O My America! by Johanna Kaplan

Author:Johanna Kaplan [Kaplan, Johanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1469-3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-07-02T17:14:00+00:00

10

AT JUST ABOUT THE time when Ez had come into the period of his new fame, with No More American Songs being shown at teach-ins everywhere, and newspapers and television stations calling up for interviews, someone else in his family, Ffrenchy—Francesca Meisel, the older of his two daughters from his affair with Paula Meisel—was embarking on a brand-new celebrity of her own. It was not a widespread celebrity, true—in fact, at first it was only the other eighth-grade girls whispering and passing notes, and staring at her. But then she could see it had spread all the way into the high school proper. Because every time she went to the girls’ bathroom, she would find herself so bugged by the most incredible and pathetic questions that just in order to get out of there, she had been forced to say—she, Ffrenchy, who hated lying—that she was allergic to cigarette smoke. And then finally, finally, out of all this really incredibly stupid, absurd and immature gossip, had come something so boss: she had been invited to a party by a girl who was a junior! Now, this girl, Tamara Dobkin, was not just any junior—she was well known—resented, in fact—for never inviting anyone lower than a junior. But not only that; even better, she had a twin sister, Gabrielle, who was a senior at Music and Art, and the two of them always gave parties together! So this meant that Ffrenchy, eighth-grade Ffrenchy, had just been invited to a party with juniors and seniors from Music and Art! This news was so boss, so terrific, that naturally she immediately flew off the phone to tell it to her mother. And that was her first mistake. Because instead of getting excited and happy, Paula had given her this very suspicious look and said, “Are your friends going? Was Janie Brecher invited? And how about little Carla Ohrenstein?”

“That’s the whole point, Ma!” Ffrenchy had tried to explain to her. “Nobody else from my class was invited! That’s what makes it so terrific! It’s all these juniors and seniors and kids from Music and Art—and me!” Ffrenchy, as she told this story to Merry and Ez, in the Slavin living room for the first time in her life, was sitting with her legs tucked under her and eating a mango. Greedily, exuberantly, she sucked at its reddish-gold flesh, and as she leaned over it, her tongue lapping around it for quick but savoring licks—like a child with a melting ice cream cone—it seemed to Merry that the color of this fruit, its lush, melony inside ripeness, was exactly like Ffrenchy’s own high reddish-gold coloring: they matched.

Ffrenchy said, “You know something? My mother would die if she knew where I bought this! She told me never to go into a bodega because the guys in there might—Ooh! Look what just happened!” Quickly she licked up the mango juice which had suddenly run onto her arm, and then noticing that it had run onto the couch

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