap. Gross. Somehow through the din of it all, I heard my mother’s shrieking laughter.
    Some little girls from down the street were in my bedroom, sitting on my bed, playing with my Barbies. They could not have reached the Barbies, or even known they were up on my closet shelf, unless some awful grown-up had helped them find them. Which meant my mom had taken the Barbies down, on purpose, without asking me. From pure frustration I started to cry.
    “Those are mine and I didn’t say you could play with them.” I said. The three little girls stopped playing and sized me up.
    “Your mom said it was okay,” said one of them. Her blue, icy eyes met mine like a dare.
    “But I said you couldn’t.” I wiped at my tears, noticing a popped off Barbie head stuck upon one of the girl’s fingertips.
    “We’re going to tell on you if you don’t let them play with us,” said the Barbie killer in a squeaky voice, wiggling her Barbie head finger in my face. Her friends giggled menacingly.
    I looked around my room. It was worse than I had initially realized. I saw that my dresser drawers were opened and the top drawer of my desk had been snooped through. A whole sheet of stickers were now decorating the back of my desk chair. I found myself both horrified and impressed at their gutsiness. They couldn’t have been older than seven.
    “Fine. Fine. I don’t care. But you can’t play with them in here.” I picked up the box that held the Barbies and set it in the hallway outside my door. “I have a headache and I need to lie down right now .”
    My eleventh birthday was the day I first put into use the favorite excuse of grown-ups: I’m sick. Case closed. It’s the one point no one ever argues. Everyone knows it’s a lie, but it works anyway. I had been watching Jenny use it for years. She was born