THE RUNNING OF THE PROM

First, thank you to all who sent me words of encouragement during my Scissor Sisters crisis. It is now resolved, and Ta-Dah comes out of every appliance in my house that plays music, and a few that don’t.

When I last left off, I was telling you about the Amazing Breast Size Guessing Nun, and how we were the Freshmen of Death. I’ve explained why I am actually a stinging insect, and Sister Mary Wookie’s theories of the social system. And I’ve told you about my sophomore and her involuntary suicide pact, and exactly how pliable and obedient I was to anyone who had a leather jacket with fringe.

And now it’s time to talk about the prom.

Ah, the prom. If you haven’t had yours yet, do you think about it? Are you planning on getting that massive issue of Seventeen Magazine with all the dresses? If your senior prom is behind you, do you still keep the photo and remember the good times?

In Devilish, the senior prom gets hijacked by something called Poodle Prom. It’s the climax of the story, so I can’t say much about it. But what I will say is that my senior prom, while not as bad as Jane’s night, was not exactly a picnic.

See, our prom was about rules. It was about obedience. It was about training. And they started us early.

From our first days at school, we were taught that as formless, breastless freshman, we were way too clueless to be allowed to wear things like heels. There was a complicated order to things relating to yearly dances, and each year it was reinforced in our heads. It went like this:

FRESHMAN YEAR

NOT A PROM. A freshman dinner dance. Party dresses only, knee length minimum. Heels at a maximum of one inch. No limos. No tuxes.

SOPHOMORE YEAR

NOT A PROM. A Soph Hop. Slightly more fancy party dresses, knee length minimum. Same heel height. No limos. No tuxes.

JUNIOR YEAR

A PROM. Tea length dresses permitted, knee length minimum. NO FLOOR LENGTH DRESSES. Two inch heels. No limos. No tuxes.

SENIOR YEAR

THE END OF THE KNOWN UNVERISE. THE KING OF PROMS.

Now, it got complicated.

Floor length dresses were permitted. Tuxes were permitted. Limos were permitted. Heel length remained constant at two inches.

The main thing to know is that we weren’t permitted to wear strapless dresses. No way, no how. That went for any dance, and this fact was drummed into our heads on every possible opportunity.

However, every year the faculty actually voted on whether or not seniors could wear spaghetti strap dresses. This was such a huge deal that it merited a yearly discussion.

It was vetoed for our year.

We also had, like I mentioned previously, prom classes. This is when our senior year religion class was taken over for a week or two, and we were taught things like plate settings. This is when we had the mysterious Kleenex discussion, and when we were told not to get out of the car until our date opened the door.

And we also learned the schedule of how our prom was going to go down, just in case we were even thinking of having any fun.

Our arrival was to take place between 8 and 8:30. NO EXCEPTIONS. Failure to show up by 8:30 could result in the holding of our diploma.

Really.

Departure could not be before midnight, but could not be after twelve thirty.

The school brought in a “beauty expert,” a truly odious woman who taught us things like an exercise to keep our chins from getting flabby (slapping them) and that the cure for acne was more makeup. She was so insidious that at least two of my friend managed to walk out of the assembly, which was no minor feat.

I bought a white satin dress for the prom. In retrospect, this was a strange choice, as I am pretty white myself. I am the color of porcelain and whole milk and daisy petals, if you’re romantic—and like someone in need of a transfusion if you’re not. Put me in a white dress with long white gloves and lean me up against a wall, and all you’ve got left is some brown hair and a blotch of lipstick.

But I loved my white dress and white gloves. It had tiny cap sleeves just cupping the shoulder. Every measurement was perfect, and yet, I still loved it. My dresses for the other years had all been a bit tragic, but this one, this one I loved.

A group of us all went off to the prom together, after driving from house to house and picking everyone up, getting 200 pictures taken. Then we divided up into cars. I got into the one with one of my best and closet friends in the whole world. Because everyone in my blog gets a new name, she will be called Betty Vox. (Except now it’s Dr. Betty Vox.) We left in plenty of time to get there by 8:00 or 8:30.

Betty’s boyfriend was driving us. She was up in the passenger’s seat, and I was in the back with my date. I remember it being a fun ride, right up until the time we got stuck in a massive traffic jam at 8:10. But we weren’t that far. We still had more than enough time.

Except that we hadn’t moved at 8:15. And not really that much by 8:20. Or five minutes after that. By now, Betty was getting seriously, seriously nervous.

“Re,” she said, leaning into the back seat. (My nickname is high school was Re. Only people who went to high school are allowed to call me this. It’s kind of a personal rule.)

“Re,” she said again, drawing me back from my own parenthetical interruption. “It’s 8:25.”

I looked at the clock on the dashboard. She was right.

“Well,” I said. “How far are we?”

“About seven or eight blocks,” her boyfriend said.

“We’re almost there,” I said to her.

“Yes. But we’re not there. And we might not be there in five minutes.”

“We can go seven or eight blocks in five minutes,” I said. “Right?”

Wrong. By 8:28 we had gotten about two blocks closer.

“Re,” she said, leaning back again. “This time, seriously. We have to go.”

“Go how?” I said. “We still have five or six blocks left.”

“I know. That’s why we have to go. Now.”

She opened her car door and got out. I followed.

“What are you doing?” I said, following her to the sidewalk. “We have two minutes.”

“If we don’t go,” she said. “They’re going to hold our diplomas.”

“And so, what? We run?”

Instead of answering this question in words, she responded in action. She started running down the street. And I ran right after her.

I’m not sure if you’ve tried to run in heels and a floor-length dress down a city sidewalk before. You probably haven’t. I don’t really recommend it. Especially if you are trying to preserve you hair and makeup and not get anything on your stark while dress and shoes, and if you are carrying long-stemmed roses and a purse. I didn’t spend a lot of time in heels back then. Our days were spent wearing our fabulous and sensible school shoes, so I wasn’t all that steady at normal walking pace. So running on a sidewalk (notorious surfaces on the best of days) was really a lot more than I was ready to take on. Also, we were the official show of all that stopped traffic.

However, bizarrely enough, this may have been the one physical act that my school had truly prepared me for. Since we didn’t have showers, we were always told to try not to sweat in gym. This doesn’t seem like something you can normally request or control, but we had actually learned to do this.

So we ran. We ran because we actually believed that we might not graduate high school if we didn’t. I must make that fact clear. That’s how whipped we were. Betty and I, aside from being the non-Catholics, were both honor students. We weren’t at the very top, but we were far, far from the bottom. And yet, we were still afraid that we might not be able to go to college or ever, ever leave our high school just because we got stuck in traffic.

We arrived, out of breath, at 8:32. Our dates had no caught up with us. We barged into the hall on our own. Our principal was waiting there, clipboard in hand.

“Miss Johnson,” she said. “Miss Vox. Running a little late, are we?”

It had to have been completely obvious that we had just been running. Our hair was all blown around, we were breathing too heavily to answer.

“And where are you dates?”

We pointed at the door, indicating that they were somewhere in the world.

“Girls,” she said, in a warning tone. “You were told when to arrive.”

“We got stuck in traffic, Sister,” Betty said.

Sister shook her head and wrote something down.

“Bring your dates and go and greet everyone,” she said. “Everyone has been waiting for you.”

That last bit was meant to sting. See, it wasn’t over yet. At our school, there was a receiving line at the proms.

“Receiving line?” you ask. “What do you mean by that?”

I mean that you had to walk around and introduce your date to every single faculty member that turned up, and they ALL turned up. An entire WALL OF NUNS. I’m talking about twenty-five or so. Seriously. And you had to say hello to every single last one of them and have your date shake their hand, and if they wanted to talk, you stood there and talked.

And here’s the kicker. The lobby area of the place where we had our prom? Mirrored on all sides. So it looked like THOUSANDS OF NUNS. I think this is the same trick they used in that last scene of Star Wars, when they go and get their medals, and there are millions of rebel alliance fighters all lined up.


Imagine that these are nuns. And that there is no wookie.

And not just thousands of nuns . . . thousands of nuns that had been denied the pre-dinner snacks because Betty and I were “late.”

In a class of 125 girls, having twenty five to thirty dedicated chaperones patrolling the edges of the floor, ready, willing, and able to bust in to any couple making out for more than 30 seconds (the limit) . . . it all makes for a fairly controlled experience. Betty and I spent the whole night not really knowing what had been written on the clipboard, and it was a while before we were convinced that we were in the clear.

Now, if that doesn’t sound like a good time, you don’t know what fun is.

The fact was, we did have a good time. If my high school was about anything, it was about learning to enjoy yourself in the face of insanity. And really, when you think about it, this is one of the most important lessons you can learn in life.

Also, I can run in heels. And not sweat.

AN INTERRUPTION

This is not a full post. This is an interruption in the normal blogging scheme so that I can complain and ask for help, and also tell you something.

iTunes constantly taunts me by not allowing me to purchase and download the entire catalog of The Divine Comedy. But today it is just being spiteful. Right now, in the UK, you can download the new Scissor Sister’s album, Ta-Dah.


Needed: one Ta-Dah

I adore the Scissor Sisters. I believe that they have been sent to help us, and Ana Metronic is my hero. She has very important things she needs to communicate, and here I sit, waiting to hear those things. Except that the UK iTunes store will not sell me the album. I have to wait until TUESDAY (the 26th), for the U.S. release.

This does me NO GOOD as I sitting here working NOW. I’m trying to listen to it off of myspace, but it’s not working so well. It’s making me twitchy.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can resolve this terrible crisis?

However, it cannot be a coincidence that Ta-Dah is coming out on the very same day as the long-awaited paperback version of 13 Little Blue Envelopes, complete with 12 pages of extras! I choose to believe that these events are linked!


Coming in two days! Now, with extras!

I’m told that some copies of the paperback have been spotted in the wild, lurking alongside Devilish, looking all paperbacky and coy. I have a few copies myself. I have used them to build a little wall around my desk. I am always taking protective measures to prepare for the inevitable zombie attack. (What have you done today on that front?)

I’ll be back tomorrow with another installment of my Catholic school stories. It’s a good one: the story of our prom, the rules, and the 100 yard dash that secured my academic future.

THE VERY POOR REBELLION OF THE FRESHMEN OF DEATH

It was a very hot autumn when I first arrived at my Catholic girls’ school, aged 13, non-Catholic, clueless, never having faced a nun before in my life. And during that very hot autumn, the order lost one sister a week for the first five weeks of school, as if on schedule. Every week, we were taken to the chapel to see them. We knelt and said prayers I did not know directly in front of the bodies of people I had never met in life.

I’d only seen a few dead bodies in my life, so five was a lot. That they were all nuns was deeply disorienting. And for a while, it looked like this was how things were always going to be at our school. Someone was going to die every single week.

But it wasn’t. It was just a bad five weeks, and it earned us the name The Freshmen of Death.

I felt that this was a bad thing, in that distant way that you do when you hear about the death of someone you do not know. You do not want anyone to die. You do not want people to be sad. But when you do not know the deceased, it can be hard to truly engage in what is going on. The five deaths that greeted our arrival almost seemed to fit the strange new surroundings I was in.

There were constant reminders that we were mortal, we were all going to die. There were prayers about it, songs about it, rituals to aid us, statues that depicted it. We said the Hail Mary every morning and before every class, imbedding the words “now and at the hour of our death” into my brain. I said it in three different languages every day. There was a giant painting by the front door of our school showing nuns of our order bravely standing up to Nazis, and being mowed by machine guns and falling into a mass grave. That was how we greeted you.

I had never seen so much death before. It was like I had arrived at Death Prep.

But there was life as well. Potential. We were constantly being told that we were blossoming young women, young and fertile. Too many comparisons were made to flowers.



Blossoming in the face of death.

Our bodies were the source of constant commentary. It started before we even got to school, at our mid-summer uniform fitting before freshman year. We were sized not according to our current shape and person, but to the blossoming young woman we would become.

By this, I mean our chest size. See, we wore these tight vests. Well, they were tight in theory. They would be tight when the blossoming had happened. But as pre-freshmen, our petals still closed, it was hard to tell just how much lily there was to gild. And your vest had to last you for four years—you didn’t get a new uniform every year.

Which is why they employed the amazing Breast-Size Guessing Nun.

The A.B.S.G.N. would take one look at us, spin us around, and then proclaim our fate in the form of our vest size. She would proclaim it VERY, VERY LOUDLY. ACROSS THE GYM.

Because, of course, the sister taking down the sizes was sitting all the way across the room. Why? Why not! It made it more fun for everyone.

“SMALL!” the A.B.S.G.N. would yell, as a tiny girl curled into a ball and prayed for someone to come and kick her away. “SHE’S FLAT! THIS ONE’S PRETTY MUCH DONE.”

No breasts for her. But not so for the early-blossoming next girl, who was probably already wearing what my grandmother used to call an “over the shoulder boulder holder” and was probably very aware of it. And now, thanks to the A.B.S.G.N., so was everyone else. Including my dad, who had taken me for my fitting—probably expecting, as most sane people would have, that it would be done it a room somewhere, privately.

The flowers may be delicate, but the gardeners rarely are.

Our uniforms were designed not to last just four years, but long enough to be passed to family members. Maybe for all of time. They were made of things not found in nature, and they could not be destroyed. I know this for a fact, because I spent four years trying.

The most remarkable thing that I discovered about them was that they were entirely water resistant. I conducted a series of experiments in the cafeteria, trying to determine the boundaries of the skirt material. My lunch partner’s most vivid memory of me is sitting in the cafeteria, pouring entire cups of water into my lap, and brushing it away, yelling, “See! It’s dry! It’s completely dry!”

They also could repel some nail polishes, could not easily be cut with scissors, and did not burn easily. In the end days, when there are only Styrofoam cups and roaches to eat, you will be wearing my school uniform.

And you will get the knee socks. Oh, yes. Yes you will.

Our socks had to be pulled to our knees, lest we accidentally cause shin-lust. The socks were a major concern. There was an entire patrol just for that. They would make us pull them up—we would push them down. This insane dance went on day in and day out. Pushing and pulling, hopping in front of classroom doors and in front of the chapel.

To this day, having socks slouching down means something to me. I don’t actually wear knee socks and reverse saddle shoes anymore, but I think in my mind I always will . . . there is some version of me that will always feel the satisfying feel of wool-polyester mix sliding around my ankles, reveling almost a whole calf, and knowing that I am dancing on the edge of oblivion.

A freshman of death forever—but living every single artificial-fiber covered minute to its flame-retardant fullest. You will never put these calves in a corner.

SISTER MARY WOOKIE EXPLAINS THE SOLAR SYSTEM

I’ve been busy working on Girl At Sea, so it’s been a few days since I’ve posted. But I’m back to tell you another story from MJ’s book of Catholic high school.

A note, first: if you are in Brooklyn this weekend, come see me, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, and David Klass at the Brooklyn Book Festival. We will be performing an exhibition of our sweet Kung Fu technique. Be there!


We will fight for the honor of the book festival.

So, when we last left off, I was telling you a little about my experiences as a non-Catholic girl at a Catholic school, and how that school relates to Devilish.

We had religion as a major subject, so we took it almost every day. Our religion classes were split by semester. Half the year would be devoted to straight-up religion, Bible study, Church history, things like that. The other half was the “social” part. This is always where it got awkward.

We leaned interesting things, like in freshman year “Relating” class, where we were taught to put a telephone book on our boyfriend’s lap before sitting down. In senior year, it was an obligatory semester long class in marriage. It was taught by a nun. So, right from the get-go, we were in for a good time. It was well-meaning, but weird. It had a strange, touchy-feely book called Loving, and lots of avoiding the entire issue of birth control.

The class was interrupted for a week around prom, at which point we got Prom Class. The prom was a bit of a Kafkaesque mess, which will certainly be discussed in a future post. But to get ready for it, we were drilled 45 minutes a day for a week on things like: how to use a salad fork, how to wait in the car and REFUSE TO EXIT until our date came to open it for us, and the mysterious “Kleenex discussion.”

“Girls,” our teacher said to us. “Sometimes, you will be holding your boyfriend’s hand, and you’ll just . . . know. You’ll know that you shouldn’t be holding his hand. You will just know. When this happens, you need to take your hand away slowly and reach into your purse for a Kleenex. Put the purse on the other side of your body so that you have to reach across.”

She said this all with a slow, grave, literal seriousness—speaking in the same way that people do in movies when they have a gun pointed at their head by someone behind the door—and they’re trying to get out a very clear message without being shot.



“Girls, you’ll just know that you shouldn’t be holding his hand. Slowly reach for the Kleenex.”

We debated the meaning of this statement the entire rest of the year. We are still trying to figure it out. We always got the sense that she meant general horniess, but she was so specific.

“What happened with his hand?” we wanted to know. “Why do have to back away so cautiously?” And why the Kleenex? What was that for? Why did we have to wear our purses on the other shoulder?

In my mind, the boyfriend was slowly transforming into a werewolf. Or he was melting . . . maybe the Kleenex was for that.

But they tried, and I was okay with that. There was only one nun I really took issue with. I will call her Sister Mary Wookie. Sister Mary Wookie was not like the other nuns, many of whom were cool and friendly. Not all, like any assortment of teachers. But a lot. They had given up everything to teach us, so they deserve credit.

Sister Mary Wookie came from a different order. Her order had run a school, but the school had lost its funding and shut down, and Sister Mary Wookie was transplanted. She didn’t wear a habit, like our nuns. She dressed like a grandma from an ad for cookies: grey, curly hair, plaid skirts, little sweaters. She was adorable.

Behind the grandmotherly façade and the smile, though, was a lady with an agenda. Sister Mary Wookie wasn’t the warmest person. She was in charge of my homeroom, and made a bit of a sport out of making student council members cry—locking them out in the mornings when they were doing their school-sanctioned jobs, calling them do-gooders, and laughing when they got upset.

This was the same woman who talked about working in a soup kitchen, and then explained that she had quit. The reason? One of the men there, so grateful for his hot meal, hugged her.

“You don’t want them touching you,” she said.

Sister Mary Wookie had no time for Protestants like yours truly. She would stand in front of the class and smile and say, “I don’t know how they do it, with no confession. Walking around with all of that sin on their shoulders all the time.”

A smile for me.

She also used to refer to Protestants as WASPs. (If you’ve never heard the term, it means White Anglo Saxon Protestants. It’s not the worst slur in the world, but it’s not exactly the nicest expression, either.) I was a WASP. She would look at me as she said it, just in case I missed it.

I figured if she was going to insist on calling me a WASP to my face in class, I got to buzz. So I would make a small buzzing noise each time.

“So the WASPS . . .”

buzzzzzz



Me.

But Sister Mary Wookie was all about equal opportunity. I was by no means her main target. I was just kind of pathetic and sad, because I was a WASP with sin on my shoulders. There was no use in even worrying about me much.

The day that will live in my mind forever is the day that Sister Mary Wookie got all kinds of cross-curricular and decided to combine religion with astronomy.

“Girls,” she said, going to the board. “Let’s look at the solar system.”

She drew the sun, then rings around it.

“Here,” she said, drawing the first ring around the sun. “Is the orbit of Mercury. This is Catholics, because we’re closest to God.”

“Okay, here . . . Venus. That's the Jews. Jesus was Jewish, so that's sort of right . . .”

Another ring.

“The third ring,” she said, “is Earth. This represents Protestants. They sort of get it, but not really.”

She smiled at me. I sighed. I didn’t even have willpower to buzz.



We all have a place in Sister Mary Wookie’s solar system

“Now the fourth ring, Mars, that’s Islam. They have a book like the Bible and one God. Saturn and Jupiter are the Hindus and Buddhists. Uranus and Neptune, those are either those Confucius people, or the Native American religions. Stuff like that. People without a book or anything. And finally . . .”

There was a Pluto, then.

“Pluto is Wiccas and crazy stuff like that.”

We actually had to write this down.

When this was all over, I comforted myself with the thought that at least I was from Earth. And then I slowly reached across my body and into my purse, and I got myself a Kleenex.



The Kleenex was the answer. But what was the question?

CONFESSIONS OF A CATHOLIC SCHOOLGIRL

I was a Catholic schoolgirl. I have a lot of stories that surround this fact. Sooner or later, I was bound to convert some of them into story material. And now, in Devilish, I have.

Specifically, I was a girl at an all-girls Catholic prep school in the city of Philadelphia. I wore a serious-looking uniform (that I gave to May Gold in The Key to the Golden Firebird) with some very attractive reverse saddle shoes.



Our actual school shoe. I am glad to see that they never update the design. It is already perfect. See how it flies though the sky in this photo. That’s because wearing this shoe is like being in heaven.

That I was a Catholic schoolgirl isn’t, in and of itself, isn’t much of a story. Add to it the fact that I was:

a. a year younger than most of my classmates
b. not from the city; I was suburban, and was brought in fresh daily, like shellfish to an inland restaurant
c. the big one—not Catholic

I had no idea this last one would matter until I actually got there. My family didn’t care about these sorts of things. We didn’t think it would be a big deal.

We were kind of wrong.

I’m sure that to everyone else, being Catholic, school wasn’t that much of a shock. It was a massive shock to me, in ways I didn’t expect. Take where you live, for example. That should be an easy one, right? Not so much.

When someone asked, “Where are you from?” I would say what neighborhood I came from. They meant parish. You could be from Queen of the Universe, or St. John’s, or St. Tim’s. I didn’t even know my parish. I didn’t know where I was from. If I named the parish (after I looked it up), I couldn’t name one single person from it. This was a problem because most people knew each other through their parishes or parish schools. I might as well have just arrived from Belgium.

Plus, there were a lot of prayers. Every day started out with about five to ten minutes worth. I didn’t know the words. Try going to a Catholic school without knowing how to say a Hail Mary. It doesn’t work for long. And there were masses, which were even more terrifying. I discovered that there were no books or sheets to guide you. The Catholic girls already knew all the words, all the prayers, all the moves. It was like I was thrust into a play, but hadn’t been given the script.

The result was that at the age of thirteen, in this strange new environment, I had to become a bit of a professional faker, employing all kinds of tricks to hide the fact that I had no idea what I was saying or what was going on. This is really good training for life.

My high school experience was actually very good. It was restricted, for sure. (We were, for example, physically locked in during the day. And the school had a convent attached to it. Literally and physically. After 3 o’clock, some of the bathrooms became convent property. This is an important part of the story called, “Why we had to run down three flights of stairs and across a soccer field to escape a nun with a three-pronged cane and why it was all my fault.”)

It was like I was in jail, but liked it because the other inmates were cool.

But let me tell you about My Big, and why Devilish starts out the way it does.

MY BIG

Devilish begins at something called the Big-Little Day ceremony, in which senior girls take on freshman little sisters. This is a version of something we did at our school. As freshmen, we each got a sophomore and a senior.

Soon after I arrived, a really nice girl walked up to me and asked me if I had a sophomore. I didn’t, so she said she would be mine. That’s often how it worked out. If you didn’t know someone in advance, you’d just ask, or someone would just ask you.

I was happy. Here I was, with my nice new big sophomore sister. She looked like the kind who would be good to me during the horrors of Freshman Week, when older students could order you around and make your life a misery. I was already dealing with the not being Catholic thing and wanted to skip and additional aggravation.

But then, along came The Other Sophomore.

The Other Sophomore was on my bus. She was tall, blonde, and very scary (to me, anyway). She wore a black leather jacket—the kind of heavy metal style, with the fringe. She smoked and hung out in pool halls. She flirted with a lot of guys, but not in a cute, flirty way. It was aggressive. You know that person at your school that everyone suspects has about fifty kinds of VD? This was that girl. I’m not saying it was fair or right—that’s just how it was.

The Other Sophomore noticed me because I was on her bus and we shared a name. I expected that from then on, I would be in for a very personal kind of hell (she could be kind of mean), but to my surprise, she allowed me to enter her world in peace. She had taken a shine to me. Why, I have no idea.

One day I said something in The Other Sophomore’s range of hearing. She came over to me.

“You’re funny,” she said. “I didn’t know that. Who’s your sophomore?”

It happened that my sophomore was in sight, so I pointed her out. The O.S. went over to her and said, “Maureen’s my freshman now. Get a new one.”

My input on this matter was not required.

Even though my sophomore was too busy with her guys, her smoking, and being scary to worry about me much, she never ignored me totally. I was her freshman, her property, her plaything to drag out on certain occasions. Like the neglected pet of the school bully, I was useful from time to time, and got sudden, inexplicable displays of affection, whether I wanted them or not.

An example. One day, I’m out on my street, minding my own business as I tried to stay awake waiting for the bus. I saw the bus coming, far off. Then, the car in front of it sped up. It came to a screeching halt in front of me. A hand reached over and opened the door. A huge cloud of cigarette smoke came out, and my sophomore leaned over.

“Get in,” she said. “I’m taking you to school.”

By this point, the bus was right behind her. The driver could see me. It should be noted that my bus driver was a complete weirdo who often made executive decisions about how we were all going to get to school. If he saw me getting into my sophomore’s car, he was likely to decide that I had new transport and would therefore never wait for me, even for a moment, if I was late. This was the same weirdo who would later ask me out, and when I turned him down, ripped out my seat.

So you can see my problem.

My sophomore was insistent, though. She wanted me in her car, and she wasn’t moving until I got in. So, because this standoff was in full view of my bus, I got in. We went screeching down the street, causing at least one of my neighbors to shake her head in anger. She would have noted the license plate number at the stop sign if my sophomore had bothered to stop.

“I had this huge fight with my mom this morning,” my sophomore said, chucking a spent cigarette out of the window. “I think I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to drive my car into a wall.”

Having made this declaration, she turned up the radio. Guns N’ Roses was on.

I’d heard plenty of people say they were going to kill themselves if they were having a rough day. But my sophomore was not most people. And I’ve been in plenty of cars that were driving way too fast and not entirely observing the laws of the road. But she was driving with a kind of deliberate insanity, her eyes glowing, a cryptic smile on her face as she floored it through red lights. This time, I wasn’t entirely convinced it was a drill. It was possible that Axl Rose was going to serenade me in my final moments.



Taking me down to Paradise City

So she had decided to pick me up today because she was planning on killing herself, and who wants to do that alone, right? If she was going, her freshman was coming with her.

I gripped my seat and tried to figure out what to do.

“But I thought about it,” she said, taking her eyes from the road as she lit a new cigarette, and narrowly missing a Pinto. “And you know what? I’d probably crash, but live and be paralyzed or something. And then I just wouldn’t have a car.*”

She laughed a genuinely alarming “I haven’t decided whether or not I am joking or serious” laugh. I laughed back, because I was sort of convinced that if I didn’t she would put her cigarette out in my eye before pushing me out of the still-moving car. Which may have been a good thing, anyway.

In the end, she decided that the risk of carless survival was too high. I ended up getting to school late, because I wasn’t the only person she had decided to pick up that morning. I was moved to the backseat, which was a nightmare. Plus she had to buy a carton of cigarettes at the gas station and randomly park in front of the local guys’ school to watch somebody do something. I huddled in the back like a kidnap victim, trying to smile and pretend like I was enjoying myself.

Being late was no small affair at our school. It got you demerits, a grilling in the lobby, calls already being made to my next-of-kin and the FBI . . . Plus I completely reeked of smoke, smoking being a real death-penalty-level infraction.

Obviously, this brand of kindness is the kind that doesn’t help a lot, but that was life with My Big. So if you read Devilish, know that this is what fuels that scene for me. It also explains how the role of the demon was cast.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, I still have the shoes. Just ask if you want to borrow them.





*Careful readers may notice that I gave this line to Avery in The Bermudez Triangle, after she was fired from P.J. Mortimer’s.

CUPCAKE DAY! CONTEST! SONGS! SNAX!

Friends, the day is here. Devilish is now on sale. Jane Jarvis has arrived. Now you can read the book that Amber Benson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Tara, is calling “the cleverest take on selling your soul that I've read in a long time.”

It’s also the book that earned me an entirely unexpected comparison to Stephen King in Kirkus Reviews. I’m still reeling over that one.



Jane is here. Hello, Jane!

Over the next few days, I’ll be giving you some inside stories about Devilish and how it was written. One of the first things you should know, however, is that it prominently features cupcakes. So today, in honor of the fact that it is Devilish release day, is also CUPCAKE DAY at the MJ desk.

So, maybe you would like to go here and check out this site, which is entirely devoted to cupcakes—and I’ll be doing an interview there a bit later. A CUPCAKE INTERVIEW. Oh yes.

I can’t actually go out and do much celebrating, as I’m still writing. And as I’ve explained before, deadlines involve a lot of sitting around and complaining. But I think I will try to obtain a cupcake somehow. Maybe one will magically appear at my door. One can always hope.


Delicious cupcakes. Won’t you have one with me?

“This is all well and good,” you say, “but how can I win a free copy?”

Thanks for asking.

ENTER THE DEVILISH HALLOWEEN HANDOUT

Nothing could be simpler! Send an email here and be automatically entered to win a copy of Devilish. Write the word “Devilish” in the subject line. On or around October 31st, ten lucky winners will be chosen. As Devilish is a Penguin book, it is possible that an ACTUAL PENGUIN might do the drawing.

If you can’t wait two months for the possibility of winning one, why not buy one today and re-gift it later? Just a suggestion. An evil suggestion, in keeping with a book about evil.

Also, you can . . .

LISTEN TO SOME DEVILISH SONGS

Need a soundtrack for your book? A few months ago, I discovered the button on my Apple that shares my playlists, and I posted iMixes for both Devilish and 13 Little Blue Envelopes. Just hop on to the iTunes store and entire either title in the iMix search, and you too can feel the noise.

Just in case you are wondering, I reported the other day that I would probably listen to that Belle and Sebastian album for 70 hours straight. So far it’s holding true. That is some delicious album. It will undoubtedly appear on the Girl At Sea iMix. I can't quite get over the line, "She's a Venus in flares, and you want to split hairs?" in the song "White Collar." I highly recommend it.



The album that is quickly becoming the Girl At Sea soundtrack.

I am blasting it at myself right now, partially to cover up the fact that my neighbor is blasting The Phantom of the Opera, which is really continuing the whole “Paris artist’s garret” theme from the other day.

Now, I am going to get back to it. If you read Devilish, please drop me a line and let me know what you think. Or if you have cupcakes, please just come here directly. No need to knock. The New York Office has an open door policy for cupcake holders.

TWO DAYS UNTIL HELL RISES

For some reason, at this exact moment, one of my neighbors is blasting French accordion music out of his/her window and into my rainy New York street. So basically, I now feel like I am living in an artist’s garret in early 20th century Paris, a la Moulin Rouge.

My neighborhood is weird. People walk their cats on leashes. One of neighbors is constantly throwing out TVs. They sell Styrofoam plates of homemade pancakes at my local grocery store. A block down, you can buy an entire lamb, head and all. My arch-enemy Mr. Sofite circles the block once every ten minutes playing that annoying song. (I have done extreme things to get away from that truck and its infernal song. Like go to Scotland to live in a castle during the winter. Really. I actually cited that as a reason when I applied for a residency there.)

Devilish materializes on shelves in two days. In just two days, you can own your very own Jane Jarvis! Scott Westerfeld said there were sightings of his new book, The Last Days, at bookstores, and our books are coming out on the same day, with the same publisher. So it’s possible that some Devilishes went out at the same time. Has anyone seen one? Please let me know!

And I am still here, working on Girl at Sea, which means that I am not allowed to leave. But here are some reports from the world of my desk.

WHAT I AM LISTENING TO OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN (besides French accordion music)

Black Cherry by Goldfrapp
Supernature by Goldfrapp

(Clearly, I like Goldfrapp.)

And today I bought The Life Pursuit by Belle & Sebastian. I have a feeling this is going to be on for the next 70 hours or so.

THINGS THAT WILL BE HAPPENING

There will be a DEVILISH GIVEAWAY at some point in the next few days. Watch this space for details!

At some point I will leave the house and record a PODCAST, so you will be able to listen to me ramble on about something. Again, details will be here.

I’ve started listing details of some of the appearances I’ll be doing for Devilish “High School is Hell” tour. In some of the cases, the dates keep getting shifted around. But here’s one for absolute sure: I’ll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 16, from 2-3 PM, with Famous Authors Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier. (Oscar Gingersnort will be visiting from London and floating around in the crowd. Find him and get a prize!*)

WHAT I HAVE BEEN DRINKING

Ginger tea, and Diet Coke with slices of lemon shoved in through the top of the can. Thanks for asking!

STRANGEST THING THAT ARRIVED IN MY MAILBOX TODAY

A pen with my name on it. Some company actually took the time to print my name on a pen and send it to me, in the hopes that I would buy more. It has a little cartoon of a man jumping back and his hat flying off, and a bubble that reads: “This pen once belonged to . . .”

THE BIGGEST THING ON MY FLOOR RIGHT NOW, ASIDE FROM THE RUG AND ANY PIECES OF FURNITURE

The same massive map of Europe I used while writing 13 Little Blue Envelopes. I keep having to jump over it, and every time I think, “I am jumping over Europe! I am a giant!”

PICUTRE THAT MOST ACURUATELY CAPTURES MY PARANOID VIEW OF THE OCEAN

I’ve never denied the fact that I am a total and utter coward when it comes to the ocean. Which is kind of funny, considering that I am currently writing a book called GIRL AT SEA. This is pretty much how the ocean looks in my head:




*he really will be there, but there is no prize. I just wrote this to scare him.

NEWS OF NICHOLSON!

I’m supposed to be working, not posting. But I saw something that made me stop and get over to the blog at once. I cannot believe I missed this. There is major action in the Sandra Nicholson story!

You all remember Sandra, right? The school board member in Florida who attempted to have books removed from schools there—and hadn’t actually read them?

Here’s the news, which I just spotted on Bookshelves of Doom. In the end, out of the ten books that she proposed removing, the board decided to remove one. One is still too many, but at least her overall effort was revealed for what it was: ill conceived.

Here’s the kicker, though. Right now, Sandra is running UNCONTESTED for her position on the school board. That’s right. Uncontested. She’s going to get back on. It looks like the chance to register as a candidate is over.

It gets a little bit better, friends. Sandra herself speaks! I found this editorial she published in the St. Petersburg Times just a few days ago. My comments are in brackets.

Look for truthful candidates, then vote
Letter to the Editor
Published August 30, 2006

While educating myself on the qualities of the candidates at the recent Chamber of Commerce's forum, I became very irritated. While speaking to a candidate after the meeting, I was told that "it is just politics, and all groups must be linked together, regardless of the facts."

[Does anyone even know what she’s talking about here? Educating herself on qualities? And the “it is just politics and all groups must be linked together, regardless of the facts.” What groups? What facts? I’m not being deliberately difficult—I genuinely cannot figure out what this paragraph is supposed to mean. Clearly she went to some meeting to scope out her (non-existent) competition, but the rest leaves me at a loss.]

I recognized several inaccurate statements, however, there are two issues I would like to address for your readers.

[Again, having no idea what she is talking about, it’s hard to speculate on what these “inaccurate statements” might be. What were these people saying? Bees make cheese? Electricity comes from rainbows? But how about this one, Sandra . . . don’t go to a meeting and try to ban books that you haven’t even read. That's an ugly brand of inaccurate statement. But go on. Go on, sweet Sandra.]

- School Board members in the schools:

I know that I and several of my fellow board members spend a great deal of time in the schools every year. We sometimes tour the sites, volunteer for many activities, like reading (groups and one-on-one), judging projects (history, science), teaching, chaperoning field trips, attending special programs, sports activities and the list goes on.

[Reading, Sandra? Really? Come on, now. We’re all on to you on that one.]

- Planning ahead for schools:

Several years ago, we purchased 80 acres for a school on the east side of the county. We have been planning for the entire county with property purchases and reorganizing existing schools where it is feasible. We have been looking at all possibilities to provide the best education and reasonably comfortable facilities for our ever-increasing student population.

[Ah yes. Was this the same patch of land you had illegally bulldozed in April of 2004, destroying protected trees?]

I realize that as an elected official I need to have a thick skin, especially at election time, but I would like to say one thing to people before they vote: "You have heard what the candidates have had to say; now find out who is telling the truth."

[I can’t help but agree with you. People should find out who is telling the truth. Or who tries to ban books she hasn’t read. Well, I guess since no one is running against you it doesn’t really matter what you say, does it?]

Thank you for allowing me to make this statement.

[No problem. We’re like BFFs. Call me. We should talk. Get to the bottom of this. Exchange sloppy kisses.]

Sandra Nicholson, member Hernando County School Board District 5

[Uncontested]

Oh, Sandra. You naughty little ferret. How you vex me!


A naughty ferret

In any case, this is a good time to mention that September 23-30th is the American Library Association’s BANNED BOOKS WEEK! (Doesn’t it seem odd that in the United States we should have such a big problem with banned books? Doesn’t this go against just about everything we are supposed to stand for?)



What can you do? (And you can SO do something about this. Believe me.)

Here are a few quick suggestions:

1. Have a look at this list of the 100 most challenged books and read one or two of them.

2. Write an editorial to your local paper, explaining your feelings on this subject. Most papers, especially community ones, will take letters that come from teenagers very seriously. Blog about it. Blogs get read, too.

3. If a book is challenged in your area, make sure the author knows about it! (Provided, of course, that the author is alive. That’s a major part of it. No use telling Mark Twain that some bonehead has a problem with Huck Finn again. He’s heard it. He would say something smart and funny about it, if he could.) Many of us have websites and can be reached, and we like to know if this sort of thing is going on.

4. If, like in Hernando County, the school board is trying to remove any books—GO TO THE PUBLIC MEETINGS! Bring friends. Make sure people know what you think.

5. Unsure if any books are challenged in your school? Ask the librarian.

Now, I have to finish my book and get ready.

And Devilish is coming soon and fast. September 7th. Are you with me?