Ten Miles Past Normal by Frances O’Roark Dowell

Author:Frances O’Roark Dowell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 2011-01-20T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

In Which My Mother Totally Loses It Once and for All

By 9 p.m., my mom has updated her blog to let the whole world know that in three weeks we will be hosting a humongous outdoor party on our mini-farm, and all her readers are invited.

By 10 p.m., her old editor at the Manneville Gazette, Maura Gibbs, having read my mom’s blog, has IM’d her with a request for a feature-length article to run the week before the party.

By 10:15 p.m., my mom has informed me that I should invite all my friends, promising we will have a rip-roaring good time.

By 10:16 p.m., I have informed my mom that I plan to be in New Zealand on the day of the hootenanny, or at least spending the night at Sarah’s.

By 10:18 p.m., my mom is complaining to my dad that she doesn’t know what’s happened to the old Janie, who was so enthusiastic about everything.

By 10:18:32 p.m., I have stomped upstairs, muttering how I don’t understand why my mother is so insistent on ruining my life.

I mean, imagine it. Your mother is inviting the whole community to your backyard to eat hot dogs and sing folk songs. Bring your beat-up guitars, your whining fiddles, your world-weary mandolins, your honkin’ harmonicas! Bring your overalls, your bandanna-wearing dogs, your hayseeds, your green-life Porta-Potties! Bring your homemade bread and lentil stew and wheat germ brownies! We’re gonna have us a good ol’ time down on the farm.

It’s over the top, you’ve got to admit.

After I stew a little while, sitting on my bed and plucking the strings of the bass Monster’s given me to practice on, I realize it’s not the gathering of the Whole Foods tribes I mind so much, it’s the publicity. It’s being identified with the Farm Freak Family that bugs me. I know a lot of kids who wouldn’t mind at all: crunchy granola types who hang out on the school steps every morning kicking around a Hacky Sack, the eco kids who wear sandals made from tires and gossip about global warming under a birch tree near the flagpole every morning, any vegan worth his or her salt. No offense, free country and everything, but I have spent the last two and a half months trying to distance myself as far from my Farm Girl identity as possible.

I remind myself that no one I know reads the paper, not even online. I mean, not even the adults, other than my parents. The circulation can’t be more than five thousand. I also remind myself that no one actually knows my name outside a circle of twenty people. I’m making too big a deal out of this.

I just wish I had fifteen minutes to get my life together before my mom comes up with yet another scheme to throw me off my game. First it’s the homemade wardrobe, now it’s the hippie-dippy back-to-basics sing-along. Next she’ll be investing in a printing press so we can hand out leaflets calling for mandatory composting toilets in every house in Manneville.

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