Getting the Boot (21 page)

Abby didn't care—that much—though, because being in this cramped, crowded plane and navigating her way through secret, coded language and pseudoexotic snacks was the first step toward that hot-fudge-sundae lifestyle she so craved. She was on her way to London. To
live
.

A thrill ran through her just thinking about it. She'd been accepted to the S.A.S.S. program—a program that encouraged high-school girls to study abroad—then she'd been approved for admittance to City College, a university based in the eastern area of the city, for a ten-week summer session. Ten weeks. In London, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. London was all about cool, sophisticated accents, fancy meals like “high tea,“ live theater that rivaled Broadway, actual royalty complete with palaces and everything—and she'd be right in the middle of it.

Was she scared? No way.

She was terrified.

The most ironic part about the trip was that the whole thing had been her parents' idea in the first place.
They
had been the ones who'd found the S.A.S.S. program and decided that it sounded like “an opportunity not to be missed.”
They
had been the ones who
insisted
that Abby apply. The same people who got on Abby when she received an A-minus rather than an A on a paper or a test (which for the record, was pretty damn rare). The same people who acted shocked when Abby professed a desire to see a movie with her friends rather than play Boggle on family night. It was these two people who had driven Abby to elaborate measures of faux rebellion such as talking on her phone from inside her bedroom closet when it was later than 10 P.M., her “phone curfew.”
Those people
actually
wanted her to move to England. For ten whole weeks.

Ultimately, Abby's reasons for wanting to stay and her parents'
highly
uncharacteristic reasons for wanting to ship her off to a different time zone were one and the same. One reason, to be precise. A boy reason.

A boy named James.

Back in November, Abby would have given anything not to be separated from James, which was obviously why her parents had insisted on doing just that. They pulled out that “not until you're seventeen” bull, which Abby was pretty sure they'd made up on the spot just because she'd happened to take an interest in the opposite sex. She was too young to date, they proclaimed, but paradoxically, she was old enough to be thrown to the proverbial wolves for the summer. The British wolves.

Abby had used every tactic she could possibly conceive of: She cried, begged, pleaded, suffered weeks without talking to her parents or eating (in their presence, anyway). . . to no effect. Abby loved James, James was bad news, Abby was going to England.

At the eleventh hour, Abby had finally come to terms with the tragic situation and used her rather prodigious babysitting savings to buy James a plane ticket over to England to visit her halfway through the summer term. There was
no way
that she was going to spend the entire summer apart from the boy she loved.

It was funny how things could change so dramatically, so quickly, Abby thought.

She took a sip of her water and broke off a tiny piece of her biscuit. It was hard and bland, like one might expect of a cookie that was called a “digestive.” It tasted of vanilla—chalky, gritty vanilla.

But that was okay.

Because in seven hours—
wait, no, six and a half
, she realized, glancing at her watch—Abby's whole world was going to be a giant, gooey pint of New York Superfudge Chunk.

Well, except in London, of course.