How to Be Popular Read online

  “What are you doing in there?” he wanted to know. “You’ve been in there an hour!”

  My big mistake was opening the door.

  “What do you want?” I asked. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  “Because I gotta pee,” Pete said, barging past me and whipping it out. “Whadduya think?”

  “Ew,” I said. I seriously doubt Lauren Moffat has to put up with her little brothers peeing in front of her in her own home.

  Of course, Lauren probably has her own bathroom. She doesn’t have to share it with her four—soon-to-be five—siblings.

  “I told you I gotta go,” Pete said, clearly not caring about the psychological scars his being full-frontal in front of me could cause. He looked around, then went, “Hey. Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

  “I’m not,” I said. Even though the light in the bathroom was out. I could only see him from the moonlight, streaming in through the windows.

  “Uh, yeah, you are.” Pete finished up and flushed. “You’re really weird, you know that, Steph?”

  Um. Duh. “Go back to bed, moron.”

  “Who’s the moron?” Pete wanted to know.

  But he went back to bed. And didn’t notice the binoculars. Thank God.

  I guess I should try to be a little more understanding of what his—Pete’s—life must be like. Having the infamous Steph Landry for an older sister, I mean. Obviously, it must put him at a severe social disadvantage, at least in this town.

  And yet he’s borne it remarkably well…the teasing, the put-downs, the roughing up on the playground.

  The way I see it, things could be worse. I mean, there was this girl in school last year, Justine Yeager, who was an actual genius—she had a perfect grade point average and got the highest score you can get on her SATs, even the essay part. But she had like zero social skills—she was BOOK smart, but not PEOPLE smart. I mean, worse than accidentally throwing a Big Red Super Big Gulp on the most popular girl in school. No one would sit next to Justine at lunch, not even the B-crowders, because all she ever talked about was how much smarter she was than everybody else.

  So whenever things get really bad—like they are right now, when it’s the last Saturday night of summer vacation and instead of being out on a date or at a party or the lake or whatever, I’m sitting in the bathroom spying on my best friend as he undresses and gets ready for bed—I think about how I could have been born Justine Yeager, instead of, you know…me. And it helps.

  Sort of.

  At least I’m not alone. In not being at a party or the lake, I mean. Jason’s home, too.

  And looking mighty, mighty fine.

  Okay, this is sick. SICK. I am fully going to ask God for forgiveness about this during Communion in church tomorrow. Since I can’t ask Father Chuck. Might as well go straight to the top. No more middlemen. That’s what Grandpa always advises, anyway.

  Although of course Grandpa doesn’t know how much time I spend spying on the naked bod of my future step-whatever-Jason-is-going-to-be-to-me when his grandmother marries Grandpa.

  But. Whatever.

  * * *

  What’s the secret of popularity? What makes some people so likable and others not liked at all?

  Popular people:

  Always have a ready smile for everyone.

  Show genuine interest in others and what they have to say.

  Remember that a person’s name is the sweetest and most important sound to them! Popular people call others by their names, and do it often.

  Are good listeners who encourage others to talk about themselves.

  Make the person they are speaking to feel important—and do it sincerely. They always make the conversation about YOU, not about themselves!

  * * *

  Five

  STILL T-MINUS ONE DAY AND COUNTING

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, NOON

  I met up with Grandpa in the observatory while everybody else was having coffee and doughnuts in the church basement after Mass. I’ve had to give up crullers and elephant ears anyway, as they go straight to my butt. I have to ride my bike around town for like an hour to work off just one doughnut. It’s totally not worth it. Unless it’s a hot glazed Krispy Kreme, of course.

  Grandpa says I inherited this tendency from his first wife, my grandma. I wouldn’t know whether this is true or not, since Grandma died of lung cancer before I was born, even though she didn’t smoke. Grandpa did, though, so Grandma blamed him for giving it to her. The cancer, I mean. I don’t think that was very nice of her, even if it was true. You can tell Gramps felt plenty bad about it.

  Although not bad enough to quit.

  Until he started going out with Kitty, that is. All she had to say was, “Smoking is a filthy habit. I could never imagine myself with a man who smoked,” and Grandpa quit. Just like that.

  Which didn’t endear Kitty much to my mom, but does go to show the power of The Book.

  “Hey,” I said after I’d let myself into the observatory, using the special code Grandpa had taught me on the electronic lock. The code is the date of Kitty’s birthday, which I think is pretty romantic. Not as romantic as having the place built and naming it after her—the Katherine T. Hollenbach Observatory—and then donating it to the city, maybe. But up there.

  My mom doesn’t think it’s so romantic, though. She calls Grandpa’s spending since he got the I-69 money “conspicuous consumption,” and says her father has made it so she’s afraid to show her face at the Downtown Community sessions. Except that the Downtown Community is pretty stoked about the observatory, which is really state-of-the-art on the inside, though on the outside it was designed to blend in with the Square’s 1930s WPA architecture.

  But Mom says she’s mainly referring to Grandpa’s new condo on the lake and the butter-yellow Rolls-Royce he bought and is still waiting for to arrive, with specially ordered wheel-well covers.

  “Hey,” Grandpa said back to me from the rotunda, where he was tinkering around with stuff on the observatory deck. Since it was Sunday, none of the workmen were there. It was just Grandpa and me. The place is practically done, anyway. There’s just a little more drywall that needs to be hung in the control room. “How goes it?”

  “Good,” I said, reaching into my skirt pocket as I climbed to the observation deck. “I’ve got eighty-seven dollars here for you.”

  “Why, thank you,” Grandpa said. He took the money, shuffled it into a neater pile, folded it, and put it in his wallet. He didn’t bother to count it. We both know I never make counting mistakes.

  Then he took a notepad from his shirt pocket and carefully wrote out a receipt, which he handed to me. “Interest rate gap’s narrowed.”

  “I saw that on the Web this morning,” I said, slipping the receipt into my pocket.

  Grandpa and I have always shared a mutual fondness for…well, money. In fact, I never really had a grasp for mathematics until Grandpa sat me down one day in the seventh grade and said, looking at the math problem that had me in tears, “Never mind how many apples Sue has. Let’s say Sue’s working a shift at the bookstore. But it’s a Saturday night, and the only way you could get her to work was to promise her eight fifty an hour, as opposed to seven fifty, because she wanted to go out to Sizzler and a movie with her boyfriend. But you don’t want to let your mother know you’ve been paying overtime when there hasn’t, in fact, been any. How do you configure Sue’s paycheck so she gets her money, without Mom knowing?”

  My reply was instantaneous: Sue would get sixty-eight dollars for working an eight-hour shift at eight fifty an hour. Sixty-eight divided by seven fifty rounds down to nine. So you put down that Sue worked nine hours instead of eight.

  And then you’d go look for an employee who isn’t as popular as Sue, so you can give them the Saturday night shift and not have to fudge the numbers anymore.

  “Very good,” Grandpa had said.

  And that was the end of my problems with math. Thinking about numbers in terms of wages and hours finall
y cleared the mists from algebra for me, and actually made it comprehensible. Now I’m top of my class and have taken over payroll from Grandpa at the store, since Mom’s falling out with Grandpa means he’s not welcome there anymore.

  “You get good deals, anyway?” Grandpa wanted to know, referring to what I’d bought with the money I’d borrowed from him.

  I shot him an aggravated look.

  “Gramps,” I said. “Come on. It’s me you’re talking to.”

  “Just making sure,” Grandpa said.

  He had the air-conditioning in the observatory on full blast, which was good because it was about nine million degrees outside, with the humidity as high as it could get without actually raining. In other words, a typical Indiana August day.

  “You transfer those funds from the savings account into checking like I told you to?” Grandpa wanted to know.

  “Of course.”

  “Because bills are due out beginning of the month.”

  “Grandpa, I know. I’ve got it covered.”

  Grandpa shook his head. He is very dapper-looking for his age, although he’s never gotten over the fact that he didn’t grow to be taller than five seven. I tell him not to worry, since that’s how tall Tom Cruise is and he did pretty well for himself—financially, anyway. Still, I suspect this is where I inherited my own lack of stature.

  But at sixty-nine, Gramps can play eighteen holes of golf and still stay awake all the way through the eleven o’clock news. He’s especially proud of his full head of (completely white) hair. He has a pretty decent mustache, too. It’s white as well. The whole time I was growing up, his mustache was stained yellow from the cigarettes he smoked. Up until he started going out with Kitty, anyway. Now it’s as white as snow.

  “How’s Darren working out?” Grandpa wanted to know. Darren’s the Indiana University student we hired for the Sunday and evening shifts at the store. He likes working at Courthouse Square Books since there are hardly ever any customers, and he can get a lot of homework done during his shifts.

  “Fine,” I said. “He reorganized the layaway shelf the other night and found a Steiff bear no one’s made payments on for an entire year. We put it back on the store shelves.”

  Grandpa clicked his tongue and went back to futzing with the sixty-inch telescope. Not that he knew what he was doing. Grandpa has NO interest in astronomy. He had to hire all these professors from Indiana University to help him design the observatory, and these grad students from there are getting college credit to run it. The only reason Grandpa decided to build an observatory in the first place is because he knows how much Jason loves looking at the stars, and he knows how much Kitty loves Jason. The whole thing is basically full-on sucking up to the woman he loves.

  I would build an observatory for Mark Finley. If, you know, he liked stars, too.

  “And how’s your mother? She doing all right?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “Another month to go before she pops.”

  “How are you going to be able to run the store,” Grandpa wanted to know, “and do this popularity thing at the same time, with your mom out of the picture for a while with this new little one?”

  “Easy,” I said. Grandpa is the only living soul on earth I’ve told about The Book. I even showed it to him. I had to, in order to get him to advance me the money. I didn’t tell him where I’d gotten it, though. The Book, I mean. I didn’t want him to think Kitty had used it to get him.

  All he had to say about it was, “What do you care what Sharon Moffat’s daughter thinks of you? That girl wouldn’t know a T-bill if one came up and bit her on the derriere.”

  But I explained to him that this was something I simply had to do—the same way he’d had to build an observatory for the town, even though no one—with the possible exception of Jason, who has tried, unsuccessfully, to start an astronomy club every year in school since the third grade when he saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the Sunday Afternoon Movie and never quite got over it—actually wanted one.

  But, as Grandpa put it, most people are too stupid to know what they really want, anyway.

  “I still don’t like it,” Grandpa said. He was done doing what it was he’d felt was so vitally important to get done at the observatory that morning, and started heading toward the door I’d just come through, me following along behind him. “Kissing up to a little stinker who’s done nothing but try to make your life miserable.”

  “I won’t be kissing up to her, Gramps,” I said. “Trust me. Besides, the whole thing was my fault in the first place.”

  “What?” Grandpa glanced at me as he threw open the door—letting the unbearable heat flood over us like spilled soup—looking annoyed. “You tripped! That’s all! Somebody’s got to go through the rest of her life being made fun of for tripping when they’re twelve? It’s ridiculous.”

  I smiled at him tolerantly. Grandpa has no idea what it’s like to be a teenage girl. When his only child—Mom—was growing up, he’d hardly been around, since he’d been out running the farm. Watching me go through my own hideously painful adolescence has been his only experience in the Hidden Aggression of Teenage Girls and the Pain It Can Cause.

  “There’s your mother,” Grandpa said, nodding toward the church doors, which you can see from the steps to the observatory. Even though a lot of people were streaming out of St. Charles at that moment, it wasn’t hard to miss my family, primarily because of my mother’s enormous stomach. But also because of the noise my brothers and sisters were making, which you could probably have heard from miles away.

  Grandpa stopped going to church after Grandma died, according to my mother, which is yet another bone of contention between them. But Grandpa says he can worship God just as well on the ninth hole as he can in church—if not better, since he’s closer to nature, and therefore God, on the golf course than he is in our pew at St. Charles. I fear for his immortal soul, and all, but I figure if God really is all-forgiving, like Father Chuck is always telling us, Gramps will be all right (and, considering what I was doing last night, so will I).

  Fortunately for Grandpa, Kitty isn’t exactly the most religious person, either. They’re having a civil ceremony, performed by one of Greene County’s judges, outside at the country club a week from today, instead of a church wedding.

  “Right,” I said. “I’d better go. You getting nervous yet?”

  “Nervous?” Gramps threw me a reproachful look as he locked up. “What’ve I got to be nervous for? I’m marrying the prettiest gal in Greene County.”

  “I mean about having to stand up in front of all those people next Sunday,” I said dryly.

  “Jealous,” Grandpa said decidedly. “That’s what they’re all going to be of me. ’Cause she’s marrying ME and not them.”

  The best part is, Gramps really believes this. He thinks the sun rises and sets on Katherine T. Hollenbach. Which I believe is due entirely to her having followed the instructions in The Book. The two of them—Grandpa and Kitty—have known each other since THEY went to Bloomville High School, back in the fifties. Only Grandpa says Kitty didn’t even know he was alive back in those days, because she was so pretty and popular, and he was so little and shy. She didn’t even acknowledge his existence until last year, when they met at the exclusive condo community they both moved to on the lake, Gramps after he got his I-69 money, Kitty after deciding she’d had enough of life in town.

  “Any sign of weakening on her part?” Grandpa asked with a nod toward my mother. Mom’s boycotting his wedding on principle, not because she doesn’t like Kitty—although she’s not exactly her favorite person in the world. Mom is not the only person to have pointed out to Grandpa that Kitty never glanced his way before he got his recent financial windfall. But Grandpa doesn’t seem to care one bit about this—mostly because she’s still so mad about the Super Sav-Mart thing.

  She’s letting the rest of us go, though…which is a good thing, since I’m Kitty’s maid of honor, Pete’s one of Gramps’s best
men (Jason’s the other one), and Catie and Robbie are the flower girl and ring bearer (Sara was judged too young to do anything).

  I like Kitty a lot, and not just because everyone likes her (except my mom). But also because she’s always kept my most shameful secret—which isn’t that shameful now, because I realize it was just part of growing up.

  But at the time, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I had been invited by Jason to spend the night—way back in kindergarten, when it was still okay for girls and boys to have slumber parties together—while his parents were out of town and his grandmother was taking care of him.

  One thing I had always admired about Jason’s parents is that they knew enough to stop at just one kid—unlike my own parents, who just keep having more and more—so they can afford to do things like take romantic vacations to Paris together without Jason, and install a pool in their backyard (except, of course, whenever I complain about this to my mother, she’s always like, “Well, which of you kids would you suggest I shouldn’t have had?” which is a mean question, because of course I love my brothers and sisters).

  (Though I don’t think anyone would miss Pete much.)

  Anyway, it had been my first overnight visit, and I guess I’d had a little too much excitement—or possibly Coke, which Kitty had given us, and of which I’d consumed far too much, having never been allowed to have Coke before, except on very special occasions like Thanksgiving and Easter—and I’d wet my underpants in what I’d assumed was the dead of night (although it had probably only been around midnight).

  I remembered lying there in my wet panties, going, “What do I do now?” Jason was asleep, but even if he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have told him what had happened. I was convinced I’d never have heard the end of it. “Wet the bed like a baby!” he’d cry. Well, knowing Jason, he probably wouldn’t have said any such thing. But in my feverish four-year-old brain, I was convinced he wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore if he knew I was a bed wetter. Also, of course, it would come up every time I beat him at anything: “Well, okay, maybe you’re better at Candy Land, but at least I’m not a bed wetter.”