I like writing about bad girls. A murderous countess. An adulterous queen. I don’t know what they’ve taught you in school, but here’s the truth: history is full of bad girls.

Meeting the Countess

When I was in high school, I got a book about vampires out of the public library. It was an anthology of short stories and excerpts from novels, and among them was a story about Countess Erzebet Bathory. It told the legend (in gory detail) of a countess so obsessed with preserving her youth and beauty that she murdered her young female servants and bathed in their blood, believing that it would make her immortally young. The story was riveting to me. It was also deeply repulsive and terrifying. When I finished reading it, I didn’t want to be anywhere near that book.

Maybe because it scared me, it stuck with me. Often the things that make an impact on us during our childhood or teen years—whether favorable or otherwise—leave a mark that still exists years later. When I started studying writing in college, I found myself returning to the story of the countess. I was fascinated by her obsession, her madness, her desperate grasp at some untenable perfection: eternal youth and beauty. We would all grow up and grow old, eventually. I was keenly aware of this fact. Assuming that she wasn’t born evil, what happened to her when she was a child that caused this transformation?

The teen years are a dramatically charged time of life. This is one reason why I write about teenagers, for teenagers. There are so many things that can influence a developing sense of self. There is so much at stake. Who are you going to be? How are you going to change? What does the future hold? It’s that urgency that makes reading and writing young adult fiction so invigorating; not only is there action surrounding the character, but the inner self is mutating in ways the character hadn’t imagined or intended.

So what’s the internal struggle of a young murderess? I kept wishing I could ask the countess “Why did you do it? What were you thinking?” This question nagged at me. Clearly, she must have been crazy—but in fiction, that’s not a satisfying answer. Perhaps she feared growing up, growing older, losing her beauty. Why couldn’t things remain just as they were, safe and contained in her castle in the mountains? I had wished for that kind of comforting consistency myself, especially when I was a young teenager and filled with dread of the unknowable that awaited me in the years ahead.

Sharing my fear with the countess offered me a way to connect with her, to empathize. As I started writing her story—which would eventually become my first novel, “The Blood Confession”—I began to see her madness drive her to do terrible, cruel, repulsive things. If I wanted to tell the story in her point of view I had to expose the weaknesses that lead her down that path. For all of her vanity and pride, the countess was ruled by fear and insecurity. It would be a dark book, certainly not for every reader, but even in those early drafts I had envisioned it as a young adult novel, as it grappled with many of the same issues that I had felt as a teenager. Those questions about why she did what she did fascinated me, not because I knew the answer, but because I wanted to know. I wanted to create a logic (if entirely mad and illogical) for the countess to follow, that led to bleeding her servants, to bathing in blood, and finally to murder.

Aside from her fears of growing older, Erzebet’s close friendship with Marianna is at the core of her story. Marianna’s acceptance of Erzebet relieves some of the loneliness of the young countess’s existence. But Marianna does not harbor the same fears of the future; she is eager to become a young woman, a wife, and a mother. When Marianna falls in love and marries, Erzebet feels abandoned by her closest friend.

We often grow apart from our childhood friends—I have, and I think most people I’ve met have had similar experiences. It’s a natural, painful part of growing up. This gave me another way to empathize with Erzebet. I remembered feeling neglected and powerless as a certain old friend pulled away. And if there was one thing I knew Erzebet would react poorly to, it was that feeling of powerlessness. I knew she would react strongly, and—when it became clear that she couldn’t control Marianna’s actions—she would take drastic measures to convince herself that she was all-powerful. Time may have changed Marianna, but it would not change her: her search for eternal youth was energized, and remorseless. Bleeding her servants was only the beginning. She would murder young girls. She would act as God in her tower room, choosing life or death for the minions held captive before her. What could be more powerful than deciding a person’s fate according to your own whim, choosing whether they live or die?

Admittedly, Erzebet’s behavior is irrational, insane. But she enjoyed playing out her own power games, and I enjoyed writing them. Fiction is liberating. You can be bad in fiction, without fear of consequences. You can slip into someone else’s skin and play their role, even if you know they are horrible, vindictive, mad as a hatter. What might draw you to read a terrifying story is the same thing that draws me to write one—we want to visit that dark part of ourselves in a safe way, a way that won’t hurt anyone. It won’t even hurt ourselves. It’s frightening and it may make an impact on us, but then we put the book down and we can walk out into the sunlight again.

A Different Breed of Bad Girl

After finishing “The Blood Confession” I tried to settle my attentions on other ideas, but they just didn’t hold up. I had spent years writing about a girl who murdered for blood, for youth, for fun. She was dramatic, malevolent. How would I follow that up? How would I find someone else bad enough to inspire me?

And then one day I was surfing the internet, and I came across the story of Catherine Howard.

Catherine Howard was a teenager when she became the fifth wife of the notoriously unpredictable King Henry VIII. He had divorced his first wife, beheaded his second, lost his third in childbirth, and then hastily divorced his fourth (she wasn’t as pretty as he had hoped, after all) in order to marry Catherine. Not a great track record, but he was king so he could get away with these things.

Image courtesy of Ann Marie Brasacchio.

So what did she do, this Tudor-era Cinderella, propped upon the throne beside her all-powerful husband? First, she lied about being a virgin upon marrying the king. The king didn’t like liars, to say the very least. And according to most historians, Catherine engaged in a secret affair with one of the king’s most trusted servants during their marriage.

Knowing what she did about her royal husband, why would Catherine have acted so rashly? Henry’s second queen, Anne Boleyn, had been executed on similar charges of adultery—and Anne was Catherine’s cousin. Further, historians tend to agree that it is doubtful that Anne had actually committed the crimes she was accused of, while Catherine’s affair may well have been real. Either way, they both met the same grim end: execution by beheading at the Tower of London.

Here I was meeting another bad girl, whose actions inspired a similar confusion and interest. I found myself wanting to ask her the same questions: “What were you thinking? Why did you do it?” How would she explain?

Catherine was much different than the countess, of course. The countess murdered people in brutal ways, without remorse. But Catherine’s actions were absurdly reckless: she was risking her own life, and the life of the young man whom she claimed to love. Did she really imagine that she was safe, seated beside this great king? Did she really believe that Henry’s love (which had already proven itself fickle, and was quite dependent on her ability to produce an heir to his throne) would protect her? I read some amazing historical accounts about Catherine’s rise to the throne, all of which offered a broad array of potential reasons for her actions, but I wanted to get inside Catherine’s head. I wanted to hear her story, from her point of view. These thoughts would lead to my second novel, “The King’s Rose.”

Though the action took place hundreds of years ago, in a culture much removed from our own, Catherine was recognizable: a teenage girl, full of flaws and desperate for love and attention. Her faults and weaknesses made her palpably human to me. I empathized with her plight. I imagined that being chosen by the king was a heady experience. In spite of her triumph, she didn’t know enough about court life to know how a queen should behave. She didn’t understand how to deal with King Henry and his dangerous mood swings. And then she risked all to indulge in a night of love (or lust?) with a young man from her past.

I’m a lifelong fan of fairy tales, and I was enthralled by how Catherine Howard’s story resembled both a princess fantasy come true, and the terrifying Bluebeard murdering bride after bride. Haven’t we all wanted to be the princess? The chosen one? I did, and I think it’s a pretty universal fantasy. I spoke to my editor about this before starting my revisions of “The King’s Rose,” how the whole story could be seen as a loose parallel to modern life: every girl wants to be chosen by the Prom King, even though he’s kind of a jerk. The point is that he’s powerful, everyone respects him, and he’s the most popular kid in school. And when you are chosen, that attention and respect and elevated status is fun for a while. But then you start to think of the nice guy that you really like, who maybe isn’t so popular but was a whole lot nicer to you and maybe really cared about you. But then it’s too late, you’re stuck dating a monster, who is enabled by the social structure of high school to be as jerky as he wants and get away with it—for reasons as infinitely complicated and illogical as any royal family tree.

When I was a teenager, writing rhyming vampire poetry and dreaming (quietly, from a distance) about boys in my class, I kept my dreams to myself. While I vigilantly protected my heart, Catherine let passion rule her. She followed it and fell blindly from grace, indulging in sin and ignoring the consequences. Though her actions are foolish, there is something powerful in her story. We all teeter on the brink of disaster at one point or another during our teen years—do we give ourselves to passion, to a potentially bad decision, or do we back away? Catherine never backed away, which is what makes her story so dangerous, and so delicious.

Wicked Fiction

I find that people—especially people who know me—often look for who I am in my novels, or what may be based on truth. This is the beauty of fiction. My life is, thankfully, very different from the lives of glamour and danger lead by my characters. Though we are very different, I can still connect with them through our inner fears, our awkwardness—something that all of humanity shares, regardless of the century in which we’re born. It’s through these very human stories that I connect most deeply with history, with those who came before me, and imagine the stories their ghosts might tell us if they could.

Reading and writing are the safest and most effective modes of metamorphosis that I have found. It can be liberating to shed your own preoccupations and obsessions and try on someone else’s for a while. To take your own pain and anger and fears and dreams and transform them into a story—someone else’s story—this is part of the magic of writing, for me. The act of creation can be liberating. It’s empowering to let your old demons dance across the page, and tell a story that is dark, and human, and true.

Alisa M. Libby has been writing stories since she first learned how to properly grip a crayon. Growing up in Natick, Massachusetts, she dabbled in other potential careers in her formative years (trumpet player, actress, astronomer, unicorn) but ended up going to Emerson College for a degree in creative writing, with a focus on fiction. While at Emerson she began writing numerous short stories about the “blood countess” of Hungarian legend, which years later evolved into “The Blood Confession,” her first novel. She lives in Brockton, Massachusetts, with her husband Thomas, and their basset hound, Roxanne.

She also writes a blog we here at YARN highly recommend!

violet

Image courtesy of Jason Rodgers (flikr.com).

she stands in the corner
of the crowded room
a song swirls
above the chatter
she wishes she hadn’t come
but still, she gathers her courage
struggles for conversation
they feign ignorance
her face burns
she creeps back
to the wall
to blend
with the flowered paper

Tortoise or Hare

Image courtesy of Collin Key (flikr.com).

I would be the tortoise
If I could choose.
Tender parts
Carefully guarded
By a hard green shell.
A portable hiding place
For those awkward moments.
No need to run,
Just pull in the appendages
And breathe slowly
Until the danger passes.
But some pernicious muse
Had other plans
And without consulting me,
Took my secrets
And made iambic feet
For a bunch of mad rabbits
That care nothing for poetry.

About Doraine: Growing up, she was the shy girl who faded into the wallpaper. She was in high school before she realized she had things to say, and that it was okay to voice her opinions. Writing has been a way of finding her voice. She loves playing with words, finding the rhythm and the tone that matches her thoughts. Crafting words that create an image that speaks to the heart of a reader is a genuine pleasure. Today, she’s a writer, an editor, a book seller, a wife and a grandmother. Finding the freedom to speak has been a long journey for her, but one that has brought great joy.

Image courtesy of Shermeee (flikr.com).

YARN is searching for amazing images to illustrate upcoming poetry, fiction and essays.  Every week or so, we’ll give you the types of images we’re looking for…if you’ve got something that fits the bill, please send it our way!

Until March 12, we need the following:  salt, apples, babydoll, orange station wagon, motel, forest, open highway.

YARN is searching for images that capture the eye, are artistic in nature, and that surprise us.  We are excited by photographers that play with light and color…we are not so excited by vacation photos.  (Well, I mean, they’re really cool and all…but probably won’t artistically fit someone else’s words.)

Please check our submission guidelines for specifics on how to submit photography.

Lyga followed his popular debut with the brave and honest “Boy Toy,” thoughtful and soul-searching “Hero Type,” and “Goth Girl Rising,” the sequel to “Fanboy.” Lyga continues to break ground with his newest work.  He recently announced a two-book deal on his blog for a new series: “I Hunt Killers.” The series is described as “Dexter meets Silence of the Lambs for teens.”

It’s obvious why we can’t wait to talk to him. Isn’t it? While you wait, check out Barry Lyga’s website.

Her hugely popular apocalyptic series begins with Miranda in LAWKI, a sixteen your old junior in high school whose private diary is the story of the novel. We start reading in the spring, when the world is atwitter about the fact that a meteor is supposed to hit the moon, an astronomical event on the order of Haley’s Comet, the kind of thing everyone in Miranda’s rural Pennsylvania neighborhood stays up late to watch. Except the light show isn’t all fun and games. Instead, the meteor hits the moon and shoves it closer to earth: “It was like if you’re playing marbles and one marble hits another on its side and pushes it diagonally,” writes Miranda.

All hell breaks loose. Tsunamis. Floods. Volcanoes whose ash covers the sky in a permanent gray winter, eclipsing the sun. And that’s just the beginning.

Miranda and her family–her mother, and two brothers–hunker down in their house, deciding to gut it out with an enormous stash of canned goods, hoping against hope that the powers that be (the government, NASA, the geniuses of the world) will set the world straight before they freeze or starve to death. But this isn’t just a page-turning survival tale. It’s also the story of a girl who fights with her mother and siblings, who wants to be kissed and to meet her lifelong hero and crush–an Olympic figure skater from her hometown. The life-and-death circumstances of the novel give Miranda’s teen angst a razor edge that cuts into readers who stay up late into the night to discover her fate.

“the dead and the gone,” which follows the same meteor story from the point of view of Alex Morales, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City–is much, much darker. In a good way. All bets are off here. Like in the “Harry Potter” books, no one is safe. Alex is stranded in his family’s apartment with his two sisters, only one of whom he particularly likes. Their parents are gone. One of the central questions of the book is: Will the parents ever come home? If you believe in miracles like Alex’s religious sister Bri, then hope is on your side. If not, then. . .

This is a gruesome story, told in unflinching detail. There are dead bodies, and terrible smells, and dirty dealings for precious cans of food. It’s also a moving story about a brother’s love for his sisters. And it’s deep, philosophically–Alex’s meditations on God and religion will turn your brain into a pretzel. Amazingly, there is humor too, largely supplied by banter between Alex and his cynical friend Kevin, but it’s downright macabre. Probably because the low moments of this book take you into such a deep, dark hole of despair, the happier moments might move you to tears.

All of which is why we can’t wait for “This World We Live In.”

And if all that wasn’t enough, Susan Beth Pfeffer is also really cool personally–read her blog, “Moons, Meteors, and Me,” (embed link) and you’ll see. With tons of humor and knowledge, she writes very regularly about her novels, about the publishing business, about figure skating and all her other passions. We highly recommend you take a look!

Photo by Marci Hanners.

But only after you read our interview. Without further ado, here is the YARN interview with the one and only Susan Beth Pfeffer.

First, a few personal questions:
YARN: In December on 2009, Lourdes and Kerri had the pleasure of hearing you speak about how you got your first book deal–75 books ago! Could you share that story with YARN?

SBP: It’s a very long story, so let’s see how I do with the short version.

It was my last semester at NYU and I was concerned about what I’d do for a living once I graduated. I had always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t think I had the talent to make a career of it. Since I loved books and was particularly interested in kids’ books, I thought about becoming an editor.

I took a course in book publishing and one of the guest speakers was a children’s book editor. I asked his advice about getting into the field and he suggested (among other things) that if I wrote a book, even if no one published it, the very act of having written one would be so impressive I’d get hired.

So for that reason, and that reason only, I added writing a young adult novel into my other obligations that semester. When I finished the manuscript, I gave it to my book publishing professor, who very nicely read it.

He told me it was publishable, and he sent a letter of introduction to a small publishing house where he knew people. They read the manuscript and suggested various changes to me. I followed their instructions, they accepted the book, and poof–I was a writer after all.

YARN: On your blog, you mentioned you are a fan of figure skating and have skated in the past. Do you have a favorite male figure skater on which you based the character of Brandon in LAWKI? Any favorites for the upcoming Olympics?

SBP: I love figure skating; I’m a huge fan. If I were allowed one pick and one pick only for a gold medal, it would be the Chinese pairs team Shen and Zhao.

I pictured Johnny Weir when I wrote about Brandon. No particular reason why. I just did.

YARN: There’s a funny section in d&g where Alex and Julie go into the empty apartments in the building looking for food, and are overjoyed to find all the Oreos, Hershey’s kisses and “weird shaped pasta” in the “rich people’s apartment.” I (Kerri) bet it made more readers than just me wonder what’s in your kitchen right now. Though I’m hardly a rich person myself, I’ll cop to having weird shaped pasta and Trader Joe’s brand of Oreo. What about you?

SBP: I live off of fruit, frozen dinners and 100 calorie snacks. Except for the fruit, I’m pretty much a nutritional nightmare.

Schools all over America are using “Life As We Knew It” and “the dead and the gone” for their students, not just in English classes, but science and math and history. One school had its students go through their kitchen cabinets to determine how many calories there were at that very moment, so they could figure out how long they could live off of what was available to them.

I could live a very long time 100 calories at a time.

YARN: There is also a similar moment in LAWKI where Miranda finds a bag of chocolate chips and eats loads before finding out they were for her brother’s birthday. Thus my (Lourdes) question: Could you resist an entire closet filled with chocolate?

SBP: I actually prefer my chocolate in small doses, like chocolate chip cookies or ice cream. But I’d certainly nibble my way through a closet’s worth!

Your writing process:
YARN: What is your writing day like?

SBP: I used to have a set amount to write a day. In college, I wrote 5 pages a day, and once I graduated and became a real honest to goodness professional writer, I raised the total to 10 pages a day. If page 5 or page 10 ended in the middle of a sentence, I’d scribble the end down somewhere, but I never wrote another full page (or even another full sentence).

Then I mastered the 10 page chapter, so I’d write a chapter a day, but basically it was still 10 pages. I did that for years, and no one, myself included, could figure out how I managed to get all my chapters exactly the same length.

I should add here that I’m a very fast worker, and especially if I’ve given a lot of thought to what I was going to write, all this would take me 2 hours, maybe less. I’ve never been one for hard work.

After a while I decided I should go with a chapter a day, regardless of length, and suddenly some of my chapters were 11 pages or 12.

If I was in a hurry (especially when I was close to the end of a book and impatient to stop working), I’d do two chapters in a day just to get it done with. I don’t think before LAWKI, I ever took more than a month to write a first draft (and I pretty much submit first drafts; I’m not one for rewrites, since they’re work).

I loved writing LAWKI and d&g, but they were both so long (over 300 pages), they just took longer. I’d start writing in the morning and not stop, except for the occasional break, until suppertime. When I wrote both books and the third in the trilogy- “This World We Live In”- I didn’t write them in chapter format. After the book was finished, sections were divided into chapters. So I didn’t write a chapter a day, or 10 pages a day, or anything else so structured. I just wrote and wrote and wrote.

I did a lot of pre-writing with all three books. LAWKI and d&g took 6-7 weeks to write; TW more like 5-6 weeks (it’s shorter).

YARN: In your “Publishers Weekly” interview, you mention “pre-writing.” Can you explain a little more about what this process entails for you?

SBP: Pre-writing is my favorite part of writing. My books almost always start out with a what if. What if you were a teenager living through a worldwide disaster?

The process consists of asking question after question. Some of the questions have to do with the plot, others with the characters. As I figure out the answers, the book falls into place.

When I’m comfortable with the beginning, a fair amount of middle, and the essence of the ending, I start the actual writing.

The pre-writing can take several weeks. It’s incredibly valuable to me, since it solves the problems that invariably arise when you’re creating a story, and saves me the middle of the manuscript freakout, when you realize something just flat out isn’t going to work.

Different people work different ways, and there’s no right way or wrong way to do it. Other writers are willing to get partway through a book and then throw out a huge section of what they’ve written. But that’s not the best system for me.

YARN: Do you do this prewriting in your head, or do you write it down? For instance, do you outline each chapter, profile characters, etc?

SBP: I do it all in my mind. Sometimes I’ll write a kind of stream of consciousness story outline (I did that for “the dead and the gone”), but mostly I keep the information in my mind until I start the actual writing.

YARN: In your many years of writing books, did you ever write something that felt like an “assignment,” and was kind of a drag to write? If so, how did you work through that?

SBP: Oh yeah, there’ve been plenty of books that I wrote more for the money than the joy of the creative process. Some of those books did very well.

Generally, you get half the advance money for a book when you sign the contract and the other half when your manuscript is accepted for publication. That half an advance is a very strong incentive to keep working even if you’re not madly in love with the book you’re writing.

Writing is my job. Nobody loves their job every single minute of every single day. In the immortal words of Lou Grant, “That’s why they call it work.”

YARN: Do you have any tips for high school readers out there who have to write for assignments all the time?

SBP: Grit your teeth and do it.

Your Books:
YARN: Having been raised a Catholic myself (this is Kerri asking), I was particularly intrigued (and put on edge) by the Catholicism of the characters in d&g. As a result, I think I was interested in the fact that d&g is both more religious and more gruesome than LAWKI; plus I also know you’re a big movie fan, and many classic horror films also link religion and violence (“Exorcist,” anyone?). Do you want to comment on the connection between religion and violence in the book?

SBP: Well, d&g is more religious and more gruesome than LAWKI because I wrote LAWKI first and I needed d&g to be as different as possible, given that they’re both about the exact same disaster at the exact same time. Miranda and her family in LAWKI were not particularly religious, so I needed Alex and his family to be religious as a contrast. And I just figured death would be more visible in New York City than in an isolated house in small town Pennsylvania.

I made Alex Catholic because I needed him to be able to get help, and the Catholic Church in NYC has a very strong infrastructure. The martyrdom of St. Sebastian had nothing to do with it!

YARN: There is a lot of altruism in LAKWI and d&g, in which central characters like Miranda and Alex seem very willing to give up food for themselves in order to feed younger siblings. Sometimes, this felt like the “good” sibling making sacrifices for the (if not “bad,” then) less appreciative, and more selfish sibling. Can you say a little more about the altruism in the books? Was it inspired by anything in particular?

SBP: I’m the younger of two children, and most of my books are about kids with older brothers, like I have. Miranda is a middle child with an older brother who’s a lot nicer than she is and a younger brother. Alex has an older brother, who is only heard from a couple of times in d&g, and two younger sisters.

As a younger sister, I think it’s the obligation of older brothers to take care of me. I don’t think of that as altruism. I think of it as my birthright.

Both LAWKI and d&g are about the main characters learning to accept responsibility. In young adult books, it’s always a good thing if the main character shows growth during the course of the book. If the main characters in the books were Jonny or Bri and Julie, they’d be very different books (and you’d see their growth instead).

In other reading…
YARN: Have you seen a shift in YA literature since you first started writing? How has the genre grown, improved, changed?

SBP: I guess so. I’ve been writing YAs for decades; they must have changed over the years.

I don’t read children’s books. Basically I’m functionally illiterate about them. More than anything, I write to entertain myself, and I’m not all that interested in what else is going on in my field.

The “New York Times” review of d&g referred to how it didn’t follow the rules. A few months after the review appeared, I ran into John Green, who’d written it. I asked him what rules I hadn’t followed and he said it was that Alex’s parents never came back.

Who knew it was a rule that parents had to come back in a YA book? Apparently not me.

YARN: I (Lourdes) find it very interesting that you do not read many children’s books. This allows you to be less bound to the “supposed” rules of YA fiction. However, your books are extremely YA. What do you believe then is the true definition of YA fiction? Is it the main character’s age, plot, or just writer’s luck? In other words: Why are your books considered YA?

SBP: My definition of a YA is a main character under the age of 18, a PG13 vocabulary level, a main character who shows growth during the course of the story, and a limited amount of sex and/or violence.

Those are my rules and since I don’t read other people’s YAs, I can’t speak for anyone else.

YARN: You once wrote a fantastic blog entry discussing the business end of writing. What prompted you to write it and what was the response to it? (For example: John Green loved it and posted about it on his blog)

SBP: I’ve never had a salaried 9-5 job. I’ve always been a self-employed freelance children’s book writer. So I’m accustomed to thinking in terms of advances and royalties and sub rights. That’s how I make my living.

But I found out that the paperback of d&g was going to cost a dollar more than the LAWKI paperback, and I decided to write a blog entry about how happy that made me, since it meant I’d get more royalties. And as I was writing it, I realized there might be people who didn’t know about royalties. So I did an entry explaining the whole process of how writers get paid.

It turned out a lot of people didn’t know and were very interested. Apparently I broke another of those rules I never know about because I discussed exactly how much money I’d gotten for my advances ($20,000 for LAWKI, $30,000 for d&g–they were combined hardback/paperback advances).

I always enjoy other people’s shop talk. I guess people enjoyed mine as well.

YARN: On your blog, you mentioned that in 2009 you tracked every book you read–a very worthy resolution. During this process, did your reading habits change at all? For example, did you become aware of reading many books in a certain genre and therefore make an attempt to diversify? Or, was there any book you kind of wanted to read, but didn’t want to admit to reading, so you set it back on the shelf?

SBP: I have no shame, at least not when it comes to keeping a booklist.

I always think I read more non-fiction than fiction, and the booklist showed I did. The percentages were close to the same, but non-fiction books tend to be longer (and almost always take longer to read than novels).

What I did find was I read in spurts, and I read considerably more in the end of the year than I had in the beginning (which makes sense, since in the beginning of 2009, I was writing “This World We Live In”). I’ve been on a bit of a reading jag since New Year’s, but I’m about to enter a stretch of watching lots of figure skating and tennis, so I know I’ll be cutting down on my reading again.

I do read two newspapers a day and enormous amounts of unimportant stuff on the internet.

YARN: Are there any blogs (including those of fellow authors) that you’d recommend to other lovers of YA literature, and aspiring writers?

SBP: My friends Elaine Marie Alphin and Todd Strasser both have blogs, as does John Green. But most blogs I only stumble onto if Google tells me they mention me. You could probably make more and better recommendations than I can!

YARN: Do you Google your own name? How often? I, Lourdes, will admit I have done it more than once. Okay, about twice a month but who is counting.

SBP: I certainly check myself and my books on Google (and it’s amazing the things I find out that way that no one bothers to tell me). I also have Google well trained to let me know what’s going on by way of email. And I check my emails all the time!

YARN: Thanks, Sue, for answering all our questions! Good luck with “This World.” We can’t wait to read it.

I thought the readers of YARN might enjoy looking at the first chapter of a “companion book,” to “The ABC’s of Kissing Boys.”  This story takes place later in the same school year and contains many of the same characters from my 2009 Random House release, “The ABC’S of Kissing Boys,” but instead of being told in Parker Stanhope’s point of view, features her best friend, Becca Benvenuto.

The writing challenges for this chapter were not only the need for me to “head hop” from Parker’s point of view to Becca’s and to establish her voice, but to recap the plot of “The ABC’S of Kissing Boys” from Becca’s perspective–while trying to unfold what I hoped was an interesting new storyline.

The Flipside

By Tina Ferraro

If you read 11:34 upside-down, it spells “hell.”

I learned this in the inky darkness of a Minnesota backyard, where I–Rebecca Benvenuto–sat in a patio chair, playing with my illuminated, digital wristwatch, pushing buttons, turning it around, doing what I could to keep from spontaneously combusting from boredom.

The eight other girls at Elaine Chu’s seventeenth birthday slumber party were her varsity soccer teammates, who mostly hung out on the field and off. I could barely kick a can, much less a field goal, and in their company, felt like the object of that old Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the other…”

But, well, whatever, right?

I’d gotten my invite because of my BFF, Parker Stanhope. In addition to being the shoo-in for the next year’s team captain, she’d pulled off an amazing feat last fall, going from social outcast (a junior left behind on JV!) to one of the most admired girls on our campus. She had the same long, blonde thing going on as Blake Lively on “Gossip Girls,” a passion for fashion, and an I-don’t-care-what-people-think-about-me attitude. The latter of which she drove home by unabashedly, in-ur-face, dating a freshman.

In the midst of her crisis and growth last fall, she and I had found each other again, remembering why we’d been inseparable in middle school. Now wherever she went, I pretty much went, too. She made sure of it. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Except on dates with her boy toy. But no problem there because of course, who wanted to be a third wheel? And, for the past eleven weeks, I’d had a boyfriend myself, a junior named Scott Cinderelli, whose Windex blue eyes made him a stand-out on the soccer field as well as in the halls. And while Scott and I weren’t all mushy-smushy like Parker and Tristan, we were definitely “in like,” had a standing Friday night date, and were all Facebook official.

Which was just right for me.

The sound of my name cut through the air, followed by a narrow beam of light. I turned to see Parker charging out the screen door, a party-gift-bag flashlight in hand.

“There you are.” Her tone was one only best friends could get away with: one-part tease and one-part Ur Mom. “I’m thinking we have better things to do than sitting in the dark, Becca. Like winning a scavenger hunt.”

Image courtesy of Travis Jon Allison (flickr.com).

I went with a whiny tone. “Sorry. Too busy playing with my watch.”

She blew out an exaggerated laugh. Parker–like most of these girls–was mega-competitive. She had to, had to win. I, on the other hand, didn’t particularly care about a game’s outcome, as long as it was fun. Which was probably why it didn’t bother me (much) that my newly elevated position in the school’s statusphere hinged on being Parker’s best friend. Popular-by-association beat being practically invisible any day.

Even if it did get boring now and then.

“Okay, Miss Other Half of the Pink Team,” she said, holding up a folded piece of loose leaf paper adorned with a pink star. The shade was accidentally or on purpose a close match with the pink hoodie she was wearing, her favorite outerwear since April showers had brought May flowers and warmer evenings. “Behold. Our first clue: ‘Where all is said and…’”

“Done,” I said, drawing the first letters out to make it sound like “duh.”

“Yeah, but what does it mean?”

“I don’t know, that we’re done? As in, finished? Because Elaine is still trying to mend fences after all that grief she gave you, and so we’re automatic winners?”

She wrinkled her nose, but whether it was at the memory of how Mandy, Elaine and some others had tormented her last September for first not making varsity, and then taking up with a freshman, or at my wild assumption was anybody’s guess. “I wish. I could really use one of those gift cards. My shin guards are shot.”

Hidden somewhere on the properties in this cul-de-sac was an envelope containing two gift cards to our town’s top sporting good store. Elaine’s parents were no-holds-barred when came to their kids, and had gone as far as bribing the neighbors with plates of homemade Korean BBQ to let us run amok in the darkness tonight.

Scarfing down some of the yummy strips of seasoned beef myself earlier, I totally understood why the neighbors had caved. In fact, if a second helping had been the scavenger hunt prize, I’d be jumping hurdles like Olympiad Lolo Jones.

Still, I couldn’t resist teasing Parker a little. “I know what you want more than new shin guards. To win.”

She held the flashlight under her chin and made a little kid, tongue-out stupid face at me. “Okay, yeah that, too. Now come on,” she said and grabbed my hand.

We did a run-run thing around the side of the house, my shoulder-length brown hair flying back against my head. Parker and I were both on the tall, slim side, and had actually met a week before seventh grade, grabbing at the same size jeans in Anna Banana’s Boutique in Old Town DeGroot. But our similarities stopped there. She was the stop-traffic beauty; I was just okay-looking. The funny part was, she swore she’d give anything for my dark hair and eyes, my olive skin, what she referred to as my “ethnic gypsy look.” Even called the mole on my chipmunk cheek “Madonna-like.”

But what I knew she wouldn’t trade was families. Not that hers was a picnic. Mr. and Mrs. Stanhope were just coming out of an ugly and embarrassing property feud with Parker’s boyfriend’s father, and there was some stress about her older brother’s grades at college. But at least they put their cards on the table. Unlike my family, who basically slinked around the house with our backs to walls, so as to carefully avoid each other and an issue the size of a circus elephant.

Racing into the Chu’s front yard now, the persistent chirp of crickets told us the three other teams (Mandy/Renee, Maia/Genevieve, Tiffany/Amber) had already taken off. Elaine had explained earlier that each team would have a different set of clues to lead to the treasure, so the key to winning was as much about independent detective-work as speed.

I couldn’t help think that a bit of favoritism might factor in, too. Elaine had prepared the clues herself, and would be more than happy to see Parker reign triumphant, so there was probably no reason to get all winded and sweaty.

Except that the way Parker was dragging me, it was either keep up or lose an arm.

After one lap around the cul-de-sac, inspiration hit her. She dragged me to the front curb of a big, white house.

“Voila!” she announced, untaping our second clue from under the mailbox that read “Dunne.” I slipped the first clue in my back pocket–I considered littering on par with terrorism and boyfriend stealing–while keeping the flashlight steady for her.

Image courtesy of Graceº (flickr.com).

The same pink star appeared on the backside as she unfolded the new note. “More than you,” she read, catching her breath, “but less than double you.”

I raised the beam up to her face. Her brows arched into the same “huh?” that my throat was sounding.

Instinctively, we exchanged the clue and flashlight.

That’s when I saw the writing on the flipside, just below the pink star. Barely visible, in very light pencil. As if tentatively written. Or poorly erased.

“Wake up,” I read aloud, holding it close to my eyes. And then, below, in print even smaller, even lighter, words that rammed like a field goal into my throat. “Scott Cinderelli is cheating on you.”

“Joke,” Parker, said, grabbing the paper back to examine it. “Bad joke. Bad, bad joke.”

It had better be. Because Scott cheating on me was not funny. Not evenly remotely.

And furthermore, it did not compute. There’d been nothing sneaky about his behavior, no changes in his schedule, no poorly explained absences. In fact, he’d been sweeter than ever when kissing me goodnight the night before–borderline romantic. And as I was getting out of his car, he told me to have fun here at Elaine’s tonight. And to call him on Sunday.

See? He cared. He liked me. He considered me an on-going part of his life.

Yep, this was crazy, and some idiot’s idea of a joke.

I drew a long inhale, hoping for calm and clarity.

But the thing was, say just for a moment, that it was true? That Scott had gone and fallen for someone else. Why not just break up with me? Why do something as down-and-dirty as cheat?

Cheating broke hearts, ruined relationships, severed lifetimes of trust. And while I realized not everyone had the same just-kill-me-now, first-hand knowledge of cheating like those of us in the Benvenuto family, even the most sheltered person knew it was wrong.

“Who,” I finally sputtered to Parker. “Who wrote this?”

She screwed her face into a frown.

“Elaine?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.” Parker exhaled so loudly I thought I heard her brains rattle. She was one of the few people on the planet who was privy to the seedy side of my home life. She knew what this had to be doing to me. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this.” She pointed the beam of her flashlight in the direction of Elaine’s two-story.

“Now? But the clues…the gift cards, the shin guards.”

She gave her head a toss, then slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Puh-lease. Who cares about some stupid game when it comes to best friends?”

A bunch of heart-thrashing moments later, we walked through the Chu’s front door. A four or five year-old boy–who was not that much older than the son my father visited in Brainerd every Sunday–saw us, then scampered up the stairs.

Probably he’d been told to stay out of sight during his sister’s party. Or maybe we plum looked scary. I know Parker did. Angry lines shot out from around her mouth and eyes. While I felt like one of those jelly fish that wash up on our Lake Superior shore in late summer, translucent almost to the point of invisibility. But if you got near me, you’d sure feel my sudden sting.

Elaine sat atop a barstool in her kitchen, sipping a diet soda, her cell phone on the counter. Parker marched across the linoleum and thrust the paper at her, tapping a fingernail at the words below the star.

“What in the world is this?”

Elaine’s lashes fled back–she knew this was serious stuff–but she also shrugged.

“You didn’t write it?” Parker persisted.

“Not that part, no.”

I took a tentative step closer to Elaine. “But, is it true?”

“What? About Scott cheating on you?”

I managed to get my head to bounce.

Elaine shrugged again. “How would I know? He and I aren’t close or anything. I don’t think any of the girls here are. I mean, this is totally weird on so many levels.”

“Totally.” Parker grabbed hold of her soda can, knocked back a drink, then thunked it on the counter. “Call the girls in.”

“Now? Someone’s bound to win soon enough.”

“Now,” Parker demanded in the same take-no-prisoners tone that their former team captain/queen bee Chrissandra Hickey had once used on them–before being booted from off the team in scandal, and then transferring to another school. Still, Parker had studied at the feet of the master. “We’ll finish the game later. We can’t leave Becca not knowing like this.”

Elaine looked like she’d been slapped. All she was missing was a red mark and tears. “Yeah, Park,” she managed. “Sure. Whatever.”

Minutes later, the nine of us were sprawled about Elaine’s living room, Mandy, Renee, Tiffany, Maia, Genevieve, Amber and Elaine listening to Parker’s mini-rant, while I studied their wide-eyed faces, wondering who knew what–and who might be doing what. With my boyfriend.

But after much meaningless group speculation, Elaine stood, threw a look at Parker, and suggested we go back to the game. Parker nodded, and the girls made a break for the door. Either running from the meeting or toward the gift cards, I didn’t know. “Sit tight,” Parker then spoke in a low voice to me. “I’m not done with Elaine.”

“No prob,” I said, sinking deeper inside the overstuffed chair, my hands moving to my wristwatch. It read 1:11, I saw, both right-side up and upside down. Which was a pretty decent metaphor for what was going on right now. I had a problem, either way I looked at it.

And while I was pretty sure the others forgot about the note the moment they hit the night air, this would not end here for me. Oh, sure, I had the rep in this group as a Girls-Just-Wanna-Have-Fun type. I wasn’t crazy-competitive, didn’t devote my after school hours to doing tireless, make-myself-better practices. But this wasn’t about some sporting event or game. And this wasn’t about pretending something or someone(s) didn’t exist.

This was different. This was personal. This was my life.

Scott was cheating or me. Or he wasn’t. But in either case, somebody wanted me to think he was. Somebody who wanted to freak me out, to break us up.

And that was just evil. Unconscionable. Crappy. I would get to the bottom of this. I would!

Although as I snuggled deeper into the chair, half-hearing Parker grill Elaine about who could have possibly added that note to our clue, my arms came up in another self-hug. And started thinking about the old line about being careful what you wished for.

Because you just might get it.

About Tina: Fans of Tina’s books enjoy Tina’s ability to combine feisty female heroines with romance and a ton of laugh out loud moments. Her debut novel, “Ten Uses for an Unworn Prom Dress,” answers a question most girls hope they never need to solve: is it possible to face your friends with grace and dignity after being dumped exactly 48 hour prior to prom?  Next came “How to Hook a Hottie,” a cautionary tale about making money by delivering relationship advice–especially bad relationship advice. And most recently, “The ABC’s of Kissing Boys,” a hilarious tale of a high school junior’s romance with a freshman (Facebook nightmare, right?)

Tina is also an avid blogger about YA literature.  Check out YAFresh and Books, Boys, Buzz!

Distortions

Remember the night in June
when we hijacked your dad’s speedboat, armed
with licorice and not-so-chaste intentions
breaking midnight’s calm with cannonballs
and waves of laughter, and the water
wrapped around like silk robes?

I don’t.

I remember goosebumps
under the blanket of summer air
at the thought of what you wanted,
fragile screams bubbling through the water
after hitting the surface like ice,
a fear of drowning in the hands
of Minnetonka’s asphalt colored waves.

Funny how the stars play tricks on you
the moonshine twinkling in your eyes
blinded you
to the malaise churning across my face.

Creed to Deal

Photo courtesy of dcis steve (flickr.com).

I believe in the power of Advil
to sweep this throbbing in my head away
and that vivacity requires only one 5 o’clock a day.
I believe the underbelly of my eyelid
is more necessary than the sunrise.

I believe running numbs racetrack thoughts—
I don’t stop until fire grips my calves
and fatigue fills me with weights.

I believe in the thesaurus, in the grassy
taste of a new word on my tongue
in the power of Twain to pull a veil
across Worry’s eyes—at least for a while.

I believe there is nothing wrong in believing
in high heels, lip gloss, and mini
skirts as solutions to sadness
or in knowing that polyester will always
pull at the wrong place in my self-esteem.

I believe in garlic over cinnamon
and that gum is a quick fix for arachnophobia.

I believe Mocha understands me better
through her puppy eyes than Thomas Epps ever will
through my articulated words. I believe skinned knees
and Disney band-aids will patch my broken heart.

About Allison: She’s  a college freshman at Columbia University currently studying French, Czech, and the humanities. Aside from being Style Editor for the “Columbia Daily Spectator,” in her spare time she also likes to indulge in reading magazines, writing poetry and short stories, and exploring the hidden corners of New York.

It’s debatable whether or not he is aware that he’s doing it, but it’s so glaringly obvious. He makes you want to scream laughter into his face so hard that it would make the white, soft skin flap behind his head. You’d turn him into a Looney Toon, but with all the pain of real life.

“Sit, sit,” he says, going to great lengths to emphasize the fact that what he is about tell you must be broken to you carefully.

“What is it Dad?” you ask, as if you don’t already know, exactly. He pauses for drama, over-exaggerates it, and then solemnly declares that it started raining pretty hard.

Photo courtesy of AlmazUK (flickr.com).

“Yes. Yes it has,” you respond.

You should be patient. Why should you blame this relatively innocent man for the nature of mankind? Because this is what humans do: they talk about the weather. We are fascinated by the cotton candy clouds with shades of white, grey, orange, and red drifting in the blue backdrop of the sky. It’s simple, really: we see the pretty colors and we get distracted, and then we forget what we really wanted to say.

“Oh man, why, would you look at that rain?” he says.

He must think you’re stupid. Maybe it’s because of your age, but since when has “young” been a synonym for “clueless”? It’s the other way around, I’d say: people tend to retreat into a little cage of idiocy and denial the older they get, while when they’re young they are able to see the rawest, most blistering truths around them.

“Yeah, it’s raining pretty hard,” you concede.

“The Weather Channel was wrong, they said it would rain on Wednesday,” he continues, “but would you look at that? It’s pouring!”

“Sometimes they get it wrong, you know.”

Maybe he knows that you know. How could he not after all? Sound has a way of meandering into rooms unapologetically; it never knocks first. It never asks you, “Hey, your mother and father are arguing again, wanna hear? Wanna hear them sling insults at each other, their shrill voices vying for attention in narrow hallways? What about that time when your mom broke the lamp? That was a great sound. Do you wanna hear it? Or, I know, how about her footsteps, only one set, as she slowly retreats to her bedroom while your father stays on the couch? Huh? Wanna?”

Manners, that’s it. Sound should really get some manners.

“Oh I know that, but today it was just ridiculous,” he drones on, “last night they said it was going to be sunny! Sunny!”

“Sunny would have been nicer, I guess.”

That’s what makes him so mad; that they got it wrong. Weathermen are the only human beings who have the gift of predicting the future. It doesn’t matter that it’s something as trivial as the weather; the simple fact that they can take a peek suddenly allows them to make claims of omnipotence. Today, the weatherman, with all his mystical powers, took a tumble and fell. If he doesn’t know what’s going to happen, then no one does. We are doomed.

“And to think that I was planning to take a stroll later today, maybe take the dog with me,” he continues.

Come on, why doesn’t he say it already.

“Guess you’re gonna have to cancel that plan,” you respond.

“Yeah I mean, there’s just no way now, hopefully tomorrow won’t be the same.”

“Maybe it’ll stop in a couple of hours, you should just wait a little.”

Spit it out. Spit it out.

“You think?”

God damn it, he has too much to say to talk about the weather.

“Well I don’t know, but I hope, I guess.”

“You know what, I think you’re right, when it rains this hard it usually stops pretty soon.” Say it, come on, come on, say it, say it. “I’m giving it another half hour.” For the love of Christ just say it, the pleasantries have been exchanged, the weather has been discussed, on to what he really wants to tell you now. “Another half hour, and then it’s gonna start drizzling. Then it will stop.”

You nod. There’s a pause.

Finally, finally. You’d think that you’d want him to delay this as much as possible; it’s truly amazing how impatient you are to go through one of the worst moments of your life.

“Son,” he states and takes a deep breath. He’s going to say it. He’s actually going to say it.

“There’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’m just gonna come right out with it.”

He pauses again, breathes in. Come on. Come on.

“Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

You’d think that hearing it like this, the truth consolidated into a statement ready to punch you in the face would shake you, despite that fact that you knew it already. You were expecting some sort of life-changing reaction, maybe hatred towards your father, maybe the opposite, or some moving outburst of tears, or something or other of the sort. You must be sorry to disappoint yourself.

You see a worried, expectant look on his face. You nod several times, then look at him blankly. He probably wants you to say something now.

So you respond, “Hey uhm, I think the weather people said it might rain tomorrow also, but I guess they’re wrong since it rained today; maybe they were just a day early.”

About Giulia: She is sixteen years old, born in Rome, Italy. Her family moved to Curitiba, Brazil, when she was around six years old. Since then, she’s lived in Austria, Greece, and in Italy again.  She then lived in New York City for one year, and subsequently began her high school career in CT at Greenwich Academy, where she is currently a Junior. She loves writing; she has attended the UVA Young Writers Workshop, has been recognized at the regional level by the Scholastic Awards (Gold Key), has been a finalist at the IMPACs, and has been published in “Connecticut Student Writers.”

Why couldn’t my relatives have a place at the beach? I’d be able to stroll off, thoughts whooshing around in my head like the crashing waves, and, most importantly, I’d have a high probability of scoping golden lifeguards with six-pack abs. Instead, our Chevy Astro heaved up a gravel driveway leading to an old house in Waynesville, North Carolina, a small mountain town. My attempt to read Seventeen along miles of winding roads had made me too nauseous to enjoy even the magazine’s folded perfume samples, usually my favorite freebie.  The postcard view of the lush highlands was totally lost on me—their peaks verified that there was no escape from this family gathering.

We’d driven three hours to devote our Memorial Day weekend to the Phillips Family Reunion, never mind the fact that I’d never known we had any affiliation with this last name.  When my dad set the parking brake, I had no choice but to drag my butt out of the car.  Clutching their Beanie Babies, my two younger sisters bounded out the minivan, high on Skittles and Dr. Pepper. I slid out of the car and scanned the scene.  About twenty of my relatives were scattered among several picnic tables on the craggy incline.

Photo Courtesy of protoflux (flickr.com).

“I’m so glad you wore those ratty shorts for the occasion,” my Mom said.

I’d had these strategically deconstructed J.Crew cut-offs for a couple of years; Mom was just waiting for her chance to sneak them into the trash.

“What, like I was supposed get all fancy for this?”  I said under my breath, loud enough for her to hear.

She sighed.  I made a face and pulled at one of the threads along my thigh.  Neither of us wanted to get into it in front of everyone.

“Are we having fun yet?”  my Dad asked.

He adjusted his visor and squinted his eyes, which ping-ponged between Mom and me.  Earlier, I’d mumbled “Yeah” and “I know” in response to his pep talk about how it was just one afternoon, and I should try to relax and get to know some of my relatives.  Little did my parents know there were actually supposed to be parties back home that weekend.  I hadn’t told them this because I sensed that they’d get a secret thrill out of ruining my social life.

My Great Aunt Kate, sort of the matriarch of The Phillips Family Reunion, lived in an old white house at the top of the hill. Everyone called her “Aunt Kate.”  I’d only met her once before this particular family event.  My Great Aunt Rooney and Uncle Robert, whom I’d also met once before, lived at the bottom of the hill in a ranch-style brick house that was right across the street from a Lowes.

I said hello to my relatives of the close-extended variety: the ones who sent me birthday cards with a crisp twenty sandwiched inside.   I vaguely recognized some of the other faces from fuzzy old photographs. I prayed no one had gotten tee-shirts made for the occasion.

Although Aunt Kate was well into her eighties, she wore semi-cool tennis shoes and carried herself like a lanky gym teacher. In a hopeful voice, Dad told me that Aunt Kate had won several medals in the Senior Olympics for running. I’d been on my high school cross-country team for a year, but I’d won nothing besides a Varsity letter that was now tacked to my cork bulletin board—I had zero desire to sport the jacket.   My passion for the activity was mainly due to its calorie-burning benefits and the fact that I hated it less than other sports. On a trail, you could just be in your head, sans blaring scoreboards and teammates screaming at you for dropping the ball.  When Aunt Kate led a few of us through her old house and pointed to her display case of ribbons and medals, I mentioned that I ran too.  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught my mom looking pleased.  Ugh.

“Do you like it?”  Aunt Kate asked.

“Um, well,” I took a deep breath.  Her house had a woody, apple cider scent.  “Probably not as much as you, y’know?  I’m not very fast, but I do like to exercise.”

“Good for you,” she said.

I wished I had more to say.

“Cool.  Where’s the bathroom?”

Photo courtesy of Jason Marshall.

In the bathroom, my Aunt Kate’s “Evening in Paris” perfume and powder set caught my eye.   The midnight blue bottles with elegant calligraphy looked like it had existed in the days of bootlegging and flappers, and the fancy set almost seemed out of place in the rustic house.  Though I wasn’t sure what kind of prospects could be found in these hills, I tried to picture a young Aunt Kate primping for a hot date: her hair in a French twist, a spritz on every pulse point so that her “Evening in Waynesville” could be as magical as the designs on those starry bottles.

Back out in the yard, my family lounged in lawn chairs around the picnic tables.  I was amazed at how many of the grown-ups wore the same gross, pleated khaki shorts.  From the words “Whitewater” and “son of a…” I knew that they were discussing their favorite boring adult topic—politics.  So much for jumping in on that conversation–not that any of them would listen to me anyhow.

I did have plenty of cousins, some of whom I was seeing for the first time that day.  The family-tree-forces had conspired against me though, so most of them were still dependent on someone else to fasten the metal clasp of their Osh Kosh straps.  While my little sisters were no ankle biters, they hadn’t yet hit the MTV phase of life.  Besides, three hours in the car with them had sucked out every ounce of my “helpful, understanding big sister” persona.  I grabbed my Discman out of the Astro, and plopped down on a metal folding chair.  I hit play on the device and covered my ears.

My tunes, the green mountains, and the crisp air, almost swept me into a Zen-like mindset.  Almost.  Then I found myself as the unintentional Monkey-in-the-Middle in a game of catch between my sister Sarah and our cousin David.  A dog-slobber-matted tennis ball whizzed my face. The last thing I needed was to get slammed in the face by this nasty ball—my zits were already enough trouble to spackle. I was forced to relocate. Radiohead’s lyrics fit my mood: “What the hell am I doin’ here?  I don’t belong here.”

In an authentic fifties convertible, a “local” relative, Tim, arrived with metallic tubs full of fried chicken with a myriad of country “fixin’s,” from some restaurant.  Everyone formed a line for the food then dug in.  I fought the urge to ask how many fat grams were in a drumstick.

Later that afternoon, I took a walk down to my Aunt Rooney and Uncle Robert’s house.   I’d said hello to them when we’d first arrived at the picnic, and I wasn’t sure if they were in Aunt Kate’s house now or what. Taking a walk would  get me away from everyone for a minute and counteract the greasy fried chicken and blackberry pie I’d inhaled that afternoon.  I didn’t tell anyone where I was going because the house was just down the stupid hill.  Like there was any trouble to get into. I dropped my Discman off in the car, and carefully walked down the slope.  Too bad we hadn’t come in the winter–sledding might actually have made things more fun.  On my way down, Aunt Kate was walking up, a smile on her face.  She waved at me without missing a beat, almost charging up the incline.  I felt lazy.

Once I reached the house, I saw that the screen door was open, so I poked my head in.

“Hello?”

Aunt Rooney came to the door.

“Um, hi,” I said.  “Can I use the bathroom?”

I was such a dazzling conversationalist.

“Of course,” she said.

I kind of hoped there’d be another “Evening in Paris” discovery in their bathroom, but it was just a standard old people bathroom: a hand-knit cover shielded the extra toilet paper roll from looking like toilet paper.

When I came out Rooney was in the kitchen, filling a tall glass with ice.

“You want a soda, honey?”  she asked.

She eagerly held open the refrigerator.  If I was a decent human being, I had no choice but to sit down and have a soda.

“Sure.”

She handed me the Coke she’d poured, and I followed her through a hallway into the living room. We walked by a framed 1950s school photograph of a smiling, brunette teenage girl.  I wondered which of the middle-aged people at the picnic that cute girl had turned into.

We reached the living room, where my uncle sat in a leather recliner.  The dark wood panels and musty couches made me feel like I’d stepped into some early 1970s sitcom.  The scene on the television really clinched the time warp— an announcer in a polyester leisure suit introduced a group of women who looked like Dairy Maids, who burst into a corny tune.

I’d never seen such cheese that didn’t seem to realize it was cheese.

“What show is this?” I asked.

“The Lawrence Welk Show,” my uncle replied.

“Mmm.”

While he hummed along with the swinging, singing women, Rooney asked me questions about school and my family.  I must’ve even mustered up some questions for her because she told me, “I don’t know why people call me Rooney.  My name is Mary Katherine.”

I was getting a kick out of Lawrence Welk in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way.  I also liked being around fewer people.   It was easy to be polite to these sweet old relatives whom I didn’t really know.  They’d never seen me slam doors and sulk.

I’d almost finished my Coke when someone tapped at the screen door.  Rooney got up, while I watched the beginning of another equally wretched song-and-dance.

I heard my Dad asking about me, so I got up.

“Just seeing if you were down here,” he said.  “You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said.

I would’ve said, “Whatever, like anything was going to happen to me in this Podunk town,” but I didn’t want to subject my elderly relatives to my snottiness. After Dad and Rooney chatted for a minute, he and I said our goodbyes and hoofed it back up the hill.  The sun had almost set and the temperature had dropped.  I wished I’d brought pants.

“How long did you talk to them for?”  Dad asked.

“I dunno, a little while I guess.”

“Did they tell you anything about their daughter?”

“Um, Rooney might’ve mentioned something.  Hey, did you know her name’s not really Rooney?”

He nodded.

“Their daughter died of Scarlett Fever when she was seventeen.”

The wholesome face from the hallway picture flashed in my mind.

“Oh.”

Chilly bumps covered my legs, and I pulled at my shorts.

“They’ve always been fond of teenage girls,” Dad said.

I was so, so grateful that I’d acted nice in front of them.

We said our good-byes to the rest of the family.  My dad steered the Astro back down the mountain while I thought about how I’d survived the Memorial Day family reunion—it wasn’t so bad after all.  I realized that maybe my relatives hadn’t always been the kind of people who donned Christmas sweaters without a smidge of irony: they’d been young once.  Not that I believed they’d all been born over-the-hill, but I’d just never considered how much life they’d lived—all the loves and deaths they’d already experienced before I made the scene. I felt lucky to be related to an eighty-year-old who could trek up mountains with a smile on her face. She probably still carried her memories of magical “Evening in Paris” scented nights with her.

About Susan: Though I have lived in Atlanta, GA since 2006, I spent my college years and early twenties in Asheville, NC, which is about thirty minutes from the town where this memoir takes place.  I have just completed my MFA in Children’s and YA Lit. through Hollins University, and I currently work at a private high school, teaching Writing and Yearbook, as well as tutoring students.  When taking breaks from writing, I can be found adding new music to my Itunes, searching for online sales, and going to concerts.

Congratulations to Susan!

For her $25 prize, Susan chose the children and YA bookstore Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, GA

Family reunions are misleadingly depicted as happy occasions.  In reality, the teenage victim of this relative-filled hell steps onto the patio, as Aunt Beatrice rushes forward, fingers poised for pinching cheeks.  My family reunion experience was no exception to this kind of familial torment.  The atmosphere was filled with that awkward how-do-you-do, I-don’t-know-where-to-sit feeling.  We had never gathered together in a “reunion” setting before.  It was hard not to laugh watching the adults try to act like they knew what was going on and what they were doing.  My uncle and aunt on my mother’s side were hosting.  They were hectically cooking; the guests were standing around, talking.  My sister and I stood by the wall just watching.  Nervous laughter flooded every conversation.  Why was everyone acting so happy?  This reunion was not a happy occasion.  It was painfully obvious how masked everyone was.  It was painfully obvious how strained everyone’s emotions were.  My sister and I stayed by the wall.

Family reunions always have a reason for occurring.  Typically, those reasons include holidays, celebrations, and occurrences of that sort.  Ours fell under the “celebrations” category.  It was a bittersweet thing, really.  We had come together that day to celebrate Death.  My granddad’s death.  I, for one, was not in the mood to celebrate the one-year anniversary of his death—at least not the way my family was doing it.  Who celebrates Death and laughs the whole time?  I felt uncomfortable, I felt confused, and most of all, I felt like my feelings of anguish were absolutely uncalled for in this sea of commemoration.  I didn’t know what to think.  I’d never been to a family reunion before.

So, there we were, my sister and I: standing against the wall.  All I wanted was to be left alone.  But at a family reunion, that’s just wishful thinking. The whole room reeked of boredom.  Rapidly, people began to search for escapes from these awkward this-is-great, how’s-the-family, oh-wait-we’re-all-here conversations.   I will never understand why it is that youth are always the portal to entertainment at reunions.  Our mother pleaded with us to sing for the family; she wanted to show us off, glorify her parental successes.  As a result, our uncle begged us to perform for them, my sister on guitar, myself as vocals.  Our aunt beseeched us to belt out karaoke.  Our older sister, age twenty-two at the time, asked us to play Frisbee out in the yard.  Our grandmother implored us to discuss various subjects of our lives with herself and the small crowd that had formed.  Thus, we were bombarded by the adults; the cowering antelope had been spotted by the famished lions; the mouse was closed up in the snake’s jaws.

Fending off these mobs of faces with hasty excuses like, “I left my coat in the car,” and, “What’s that, Mom, way over there, on the other side of the house?” we managed to make it to dinner.  I sustained a few wounds to my cheeks and various areas of my face where I had been smothered in kisses, but food awaited, and so all was well.  Sitting down, I didn’t expect anything really emotional to happen.  Nonetheless, as soon as the food disappeared from our plates, my uncle spoke.  We were each supposed to share one memory, our favorite or most profound, of Granddad, with the everyone gathered.  My uncle was going to start, and then we would go around the table.

At first, panic seized my very heart.  I could feel the muscle being compressed within the massive palm of an invisible attacker.  I had to pick a memory.  I had to pull one random thought out of a hat.  I knew they would accept anything.  I could tell them about him savoring his one tiny bite of chocolate ice cream once a day after he was moved from the hospital back home until the day that he died.  I could tell them anything.  But I chose my one memory; the only memory I knew would really hurt me to share.  It was my most vivid memory of him, even though I was not actually present at the creation of this memory.

And so, I waited with baited breath.   No one had started crying yet, but people were wiping their eyes.  I had never cried over him since he died.  I wasn’t allowed to see him before he died, because I was ill, and I would make him die faster.  So, I didn’t get to say goodbye to him.  When my dad told me he died, when I joined my family downstairs over his deathbed, when my mother embraced me in her shaking arms sobbing, even when they told me his last words, I never cried.

Photo courtesy of Stephen Coles (flickr.com).

I cried that day.  It was my turn.  With a slow breath, I explained how I wrote him a letter in painstakingly perfect calligraphic writing, which I had been encouraged by him to learn.  I had used his pen set, his ink, his paper.  He had given them to me.  I wrote that letter, and I sealed it with hot wax, burning myself over and over to get it right, because I was pouring it straight onto the envelope instead of stamping it. What it said wasn’t anything complicated or long or particularly sentimental.  It was what any granddaughter might write to her dying grandfather: I know you will get better!  Your doggies miss you, they follow Mom everywhere.  I miss you more.  I can’t wait to see you.  You’re going to get better.  I know it.  I love you.

I wasn’t there when that letter was delivered.  My mother was the one who originally told me what he did when he received it.  But I could picture it so perfectly in my mind’s eye that I was there.  I shared this piece of my memory so utterly deep within my soul that a fragment of my heart shattered as I let the words slip from my lips.  He slowly opened the letter.  He unfolded the paper with the utmost care.  He read the letter.  He folded it up.  He unfolded it with the same care.  He read it again.  He folded it up.  He unfolded it and read it again.  Then, he placed it on his windowsill, where he could always see it and read it over and over. This, my mother told me.  This, I recalled for them.  It was this that ultimately released my unyielding wall against tears.  I left the table after I told them that.  I left it not because I cried, but because they started laughing at me for it.

I will never understand adults.  They cry when something distressful happens, but they cannot bring themselves to cry in a gathering for the purpose of crying.  I know that the laughter was meant to prevent them from breaking out in sobs themselves.  There was no other explanation for this bizarre reaction.  There was dead silence when I finished my story.  My attempt to control my emotions was what actually initiated the first of the laughs.  But honestly, I would have preferred to have them all crying with me so that I didn’t feel so inconceivably alone and stupid.  They laughed at me when I went back, too, after regaining my composure.  Even my sister laughed.  I loathed them.  No one else cried; they all were weeping inside, but they didn’t let it out.

About Helen Hasbun: Raised in California, I have been a writer all my life.  My family has always been extremely supportive, through my move from California to Washington and through all the hardships I have faced.  I am a senior in high school, and while my passion for writing is evident, I am pursuing orthodontics.  My grandfather passed away in 2007, the day of his sister’s birthday.  While we miss him every day, we know that he left happily.  His last words were, “Hugs all around, love to all; I have to fly away now.”

CONGRATS to Helen, and thank you to all the teens who bravely threw their own family gatherings into the ring.

For her $25 prize,  Helen chose the Lion Heart Book Store in Seattle, WA.