The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Kristen Tracy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tracy, Kristen.

  The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter / by Kristen Tracy. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Eleven-year-old Bessica’s plans to begin North Teton Middle School as a new person begin to fall apart even before school begins.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89738-2

  [1. Self-perception—Fiction. 2. Best friends—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Middle schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Idaho—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.T68295Re 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010004844

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For my mom, Pat Tracy,

  who once made me

  the fiercest set of bear paws

  this world has ever seen.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to all my friends and family for your kindness and support: Dad, Julie, Joe (and awesome family), Mom, Doreen Leonard, Ulla Frederiksen, Michelle Willis, Rachel Howard, Cory Grimminck, Amy Stewart, Richard Katrovas, Mark de la Viña, Christopher Benz, Kathie Velazquez, Tracy Roberts, my gardening friends on Alcatraz, and Bunny. I keep getting older and you’re still there. Also, there are more of you. It’s fantastic. Thanks to Sara Crowe, my agent, for “getting” me and for helping my stories find their way into the world. Both matter. Thank you to the talented team at Delacorte Press who take my doc files and turn them into gorgeous children’s books. It’s a thrilling process that I tend to appreciate best once it’s over. And thank you so much to my amazing editor, Wendy Loggia, who supports, appreciates, and nurtures all my zaniness, bear plots included. How did I get so lucky?

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Things to Do Before Middle School Starts

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  About the Author

  Destroy my collaborative diary

  Get a brand-new look

  Buy school supplies

  Hang out with Sylvie

  Spy on Noll Beck (when possible and convenient)

  Find Grandma a new boyfriend (preferably one with a boat)

  stared into the dark, cavernous hole with my best friend, Sylvie. I didn’t know what had made the hole or how far down it went or if its bottom contained dangerous sludge. To be honest, neither Sylvie nor I cared that much about holes. The less we knew about this one, the better.

  “I’m not sure,” Sylvie said.

  This was the sort of thing Sylvie Potaski always said. She wasn’t the kind of person who would go down in history for leading a revolution where people burned flags or bras. She was the kind of person who would check with other people (several times) about what they thought about burning flags or bras. Some people might consider this a shortcoming. But I didn’t mind it. Or that she repeatedly licked her fingers after she peeled an orange. Sylvie Potaski was my best friend.

  Sylvie stopped looking into the hole and started looking at our diary again. Every page was full. This wasn’t because of me. It was Sylvie. She was detail-oriented. She couldn’t just write in the diary that she saw a tree. She’d tell you how green the leaves were and how brown the bark was and how much shade the tree gave and if there happened to be a bird in it. I’d read every word she wrote in our diary. And she’d read every word I wrote. Because our diary was collaborative, which meant that we each paid for half of it and we both got to use it.

  Writing in it had been a lot of fun. We’d passed the diary back and forth for three years. At one point, we thought about keeping a blog instead, but then we saw a story on the news about two girls in Utah who had one, and they posted lots of pictures of their cats, and they got over one hundred thousand hits a month. Sylvie and I didn’t want one hundred thousand hits a month, so we kept writing in our diary.

  Except it wasn’t fun anymore. Because I didn’t want anybody finding what we’d written. Some of it was stupid. Actually, a ton of it was. And I regretted that. Especially the stuff I wrote in third grade about liking Kettle Harris. He turned out to be such a dork. And if I went to middle school and somebody managed to find written proof that I liked a dork, I’d be bummed for the rest of my life. And ostracized. Which was what popular kids did to dorks and people who liked dorks. It basically meant that you lived inside an imaginary trash can and that nobody talked to you.

  Sylvie held our diary over the hole, but she didn’t drop it. I hadn’t expected this event to take all afternoon. I sighed. I wanted to go to the big irrigation canal across from my house and observe the flotsam, and then go inside and watch television, and then beg my grandmother to drive us to the mall.

  “What if I lock it inside something in my bedroom?” Sylvie asked.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” I said. “Anytime you lock something up, you’re just begging for it to get stolen.” That was why criminals robbed bikes from bike racks. Didn’t she know that?

  “Sylvie, remember the pages where we left our toe prints and then wrote poems to our toes?”

  Sylvie blinked. Sylvie was always blinking.

  “And remember all those awful pictures we drew of our classmates with fart bubbles near their butts?”

  Sylvie nodded. Those particular drawings occurred in fourth grade. The fart bubbles had been my idea. But she was the one who sketched them.

  “The diary needs to disappear. When we show up at North Teton Middle School, we can’t be haunted by our pasts. We need to walk down those halls like two brand-new people.”

  Sylvie looked up at me and did more blinking.

  “Just toss it,” I said.

  She hesitated.

  “But what if one day when I’m old, like thirty, I want to look back at how I was feeling and thinking when I was in elementary school?”

  “That will never happen,” I said. “Trust me.”

  I wanted the diary out of my life. In addition to its being embarrassing, I thought Sylvie had grown too attached to it. Sylvie held the notebook tightly as she stared down into the hole. The ground where we stood was about to have a storage lot built on top of it for farm equipment. And after that happened, after it
was covered with a thick coat of cement, after front-end loaders and tractors and hay balers were parked there, our diary would be buried forever.

  “Can I keep one part that means a lot to me?” she asked.

  And even though I wanted her to throw the whole thing away, I also had a soft heart. And so I said, “Okay. But it has to be ten pages or less.”

  Sylvie opened the diary and tugged at a group of pages in its center. After she ripped them out, she folded them carefully and put them in her back pocket.

  “What did you save?” I asked.

  “My drawings of the ocean,” Sylvie said.

  And that really surprised me. Because those drawings weren’t so hot. When Sylvie finally dropped the diary into the hole, the pages fluttered in the breeze like a bird trying to fly. Except it didn’t fly. The diary dropped like a rock. Lower and lower. Bonk. Bonk. Bonk. It smacked against the side of the hole as it tumbled. And then the sounds ended.

  “Kiss it goodbye,” I said. “That thing is in China now.”

  I walked away from that hole in the ground, feeling like I’d solved something important.

  “We’re about to have the best year of our lives,” I said.

  I hurried down the trail, back to the sidewalk. I pulled on Sylvie’s hand for her to follow me. Pine trees and sycamores climbed into the sky around us. I stepped out into the sun and took a deep, victorious breath.

  “We need to sign up for everything,” I said. “Yearbook. Cheerleading. Math Club. Chorus. Book-of-the-Month Club.”

  “Okay,” Sylvie said.

  I turned around and grabbed Sylvie by the shoulders. “I feel so happy right now I could sing.” But I didn’t. I figured I could wait until chorus started. I also wanted to skip. All the way home. But I didn’t do that either. Once we got to my front door, I invited Sylvie in for cookies and comic books. And she followed me. Sylvie always followed me.

  Then we downed a few macaroons and laughed.

  “So you don’t miss our diary at all yet?” Sylvie asked.

  “No,” I said. And I was surprised she even brought it up. Because she still had her ten pages of ocean drawings. Then I pounded a macaroon flat as a pancake and tossed it outside for the birds to eat.

  “Getting rid of that thing was the best move we ever made,” I said.

  And when I said those words, I meant them. Even though they were completely wrong. The rest of that day I felt very good about my life and middle school and my new shoes. Grandma had bought them online, and the UPS man had delivered them yesterday. And they weren’t like regular shoes. These had detachable tongues. They were held in place with Velcro. And you could rip them out and put in different ones. You could also go without tongues. But that didn’t look so hot. The shoes came with twelve different colored tongues. Grandma said they would match any shirt I owned. She called them fashion forward.

  And because I was eleven, and hadn’t experienced irreversible tragedy or bone-crushing disappointment, I thought I could graduate from elementary school and start middle school and remain a happy person who enjoyed life.

  But that wasn’t how things happened. On that fateful day, when I politely asked Sylvie Potaski to dispose of our collaborative diary in a hole, unbeknownst to me, I, Bessica Lefter, had doomed myself. Now all the good things in my life were about to turn bad.

  t was the day after the diary dump, and my mom and grandma and I were shopping for back-to-school supplies.

  “I really wish Sylvie were here,” I said.

  My mother looked over my list and then jerked free an empty cart from a long line of empty carts in front of the store. “Did you know that you need a pocket dictionary?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m very excited about the pocket dictionary,” I said. “I’m hoping to find a pink one.”

  Grandma patted my shoulder. “If you can’t find a pink one, you can always decorate it with pink stickers.”

  “That’s a creative idea,” I said. Then I smiled an enormous smile. Because I realized that after shopping for school supplies, I might be able to talk my mom into taking me to Sticker Street, the best sticker store in Idaho!

  As soon as we walked into Target, my stomach flipped with excitement. The aisles were packed with back-to-school shoppers. I looked around for people I knew. But I didn’t see anybody familiar. I just saw a bunch of kids I didn’t recognize with their moms. I followed my mother as she zoomed the cart toward the binder section.

  As soon as we turned the corner, I knew I had to call Sylvie. There were two solid rows of binders to choose from. Fat ones. Red ones. Sparkly ones. Tiny ones. Binders with buckles. Binders with straps. Binders with Velcro. Binders with snaps.

  “Mom!” I said, pulling her and the cart to a stop. “I need to call Sylvie.”

  “Why?”

  I grabbed her hands. “Because I need to know what kind of two-inch binder she bought so I can buy the same one.”

  “That’s precious,” Grandma said.

  I glanced at her and realized that she had her phone flipped open and was texting somebody, which meant that I couldn’t use it to call Sylvie. Because my mom made Grandma and me share a cell phone. Grandma’s thumbs tapped happily across her keypad. I let go of my mother.

  “Are you texting Willy again?” I asked. “Doesn’t Willy have a job? Doesn’t Willy do anything besides text and be texted?”

  Ever since Grandma had joined an online dating service last year and met Willy, she seemed to be in contact with him a hundred times a day. It got on my nerves. Because she turned out to be a huge cell-phone hog. I regretted ever teaching her how to text.

  “Leave your grandma alone,” my mother said. And then she started walking down the binder aisle again.

  “One day I am going to need my own cell phone, and that day might be today,” I said.

  “I’m almost finished,” Grandma said.

  I watched her bump into a lady carrying a stack of empty plastic cartons.

  “You are not the kind of person who should text and walk,” I said.

  Grandma snapped her phone shut. “He is so special.”

  I did not want to hear about how special she found Willy. “I don’t know. Don’t you watch television? What if Willy is a maniac?”

  My mother turned around and wagged her finger at me. “We’ve met Willy four times. He’s not a maniac. You know that.”

  “Sometimes people hide their maniac side,” I said, wagging my finger back at her.

  The phone buzzed again. Grandma flipped it open and smiled. Then she snapped it shut. “I’m ready,” she cheered. “Let’s shop till we pop.”

  I was so glad that Willy lived in New Mexico and not Idaho.

  “Can I use the phone now?” I asked. Grandma handed it to me and it was still warm from her texting.

  “Don’t you want to get your own unique binder?” my mom asked. She held up one with a picture of a mare.

  “No,” I said. “Sylvie and I should match. We enjoy that.” Normally, Sylvie matched what I bought. But because Sylvie and her mom had already gone shopping, we had to do it the other way around.

  My mother picked up another binder. This one had a unicorn and a rainbow.

  “Mom,” I said. “Sylvie and I hate unicorns!”

  “What about rainbows?” Grandma asked. “Remember, we can cover up anything you don’t like with stickers.”

  I shook my head and dialed Sylvie’s number.

  “Talk with Sylvie,” my mom said. “I’ll be in the next aisle selecting pencils and erasers.”

  She left the cart with me and Grandma, and I waited for Sylvie to answer her phone. Then I got straight to the reason I’d called.

  “Sylvie! I’m at Target and there’s a mountain of binders and I’m stuck. There’s one with a dog that I like. What did you get?”

  “I got the two-inch binder with the lighthouse,” Sylvie said.

  I pawed through a pile at eye level.

  “I see one with a fort,” I said.

&
nbsp; “No. Mine has a lighthouse and a bird and the ocean. There isn’t a fort. Not even on the back. I’m looking at it right now.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Had Sylvie bought the last one with a lighthouse? Neither one of us had ever been to a lighthouse. When did she start liking those?

  “I don’t see it. I think I might get the one with the dog.”

  “I remember that one,” Sylvie said. “It was cute.”

  I inspected it a little bit more. I feared it was a little too cute. My mom came back carrying a large pack of mechanical pencils. And another mom and her daughter rounded the corner behind her.

  “Oh my heck!” I whispered into the phone. “You’ll never guess who’s in the binder aisle with me.”

  “You sound freaked out. Is it Noll Beck?” Sylvie asked.

  That was a good guess. Noll Beck was my neighbor, and even though he was fifteen and I was only eleven, I was madly in love with him.

  “No,” I said. I whispered so quietly I could hardly hear my own voice. “It’s Malory Mahoney the Big Plastic Phony.”

  Sylvie gasped. “What’s she doing?”

  “Picking out a binder,” I whispered.

  “Which one?” Sylvie asked.

  “That dog is very cute,” my mom said, pointing to the binder I was holding. “Good choice.”

  I shook my head and set the binder back in the pile of other dog binders. “I’m still shopping,” I said.

  “What’s Malory doing now?” Sylvie asked.

  Sylvie and I couldn’t stand Malory. Because if you ever did anything wrong, even something small like chewing gum during class, she’d rat on you to the teacher, but then pretend like she hadn’t.

  I gasped into the phone. “She’s got the binder with the lighthouse!”

  Sylvie gasped too. “With a bird? And the ocean?”

  I nodded.

  “What’s wrong, Bessica?” my mom asked. “Why are you making that face?”

  “Hi, Bessica,” Malory said, waving at me.

  I dipped my chin down and said breathily into the phone, “Malory is talking to me.”

  “I know!” Sylvie said. “I can hear her.”

  “I gotta go,” I said. Then I flipped the phone shut and walked up to Malory.