Meg Cabot - All American Girl

What I saw sitting on either side of my reflection I liked even less:

A delicately featured girl with no freckles in a purple-and-white cheerleader uniform, her own bright-red hair completely under control and only curling softly where it tumbled down from a barrette.

And:

A gorgeous, big-shouldered hunk with piercing blue eyes and long brown hair in torn-up jeans and an Army Navy surplus trenchcoat, eating doughnuts as if there were no tomorrow.

And there was me, in the middle. In between. Where I always am.

I saw a documentary on birth order on the Health Network, and guess what it said:

First born (aka Lucy): Bossy. Always gets what she wants. Kid most likely to be CEO of a major corporation, dictator of a small country, supermodel, you name it.

Last born (aka Rebecca): Baby. Always gets what she wants. Kid most likely to end up discovering a cure for cancer, hosting her own talk show, stepping up to the alien mother ship when it lands and being all, “Hey, welcome to Earth,” etc.

Middle child (aka me): Lost in the shuffle. Never gets what she wants. Kid most likely to end up a teen runaway, living on leftover Big Macs scrounged from Dumpsters behind the local McDonald’s for weeks before anyone even notices she is gone.

Story of my life.

Although if you think about it, the fact that I am left-handed indicates that I was probably, at one time, a twin. According to this article I read in the dentist’s office, anyway. There’s this theory that most lefties actually started out as one in a pair of a twins. One out of every ten pregnancies starts out as twins. One of out every ten people is left-handed.

Hey. You do the maths.

For a while I thought my mom had never told me about my dead twin to spare my feelings. But then I read on the Internet that in seventy per cent of pregnancies that begin as twins, one of the babies disappears. Just like that. Poof. This is called vanishing-twin syndrome, and generally the mothers don’t ever even realize that they were carrying two babies instead of just one because the other one gets lost so early in the pregnancy.

Not that any of this really matters. Because even if my twin had survived, I’d still be the middle child. I’d just have someone else to share the burden with. And maybe to have talked me out of taking German.

“Well,” I said, dropping my gaze from my reflection and scowling instead at the place mat beneath my elbows. “What am I supposed to do now? Nobody ever said anything to me about not adding things in school, when we had art. They let me add things all I wanted.”

Jack snorted. “School,” he said. “Yeah, right.”

Jack was having an ongoing and extremely bitter feud with our school’s administrative offices over some paintings he entered in an art show at the mall. Mr. Esposito, the principal of Adams Prep, where Jack and Lucy and I go, didn’t approve Jack’s entering these paintings in Adams Prep’s name—he never even saw them. So when they were accepted, he was peeved, because the subject matter of the paintings wasn’t what he considers Adams Prep‘ quality. The paintings are all of baseball-hatted teens slouching around outside a Seven Eleven. They are titled Studies in Baditude, Numbers One through Three , though at a recent board of trustees meeting, one irate parent called them Studies in Slackitude .

The Impressionists, I often remind Jack, when he is feeling down about this, weren’t appreciated in their day, either.

In any case, there is no love lost between Jack and the John Adams Preparatory School administration. In truth, were it not for the fact that Jack’s parents are major contributors to the school’s alumni foundation, Jack probably would have been expelled a long time ago.

“You’ve just got to find a way to fight this Susan Boone person,” Jack said. “I mean, before she drives out every creative thought in your head. You have got to draw what is in your heart, Sam. Otherwise, what is the point?”

“I thought,” Lucy said in a bored voice as she flipped over a page in her magazine, “that you’re supposed to draw what you know.”

“It’s write what you know.” Rebecca, down at the opposite end of the table from me, looked up from her laptop. “And draw what you see . Everyone knows that.”

Jack looked at me triumphantly. “You see?” he said. “You see how insidious it is, this thing? It’s even seeped into the consciousness of little eleven-year-old girls.”

Rebecca shot him an aggravated look. Rebecca has always been fully on my parents’ side on the whole issue of Jack.

“Hey,” she said. “I am not little .”

Jack ignored her. “Where would we be if Picasso had only drawn what he saw?” Jack wanted to know. “Or Pollock? Or Miro?” He shook his head. “You stay true to your beliefs, Sam. You draw from your heart. If your heart says put in a pineapple, then you put in a pineapple. Don’t let the establishment tell you what to do. Don’t let others dictate how—and what—you draw.”

I don’t know how he does it, but somehow, Jack always says the right thing. Always .

“So, are you going to quit?” Catherine, calling me later that evening to discuss our Bio assignment, wanted to know. Our Bio assignment was to watch a documentary on the Learning Channel about people who have body dysmorphic disorder. These are people who, like Michael Jackson, think they are horribly disfigured, when in reality, they are not. For instance, one man hated his nose so much, he slit it open with a knife, pulled out his own nasal cartilage and stuck a chicken bone in there.

Which just goes to show, no matter how bad you think something might be, it could always be much, much worse.

“I don’t know,” I said, in response to Catherine’s question. We had already fully discussed the whole chicken bone thing. “I want to. That class is filled with a bunch of freaks.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said. “But you told me there was one cute guy.”

I thought about familiar-looking David, his Save Ferris T-shirt, his big hands and feet, and his liking my boots.

And the way he had seen me totally and utterly crushed, like an ant, in front of him by Susan Boone.

“He’s cute,” I admitted. “But not as cute as Jack.”

“Who is?” Catherine asked, with a sigh. “Except maybe for Heath.”

So, so true.

“Will your mom let you quit?” Catherine wanted to know. “I mean, isn’t this supposed to be kind of a punishment for the C minus in German thing? Maybe you aren’t supposed to like it.”

“I think it’s supposed to be a learning experience for me,” I said. “You know, like how Debbie Kinley’s parents sent her to Outward Bound after she drank all that vodka at that party at Rodd Muckinfuss’s house? Art lessons are supposed to be like my Outward Bound.“

“Then you can’t quit,” Catherine said. “So what are you going to do?”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said.

Actually, I already had. Little did I know what I’d figured out was going to end up practically getting me killed.

Top ten Reasons I Would Make a Better Girlfriend for Jack than My Sister Lucy:

10. My love for and appreciation of art. Lucy doesn’t know anything about art. To her, art is what they made us do with pipe cleaners that summer we both went to Girl Scout Camp.

9. Having the soul of an artist, I am better equipped to understand and handle Jack’s mood swings. Lucy just asks him if he is over himself yet.

8. I would never demand, as Lucy does, that Jack take me to whatever asinine teen gross-out movie is currently popular with the sixteen to twenty-four crowd. I would understand that a soul as sensitive as Jack’s needs sustenance in the form of independent art films, or perhaps the occasional foreign movie with subtitles.