We Are Party People Read online

  Barry makes everything about his parties fancy and expensive, as if that’s the most important thing. A lot of people fall for it.

  Except just because something costs a lot of money doesn’t mean it’s going to be the best. That’s what my parents always say. A party’s success is all about energy and creativity and the right attitude. Also? A party is only as good and as fun as the people who are throwing it.

  I’m not going to explain this to Jenna, though, not when I’m not even invited to her birthday. Only a few people are. That’s the thing with girls like Jenna. More important than who gets invited to her party is who isn’t on her list—the exclusivity of it all.

  Anyway, Allie is reading the invitation and raving about the picture, saying, “You could seriously model, Jenna.”

  Jenna runs her fingers through her sleek dark hair, flipping her part from one side to the other, pretending to be bashful, except not very convincingly. “Shut up. You’re lying,” she says.

  Allie shoves her playfully. “Am not!”

  “Yeeouch, that hurt,” Jenna says, her pink, glossy lips pouty. Although I can tell she doesn’t mean it. She simply wants to make her friend feel bad, which she does. It’s obvious by the look on Allie’s face.

  “Sorry,” Allie whispers.

  “It’s fine,” Jenna says, rolling her eyes and sighing. “Just don’t be late, because there’s a lot going on. I couldn’t decide between a pool party and a movie party and ice-skating, so we are ice-skating in the morning and then going to a movie and after that my parents are heating the pool so we can night-swim.”

  “Awesome!” says Allie.

  “Yeah, no kidding. But I’m not done yet. It’s a sleepover party, too. After swimming we’ll make our own gourmet pizzas, the dough included. A real gourmet pizza chef is going to come over and teach us how and give us a whole cooking lesson.”

  “Amaze-balls,” Allie says, clearly impressed.

  “And I saw his picture on the website and he’s supercute,” Jenna adds.

  Allie raises her hand up and the two of them high-five, giggling all the while.

  If I were rude, or more honest, I guess, I’d interject and offer her some advice, because actually, what Jenna described does not sound like an amazing party. It sounds like an exhausting party. I’m not only thinking this out of bitterness over not being included—I literally know it for a fact.

  Cooking, swimming, movie watching, ice-skating, and sleeping over are way too many things to do in one day. Plus, the activities aren’t even thematically linked in any way. Jenna’s friends are going to be confused as they rush from activity to activity. None of them will be able to enjoy her party, and by the end of the night they will all be blurry-eyed and exhausted and probably cranky, too.

  If Jenna asked for my advice, here is what I’d tell her: A pizza chef is an awesome idea! But what a person looks like does not matter at all. You need to make sure he or she is excellent with kids and a good, patient teacher. Once that’s established, have him or her come at the beginning of the party, so everyone can make the pizza together before it gets too late. Then, while the pizza is cooking, you can play some pizza-themed games. Maybe create a word search ahead of time with words related to pizza. For example: red sauce, pepperoni, Parmesan, mozzarella, pepper, Italy, and delivery. Do a blind taste test of sauce. Or hide different ingredients around the house and have people search for them.

  After dinner, fine, you can swim. But that’s it. If you want your friends to sleep over, why not choose a pizza-themed movie, like Mystic Pizza? It was one of Julia Roberts’s first films, and I think it’s one of her best. Forget about skating, though. The closest rink is two towns over, a half-hour drive each way. Save that for next year.

  “Who else is coming?” Allie asks.

  Jenna rattles off six names: Jamie Franklin, India Pierson, June Willoughby, Beatrix Christy, Ruby Benson, and Olivia Cohen. None of them surprise me. After Jenna, they are the six most popular girls at our school, at least in the seventh grade. What is shocking is this: I suddenly have this weird, empty, scratchy, sad feeling in the back of my throat. It makes no sense. Even though I’ve never really spoken to Jenna, even though I’ve never hung out with any of those girls she named, it hurts to know she’s planning a big fancy party and I’m not invited.

  More than that, though, it hurts that she doesn’t even see me.

  4

  The line is super-slow but I finally make it, collect my food and extra napkins, and head to my usual table. I sit down across from Lola Sanchez and next to Sophie Meyers, like I always do.

  Lola never gets hot lunch because she has celiac disease, which means if she eats gluten, which is in bread and a lot of other processed food, she might puke. And I don’t mean she’d puke once—I mean she could go on a ginormous puking jag that ends with a trip to the hospital. It’s happened before, although lucky for her, never at school. Even if she eats something that was cut with a knife that was previously used to cut something with gluten, she might get sick to her stomach, so she doesn’t take any chances.

  Lola speaks Spanish fluently because her parents are both from Mexico. She’s tall and skinny with long, straight black hair and dark brown eyes. She wears her hair in a low ponytail every day, and she ties her ponytail with a ribbon that matches her socks exactly. I’m not just talking about blue socks and blue ribbon. I mean if she’s got red socks with white polka dots on them, her hair ribbon has the exact same pattern. Today she’s wearing a silver-and-purple-striped ribbon and I don’t even need to check under the table—I know her socks are a perfect match.

  What happens is that Lola gets the socks first and then Maria, her mom, finds a matching pattern at the fabric store and makes the hair ribbon. If Maria can’t find an identical design, she’ll try online, and if that doesn’t work out, she buys a second pair of the same socks and makes a bow out of the material. I know because I asked.

  Lola writes poetry for fun in a green spiral notebook she always has with her. Many of her poems are about fairies. Lola still believes in them. A bunch live in her backyard, she’s told me, and sometimes she leaves them notes and presents. I once asked her if the fairies bring her gifts as well, and she looked at me as if I were crazy and said, “Of course not, Pixie. They bring me luck.” I didn’t ask any more questions after that, and it hasn’t come up again. Lola keeps the whole fairy thing a secret because everyone knows you’re not supposed to believe in them once you get to middle school. It would be bad enough if we were in sixth grade, but we’re already in seventh.

  I don’t know if Sophie believes in fairies because we’ve never talked about it. She’s got pale skin, and thick and bouncy dark blond hair that she parts in the middle. Sometimes her bangs fall into her big blue eyes and sometimes she gels them to the side. Sophie’s hair is long enough for hair clips and ribbons, but she never wears them. When she plays Ping-Pong, which is often since she has a table in her backyard, she holds her hair back with a thick rainbow-striped sweatband. She’s got matching wrist guards as well, even though wrists aren’t a particularly sweaty body part. They’re mostly for decoration, she says. Sophie sometimes wears mismatched socks on purpose because it’s more interesting that way. That’s what she tells us, anyway.

  Sophie and Lola are almost halfway done with lunch by the time I sit down.

  Lola says hi.

  Sophie gives me a thumbs-up because she’s in the middle of chewing. But as soon as she swallows she makes an announcement: “Guess what? I’m going to run for class president.”

  Sophie is pretty new to Beachwood. She moved here from Seattle at the beginning of the school year and it’s still September. School only started three weeks ago. I guess she’s still figuring stuff out. That’s probably why she doesn’t yet realize that student council elections aren’t for girls like us. Student council is filled with people like Jenna Johnson and all the girls she invited to her birthday party. They are the kids who walk through the halls like they ow
n the whole school, which I guess they basically do. I’m surprised that Sophie hasn’t noticed. Or maybe Sophie’s big plan is to become popular, in which case she’ll have to ditch us, and that would be a bummer because I like Sophie.

  Except that won’t actually work. You can’t decide to be a popular kid. Other people determine it for you. I’m not sure how exactly this works, but I know it’s a fact. Once your status is decided you are stuck there, possibly forever.

  Maybe things work differently in Washington. Or maybe Sophie was popular up there and she figured her high social rank would transfer with her wherever she went. But it doesn’t seem to have. Not in Beachwood, anyway. Or at least no one gave us the message yet. Otherwise, Sophie would be going to Jenna Johnson’s skating/swimming/pizza-making/movie-watching sleepover. And she’d be sitting on their side of the cafeteria.

  When I glance over at Jenna’s table, I see her and her friends huddled over a pink cell phone. No one is allowed to use phones during school hours at Beachwood Middle School. Plenty of kids have them in their backpacks, but if one gets pulled out during the day it gets confiscated. Yet somehow Jenna and her friends always manage to smuggle one in at lunchtime. I don’t know if they’re playing some video game or texting boys, but whatever they are doing, the entire group is way into it.

  It’s obvious to me and it would be pretty clear to anyone who glances in their direction, and yet they never seem to get caught. Maybe the lunch monitors are intimidated by them, too.

  “What are you looking at?” asks Sophie.

  “Nothing,” I say, turning back around. I take a bite of pizza and chew as I try to figure out how to break the whole Jenna Johnson situation to her gently.

  Lola must be doing the same thing because she’s looking down at the table with her mouth screwed up tight. When Lola thinks hard she seals her lips together and moves her mouth back and forth, like she’s swishing liquid between her cheeks, except she doesn’t actually take a drink.

  As I’m swallowing my first delicious bite of pizza, Lola stops swishing and looks up and grins. “I think you’d make an awesome class president, Soph,” she says.

  Lola is totally right. Sophie would make an awesome class president. She’s smart and nice and thoughtful and responsible, too. She makes her own lunch every day and she packs herself apple slices and carrots and celery and cucumbers and a sandwich. Sometimes it’s turkey and cheese, sometimes peanut butter and jelly, and sometimes ham with lettuce and mustard. I think if it were up to me, I’d pack chips and dip, some cookies, and a chocolate bar. Maybe even candy, but definitely no vegetables. Lots of kids would do the same, right? But not Sophie—she represents each food group in her lunch, every single time.

  Except no one cares who packs the most nutritious lunch, or who’s smart and nice. Class president elections are all about coolness, and while Sophie is a lot of things, cool is definitely not one of them.

  It’s truly worrisome, because this election could turn out very badly for her. People might make a joke out of the whole thing. Sophie will probably get made fun of and that’ll be embarrassing for her. Maybe for me, too, by proxy, since Sophie and I are friends.

  The more I think about it the more I realize that running for class president is a huge, horrible mistake. I wish I could warn her, except it’s too late. She’s super-excited by the idea. I can tell by the way her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are bright. Brighter than usual, I mean.

  And now Lola is making things even worse by asking, “Do you need someone to run your campaign? Because Pixie and I would love to help out!”

  I almost choke on my pizza. It’s bad enough worrying about Sophie. Now we’re all going to be humiliated, like as a whole entire group.

  But before I can argue or find a way out of this, Sophie says, “Sure.”

  She’s beaming now.

  Both of them are.

  There is nothing I can do.

  Lola has it all planned out. “We can have our first campaign meeting at my house after school. My mom is picking up Pixie and me anyway, so she can give you a ride, too, Sophie. This’ll be perfect because I just got eight new tubes of glitter.”

  Sophie raises her eyebrows. “That’s a lot of glitter!”

  “I know—I go through it pretty fast,” says Lola. “Hey, what’s your favorite color? You know, for the campaign posters. My mom can take us shopping for poster board and stuff on our way home.”

  Sophie thinks carefully before she answers. “I like turquoise and pink, but I’m not sure if those colors say ‘presidential’ in the way that we’ll need them to.”

  Lola nods. She’s impressed, I can tell. “Excellent point, Sophie, way to think like a winner. We can pick the most presidential colors when we get to Swain’s.”

  “Swain’s?” asks Sophie.

  “That’s the art-supply store,” Lola tells her. “It’s huge and they have everything we’ll need. Plus a gazillion things we may not need but will definitely want. You’ll love it.”

  “Oh, cool. That sounds great,” Sophie replies.

  Lola claps her hands and rubs them together, scheming about secret, happy schemes. “This is going to be amazing. Right, Pix?”

  I offer them a weak smile and a slow nod. It’s all that I can manage.

  There is no getting out of this now.

  We are doomed.

  5

  Lola’s mom is more than happy to take us shopping after school. We pick up poster board and a set of fresh Magic Markers and some puffy paint and even more glitter, because Lola says you can never have too much. Anyway, Swain’s is having a sale. There’s jumpy jazz music playing in the store. The aisles are super-colorful. I see a lot of real artists shopping here—I can tell by their tattoos and piercings. The shopping is fun and I’m starting to feel better. Not about the actual election, of course. That will be mortifying for everyone involved. But the hanging out with my friends and making posters part is awesome.

  As soon as we get to Lola’s, we race up to her room and dump our purchases on the floor.

  Lola’s carpet is pale pink and fluffy and always clean. Our stuff looks extra-bright against it.

  “I love new art supplies,” I say.

  “Me, too,” says Sophie.

  Lola frowns down at everything, doing her mouth-swishing thing. “I wish we’d gotten more poster board,” she says.

  Sophie shakes her head. “There’s no point because Principal Schwartz told us every candidate can only put up six posters.”

  “But that’s not going to be enough,” Lola says. “You’re new here, so we really need to get your name out.”

  “I wish we had a choice,” says Sophie. “But since we don’t, all it means is that each one will have to be amazing.”

  “Oh, don’t stress—they’ll be amazing,” Lola promises. She unzips her backpack and pulls out her green spiral notebook and a gold pen that has silver tassels where the eraser should be. “The first thing we need is a catchy slogan. What rhymes with Sophie?”

  “Trophy!” Sophie says.

  “Vote for Sophie. She deserves the trophy,” says Lola. She writes this down and stares at the page.

  Sophie and I lean over her shoulder so we can see, too. “It sounds good, but does the president actually get a trophy?” I ask.

  “I was thinking more of a symbolic trophy,” Lola says. “But you’re right—it’s probably too confusing.”

  “Mostly rhymes with Sophie,” I say.

  “Sophie is the mostly,” Lola tries out.

  “Mostly what?” I ask.

  “Mostly the best candidate,” Sophie says. Then she crinkles her nose. “Or maybe not.”

  Lola sighs and sits down cross-legged. “This is hard.”

  Sophie and I join her on the floor. I lean up against the wall and hug my knees.

  “How about ‘Vote for Sophie,’ bold and in all caps?” I say. “It’s simple and to the point.”

  “So is ‘Sophie for President,’” Sophie says. “A
nd maybe we cut the poster board into the shape of a trophy, so it’s like a subliminal message that tells people I’m a winner.”

  “You’re so good at this,” Lola says. She writes both of these slogans down. We stare from her list to the poster boards.

  “Wait, I have an idea,” Sophie says, brightening. “Let’s do an acrostic.”

  “A what?” asks Lola.

  “Here, hand me the notebook and I’ll show you,” says Sophie.

  Lola passes it over and Sophie writes her name in a line down the page, one letter per line. Then she writes this:

  S: Smart

  O: Optimistic

  P: Perfect attendance record

  H: Happy most of the time

  I: Is the best candidate for President

  E: Every time you vote, vote for Sophie

  Lola grins as she stares down at the page. “Oh yeah. I always forget what those things are called, but I like them.”

  I lean over the notebook and point to the bottom letter. “How many times are kids expected to vote?” I ask.

  “Just once,” says Sophie, looking at her list. “I guess I should come up with a better line for E.”

  “How about effervescent?” asks Lola.

  “Or energetic,” I suggest.

  “Let’s go with energetic.” Sophie writes it down and grins. “Then we can write ‘Sophie for President’ across the top. And draw a picture of a trophy.”

  “You really like this trophy motif, huh?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I really do,” says Sophie. “I think it should be my trademark.”

  “That is an awesome idea,” says Lola. “Let’s take the three best slogans and make two posters for each one.”

  Sophie nods. “Okay, that would mean two acrostics, two Vote for Sophies, and two Sophie for Presidents, in regular writing, and trophy pictures on every single one.”