The Real Prom Queens of Westfield High Read Online Free PDF

my talk with Marnie after school feels very wrong, but I need to talk to Mom about this whole thing before I figure out what to tell my best friend.
    Marnie and I keep secrets together , not from each other. Her secret crush on James, my secret obsession with the movie Pretty Woman —for years we’ve even shared similar secret hobbies. That is, secret up until Marnie had to go all public with the stupid Future Homemakers of America club. She’s tried to convince me I should be proud of my talent, but how can I be proud when the Elf Ucker finger cot catastrophe all stems from this stupid hobby?
    How could I be proud of a hobby as lame as quilting? That’s right, I’m a quilter. I’d be a big hit with the Amish.
    The mini-condom that started the whole Elf Ucker thing is actually a handy-dandy insider’s trick to help with hand quilting, so the needle doesn’t slip. Which pretty much makes the whole thing even sadder.
    It all started with a sleepover at Marnie’s house the same night her mom was hosting a stitch-n-bitch with about a dozen women. Marnie and I were still pretty young, like, maybe sixth grade or so, and in our defense, nothing on television was more interesting than the bitch-fest happening in the living room.
    I’d learned from my mom and Aunt Kate that with grown-ups, all you have to do is sit very quiet and still and wait for them to gradually forget you’re there. That’s when you get to hear the good stuff. So Marnie and I parked ourselves outside the sewing circle and got busy disappearing into the background. It was working too. Mrs. Engelbert was just launching in about Mr. Engelbert’s inadequate sexual maneuvers when, wouldn’t you know it, Marnie’s mom noticed us sitting there listening. Instead of just chasing us out of the room, like my mom would’ve done, she changed the subject and included us in piecing her quilt together.
    It was like a giant puzzle but with colors and patterns that had to blend together. Somehow mixing and matching the fabrics made sense to me in a way that’s hard to describe. It was almost like hearing a new song that seems familiar, and then when you open your mouth, you discover that you can already sing it. Like it was inside you all along.
    So now, I’ll be flipping through a fashion magazine, looking at all the makeup that I have no clue how to use, and I’ll turn the page to some knee-length, brightly patterned wrap dress on a model with a severe eating disorder. Instead of thinking, Gee, I think I’ll skip lunch to look like that, like any normal, painfully insecure and damaged teenage girl, I go, Wow, the material of that dress would look awesome in a Log Cabin quilt design.
    A lot of the time, when it seems like I’m daydreaming, I’m actually constructing new shapes and patterns in my mind. For instance, the day Grace tripped me in the hallway as a part of her ongoing mission to make my high school experience pure hell, I sat in English class afterward envisioning a quilt called Crushing Grace Douglas’s Face with an English Literature Textbook . It had a Shakespeare-patterned background and a nice swirly design with lines of text and lots of red.
    As stupid as I think quilting is, I’m hopelessly into it. Marns and I spend lots of time sitting in her bedroom as she constructs her unique outfits and I quilt. This is probably one of the many reasons I’m not exactly on my way to accessorizing my head with a tiara come prom night. In fact, I can picture Marnie and me falling into a laughing heap at the idea of me becoming the Prom Queen.
    ***
    â€œNo, no, absolutely not,” Mom says as soon as I’ve gotten five minutes of her attention to tell her about the show. I didn’t even get to the part where I spend my summer at Prom Queen Camp.
    â€œThose reality shows are destroying lives, honey,” she says as she scans the massive stack of contract pages.