Top ten things Samantha Madison isn't ready for:
10. Spending Thanksgiving at Camp David
9. With her boyfriend, the president's son
8. Who appears to want to take their relationship to the Next Level
7. Which Sam inadvertently and shockingly announces live on MTV
6. While appearing to support the president's dubious policies on families, morals, and yes, sex
5. Juggling her new after-school job at Potomac Video
4. Even though she already has a job as teen ambassador to the UN (that she doesn't get paid for)
3. Riding the Metro and getting accosted because she's "the redheaded girl who saved the president's life," in spite of her new, semipermanent Midnight Ebony tresses
2. Experiencing total role reversal with her popular sister Lucy, who for once can't get the guy she wants
and the number-one thing Sam isn't ready for?
1. Finding out the hard way that in art class, "life drawing" means "naked people."
Which might explain why I finally got the guts to do it.
Make a change, I mean. And a pretty big one, too. For the better.
Who cares if my sister Lucy doesn't necessarily agree?
Actually, she didn't say she didn't like it. Not that I would have cared if she had. I didn't do it for her. I did it for myself.
Which is how I replied to her. Lucy, I mean. When she said what she did about it, which was: "Mom's going to kill you."
"I didn't do it for Mom," I said. "I did it for me. No one else."
I don't even know what she was doing home. Lucy, I mean. Shouldn't she have been at cheerleading practice? Or a game? Or shopping at the mall with her friends, which is how she spends the vast majority of her time, when she isn't working at the mall -- which amounts to almost the same thing, since all her friends hang out in Bare Essentials (the lingerie store where she gets paid to do nothing), while she's there anyway, helping her squeal over the latest J-Lo gossip in Us Weekly and fold G-strings?
"Yeah, but you don't have to look at yourself," Lucy said from her desk. I could tell she was IMing her boyfriend, Jack. Lucy has to IM him every morning before school, and then again before bed, and sometimes, like now, even in between, or he gets upset. Jack is away at college at the Rhode Island School of Design and has proved, since he left, to be increasingly insecure about Lucy's affections for him. He needs near-constant reassurances that she still cares about him and isn't off making out with some dude she met at Sunglass Hut, or whatever.
Which is kind of surprising, because before he left for college, Jack never struck me as the needy type. I guess college can change people.
This isn't a very encouraging thought, considering that my boyfriend, who is Lucy's age, will be going off to college next year. At least Jack drives down to see Lucy every weekend, which is nice, instead of hanging with his college friends. I hope David will do this as well.
Although I'm beginning to wonder if Jack actually even has any. College friends, I mean.
"I have to look at myself in the mirror all the time," is what I said to Lucy's remark about how I don't have to look at myself. "Besides, no one asked you." And I turned to continue down the hallway, which is where I'd been headed when Lucy had stopped me, having spied me attempting to slink past her open bedroom door.
"Fine," Lucy called after me, as I attempted to slink away again. "But just so you know, you don't look like her."
Of course I had to come back to her doorway and go, "Like who?" Because I genuinely had no idea what she was talking about. Although you would think by this time, I would have known better than to ask. I mean, it was Lucy I was talking to.
"You know," she said, after taking a sip of her diet Coke. "Your hero. What's her name. Gwen Stefani. She has blond hair, right? Not black."
Oh my God. I couldn't believe Lucy was trying to tell me -- me, Gwen Stefani's number-one fan -- what color hair she has.
"I am aware of that," I said, and started to leave again.
But Lucy's next remark brought me right back to her doorway.
"Now you look like that other chick. What's her name?"
"Karen O?" I asked, hopefully. Don't even ask me why I thought Lucy might be about to say something nice, like that I looked like the lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I think I had inhaled too much ammonium hydroxide from the hair dye, or something.
"Nuh-uh," Lucy said. Then she snapped her fingers. "Got it. Ashlee Simpson."
