Front and Center by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Author:Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-06-29T16:57:41.665000+00:00

It was all back to normal, though, by the time I came down after a fifteen-second shower to find Beaner shooting the breeze with Kathy Ott, who was staying with us while Dad was gone. Curtis and I had said over and over that she didn't need to, that we didn't need babysitters for crying out loud, but Mom had seen this TV program about teenagers and the house-wrecking parties they threw and she wouldn't budge. I even pointed out that we don't know enough kids to throw a party and also that our house is already wrecked, but strangely enough that didn't help.

Beaner was cracking Kathy up as he finished off the walnut bars, telling her how we had to go back to his house to test out Abby's Christmas present. Which Abby was so excited about that she'd talked her folks into letting her open it early. And Beaner was so excited—well, half excited and half joking-excited—that he'd invited me and the Jorgensen twins and their boyfriend and girlfriend over so we all could test it out together. Because what Abby had wanted more than anything in the world was a karaoke machine.

Okay. If you had to guess my twenty-five favorite things in life, you probably wouldn't include karaoke. If you had to guess the top twenty-five hundred. But it was okay, once we got to Beaner's and he and Abby started, and were acting so goofy that no one could possibly be self-conscious about their own performance. Abby's friend Gabby was there too, of course, and the two of them did this song about feeling like a natural woman, with Abby singing and Gabby doing backup. They'd been practicing for weeks apparently. Then the three of them, Abby and Gabby and Beaner, acted out a song about twisting and shouting that apparently the three of them had been working on—that's how great a brother Beaner is—and it was so funny that Kyle Jorgensen's girlfriend had to scuttle to the bathroom like a crab so she wouldn't wet her pants.

We all performed, even me, though I made them pick out a Christmas carol because those are the only songs I know, and for once in my life I sang "The Twelve Days of Christmas" the right way because I could follow along with the words. Everyone joined in on the "five golden rings" bit, really drawing it out so we had to rush through all the little birds before the verse ended. And Beaner's mom made popcorn that wasn't sticky-furry, and we drank tons of pop, and we ended up having a huge snowball fight in their yard with their dog going crazy trying to dig up every snowball, so confused about why the ball had landed but now there wasn't anything there but snow. I could have spent a couple hours tossing snowballs to that screwy dog, it was so hilarious.

Beaner drove me home, singing about how it was the end of the world but he felt fine, drumming on my leg.

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