A Novel Idea (3 page)

“Norah! Where’s Mom?” she gasped. Then she grabbed me by the shoulders. “Have you seen my new satin-trimmed Aqua tank? Did you steal it?”

“Yeah, Stace.” I shrugged out of her grasp. “All this time, I’ve been waiting for a chance to snatch your new top. Now I have it in my evil clutches and I’m never giving it back. Heh, heh, heh. “I rolled my eyes.

“Shut UP, Norah. Mom! MOM!” Stacey tore toward the kitchen just as our mother emerged carrying a pasta strainer and a pair of galoshes, as if the two items actually went together.

“Stacey Bloom, your shrieking is liable to puncture somebody’s eardrums,” Mom said. Then she pushed her enormous glasses up to her forehead and glanced at me. “Oh, Norah. Have you been here all this time?”

“I guess,” I said, gazing around our living room. Sometimes I can’t believe I live here. The only books on the shelves are science encyclopedias and medical journals. A photograph of Einstein sits above the fireplace. There are no novels or paintings in sight. If we Blooms didn’t all look alike, I’d swear Stacey and I were adopted—from different families, of course.

I know I shouldn’t complain. Scott’s parents are divorced, and, even though that gives him a lot of freedom, he says it kind of sucks that they’re never around.

But sometimes I think if would be okay if my family was a little less … around.

“What’s the big deal about this top, anyway?” I asked Stacey.

She turned on me, and I noticed that her face was perfectly made up—raspberry lip gloss, sparkly blue eyeshadow, rosy blusher. Typical. I barely know how to use a mascara wand, and my baby sister is a mini makeup maven.

“I’m going to the movies with Dylan. In, like, ten minutes. He hasn’t seen me in this tank yet. Plus, I
need
to wear pink because it’s Valentine’s Day—”

“Don’t remind me,” I said wearily.

“You don’t have a date?” Stacey narrowed her big brown eyes at me and said what Ms. Bliss must have been thinking: “Ew, Norah, you are
so
pathetic.”

Before I could reach for her throat, my dad stumbled out of the kitchen, trying to tamp down his mane of silver hair. Audre calls my dad’s hair “The Thing.” It really does have a life of its own. And it’s really embarrassing.

“Hi, dear,” Dad said to me. “Did you have fun at the movies?”

“
I’m
the one going to the movies, Daddy,” Stacey cried, shoving past me. “And I can’t find my new satin-trimmed tank top!”

“Oh,” Dad said, raising his bushy eyebrows. “Was it pink?”

“Yes …,” Stacey said, drawing a deep breath so she could prepare for a really good scream. Seeing what was coming, I started for the staircase.

“Gosh, Stace. I’m sorry,” Dad said. “I saw it in the laundry basket the other day so I lent it to my friend Hal, you know, the chemist? He needed to burn some material for an experiment—”

“BURN?” Stacey wailed.

“There’s no need to make such a fuss about the spaghetti sauce,” Mom said, coming back from whatever planet she’d been on.

I took the stairs two at a time, sprinted into my room, and locked the door behind me.

Ahh
.

My room is a little rectangle of heaven. The wall above my bed is covered in blackand-white photos I’ve taken of Audre and Scott, colorful spreads I’ve clipped from
Time Out New York
, and an abstract blue painting that Tuesday Levine, a friend from my
Blank Canvas
days, made me for my birthday. The wall across from my bed has built-in shelves that are stuffed with novels, kind of like my own mini Book Nook.

I unzipped my hoodie, flung it on my blue velour armchair, and skimmed my shelves. It’s a ritual: The first thing I do when I get home is read. Earlier, I’d been craving
Weetzie Bat
, but, after my hectic afternoon, I wanted something fluffier.

Speak
? Too depressing.
Sense and Sensibility
? Too old-fashioned.

The choice was clear: I’d have to turn to my hidden stash.

I knelt down and looked under my bed. There they were. In a pile. Waiting for me.

Here’s a secret: I love trashy paperback romances. Please don’t mock me until you hear me out.

Yes, they’re completely cheesy and have embarrassing titles like
Ravaged by Love
and
A Pirate’s Passion
. The covers alone make me blush: women spilling out of their gowns, bare-chested guys with flowing hair, candles, canopy beds, ruffles.
So
not me. Of course, I hadn’t told a soul—except for Audre—about my habit; it would kind of ruin my reputation as Literary Girl among my friends.

Not to mention my whole I-hate-romance stance.

But when I’m alone in my room, I love to indulge. The sweet, simple story lines are just yummy and comforting—like eating pistachio ice cream in a hot, bubbly bath. And, yeah, the sex scenes aren’t bad either. Jane Austen is awesome, but nobody ever gets it on in
her
books. I tried to tell myself that when—or
if
—I finally got a boyfriend, I’d magically get over my secret addiction.

Until then, there was really no point in resisting.

I reached under my bed and pulled out an old reliable:
Dangerous Embraces
, by my favorite romance author, Irene O’Dell. She is—according to the photo inside the book—a glamorous old lady dripping in diamonds and wrapped in fur. I don’t know how Irene does it, but she comes out with a brilliant new book every two months.
Dangerous Embraces
was a tale of forbidden desire between a milkmaid named Elsabetha and a count named Antonio. I sat cross-legged on my shag rug and was devouring the first line—
Elsabetha, a striking green-eyed beauty, had never known true love
—when my cell phone rang. It was Scott.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he said, around a mouthful of what had to be Veggie Booty—he lives on the stuff.

“Ha,” I snorted in response, glancing across my room to the full-length mirror. Explain to me how gangly limbs, fair skin, nearly-black eyes, and even darker hair add up to gorgeous. But ever since I met Scott in freshman-year algebra, he’s acted as my professional confidence booster. It’s probably because he has so much self-esteem, he feels the need to spread some of it around. He’s always telling me and Audre that he doesn’t understand how such sexy mamas as ourselves could possibly be single.

Really, it’s too bad that he’s gay.

“Are you holding up okay?” I asked him, leaning against my bed and peeking into
Dangerous Embraces
.

Scott’s boyfriend, Chad (whom Audre and I secretly nicknamed “Cheekbones” because, honestly, those were his only good features) cruelly dumped him one week before V-Day, after they’d been together for six months. Instead of slumping into suicidal depression, as I surely would have, Scott threw himself into more activities, like volunteering to organize the upcoming Spring Formal. That morning, catching me and Audre in the hall before class, he’d declared that he was officially “taking a break from love.” Scott has used this expression before, and his “break” usually lasts no more than, oh, two days. But this time, he seemed serious. I’d told him I fully supported the plan, since I was taking a break myself—a sixteen-year-long one.

“Naturally,” Scott replied, chomping away. “As long as I have you and Audre, events to plan, a steady supply of Veggie Booty, and copious amounts of alcohol, I’m golden.” He paused. “I was kidding about the alcohol part.”

I giggled. “God, I wish you lived in Brooklyn.” Like most Manhattanites, Scott rarely treks over to Park Slope; he sees all the outer boroughs as odd foreign lands—which Audre and I think is hilarious.

“Speaking of Brooklyn!” Scott exclaimed. “I hear it’s going to be the setting for a certain fabulous
book group
.”

“Why am I not surprised you know this?” I brushed a piece of lint off my black CBGB T-shirt. Scott is involved in every club known to man, so he gets the dirt on people before they’ve even
done
anything gossip-worthy. Still, despite Scott’s popularity, he shuns the Plums of Millay and prefers to hang with Audre, me, and our cluster of low-key, artsy friends. I knew he’d be into the idea of a book group.

In fact, Scott told me, not only was
he
into the book group—which he’d heard about from Audre earlier that evening—but he’d already gotten Tuesday Levine and another friend of ours, Olivia Ramirez, to sign up. He’d created fifteen flyers, posted the news on Friendster, and drafted a permission statement for Mr. Whitmore to sign in the morning.

This is why I love Scott: He’s crazy, but he gets things done. I was totally relieved that he’d taken care of all the messy details, and told him so.

“Oh, and I hope you don’t mind,” he added breezily. “I decided on a date: February twenty-fourth. Cool?”

“Uh, not so cool,” I said, my stomach tightening. Suddenly, the whole thing felt all too real. “Scott, that’s ten days away! I still need to—”

“What?” he challenged. “Everything’s set.”

I glanced down at
Dangerous Embraces
. “Well, we have to pick the books….” I trailed off, wondering, for one nutty moment, if the group could start off by reading some classic Irene O’Dell.

“Chill, baby,” Scott laughed. “
That
stresses you? You’re like a walking library. Just don’t assign us anything
too
smarty-pants, okay? I bet you’re in the middle of
War and Peace
right now. Or the collected works of James Joyce?”

I snapped
Dangerous Embraces
shut, feeling a stab of shame. “Close,” I lied. I
had
to keep my passion for paperback romances separate from my book group. This was, after all, an actual, serious, after-school club. My very own. And I couldn’t allow anything to ruin what could be the most important undertaking of my life.

Well, next to convincing my mom to let me buy that green army jacket I’d been eyeing on eBay.

“Does this look decent up there?” I asked Audre the next afternoon, pinning the final thumbtack into Scott’s flyer, and taking a step back. Scott had handed us a bunch of flyers at school that morning, and Audre and I had gone straight to the Book Nook that afternoon.

Now we studied the flyer’s bright yellow color and bold, block letters, which stood out against the cluttered bulletin board:

SEARCHING FOR SMART NEW FRIENDS … AND SOME JUICY READS? JOIN NORAH BLOOM’S BROOKLYN BOOK GROUP!

THE BOOK NOOK, PARK SLOPE, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 12 P.M. BRING JUST YOURSELF, YOUR IDEAS, AND LOTS OF ENTHUSIASM!

“Better than decent,” Griffin said, swinging by and playfully tugging Audre’s pouffy ponytail. “I’m impressed.”

“Our friend Scott did them,” Audre said, beaming at her love. “You’ll get to meet him next Sunday.”

“Thanks for the reminder,” Griffin said, grabbing an extra flyer from the stack at my feet. “I need to tell
my
friend about this.”

“Right,” Audre said, and shot me an impish grin. When Griffin had walked off, she sidled up to me and murmured, “Watch out, Nors. Between Griffin and his hot friend, we’re
so
getting ourselves some Book Nook nookie.”

I tried to grin back, but my stomach was in knots. My minor freak-out on the phone last night was slowly mushrooming into a full-on panic attack. What if Griffin’s hot friend brought still another friend? What if, like, five hundred total
strangers
showed up, all wanting to read different books? I’m not exactly good at meeting new people. I had a nightmarish vision of random teen, adult, and elderly readers gathered around a table at the Book Nook, their faces all turned eagerly toward me. What had I gotten myself into?

“Get a grip,” Audre whispered, grabbing my elbow. I realized I’d been reaching up to remove the flyer from the board.

“Sorry,” I whispered back. “I was just thinking, you know, that maybe this was a mistake.”

“Forget it,” Audre said, steering me away from the flyers. “It’s too late now. Griffin knows about it, and, thanks to Scott, so does half of Millay.”

Audre was right. The book group had been set into motion. There was nothing I could do but wait for that fateful Sunday to arrive.

Three

At noon on Sunday, February twenty-fourth, I walked into the Book Nook with just myself, my ideas, and lots of jangling nerves.

I’d meant to arrive earlier, but the morning had been hectic. I’d spent an hour choosing an outfit, finally settling on shredded jeans, my Belle & Sebastian T-shirt, a fuzzy blue cardigan, chandelier earrings, and blue Pumas. Next, I pulled out my cloth-bound journal and jotted down ideas for different books the group could discuss, like
Life of Pi
and
The Lovely Bones
. My first choice was
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
, which I’d seen on the shelf at the Book Nook—it had a cool orange paperback cover and a potentially good mystery story about an autistic kid. Still, I wasn’t sure if the others in the group would go for it.

I was finishing off my book list when Tuesday Levine called. Her rich exboyfriend had flown her to his parents’ house in Cabo San Lucas for the weekend to win her back, and now that they were together again, she was planning to spend all her free time glued to his side. I made a gagging motion at my mirror as I listened to my friend apologize for having to drop out of the book group. Tuesday has that kind of nauseating love karma, so I wasn’t too surprised. But I also couldn’t help wondering if her pulling out was a bad omen.