Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [24]
“You’re over-reacting,” I said with my usual reasonable calm. I helped myself to a crisp. “I’m sure you would have said the exact same thing if you’d been me.”
Hand-reared by Marilyn Gerard, Colonel in the war against dirt and disorder, Ella automatically brushed my crumbs from the counter.
“If I were you I wouldn’t know any better, would I?” she asked. “I’d be crazy enough to tell Carla Santini that Marsh Foreman had invited me to the Sidartha goodbye party.”
I flashed her one of my peppiest smiles.
“Be fair,” I begged. “I told her you were invited, too.”
Ella gave me a long, hard look. She sighed. “Have you really gone insane?” she asked quietly. “What were you thinking of? Doesn’t your brain ever get in touch with your mouth?”
“I was thinking what a pain in the neck Carla is, that’s what I was thinking of,” I replied honestly. “It drives me nuts the way she’s always tossing her hair around and smiling. She acts like she’s visiting royalty and the rest of us are just a bunch of lepers.”
Ella put the juice on the counter. “OK, so Carla Santini has insurmountable ego problems. That’s beside the point.”
I slapped the gleaming marble top with my hand. “I disagree. That’s exactly the point, in my humble opinion. If Princess Carla didn’t start practically every sentence she utters with ‘I this…’ or ‘My that…’ I would never have opened my mouth.”
And maybe if Carla had bothered to congratulate me on being Eliza instead of threatening my life.
Ella side-stepped my irrefutable argument.
“But you did open your mouth,” said Ella. “I tried to tell you that if Carla says she’s going to put you in your place, she means it. And what do you do? You open your enormous mouth, that’s what you do.” She shook with frustration. “You handed her exactly what she needs to humiliate and ridicule you for the rest of your life.” She scowled. “And me, too, probably.”
Ruminating, I bit into another crisp. “I don’t know about that…” I said slowly. “I mean, it depends, doesn’t it?”
Ella handed me a glass. “Depends on what? Whether or not someone drops a gold record on her head at the party and she develops amnesia?”
I stared at the glass for a minute. I was used to fingerprints on my glasses. This one sparkled the way they do in dishwasher advertisements.
“Well…” I said at last. “It kind of depends on whether we go or not, doesn’t it?”
Ella spilled grape juice all over the counter.
“On whether we go or not?” she shrieked. She was so upset that she wasn’t even mopping up the juice. She was just standing there, staring at me in stupefied horror. “What do you mean? We’re not going to the Sidartha party, Lola. This may have slipped your mind, but we haven’t exactly been invited.”
I waved this objection aside. “You don’t have to be invited to a party like that,” I assured her. “You just crash. There are people in New York who never go out unless it’s to crash some celebrity bash.”
“Well, I’m not from New York,” said Ella between clenched teeth. “And anyway, my mother would never let me go to a party like that, even if it were being held next door, and you know it. Not without her. Are you planning to take my mother with us?”
What a thought! Mrs Gerard stopped listening to music when the Beatles broke up. And although I’m pretty sure that she must have had a youth, I’m also pretty sure that it wasn’t what you’d call wild unless you were comparing it with the life of a drop of paint. I’d rather have taken the Pope on my honeymoon than taken Mrs Gerard to the Sidartha party.
“We can work around your mother,” I informed Ella. “She doesn’t have to know.”
“Are you kidding?” Ella’s voice was unnervingly shrill. “There’s no way on earth you and I are going to sneak into the city for a concert without my mother finding out. Never mind going to a party afterwards.