Tales From Another Oakland Home (sequel to "The Summer of our Lives), New & Improved Version, chapter 1
"Cassie, can you sign my yearbook?" Once again, it was the last day of school. I took the book from the girl who was thrusting it at me and scrawled in it, "Happy summer, Leecey! Hope it's a good one! xoxo, Cass." I capped my pen, handed the book back to her, and sat back down in my chair.
We were being held hostage in homeroom for those precious few minutes before the final bell rang and we could all leave. Right now I was sitting behind my new friend, Alice. Seventh grade had changed me. Oh, I'd had a falling out with Kevin halfway through the year, but we were cool now. I'm not talking about that; I'm talking about how (a) Liv and I had made a new friend this year, and (b) everybody now knew my name.
I had curly auburn hair and grey eyes, plain features, and was a little on the short side. I wasn't a brain or an athlete; I was a singer, but of course nobody cared about that. Until the first week of grade seven. I wrote a report stating the truth, that I'd met Green Day over summer vacation, and since then everybody remembered me as "the girl who met Green Day" and tried to get on my good side. This didn't bother me, since my new friend started hanging out with me before the report incident, and therefore we were true friends.
The dark-skinned, black-haired girl sitting in front of me was Maria Alícia Gonzalez. And her name was pronounced "Aleesia," too, because it was Spanish for Alice. On the first day of school, she was new to town and ended up being my partner for doing to V-sit reach. After I said her name wrong, she corrected me and told me how she and her family were from Mexico originally. Now I either used her English name or shortened her Spanish one to "Aleece" or just "Leece."
This summer was gonna be the best ever, I could feel it. Maybe nothing could beat the Green Day concert and of course the whole meeting-Green-Day thing from last summer, but I still knew I had ten whole weeks to spend with Alice and Liv. Liv said that she could foresee a great adventure this summer. I believed her. If anybody I knew had psychic powers, it was Olivia Thompson. Liv probably had an IQ of about 170, and sometimes she used a lot of really big words, making it hard for us less intelligent human life forms to understand her. But I figured if Liv foresaw it, it had to be true.
As the last ten seconds of seventh grade ticked by, Alice felt the need to shout, "Ten, nine, eight...." despite all the people (our homeroom teacher included) who looked at her weird before finally joining in. Alice never really cared whether or not people stared, as long as it wasn't for her losing a game or getting beaten at some athletic thing. Alice loved sports. And she was the best athlete I had ever seen. She could do fifty push-ups in a row, run a mile and hardly even be tired, and do about sixty crunches in a minute without taking a break.
So we three, the brain, the athlete, and the singer, planned to meet at the mall that night with our (our being my and Liv's) boyfriends, to think and plan and figure out what the hell we were going to do with the ten weeks ahead of us. I knew we would think of something eventually. But it turned out we didn't have to. My cousin thought of it for us.
We were being held hostage in homeroom for those precious few minutes before the final bell rang and we could all leave. Right now I was sitting behind my new friend, Alice. Seventh grade had changed me. Oh, I'd had a falling out with Kevin halfway through the year, but we were cool now. I'm not talking about that; I'm talking about how (a) Liv and I had made a new friend this year, and (b) everybody now knew my name.
I had curly auburn hair and grey eyes, plain features, and was a little on the short side. I wasn't a brain or an athlete; I was a singer, but of course nobody cared about that. Until the first week of grade seven. I wrote a report stating the truth, that I'd met Green Day over summer vacation, and since then everybody remembered me as "the girl who met Green Day" and tried to get on my good side. This didn't bother me, since my new friend started hanging out with me before the report incident, and therefore we were true friends.
The dark-skinned, black-haired girl sitting in front of me was Maria Alícia Gonzalez. And her name was pronounced "Aleesia," too, because it was Spanish for Alice. On the first day of school, she was new to town and ended up being my partner for doing to V-sit reach. After I said her name wrong, she corrected me and told me how she and her family were from Mexico originally. Now I either used her English name or shortened her Spanish one to "Aleece" or just "Leece."
This summer was gonna be the best ever, I could feel it. Maybe nothing could beat the Green Day concert and of course the whole meeting-Green-Day thing from last summer, but I still knew I had ten whole weeks to spend with Alice and Liv. Liv said that she could foresee a great adventure this summer. I believed her. If anybody I knew had psychic powers, it was Olivia Thompson. Liv probably had an IQ of about 170, and sometimes she used a lot of really big words, making it hard for us less intelligent human life forms to understand her. But I figured if Liv foresaw it, it had to be true.
As the last ten seconds of seventh grade ticked by, Alice felt the need to shout, "Ten, nine, eight...." despite all the people (our homeroom teacher included) who looked at her weird before finally joining in. Alice never really cared whether or not people stared, as long as it wasn't for her losing a game or getting beaten at some athletic thing. Alice loved sports. And she was the best athlete I had ever seen. She could do fifty push-ups in a row, run a mile and hardly even be tired, and do about sixty crunches in a minute without taking a break.
So we three, the brain, the athlete, and the singer, planned to meet at the mall that night with our (our being my and Liv's) boyfriends, to think and plan and figure out what the hell we were going to do with the ten weeks ahead of us. I knew we would think of something eventually. But it turned out we didn't have to. My cousin thought of it for us.
Page 1/7 | Next
