Inside Girl Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1 Back in the City Again

  Chapter 2 She’s a Star … From Outer Space

  Chapter 3 Getting Ready for School, the Sara-Beth Way

  Chapter 4 Hello, High School, Here I Come

  Chapter 5 Making Friends is Hard to do

  Chapter 6 Sara-Beth Who?

  Chapter 7 I Surprise Even Myself Sometimes

  Chapter 8 Don’t Open That Door!

  Chapter 9 Something Sweet

  Chapter 10 What’s Next—My Eyebrow?

  Chapter 11 All I want is an Umbrella in My Drink

  Chapter 12 The House Gets Crowded

  Chapter 13 An Invitation … to Disaster

  Chapter 14 If this is an Orphanage, can I be Annie?

  Chapter 15 Flan Flood, Foster Mom

  Chapter 16 From One Madhouse to Another

  Chapter 17 Round and Round it Goes….

  Chapter 18 My Life Rocks

  Chapter 19 Back at School, Taking Notes

  Chapter 20 You Don’t Double-Book Liesel Reid

  Chapter 21 I am Sooo Busted

  Chapter 22 I Get the Cold Shoulder

  Chapter 23 I’m so Busted … Again

  Chapter 24 Quality Time with the Folks

  Chapter 25 Patching Things Up

  Chapter 26 Ice Cream and Sympathy

  Chapter 27 I Heart Soul Mates

  Chapter 28 Making a List, Checking it Twice

  Chapter 29 When do Things Not Fall Apart?

  Chapter 30 Welcome to My World

  Chapter 31 The Girl Next Door

  Also by J. Minter

  for CKS

  Chapter 1

  Back in the City Again

  Our yellow Mercedes convertible turned a corner onto Perry Street, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d spent the whole long summer in boring Connecticut, but now, thank God, I was back in the city again.

  And, more important, I was free.

  My brother, Patch, was driving, and our sister, Feb, was supposedly in the city somewhere, but our parents were staying in Connecticut for a couple more weeks, to go to a horse show and go yachting and stuff while the weather was still nice. After that they might go on to Marrakech, to see some sultan’s palace or something. It used to make me nervous when they went traveling for weeks without us, but I was used to it by now. This time, I was even glad they were going to be away for a little while. As much as I love them, they’re so scatterbrained and wrapped up in their own lives that they drive me kind of nuts sometimes. Besides, I was fourteen years old and about to start my first year of high school. I figured I was old enough to take care of myself. After all, Patch and Feb had started taking care of themselves as freshmen, and look how they turned out.

  “Looks like some of your friends are here to welcome you home, Flan,” Patch said as he turned off the engine and double-parked in front of our town house.

  The three girls I’d been hoping to avoid most were standing right there on the sidewalk staring at us: Angelica, Camille, and Beverly. They weren’t in school uniforms, but they might as well have been. Beverly and Camille were both wearing those footless leggings that just came back in style, and all three of them had on these gauzy, faux-vintage tank tops in pastel colors. We’d all gone to this private girls’ school on the East Side together from the time we were little kids—until now. I wasn’t going back to Miss Mallard’s Day this year. But of course they didn’t know that yet.

  “Flan! It’s so good to see you!” they cried, rushing over to me. After a tornado of air-kisses, I stepped back, leaned against the car, and counted the milliseconds before the questions started.

  “So,” said Camille, sneaking a look at Patch, who was unloading our bags from the trunk. “We’re dying to know how your summer has been! Where did you go? What did you do? Who did you meet?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. Like I said in May, I was just out at our place in Old Greenwich all summer.”

  “But what about your brother and sister? What parties did they take you to?” pressed Angelica. She sat down on the steps to our house, like she was settling in for a long conversation.

  “I didn’t really go to any parties. Mostly I just rode my bike and went swimming and stuff. On the Fourth, I watched the fireworks from my parents’ sailboat. Seriously.” Actually, I had gone to a few parties out on the beach with Feb—there was this one really wild one where some guys from the house next to ours roasted a goat—but I wasn’t about to tell them that. One little story and they’d be pumping me for details for the next fifteen minutes. And I wasn’t in the mood to recap my entire summer just then.

  “Well, what about Patch?” Beverly whispered. An air conditioner dripped onto her head, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Did he have a good summer? Is he … seeing anyone?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in a normal tone of voice, right as Patch walked by us carrying a couple of suitcases. “Why don’t you just ask him yourself?”

  Angelica, Camille, and Beverly all just stared at me like I’d killed Santa Claus. And that right there is exactly the reason I wasn’t going back to Miss Mallard’s Day.

  You’ve probably heard of the Floods: February and Patch, my older sister and brother. Their parties, their celebrity friends, their VIP passes. Both of them are gorgeous (not to brag, but good looks run in our family), and by the time they were my age, they were both as popular as any Manhattan private school teenager can possibly be—which, believe me, is pretty popular.

  You might think that having them as siblings would be the coolest thing ever, and in some ways you’d be right: there’s a reason everybody likes them so much. But let me tell you firsthand, there’s nothing as uncool as having your friends more interested in your siblings than in you. Sure, I could have a party at a cool club like Lotus, like I had for my birthday at the beginning of the summer. It hadn’t made any difference: by July the only friend who even bothered to call me was my old pal Liv, and she just wanted to grill me on what was going on with Patch, who she—like most all the girls I know—is so totally obsessed with that she’s fooled herself into thinking it’s love.

  “So,” said Camille, to fill up the shocked silence still hanging in the air. “Did you hear about the new uniform rule? Ramona Wood’s mother is on the committee, and she said they voted to make the skirt two inches shorter.”

  “Finally,” said Angelica. “Thank God we don’t have to start high school looking like nuns.”

  “Listen, guys,” I said, because now seemed as good a time as any. “I’ve got something to tell you. I’m not going to Miss Mallard’s this year.”

  “What?!” all three of them cried at once.

  “I got into Stuyvesant. I would have told you in the spring, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and Stuyvesant held a place for me. So I’m doing it. I’m going to public school.”

  The girls all looked confused and almost scared, like I’d just told them I was committing myself to a mental institution.

  “But Flan, you’re a Flood,” Camille breathed. I could tell she was upset, because even though a cute guy in Diesel jeans came out of a town house right across the street from us, she didn’t take her eyes off me for a second.

  “So?”

  “Your sister’s a legend at Miss Mallard’s. Your brother was voted hottest private school boy. You’re legacy cool. Why would you give that up? For a public school?”

  I shook my head. “Listen, if you guys don’t understand it already, I don’t think I can explain it to you.”

  And with that, I walked into the house. The truth is, I’d been prepping for that moment for the past two months and now that it had happened, I was deliriously happy and almost kind of in shock. I’d done it! The first true speech uttered by the new Flan!

>   So I was glad to get away from those three. But once I was inside the town house, it seemed awfully big and empty all of a sudden.

  “Feb?” I yelled, dropping my bags in the foyer. I stepped out into the living room. “Anybody home?”

  My older sister, February, had supposedly been living in the attic for most of the summer, but except for a lipstick-stained wineglass on the coffee table that looked like it had been there for weeks, I didn’t see signs of her anywhere. Patch tossed his duffel down next to mine, then glanced around aimlessly.

  “I think I’ll go out for a sandwich,” he said, trying to stifle a yawn. “You gonna be all right here by yourself?”

  “Sure,” I said—I kind of didn’t want to be by myself, but it wasn’t like I’d never been home alone before. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay, well, call me if you need anything. I’ll be back.”

  When Patch left, he didn’t even bother closing the door all the way behind him. And the thing about Patch is that going out for a sandwich could equal being gone for an hour or a day or a week. He could go out for a sandwich and end up on a mountaintop in Nepal or surfing off the coast of Australia. Which is why I didn’t bother to ask him to bring me back a coffee yogurt.

  After I locked the door and put the chain on for good measure, I glanced around. Our house is really nice—three floors if you count the attic, four if you count the basement—and the living room is one of the best places in it. It always cheers me up to sit in there. Mom and Dad aren’t huge art collectors, but a few years ago they went to Florence and found this great Italian artist who does all these sort-of-Cubist-but-not-really ink-on-paper drawings. They bought the whole show and shipped it home and now his pictures are all over our walls: colorful little shapes and noodly lines. Then they have this great supermodern sofa, made of soft leather and sort of shaped like a Nike swoosh, but unlike a lot of designer furniture it’s really comfortable, and it’s got all these llama-fur afghans on it that they found in Peru a few years ago. There’s a glass coffee table, usually covered with remotes for the TV and all the different VCRs and CD and DVD players, not to mention some video game controllers. Across from that is our entertainment system. Through the door at the far end of the room is our kitchen, which is usually bright and sparkly clean. Right now, though, the whole house looked dark and unused and somehow a lot less friendly than I remembered.

  What was I going to do for the rest of the afternoon? I could curl up on the couch and watch my new DVD of Some Like It Hot, but I’d already binged on old movies back in Connecticut, and it seemed pretty dumb to keep on doing that now that I was back in New York. I should be doing something fun, something wild and independent, something grownup. Or at least I shouldn’t just be standing around. Maybe I should have gone out for a sandwich with Patch and seen where that led me.

  Before I could even step away from the door, though, the bell rang urgently, three times in a row. I figured it was Patch, just having forgotten his money or what his mission was or whatever, and so I opened it without even looking through the peephole. Now that he was back, maybe he’d take me with him. Sure, I’d be tagging along, but so what? I didn’t feel like being alone in this big dark house. When I opened the door, though, I saw it wasn’t my brother at all.

  Her tiny face was almost hidden behind a huge pair of sunglasses with black, round frames that reminded me of Mickey Mouse ears, and even though it was sweltering outside, she was bundled up in a gray mink coat that was about ten sizes too big for her. She’d put on a weird old lady wig, all white and puffy. Underneath it, strands of her short dark hair were sticking out, all hot and squashed looking. And before I could say anything, she’d shoved me back inside and locked the door behind her.

  Chapter 2

  She’s a Star … From Outer Space

  “Sara-Beth Benny,” I gasped. “What are you doing here?”

  Sara-Beth threw her mink coat on the floor and kicked it away from her. Beneath it she had on a vintage flapper dress that looked like it was made entirely of spangles and ostrich feathers, like something Catherine Zeta-Jones would wear in Chicago. That’s Sara-Beth for you: even when she’s wearing her own clothes, she looks like she’s in costume.

  “Oh, Flan, I knew you’d see through my disguise. That’s why you’re such a true friend. You know the real me even better than I know the real me.”

  I shook my head. I doubted I was the only one who’d recognized her. Tourists had probably been following her around the West Village and snapping pictures of her all afternoon. In case you don’t know, Sara-Beth Benny is one of the most famous seventeen-year-olds around. After she grew up on national television as the most adorable star of Mike’s Princesses, she started getting parts in all kinds of really cool movies—like this really creepy thriller called Blennophobia, and a remake of this French New Wave movie. She even tried her hand at comedy in The Seventeen-Year-Old Virgin. I’ve always preferred old movies, myself, but I think Sara-Beth Benny’s a really good actress, and I’d say that even if we weren’t friends. When her eyes get all big and her lower lip starts quivering, she can make you believe whatever she wants.

  “But wait. I still don’t know what you’re doing here. Aren’t you supposed to be filming a movie in Gdansk or something?” Sara-Beth definitely had a decent excuse for not calling me all summer, since she’d been halfway around the world for the last couple months.

  “Oh, Ric Roderickson, that idiotic director—he makes me so furious, I can’t even talk about it. The catering people couldn’t get my uva-ursi, so of course my face starts swelling up like a balloon. So what does he do? Does he find me an acupuncturist? No. He cut two of my scenes. And I had to come home early to a very toxic apartment.”

  “But wait, how would an acupuncturist—”

  “Well, that was a separate thing.” She threw herself down onto the couch with a sigh. “Oh, Flan, I just can’t talk about it anymore. It’s just so good to be home, with my real friends. I couldn’t talk to those people on the set anyway. The guys were all so strange and hyper, and the girls were all prima donnas. Do you have any clothespins? Well, do you?”

  Sara-Beth tossed the old lady wig behind the couch and raked her fingers through her short hair. She’s so tiny and nervous that she sometimes reminds me of a Chihuahua. The first time I met her, at a sweet sixteen party for our friend Liesel Reid, we were in line for the bathroom, and I thought she was jumpy just because she really had to go. But it turned out that’s just the way she always is.

  “I don’t know.” I glanced around. I couldn’t imagine anyone in our family buying clothespins, and I didn’t want to know what weird holistic remedy Sara-Beth needed them for.

  “Well, that’s all right, it can wait.” And all of a sudden she was standing up again, and she rushed over to me and took both of my hands in hers. She looked intently into my face. “How are you, Flan? I mean, really? Have you missed me?”

  I stared at the two tiny Flans reflected in her enormous eyes. The Flans looked back, a little nervously.

  “Sure. Of course. I just got back from Connecticut, though, so I haven’t really—”

  “Oh, good. Because I’ve missed you too. When I was in Gdansk, surrounded by all those … energy vampires, I kept thinking about that wonderful sleep-over you threw for me back in May, and just how simple you are.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about being called simple, but like I said, Sara-Beth is very convincing, and I could tell her heart was in the right place. Besides, it had been fun having her over for that sleepover, even if she did refuse to eat anything but the bag of rice crisps she’d brought for herself. It had also been a little weird when the doorbell rang and she freaked out and hid under the bed. It was just one of Feb’s friends, but it took almost an hour to convince Sara-Beth that it wasn’t the paparazzi.

  “Which is why I feel like I can ask you for a favor. It’s not anything too big, and I know you’ll understand.”

&
nbsp; “Of course,” I heard myself say. “I’d love to help you, Sara-Beth.”

  “Oh, good! Oh, fabulous!” Sara-Beth sighed with relief and hugged me. I could feel her bony elbows pressing into my back before she finally let go. “Wonderful. Just let me get my bags.”

  “Bags? But—”

  “You see, as I just mentioned about half a dozen times, my apartment is toxic. Everything’s so … sharp, and cold, and empty, and metallic. And it’s lonely there.” It was true: the one time I’d visited, I’d been amazed at how little stuff she had. Her apartment was basically four thousand square feet that contained a Mies van der Rohe chair, a tube of lip gloss, a bottle of Dom Pérignon, and about eight closets full of clothes.

  “And I can’t go stay with David again, not even if he begs me to.” Sara-Beth gazed dreamily off into the distance. “Sweet, gentle David. He had to leave Gdansk even earlier than I did. He must be heartbroken, being without me for so long. I’d love to be with him, I really would, but I have to think of his folks. That’s a lot to ask of your future in-laws, you know.”

  “Right,” I said. David is a friend of my brother’s, and at one point, Sara-Beth lived with his family for about six months. His parents are psychiatrists, so I guess they were fascinated by Sara-Beth, since she’d always been a celebrity and had never really had a chance to just be a kid. They even wrote an article on her for the New York Times magazine’s health column, called “Beyond Help? A Case Study of America’s Favorite Starlet.”

  “I’m trying to get a nice little place near where Liesel lives on the Upper East Side, in this charming building with all this … wood, you know, and views of the park. I need to be around nature. It’s just the way I am. But this ridiculous board has to approve me first. They think they’re so exclusive, just because the building used to be Shakespeare’s birthplace or the Australian embassy or something—it’s all very historical. It makes me crazy. Flan …” And now she gripped my wrists again in the steely bones of her hands and her eyes grew a few degrees bigger and started to well up. “Flan, could I spend the night? I just need some time for girl talk.”