I almost never have anyone sleep over. I hardly ever did, even before the debacles of sophomore year. Our place is so much smaller than where my friends live, and the walls are thin. Why would you sleep on the floor in the living room of a semibohemian houseboat when you can have hot tubs and swimming pools and bedroom-bathroom suites?
The answer was always obvious: you wouldn’t.
But I invited them anyway, because Meghan was going away to visit her grandparents for the holidays, so we wouldn’t see her for two weeks. And they came.
My parents went to Juana’s for dinner, and Nora made nachos and chocolate chip cookies, and the three of us played Trivial Pursuit, Silver Screen Edition, which I’d bought for myself after spending a horror-filled evening with the four-year-old vomit machine I used to babysit. (I kicked some serious butt at Trivial Pursuit, by the way, even when Meghan and Nora teamed up against me.)
Then we put mud masks on our faces and Meghan painted her toenails and Nora looked at my dad’s flower photograph books and I cleaned up the kitchen so my parents wouldn’t have a fit when they got home.
They arrived, and my dad was tipsy and pretended to be terrified at our green-mud faces, and they made a lot of noise going in and out of the bathroom brushing their teeth, and then they left us alone.
We made a big extended bed on the living room floor with couch cushions, three pillows and sleeping bags Nora and Meghan had brought over, plus my bedclothes and a lot of extra sheets. It was like fifteen feet wide. We washed the mud off our faces, put on pajamas and got in to watch Saturday Night Live.
The show was kind of boring, and Meghan fell asleep five minutes into it. Nora, on my other side, went out a couple of minutes later.
I lay there in the blue light from the TV set. Not really watching. Just lying there, between Meghan and Nora.
Meghan snored softly.
Nora was breathing through her mouth and drooling onto the pillow.
The TV went to a commercial and I switched it off with the remote.
The water lapped at the sides of our houseboat.
And I felt lucky.
acknowledgments
Thank you to Marissa for hacking out the boring footnotes and making the whole thing so much better. And to Beverly, Chip, Kathleen and everyone else at Delacorte Press, especially the sales force, for all their hard work and support of my books. I am always and muchly in debt to Elizabeth for her stellar and unflagging representation.
I am grateful to the people in my YA novelists newsgroup for their wonderful humor and insight about the publishing and writing process.
Thank you also to the FOZ (friends of Zoe)—Julia, Anne, Vanessa and Mika—who gamely took the John Belushi pop-reference quiz, thus enabling this book to be (hopefully) full of footnotes and film references that are entertaining and semi-informative, rather than un-. Most of all, my appreciation to Zoe, quiz administrator extraordinaire, who also helped me figure out how to end the book.
Thanks to Bellamy Pailthorp and Melissa Greeley for helping me get the Seattle details right, though I know I completely reinvented the Woodland Park Zoo for my own literary purposes.
My love and thanks to my immediate family and felines, although for accuracy’s sake it must be noted that the cat Mercy Randolph caused more problems than she solved.
Excerpt copyright © 2006 by E. Lockhart Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Fly on the Walclass="underline" How One Girl Saw Everything is about a girl called Gretchen Kaufman Yee who goes to a wacked-out art school in New York City. Gretchen is a collector of plastic Chinese food and odd figurines, a passionate comic-book artist, and a crazy Spider-Man fanatic. She’s also completely freaked out by the opposite sex—in particular, the Art Rats, a group of guys in her drawing concentration. One day, she wishes she could be a “fly on the wall of the boys’ locker room,” just to find out what the heck guys are really talking about.
And the next thing she knows…she is.
Afly.
On the wall of the boys’ locker room.
“I think this might be the best YA novel, as in a book published for young adults and also written for young adults, that I’ve ever read. Because it’s a reworking of Kafka, and it’s this crazy brilliant upending of all the sexual stereotypes we’ve ever had—particularly in YA lit—and it’s hilarious, and it’s so very smart. I mean, I’m serious…. It’s really amazing.”
—John Green, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Looking for Alaska
f riday. I am eating alone in the lunchroom.
Again.
Ever since Katya started smoking cigarettes, she’s hanging out back by the garbage cans, lighting up with the Art Rats. She bags her lunch, so she takes it out there and eats potato chips in a haze of nicotine.
I hate smoking, and the Art Rats make me nervous. So here I am: in my favorite corner of the lunchroom, sitting on the floor with my back against the wall. I’m eating fries off a tray and drawing my own stuff—not anything for class.
Quadriceps. Quadriceps.
Knee.
Calf muscle.
Dull point; must sharpen pencil.
Hell! Pencil dust in fries.
Whatever. They still taste okay.
Calf muscle.
Ankle.
Foot.
KA-POW! Spider-Man smacks Doctor Octopus off the edge of the building with a swift kick to the jaw. Ock’s face contorts as he falls backward, his metal tentacles flailing with hysterical fear. He has an eighty-story fall beneath him, and—
Spidey has a great physique. Built, but not too built. Even if I did draw him myself.
I think I made his butt too small.
Do-over.
I wish I had my pink eraser, I don’t like this white one.
Butt.
Butt.
Connecting to: leg…and…quadriceps.
There. A finished Spidey outline. I have to add the suit. And some shadowing. And the details of the building. Then fill in the rest of Doc Ock as he hurtles off the edge.
Mmmm. French fries.
Hell again! Ketchup on Spidey.
Lick it off.
Cammie Holmes is staring at me like I’m some lower form of life.
“What are you looking at?” I mutter.
“Nothing.”
“Then. Stop. Staring,” I say, sharpening my pencil again, though it doesn’t need it.
This Cammie is all biscuits. She’s stacked like a character in a comic book. Cantaloupes are strapped to her chest.
Her only redeeming quality.
“Why are you licking your Superman drawing?” Cammie tips her nose up. “That’s so kinky. I mean, I’ve heard of licking a centerfold, but licking Superman?”
“Spider.”
“What?”
“Spider-Man.”
“Whatever. Get a life, Gretchen.”
She’s gone. From across the lunchroom comes her nasal voice: “Taffy, get this: I just caught Gretchen Yee giving oral to some Superman drawing she made.”
Spider. Spider. Spider-Man.
“She would.” Taffy Johnson. Stupid tinkly laugh.