You’re Invited Too (2 page)

“Do you think that's her?” Vi whispers.

Becca cranes her head around. “Ooooooh yeah.”

“Do we go over?” Lauren asks.

“I think it would look more professional if she comes to us, right? Just look busy. And important.” Becca shoves a menu at each of us while throwing her head back and letting out a fake laugh that can only be described as “tinkling.”

I peek over my menu to watch Alexandra Worthington's eyes sweep right over our table and then turn away to peer down at her watch with a frown. She's still hovering just inside the doorway.

“I don't think it's working, guys. I'm gonna go get her.” I push my chair back and make my way to the front. “Excuse me, by any chance are you Alexandra Worthington?”

She looks at me and one eyebrow lifts. (I'm so in awe of people who can do that.) “I am. I'm sorry, I can't really chat, though. I'm supposed to be meeting someone, or rather, a group of someones. Though they're late, which is inexcusable, really.” She begins to pick at a thread on her tube top.

“Oh no, actually, we're all here. See?” I gesture to our table, where Becca, Lauren, and Vi give little waves. Lauren's is a regular one, Vi's is more of a tomboy kind of hand flick, and Becca's cupped fingers and back-and-forth motion make her look like Miss America on a parade float. I can't help grinning at all three.

“Beg your pardon? I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding. I'm meeting four women who run a wedding-planning business,” Alexandra Worthington says.

“Party planning, really,” I say. “You'll be our first wedding.”

Oh yeah. The thing that happened yesterday? It's this: Becca, Lauren, Vi, and I were meeting at the
Purple People Eater
, which is what we call the old abandoned yacht that we turned into our clubhouse. The whole point of our meeting was to dissolve our little summer company and say good-bye to the Best Summer Ever. But then, right as we were toasting RSVP with glasses of lemonade, the phone rang and it was Alexandra Worthington, wanting to know if she could book us to plan her wedding.

Up till now, we've mostly done birthday parties for kids, plus a few parties at the senior center (where Lauren's sorta crazy grandmother Bubby lives), which were basically matchmaking ventures to get Bubby together with the elderly guy she was crushing on. They were great and we rocked them, but they weren't anything on the level of a wedding.

But when Alexandra Worthington called, she said she'd had been hearing our name all over town since she moved here in June. I guess people really liked the parties we planned, and, well, Sandpiper Beach is really tiny, and the rule of living somewhere really tiny is that you have to spend approximately 82 percent of your time gossiping about everyone else, so I guess word got out about RSVP.

Before the rest of us could even sign off on it, Becca grabbed the phone and said, “We're your girls, Miss Worthington.”

Judging by how pale Alexandra Worthington just got behind her tan, it kind of seems like the “girls” part might not have computed.

She takes a tiny step backward. Her head gives a shake back and forth. “No. No, no. No. No. You're . . .” There's a long pause before she says, “Children!”

Um, ouch? We're going into
seventh
grade. We're not
that
young!

Becca, Lauren, and Vi can tell something is wrong, and they all get up and race over.

“Excuse me, is everything okay?” Lauren asks.

“Everything is most certainly not okay,” Alexandra Worthington says. I know I should probably call her Miss Worthington or Alexandra (though not to her face, of course!), but she's just such an “Alexandra Worthington” that I can't.

“I already fired my wedding planner.” Alexandra Worthington is getting screechy now. “I can't go crawling back to her. I won't. That's not how I operate.”

Oh yeah. If you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, here you go: The wedding planner Alexandra Worthington fired?

That would be Lorelei Pleffer . . . a.k.a. my mom.

So there's that.

Hence the iron anchor in my belly. Because when Mom finds out her client fired her to hire her daughter, one of us is dead. Me because Mom has killed me, or Mom from a broken heart. Either way, things are not looking good for the Pleffer family.

Alexandra Worthington's voice screeches up another note. “Apparently, now I am
sans
planner because you are not at all what you represented yourselves to be! Why didn't you
tell
me you were a bunch of kids?”

Mayor Keach looks up from his liver, and Meg, who owns Polka Dot Books, turns in her chair. I kind of wish I could melt into the floor. Lance comes out from the kitchen with a crinkled forehead, carrying a tray of biscuits and sausage gravy. Becca, Lauren, and Vi share desperate looks.

I would be in on that look too, except at the moment I'm halfway hoping Alexandra Worthington will turn and walk out before this whole mess goes any further. On the one hand, I love my friends and I love RSVP and I'm still a tiny bit mad at my mom for firing me in the first place and then not making it to any of our parties this summer; if I wanted her attention,
hooo boy
, would this get it. But on the other hand . . . it's my mom we're talking about.

“Pardon me, Alexandra,” Becca says. See what I mean? Becca's never afraid of authority figures. She calls her Alexandra to her face. “But we never ‘represented' we were adults. In fact, you referenced so many of our clients when you called to hire us, we assumed you knew everything there was to know about RSVP. Why wouldn't we have?”

“Well, none of
them
thought to mention you're barely out of diapers!”

Becca bites her lip and Lauren claws her fingers into Becca's arm to stop her from answering that comment with whatever she's about to say. Becca takes a deep breath, smiles oh-so-sweetly at Alexandra Worthington, and instead says, “Probably they didn't mention our age because how old we are is totes not relevant to how fantastic our party-planning skills are.”

Which would have sounded a lot more impressive if Becca had skipped the “totes.” Then again, if she had, she wouldn't be Becca.

Alexandra Worthington stares hard at Becca for a second, and Becca lifts her chin and stares right back. Neither one blinks. After a couple of seconds Alexandra Worthington's eyes narrow slightly, and she says, “You may have a point.”

She takes off her hat, tucks it under her arm, and pushes past us into the restaurant. “Where are we sitting? I'll need to tell you some things about myself if this is to be a successful client-planner relationship. First things first. I do not do liver and chicken fried steak for breakfast, and I sincerely hope none of you do either. If so, I will need to excuse myself because that is just plain disgusting and I won't hear of it.”

Okayyyyyyyy, then. I guess we're hired.

Which is a good thing, right?

Right?

optimism
noun -

to be full of hope and confident about the future or about something in particular

Use in a sentence:

I am full of optimism that this school year will be the best ever!

Z
ach's car wheezes and shudders as he hits the squealing brakes at the bottom of the circular drive that winds in front of Sandpiper Beach Middle School, home of the Pirate Pelicans. I grip the dashboard so I don't end up kissing it instead. He inherited this pile of rust when our oldest brother, Josh, went off to college. I secretly hope the car will collapse before it's time for me to get stuck with it.

“A little closer, maybe?” I point to the doors, which are way up the drive.

Zach slams the gas and then screeches to a stop in front of the doors. I still haven't figured out why Mom and Dad think that riding with Zach is even remotely safe. I'd be much better off riding the smelly school bus with Sadie and Becca, or cruising across the bridge to the mainland and down the main highway in one of my dad's golf carts from the marina. Somehow statistics on golf-cart crashes worry Mom more than statistics on crashes involving teenage-boy drivers.

“Out,” Zach says.

“Thank you for the ride, brother dearest.” I flash him a smile as I grab my backpack and heave the door open.

He rolls his eyes. Back-to-school might be the worst day of the year for him, but it's like Christmas to me. The tailpipe pushes out a cloud of smoke as Zach takes off toward the high school (which is all of right next door to the middle school, so he really can't complain about driving me), and I turn and head inside. By some miracle, Zach actually got me here half an hour early.

I stop just inside the doors and inhale that freshly-scrubbed-no-vomit-on-the-floors-or-anything-gross-yet school smell. And I feel like I could run up and down the halls cheering and laughing. Not only is it the first day of school, but all my extracurriculars start this week. I'm playing Bunco with my grandmother, Bubby, and her friends at Sandpiper Active Senior Living this afternoon,
and
RSVP just landed that amazing job with Miss Worthington.

Okay, so maybe she's a little on the scary side, but still—it's a
wedding
, and we're going to plan it. And maybe we barely have three months to do so, but hey, we wouldn't be the most amazing new party-planning company in the Cape Fear region if we couldn't pull off a simple wedding on short notice.

Besides, Sadie's mom already handled most of the major stuff, like the venue and the dress and the caterer, a long time ago. All that's left to do is pull all the small details together. Although that's really the most important job—they're the things that'll make the wedding extra memorable, and they're the most fun. The favors, the cake, the music. And I can't wait to get started breaking down the budget Miss Worthington gave us. Best of all? Vi, Becca, Sadie, and I get to plan this wedding together!

Life could not be any more perfect.

I salute the giant Pirate Pelican painted on the lobby wall. (It's a pelican with an eye patch and a skull-and-crossbones hat and its wings are crooked like it's holding its nonexistent hands on its nonexistent hips. Seriously.) Then I find my new locker in the empty second-floor hallway. It's squeaky clean—probably thanks to Vi's dad, who's the new janitor this year—and full of possibility. I hang up the seashells I threaded with yarn last night, and stick a new dry-erase calendar on the inside door. Sadie probably has one exactly like it. Once I've gathered everything I need for my first three classes, I find my new homeroom—super-conveniently located just across the hall. It's totally a sign that this year is going to be the best ever. If I believed in signs, that is. Which I don't. Mostly.

No one's inside yet, not even the teacher. I grab a seat and pull out my phone. Technically, we can carry phones in school, but they're supposed to be kept off and in our bags. But no one really follows those rules. Plus, my day planner is on my phone, so I don't know how anyone expects me to keep track of homework and my life if I don't pull it out now and then.

Under the watchful poster eyes of Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Ms. Purvis's other favorite historical figures, I click my phone on and check out my schedule for the rest of the week.

Monday, August 31

3:00 It's All Academic team organizational meeting

4:30 Bunco with Bubby and friends

7:00 Meet S, B, and V at PPE to talk wedding

8:00 Make Zach show me a computer game, but not one of those gross war ones (maybe while doing homework because how hard can a computer game be?)

Tuesday, September 1

3:00 Tutoring

5:00 SAT prep class

7:00 Create wedding budget

8:00 Watch TV (maybe while doing homework)

It all pretty much looks the same for the rest of the week. I skip down to the weekend, hoping that maybe things let up a little.

Friday, September 4

3:00 Founder's Day dance committee meeting with Becca at Chamber of Commerce (volunteer for ticket sales)

4:30–8:00 Work at marina

8:15 Have V, B, and S over for something fun

Saturday, September 5

10:00 RSVP meeting

12:00–5:00 Work at marina

7:00 Simmons family game night (ugh—try to do homework between rounds of Uno)

Okay. I can do all of this. No problem. I mastered balancing work and fun this summer. I'm a total pro.

“Did you really schedule ‘watch TV'?” Vi's standing over my shoulder. Apparently, while I was memorizing my schedule, the room started to fill up.

“Of course.”

“You're really going whole hog with this having-fun thing, aren't you? But doesn't writing it in your planner kind of defeat the point of loosening up?” Vi plops herself into the desk next to mine.

“It'll still be fun.” Maybe she's right, though. Maybe I'm not having fun the right way. But if I don't write it down, I'll end up doing pre-algebra instead. Which is fun to me, actually, but my whole new motto after this summer is
Live it up!
(Bubby's words, not mine. At least she didn't say
Totes live it up, girlfriend!
or something else equally embarrassing for a grandmother to say.)