Babysitters' Winter Vacation, part C
The stupid is about to be kicked up a notch or three. Get ready for every older-guy crush in the rest of the series to suddenly not other you anymore.
Also do you ever wonder what the other parents in Stoned-by-the-Brook do without the BSC to improperly raise their kids for them? How the hell do they grocery-shop if they can't ditch their kids at home? Do they all starve, or eat the tenderest one?
Prologue through Chapter OH GOD NO MORE
Chapters 5 through Chapter Whine
Just to err on the side of caution, trigger warning for chapter 13. It's Claudia being stupid, and everything is innocent in the end, but her belief gives the chapter a bad feeling (Chris Hansen makes an appearance in a gif) that I think should get a trigger warning. I'm typing this paragraph after finishing, and really need to open a beer and read something else so I don't have nightmares, so that means trigger warning for you.
And just a reminder, stuff like this are exact quotes from the book.
Wok zees way
Chapter 9: Mallory
Mallory is, as usual, the one who acts closes to her chronological age. I thin Ann meant this sort of behavior to be an insult, but, like with Richard, it ends up making her the most believable character of her age group.
So horror of holy horrors, Friday night there will be a mandatory dance for all the schools, because that's just what you need when you've got three middle schools and an elementary school class, especially with all those unsupervised bedrooms. SMS sure loves forcing kids into unsupervised positions where they aren't comfortable.
Also I think Mal might be lesbian. She said she's Not in the Game of Boys.
You go, Mal. Go become that gorgeous swan who earns the love of a wonderful woman like Portia de Rossi.
Poor Mal is actually pretty scared. She's never been confident around boys, and it's not like there's a way of opting out of this dance. Because forcing these situations is somehow good for kids, or something. No reason's given for that dance or this trip at al to be absolutely required.
Do you care to hear about breakfast and Jessi whining about how any time at all in the snow may result in frostbite and her dancing career (what career?) would be over? No? Because I love you all, I'll spare you.
Kristy decides to literally stand on a chair and scream bloody murder for attention just to tell people to remember the snow sculpture contest. Barely anyone replied.
And then Jessi does the same thing to tell everyone about talent show auditions.
If I didn't want to get Claudia's next chapter up, I would be drinking shots right now. I have a new, unopened bottle of butterscotch schnapps.
Mal says something that makes me snicker. After informing us that Mary Anne was moping, she says Stacey seemed to be in an awful rush to get somewhere. Where? I wondered.
Uh, she's taking advantage of temporarily being 17 and having sex. Seriously, this is about all we're going to see of Stacey until Chapter 22. She's pretty much hiding with her new crush doing stuff....
Mal decides to play Harriet the Spy again, only because she wants to be a writer one day, and she only wants to write the truth. She noted that Mary Anne is a basket case. She peeked over Mary Anne's shoulder into the notebook she was writing in and saw Mary Anne and Logan. Mary Anne Bruno. Mrs. L. Bruno. Logan Spier (hmm . . .) Mary Anne Spier-Bruno. XXX, OOO. Logan, my love, my one and only love.
Logan Spier? Wow. Kinda ahead of the time there! If I was giving this snark stupid-points a lá Cinema Sins, I'd remove a sin for that one.
This made me chuckle:
From what I can see of her notes, this lodge is haunted! I never knew that before. But maybe that explains the white thing I saw in the corner of our dorm last night. Then again, it might just have been Stacey’s bathrobe, hanging on a hook.
Mal lampshades the stupidity. Mary Anne believes in the ghost bull. Mal shrugs it off.
Oh god, Mal, why did you go from cool to stupid? You're still okay, kid. I think you know the truth and are just having some fun believing in ghosts. It's the sort of thing I might have done and squealed with a friend about, not much different than adults going into scary haunted house attractions, knowing the ghosts in them aren't real, and peeing themselves in fear anyway.
The cook is sprinkling something into a vat of soup. The stuff is coming from a jar that’s not labeled. I think it is poison. And now he’s picking up a huge knife. Oh, no. The cook is crazy. He may be trying to kill us all!
We all wish. And if she believed that, I think she'd tell someone instead of eat the next meal.
Mal finds Ms. Halliday crying and concludes she suffering from unrequited love. She has a crush on the vice-principal, but he isn’t interested in her. I'm suffering from a migraine.
She also finds Stacey and her boytoy kissing in an empty library on a couch. Yeah, I bet that's not all they were up to. And I can't help but be giddy about it. If you had a crush that age, especially a major crush and felt like an adult for it, you may remember the thrill of the butterflies. So it's cute. It really is.
Boy, was my journal ever juicy. I would have to find a better hiding place for it than under my mattress. At home, too. If my little brothers or sisters ever found this, they would read things that are far too mature for them.
I'm not even commenting on that.
Chapter 10: Dawn
I feel bad for Dawn in this chapter. This is rare. And it can only happen if I force myself to not consider her inredibly mean thoughts about Ashley.
Dawn can't get out of participating in the contests Kristy was putting on. The penalty is dess or something.
During the speed-skating, Dawn falls and does the worst, which is pretty embarrassing for a kid when everyone else did fine. Some seventh-graders laugh like hell at her.
During the relay (consisting of carrying a baton from point A to point B and back to A, and handing it to the next person, with the teams that goes back and forth the most in ten minutes winning the point, which sounds boring), Dawn drops it because her mittens are too puffy for her to get a good hold, and then she falls on the ice, and lost a lot of time. As you can imagine, her team wasn't happy with her.
For the third event, an obstacle course, she is sidelined altogether. Her team ends up losing, partly because of how bad she did in the relay, and yes, other kids make it well-known to her what they thought. Poor girl tries justifying it to herself by telling herself anyone could have fallen, and the thing is, she's right. What happened to her could have happened to many people. Maybe she could chalk it up to just being her unique, speshul snoflaik self.
She decides to go to the practice for the snowball fight instead of hide inside.
(I'm pretty good at skating and have three pairs of my own and will be heading to the rink later this week. No point in saying this, aside from my own annoyance at needing to go have my blades sharpened.)
Alan Gray, in a genuine dick-move, pelts her in the face with a snowball and started laughing at her, which gets a bunch of other kids to do the same. That's all she can take, so she leaves the fight and decides to go do a couple runs down the mountain, since she's a decent skier, to clear my head and drive away some of the anger I could feel building up.
Reasonable. I like this Dawn and hope the aliens keep the original Dawn we saw earlier. Good Dawn, you may stay. Bad Dawn, I hope you get pelted in the face again.
But ouch. To add insult to injury, she falls trying to get on the lift. I did that before. It was my first time EVER skiing. My then-boyfriend was a major jerk about it. I wish he'd crashed into a tree. As it was, the lift operators were PISSED when they found out he made me go on the lift, especially to that particular slope, when I'd never even gone down a bunny slope before. He was asked if he wanted to kill me. I did have a new life insurance policy that he was the beneficiary of, and he was indeed abusive. So, in retrospect...
Usually I don’t care what anyone says or thinks about me, but one too many people had laughed at me that morning.
This is me. I usually don't care, but I would have had enough by that point too.
Dawn huffs back into the lodge to find Mary Anne. She clearly needs to let off steam, found Mary Anne, and started spilling it.
After Dawn finished, sensitive, caring Mary Anne asked, “Do you have any idea how far Aruba is from Hooksett Crossing?”
That's pretty cold. Dawn thinks so too and snaps at Mary Anne that she rarely spills her heart, and when she does, all Mary Anne can do is whine about Logan, and has Mary Anne thought of anything else?
Mary Anne lets loose in her own stupid way by trying to say yeah, she's done this...sort of...and that...kinda. This leads to them firing each other as bunkies (bunkie politics since there are no lunch tables), and Dawn deciding their friendship is over. In the heat of the moment, I can understand this. Dawn's had a horrid day that we can all agree has been a truly terrible one, and Mary Anne just doesn't care.
Chapter 11: Mary Anne
Ooh, I am so mad at Dawn Schafer. Logan, you should have heard her this morning. I don’t know what got into her. She had a bad day and she took it out on me. Not only is that unlike Dawn, but it wasn’t fair. If she wants something, she should get a dog. Or a parrot, so it could talk back to her. Well, maybe that’s not fair, either. Maybe I should have listened to her. I’m her best friend, after all. On the other hand, I was having problems of my own.
Blah blah bullshit, Mary Anne. She tried talking to you, and instead of commiserating and being a friend, you went off and ignored her. And all YOUR problems revolve around your codependency and lack of trust in your boyfriend. So SHUT UP.
Let's see. She spends a paragraph insulting an old woman's ear lobes. I'm not making this up, Folks. An entire paragraph. She can't spare a moment to console Dawn, but she can spend that much time thinking about how ugly an elderly lady's ear lobes are.
She hunts down that poor woman to badger her about the ghost that even Mal brushed off.
Then she finds the cook, Curtis. Curtis looked up and smiled. He is missing a tooth, which is something I just can’t stand. I mean, in adults. I am a firm believer in dentures.
Oh my god. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!
Mary Anne is such a BITCH in this book!! Oh my GOD, I expect this level of bitchiness from DAWN!
Curtis says nothing about the ghost. So Mary Anne leaves to find someone else, someone named Teensy.
Despite her age, Teensy was wearing blue jean overalls, a plaid shirt, and a paint-spattered baseball cap.
Despite her age? I can't even. What can I say? I guess hotel-workers who do manual stuff would be in starched blouses and pressed slacks?
All I could get out of here was, “No such things as ghosts.” (Actually, she said, “No setch things as ghosts.”)
I really don't know what else to say.
At least she doesn't insult Mr. George, though he tells her the story of a man who died there who supposedly haunts the place, but that he thinks people's imaginations run away with them. By the end of it, she's busy imagining Logan and that gorgeous girl doing all sorts of island things together - snorkeling, waterskiing, tanning . . . kissing.
I think it's clear that "kissing" after the elipses is meant to mean "boning."
This is when the above Dawn scene happens. As she sees it, Dawn picked a fight with her (I side with Dawn), and whines that Dawn accused [her] of being insensitive (because it's the truth, Mary Anne!), and then says, What a baby. Why did I ever think she was one of my best friends? Well, Mary Anne, she DID forgive you when it became clear that you were using her to get back at Kristy when you first met her.
So she huffs off and slumps in another chair while feeling sorry for herself. Someone sits in another seat, and ever-sensitive Mary Anne keeps willing the other person to GTFO. Turns out to be Ms. Halliday. Rather than saying anything to the woman Mary Anne describes as looking very sad, she tries to sneak out. Ms. Halliday tells her she doesn't have to go. Sweet teacher, despite her own sadness, notices Mary Anne's sadness. Ms. Halliday is missing her fiancé, which, in my opinion, trumps missing your little boyfriend who you've known, what, a couple months? If we look at it chronologically.
By the way, my husband's overseas for work right now, and we'll get to talk with less frequency than Mary Anne talks to Logan. My husband won't be back for a few weeks. I'm handling it better than Mary Anne. Our child's handling Dad being gone better than Mary Anne. It's been a couple days. I feel what Ms. Halliday's feeling. But we are still doing stuff, unlike Mary-fucking-Anne. I'm doing this snark relatively quickly. Cleaning. Planning Thanksgiving. Planning a friend's visit. Painting a couple rooms. And so on. So Mary Anne can EXTRA shut the fuck up.
Ms. Halliday point blank tells her the only reason she pushed Mary Anne so hard in class is that she wants her to try her hardest. All Mary Anne gets out of this is that she feels better about her fight with Dawn.
Thank the dieties of your choice that this chapter is OVER.
Chapter 12: Kristy
Kristy whines about how Dawn lost the contest. Darn old Dawn was being a total klutz. I didn’t know she was such a klutz. If I had known, I wouldn’t have encouraged her to enter the contests. And I was certainly going to quit asking Mary Anne to participate. We did not need another klutz. I know that sounds mean but, well, I wanted to win. I was the team captain and I like winning, okay? What’s wrong with that?
How about you'd prefer to make a middle-school good-natured event about winning instead of spending time with your friends? And when will you idiots ever learn that forcing people, excuse me, "encouraging people," to do what they really don't want to do is a bad, bad idea?
So I'm a mom. Duh. I mentioned my kid just a few minutes ago. I'm not the most permissive mom in the world. I have this old-fashined idea that kids can be respected while still having rules. But at most, I will encourage my daughter to take a small step outside of her comfort zone, but won't force it. That's not respectful, and it's counterproductive. She needs to know she has my support if she feels very shy one day. Knowing Mom has her back helps her the next time.
So when I see these girls forcing each other, and the kids they watch, to do things so far outside their comfort zones, I want to scream at them.
There's a recap again of some of the sporting stuff. There were planned prize for the current snow sculpture for the older middle school kids later, but what about the younger children now? Claudia, in her only smart moment, improvises, grabs her Polaroid camera, takes pics of the kids with their snowmen, and posts them in the common room so the kids can feel proud to have something to show off.
Time for the big kids' contest.
I was working with Dawn and Stacey on a giant teddy bear. (Dawn was barely speaking to me.) Not far away Jessi and Mal were working on something that I couldn’t identify. Good. They were on the other team. I hoped Claud wouldn’t be able to identify it, either.
Because that pizza certificate the winning team gets is so important that you need to ill-wish your friends. When I was in school, pizza certificates were good for one location only, usually the closest one that decided to participate in a school event. It's not like you got a Pizza Hut certificate in one state and could use it in another. Those certificates weren't corporate. So what good is a pizza certificate anyway?
None of the BSC's crappy sculptures won. A couple throw-away characters on the red team (Kristy is on the blue) won. Of course Kristy took this loss in stride.
Oh, brother. I should have known better than to agree to let Claud judge the contest. Of course she’d chosen a sculpture by Red Team members.
...
I couldn’t help giving Claud a dirty look
See? Oh, wait, I lost my mind from all the stupidness for a moment. How dare the judge be honest in her assessments!
The next contest is a few days away, and it's skiing, which Claud is good at. The ever-good friend, Kristy tries pressuring Claudia, who is tired, into practicing.
“I suppose you think you’re so good you don’t need to practice.”
“That is not true!” exclaimed Claud. “I may be good, but I’m not stuck-up.”
“Are you calling me stuck-up?”
“NO.”
She totally is, Pisty. To shut her up, Claud goes to practice, and since she's the best student on the slopes, Pisty smack-talks her. The best friends you'll ever have, my lily ass. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Chapter 13: Claudia
Read and weep.
Winsday afternoon
I will never juge anything again - unless I’m juding totle strangers. The snow sculpture contest was awful all afternoon. Kristy tryed to be really nice to me. I know she whanted me to choose her teddy bear as the winning sculpture but it was just too cute for words. As juge I no better then to look for cute. I was looking for a well planed, well done, not cute peice of work. The cheshur cat fit the bill. It was realistic and just a little bite mean looking. Ashley is made at me too.
And then a couple missing hyphens.
The stupid is going to be so strong I went and made myself a caprese salad
I come bearing proof. Nice and big so you can see this screen in the background. (I fixed a couple typos of my own.)
I'm going to need that salad so I can chew instead of scream loud enough to scare China.
So off Claud goes to an advanced ski lesson, and here's where it all goes downhill for her, figuratively and literally.
The ski instructor is cute and speaks with an accent. A French accent. You know vot zees means.
“Hello,” he greeted us. All I students were awe-struck, particularly the girls. “My name eez Guy.” (He pronounced his name so that it rhymed with “ski.”) “I am your eenstroctor. I trost zat you are very goode skiers.”
I think there's a beer in the fridge.
I love how no one is juging me. See what I did there?
Guy smiled, showing a row of perfectly straight, sparkly white teeth. “Excellent. Zen let us get on wiss sings.”
Sings? Oh, things.
I may need a second bottle.
He looked about twenty-five. Well, maybe that didn’t matter. I could fall in love with an older man . . . couldn’t I? It happens all the time. I mean, to other people.
Join the fun!
Guy nodded and smiled. “I understand. Now. Let me see what you can do.”
I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. I wanted to do my best for Guy.
That's what she... Yeah, not even going there.
So down I went. I concentrated very hard.
Can't...say...it....
I tried to remember everything I’d been taught. When I reached the bottom, I knew I’d performed well. I returned to Guy, feeling pretty pleased. But when I saw the expression on his face, my pleasure turned to joy.
That is verbatim. VERBATIM!!!!!
I took nothing out. Dig out your "educational" copy and go to the bottom of page 66 and see. For. Yourself!
“Thanks - thanks, Guy,” I said breathlessly.
Guy smiled. And then . . . he put his hand on my arm.
Kristy sticks her tongue out at Claudia, but Guy distracts her by touching her arm again. Claudia is much too mature to do a thing like that (sticking her tongue out) when a handsome older man has his arms around me.
She starts another run, and Kristy is close behind. Claudia tells us she doesn't like that someone is so close on the trails.
I thought that over and changed my mind when I realized that Guy could have been skiing two inches from me and I would have been delighted. But Kristy was several feet away and that was too close.
Two. Inches. TWO INCHES. On the slopes, that means you're crashing and will be on top of each other. I wasn't kidding when I told you that what goes on here makes you forget every other crush in the entire series, and makes Stacey's crush on Wes look like nothing at all.
Somehow Guy is at the bottom when they get there, and he takes Claudia's mittened hands in his, and gives her a pep talk.
Woah, buddy, you need to stop touching kids. I know some cultures are more affectionate than others, and it's innocent, but you're in America now, and that's going to get you arrested here.
He gave her a pep talk on concentration so she won't be deestracted on zee trail.
“Okay,” I said. At least, I think I said it. I was looking into Guy’s eyes, which were sparkly and bright. Then I looked at his lips and couldn’t help imagining myself kissing them. I’m not sure whether any sound came from my own lips.
Then he pats her shoulder.
I...don't even know.
So down she goes again. Down the MOUNTAIN. Let's try to clean it back up here. Kristy skied too close again, but all I could think of was pleasing Guy. How very Ana.
I can't belive there's another movie made. Actually, the next two. I did see the first one, and thank goodness it was on my computer. It was so triggering that I had to stop watching for a few hours and process the memories of that abusive ex. I understood Ana's fear too well. I have no respect for people who thought that movie is sexy and wonderful. It's horrifying, and Ana is even obviously scared the entire time.
Back to business.
Aw, how sad that she needs to get back to the kids she's supposed to be watching.
So I said a sad goodbye to Guy and got ready for one last run.
“I weel see you tomorrow, no?” said Guy. “Anozzer lesson for my star pupeel?”
No? Yes! Yes, of course he would see me. I would do anything Guy wanted.
If it makes you feel better to know now, no, this guy isn't actually a pervert. He's French, and in France, people get more touchy without it meaning anything. However, these actions, as said, aren't appropriate in a kids' book where a girl is crushing about a man old enough to have been her own babysitter, and when she's daydreaming about kissing him when his hand is on her arm. INAPPROPRIATE.
Let's make it worse. She thinks about the guy she met at Camp Mohawk who she still exchanges letters with. She still felt a funny thrill in my stomach every time I saw his return address on a letter. But that feeling was nothing compared to what I felt for Guy.
You know that funny feeling, right? That tickle way down that you don't have words for at 13, but later finds out is basically arousal because your newly-released hormones are acting up? Guys, she's turned on by her ski instructor, more than the boy her own age.
When I returned to the lodge, I couldn’t help it: I raced up to our dorm, found Stacey, pulled her into a corner, and said (not very quietly), “My ski instructor has a crush on me. His name is Guy, he’s adorable, and he talks with an accent!”
“Oh, wow!” cried Stacey.
“Oh, wow!” cried Dawn. Then she added, “Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing.”
“That’s okay,” I replied.
By dinnertime, all the BSC members, plus a few other friends, knew about Guy and me.
I didn’t mind. I was proud of it.
This is the end of the chapter, verbatim, and she is proud to think an adult has a crush on her, and no one has told her WHOA WTF RED FLAG RED FLAG! Nope, this is all cool and awesome and isn't she lucky.
This book never does make it clear that there'd be a HUGE problem if a man at least 25 years old had a crush on a child. Only once does anyone eeven suggest that maybe he's too old, and it's who you'd least expect.
I told you I was NOT kidding about how bad this is. To tell the truth, I'm slightly nauseated, and it's not from caprese and beer. I need to actually open this bottle of beer now.
Also do you ever wonder what the other parents in Stoned-by-the-Brook do without the BSC to improperly raise their kids for them? How the hell do they grocery-shop if they can't ditch their kids at home? Do they all starve, or eat the tenderest one?
Prologue through Chapter OH GOD NO MORE
Chapters 5 through Chapter Whine
Just to err on the side of caution, trigger warning for chapter 13. It's Claudia being stupid, and everything is innocent in the end, but her belief gives the chapter a bad feeling (Chris Hansen makes an appearance in a gif) that I think should get a trigger warning. I'm typing this paragraph after finishing, and really need to open a beer and read something else so I don't have nightmares, so that means trigger warning for you.
And just a reminder, stuff like this are exact quotes from the book.
Wok zees way
Chapter 9: Mallory
Mallory is, as usual, the one who acts closes to her chronological age. I thin Ann meant this sort of behavior to be an insult, but, like with Richard, it ends up making her the most believable character of her age group.
So horror of holy horrors, Friday night there will be a mandatory dance for all the schools, because that's just what you need when you've got three middle schools and an elementary school class, especially with all those unsupervised bedrooms. SMS sure loves forcing kids into unsupervised positions where they aren't comfortable.
Also I think Mal might be lesbian. She said she's Not in the Game of Boys.
You go, Mal. Go become that gorgeous swan who earns the love of a wonderful woman like Portia de Rossi.
Poor Mal is actually pretty scared. She's never been confident around boys, and it's not like there's a way of opting out of this dance. Because forcing these situations is somehow good for kids, or something. No reason's given for that dance or this trip at al to be absolutely required.
Do you care to hear about breakfast and Jessi whining about how any time at all in the snow may result in frostbite and her dancing career (what career?) would be over? No? Because I love you all, I'll spare you.
Kristy decides to literally stand on a chair and scream bloody murder for attention just to tell people to remember the snow sculpture contest. Barely anyone replied.
And then Jessi does the same thing to tell everyone about talent show auditions.
If I didn't want to get Claudia's next chapter up, I would be drinking shots right now. I have a new, unopened bottle of butterscotch schnapps.
Mal says something that makes me snicker. After informing us that Mary Anne was moping, she says Stacey seemed to be in an awful rush to get somewhere. Where? I wondered.
Uh, she's taking advantage of temporarily being 17 and having sex. Seriously, this is about all we're going to see of Stacey until Chapter 22. She's pretty much hiding with her new crush doing stuff....
Mal decides to play Harriet the Spy again, only because she wants to be a writer one day, and she only wants to write the truth. She noted that Mary Anne is a basket case. She peeked over Mary Anne's shoulder into the notebook she was writing in and saw Mary Anne and Logan. Mary Anne Bruno. Mrs. L. Bruno. Logan Spier (hmm . . .) Mary Anne Spier-Bruno. XXX, OOO. Logan, my love, my one and only love.
Logan Spier? Wow. Kinda ahead of the time there! If I was giving this snark stupid-points a lá Cinema Sins, I'd remove a sin for that one.
This made me chuckle:
From what I can see of her notes, this lodge is haunted! I never knew that before. But maybe that explains the white thing I saw in the corner of our dorm last night. Then again, it might just have been Stacey’s bathrobe, hanging on a hook.
Mal lampshades the stupidity. Mary Anne believes in the ghost bull. Mal shrugs it off.
Oh god, Mal, why did you go from cool to stupid? You're still okay, kid. I think you know the truth and are just having some fun believing in ghosts. It's the sort of thing I might have done and squealed with a friend about, not much different than adults going into scary haunted house attractions, knowing the ghosts in them aren't real, and peeing themselves in fear anyway.
The cook is sprinkling something into a vat of soup. The stuff is coming from a jar that’s not labeled. I think it is poison. And now he’s picking up a huge knife. Oh, no. The cook is crazy. He may be trying to kill us all!
We all wish. And if she believed that, I think she'd tell someone instead of eat the next meal.
Mal finds Ms. Halliday crying and concludes she suffering from unrequited love. She has a crush on the vice-principal, but he isn’t interested in her. I'm suffering from a migraine.
She also finds Stacey and her boytoy kissing in an empty library on a couch. Yeah, I bet that's not all they were up to. And I can't help but be giddy about it. If you had a crush that age, especially a major crush and felt like an adult for it, you may remember the thrill of the butterflies. So it's cute. It really is.
Boy, was my journal ever juicy. I would have to find a better hiding place for it than under my mattress. At home, too. If my little brothers or sisters ever found this, they would read things that are far too mature for them.
I'm not even commenting on that.
Chapter 10: Dawn
I feel bad for Dawn in this chapter. This is rare. And it can only happen if I force myself to not consider her inredibly mean thoughts about Ashley.
Dawn can't get out of participating in the contests Kristy was putting on. The penalty is dess or something.
Click to viewDuring the speed-skating, Dawn falls and does the worst, which is pretty embarrassing for a kid when everyone else did fine. Some seventh-graders laugh like hell at her.
During the relay (consisting of carrying a baton from point A to point B and back to A, and handing it to the next person, with the teams that goes back and forth the most in ten minutes winning the point, which sounds boring), Dawn drops it because her mittens are too puffy for her to get a good hold, and then she falls on the ice, and lost a lot of time. As you can imagine, her team wasn't happy with her.
For the third event, an obstacle course, she is sidelined altogether. Her team ends up losing, partly because of how bad she did in the relay, and yes, other kids make it well-known to her what they thought. Poor girl tries justifying it to herself by telling herself anyone could have fallen, and the thing is, she's right. What happened to her could have happened to many people. Maybe she could chalk it up to just being her unique, speshul snoflaik self.
She decides to go to the practice for the snowball fight instead of hide inside.
(I'm pretty good at skating and have three pairs of my own and will be heading to the rink later this week. No point in saying this, aside from my own annoyance at needing to go have my blades sharpened.)
Alan Gray, in a genuine dick-move, pelts her in the face with a snowball and started laughing at her, which gets a bunch of other kids to do the same. That's all she can take, so she leaves the fight and decides to go do a couple runs down the mountain, since she's a decent skier, to clear my head and drive away some of the anger I could feel building up.
Reasonable. I like this Dawn and hope the aliens keep the original Dawn we saw earlier. Good Dawn, you may stay. Bad Dawn, I hope you get pelted in the face again.
But ouch. To add insult to injury, she falls trying to get on the lift. I did that before. It was my first time EVER skiing. My then-boyfriend was a major jerk about it. I wish he'd crashed into a tree. As it was, the lift operators were PISSED when they found out he made me go on the lift, especially to that particular slope, when I'd never even gone down a bunny slope before. He was asked if he wanted to kill me. I did have a new life insurance policy that he was the beneficiary of, and he was indeed abusive. So, in retrospect...
Usually I don’t care what anyone says or thinks about me, but one too many people had laughed at me that morning.
This is me. I usually don't care, but I would have had enough by that point too.
Dawn huffs back into the lodge to find Mary Anne. She clearly needs to let off steam, found Mary Anne, and started spilling it.
After Dawn finished, sensitive, caring Mary Anne asked, “Do you have any idea how far Aruba is from Hooksett Crossing?”
That's pretty cold. Dawn thinks so too and snaps at Mary Anne that she rarely spills her heart, and when she does, all Mary Anne can do is whine about Logan, and has Mary Anne thought of anything else?
Mary Anne lets loose in her own stupid way by trying to say yeah, she's done this...sort of...and that...kinda. This leads to them firing each other as bunkies (bunkie politics since there are no lunch tables), and Dawn deciding their friendship is over. In the heat of the moment, I can understand this. Dawn's had a horrid day that we can all agree has been a truly terrible one, and Mary Anne just doesn't care.
Chapter 11: Mary Anne
Ooh, I am so mad at Dawn Schafer. Logan, you should have heard her this morning. I don’t know what got into her. She had a bad day and she took it out on me. Not only is that unlike Dawn, but it wasn’t fair. If she wants something, she should get a dog. Or a parrot, so it could talk back to her. Well, maybe that’s not fair, either. Maybe I should have listened to her. I’m her best friend, after all. On the other hand, I was having problems of my own.
Blah blah bullshit, Mary Anne. She tried talking to you, and instead of commiserating and being a friend, you went off and ignored her. And all YOUR problems revolve around your codependency and lack of trust in your boyfriend. So SHUT UP.
Let's see. She spends a paragraph insulting an old woman's ear lobes. I'm not making this up, Folks. An entire paragraph. She can't spare a moment to console Dawn, but she can spend that much time thinking about how ugly an elderly lady's ear lobes are.
She hunts down that poor woman to badger her about the ghost that even Mal brushed off.
Then she finds the cook, Curtis. Curtis looked up and smiled. He is missing a tooth, which is something I just can’t stand. I mean, in adults. I am a firm believer in dentures.
Oh my god. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!
Mary Anne is such a BITCH in this book!! Oh my GOD, I expect this level of bitchiness from DAWN!
Curtis says nothing about the ghost. So Mary Anne leaves to find someone else, someone named Teensy.
Despite her age, Teensy was wearing blue jean overalls, a plaid shirt, and a paint-spattered baseball cap.
Despite her age? I can't even. What can I say? I guess hotel-workers who do manual stuff would be in starched blouses and pressed slacks?
All I could get out of here was, “No such things as ghosts.” (Actually, she said, “No setch things as ghosts.”)
I really don't know what else to say.
At least she doesn't insult Mr. George, though he tells her the story of a man who died there who supposedly haunts the place, but that he thinks people's imaginations run away with them. By the end of it, she's busy imagining Logan and that gorgeous girl doing all sorts of island things together - snorkeling, waterskiing, tanning . . . kissing.
I think it's clear that "kissing" after the elipses is meant to mean "boning."
This is when the above Dawn scene happens. As she sees it, Dawn picked a fight with her (I side with Dawn), and whines that Dawn accused [her] of being insensitive (because it's the truth, Mary Anne!), and then says, What a baby. Why did I ever think she was one of my best friends? Well, Mary Anne, she DID forgive you when it became clear that you were using her to get back at Kristy when you first met her.
So she huffs off and slumps in another chair while feeling sorry for herself. Someone sits in another seat, and ever-sensitive Mary Anne keeps willing the other person to GTFO. Turns out to be Ms. Halliday. Rather than saying anything to the woman Mary Anne describes as looking very sad, she tries to sneak out. Ms. Halliday tells her she doesn't have to go. Sweet teacher, despite her own sadness, notices Mary Anne's sadness. Ms. Halliday is missing her fiancé, which, in my opinion, trumps missing your little boyfriend who you've known, what, a couple months? If we look at it chronologically.
By the way, my husband's overseas for work right now, and we'll get to talk with less frequency than Mary Anne talks to Logan. My husband won't be back for a few weeks. I'm handling it better than Mary Anne. Our child's handling Dad being gone better than Mary Anne. It's been a couple days. I feel what Ms. Halliday's feeling. But we are still doing stuff, unlike Mary-fucking-Anne. I'm doing this snark relatively quickly. Cleaning. Planning Thanksgiving. Planning a friend's visit. Painting a couple rooms. And so on. So Mary Anne can EXTRA shut the fuck up.
Ms. Halliday point blank tells her the only reason she pushed Mary Anne so hard in class is that she wants her to try her hardest. All Mary Anne gets out of this is that she feels better about her fight with Dawn.
Thank the dieties of your choice that this chapter is OVER.
Chapter 12: Kristy
Kristy whines about how Dawn lost the contest. Darn old Dawn was being a total klutz. I didn’t know she was such a klutz. If I had known, I wouldn’t have encouraged her to enter the contests. And I was certainly going to quit asking Mary Anne to participate. We did not need another klutz. I know that sounds mean but, well, I wanted to win. I was the team captain and I like winning, okay? What’s wrong with that?
How about you'd prefer to make a middle-school good-natured event about winning instead of spending time with your friends? And when will you idiots ever learn that forcing people, excuse me, "encouraging people," to do what they really don't want to do is a bad, bad idea?
So I'm a mom. Duh. I mentioned my kid just a few minutes ago. I'm not the most permissive mom in the world. I have this old-fashined idea that kids can be respected while still having rules. But at most, I will encourage my daughter to take a small step outside of her comfort zone, but won't force it. That's not respectful, and it's counterproductive. She needs to know she has my support if she feels very shy one day. Knowing Mom has her back helps her the next time.
So when I see these girls forcing each other, and the kids they watch, to do things so far outside their comfort zones, I want to scream at them.
There's a recap again of some of the sporting stuff. There were planned prize for the current snow sculpture for the older middle school kids later, but what about the younger children now? Claudia, in her only smart moment, improvises, grabs her Polaroid camera, takes pics of the kids with their snowmen, and posts them in the common room so the kids can feel proud to have something to show off.
Time for the big kids' contest.
I was working with Dawn and Stacey on a giant teddy bear. (Dawn was barely speaking to me.) Not far away Jessi and Mal were working on something that I couldn’t identify. Good. They were on the other team. I hoped Claud wouldn’t be able to identify it, either.
Because that pizza certificate the winning team gets is so important that you need to ill-wish your friends. When I was in school, pizza certificates were good for one location only, usually the closest one that decided to participate in a school event. It's not like you got a Pizza Hut certificate in one state and could use it in another. Those certificates weren't corporate. So what good is a pizza certificate anyway?
None of the BSC's crappy sculptures won. A couple throw-away characters on the red team (Kristy is on the blue) won. Of course Kristy took this loss in stride.
Oh, brother. I should have known better than to agree to let Claud judge the contest. Of course she’d chosen a sculpture by Red Team members.
...
I couldn’t help giving Claud a dirty look
See? Oh, wait, I lost my mind from all the stupidness for a moment. How dare the judge be honest in her assessments!
The next contest is a few days away, and it's skiing, which Claud is good at. The ever-good friend, Kristy tries pressuring Claudia, who is tired, into practicing.
“I suppose you think you’re so good you don’t need to practice.”
“That is not true!” exclaimed Claud. “I may be good, but I’m not stuck-up.”
“Are you calling me stuck-up?”
“NO.”
She totally is, Pisty. To shut her up, Claud goes to practice, and since she's the best student on the slopes, Pisty smack-talks her. The best friends you'll ever have, my lily ass. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Chapter 13: Claudia
Read and weep.
Winsday afternoon
I will never juge anything again - unless I’m juding totle strangers. The snow sculpture contest was awful all afternoon. Kristy tryed to be really nice to me. I know she whanted me to choose her teddy bear as the winning sculpture but it was just too cute for words. As juge I no better then to look for cute. I was looking for a well planed, well done, not cute peice of work. The cheshur cat fit the bill. It was realistic and just a little bite mean looking. Ashley is made at me too.
And then a couple missing hyphens.
The stupid is going to be so strong I went and made myself a caprese salad
I come bearing proof. Nice and big so you can see this screen in the background. (I fixed a couple typos of my own.)
I'm going to need that salad so I can chew instead of scream loud enough to scare China.
So off Claud goes to an advanced ski lesson, and here's where it all goes downhill for her, figuratively and literally.
The ski instructor is cute and speaks with an accent. A French accent. You know vot zees means.
“Hello,” he greeted us. All I students were awe-struck, particularly the girls. “My name eez Guy.” (He pronounced his name so that it rhymed with “ski.”) “I am your eenstroctor. I trost zat you are very goode skiers.”
I think there's a beer in the fridge.
I love how no one is juging me. See what I did there?
Guy smiled, showing a row of perfectly straight, sparkly white teeth. “Excellent. Zen let us get on wiss sings.”
Sings? Oh, things.
I may need a second bottle.
He looked about twenty-five. Well, maybe that didn’t matter. I could fall in love with an older man . . . couldn’t I? It happens all the time. I mean, to other people.
Join the fun!
Guy nodded and smiled. “I understand. Now. Let me see what you can do.”
I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. I wanted to do my best for Guy.
That's what she... Yeah, not even going there.
So down I went. I concentrated very hard.
Can't...say...it....
I tried to remember everything I’d been taught. When I reached the bottom, I knew I’d performed well. I returned to Guy, feeling pretty pleased. But when I saw the expression on his face, my pleasure turned to joy.
That is verbatim. VERBATIM!!!!!
I took nothing out. Dig out your "educational" copy and go to the bottom of page 66 and see. For. Yourself!
“Thanks - thanks, Guy,” I said breathlessly.
Guy smiled. And then . . . he put his hand on my arm.
Kristy sticks her tongue out at Claudia, but Guy distracts her by touching her arm again. Claudia is much too mature to do a thing like that (sticking her tongue out) when a handsome older man has his arms around me.
She starts another run, and Kristy is close behind. Claudia tells us she doesn't like that someone is so close on the trails.
I thought that over and changed my mind when I realized that Guy could have been skiing two inches from me and I would have been delighted. But Kristy was several feet away and that was too close.
Two. Inches. TWO INCHES. On the slopes, that means you're crashing and will be on top of each other. I wasn't kidding when I told you that what goes on here makes you forget every other crush in the entire series, and makes Stacey's crush on Wes look like nothing at all.
Somehow Guy is at the bottom when they get there, and he takes Claudia's mittened hands in his, and gives her a pep talk.
Woah, buddy, you need to stop touching kids. I know some cultures are more affectionate than others, and it's innocent, but you're in America now, and that's going to get you arrested here.
He gave her a pep talk on concentration so she won't be deestracted on zee trail.
“Okay,” I said. At least, I think I said it. I was looking into Guy’s eyes, which were sparkly and bright. Then I looked at his lips and couldn’t help imagining myself kissing them. I’m not sure whether any sound came from my own lips.
Then he pats her shoulder.
I...don't even know.
So down she goes again. Down the MOUNTAIN. Let's try to clean it back up here. Kristy skied too close again, but all I could think of was pleasing Guy. How very Ana.
I can't belive there's another movie made. Actually, the next two. I did see the first one, and thank goodness it was on my computer. It was so triggering that I had to stop watching for a few hours and process the memories of that abusive ex. I understood Ana's fear too well. I have no respect for people who thought that movie is sexy and wonderful. It's horrifying, and Ana is even obviously scared the entire time.
Back to business.
Aw, how sad that she needs to get back to the kids she's supposed to be watching.
So I said a sad goodbye to Guy and got ready for one last run.
“I weel see you tomorrow, no?” said Guy. “Anozzer lesson for my star pupeel?”
No? Yes! Yes, of course he would see me. I would do anything Guy wanted.
If it makes you feel better to know now, no, this guy isn't actually a pervert. He's French, and in France, people get more touchy without it meaning anything. However, these actions, as said, aren't appropriate in a kids' book where a girl is crushing about a man old enough to have been her own babysitter, and when she's daydreaming about kissing him when his hand is on her arm. INAPPROPRIATE.
Let's make it worse. She thinks about the guy she met at Camp Mohawk who she still exchanges letters with. She still felt a funny thrill in my stomach every time I saw his return address on a letter. But that feeling was nothing compared to what I felt for Guy.
You know that funny feeling, right? That tickle way down that you don't have words for at 13, but later finds out is basically arousal because your newly-released hormones are acting up? Guys, she's turned on by her ski instructor, more than the boy her own age.
When I returned to the lodge, I couldn’t help it: I raced up to our dorm, found Stacey, pulled her into a corner, and said (not very quietly), “My ski instructor has a crush on me. His name is Guy, he’s adorable, and he talks with an accent!”
“Oh, wow!” cried Stacey.
“Oh, wow!” cried Dawn. Then she added, “Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing.”
“That’s okay,” I replied.
By dinnertime, all the BSC members, plus a few other friends, knew about Guy and me.
I didn’t mind. I was proud of it.
This is the end of the chapter, verbatim, and she is proud to think an adult has a crush on her, and no one has told her WHOA WTF RED FLAG RED FLAG! Nope, this is all cool and awesome and isn't she lucky.
This book never does make it clear that there'd be a HUGE problem if a man at least 25 years old had a crush on a child. Only once does anyone eeven suggest that maybe he's too old, and it's who you'd least expect.
I told you I was NOT kidding about how bad this is. To tell the truth, I'm slightly nauseated, and it's not from caprese and beer. I need to actually open this bottle of beer now.