Last night a friend of mine told me that her seven-year-old daughter reads my blog. I couldn’t have been more delighted if she had told me that Salman Rushdie was a fan. Granted, her daughter has also read the entire Goosebumps series, but I feel like if you can hold a precocious seven-year-old’s attention even for a minute, you are doing something right.
This also opens up a huge YA market for me that I hadn’t previously thought about exploiting. From now on when I write, I will consider, “Would a young reader like this post?” Adjusting my audience should be easy. For example, how hard is it to tell you about my weekend in the language of the Sweet Valley Twins? Not hard at all it turns out.
After I got out of school at 5 o’clock on Friday, I called my friend Harper* Wakefield to meet me downtown for hotdogs and sodas. Harper wore sequined silver tap shoes and a white peasant dress. I wore jeans and boots because I am not as crazy for fashion as she is. She would sleep in tap shoes if she could whereas I am most comfortable in an oversized sweater. And how she finds anything in that messy closet of hers I’ll never know. Her mom must be furious! Anyway, when we rolled up to the concert in her stroller, Harper wanted to prance around in front of all the boys, but I wanted to go to a restaurant and talk quietly about books and newspapers with platonic friends. Because last weekend we did everything she wanted to do (ate cookies, went swimming, colored), she agreed to come with me to the restaurant, but only if she got a balloon first. Even though I knew she’d just lose it and make a big scene, I said okay. And what do you think happened? Sure enough, an hour later the balloon was floating up into the sky and Harper was crying about it. But even though she acts like a big baby sometimes, I can’t help but feel bad for her when she cries. She wears her heart on her sleeve, that one. Not like me. I’m all bottled up inside like champagne or a semi-automatic gun waiting to be triggered. Speaking of champagne, later that night I drank too many big-girl sodas and left my credit card at the bar for the second weekend in a row. I felt like such a nincompoop! Especially on Saturday morning when I discovered I had slept in a neighbor’s vegetable garden and my underpants were missing as well. Haha! What kind of silly mixed-up scenario would leave a girl without her underpants? My mother’s going to kill me when she finds out we have to make yet another trip to the Junior’s Department at the mall. I guess what I don’t own in sparkly tap shoes, I make up for in floral underpants! Haha!
*Names have not been changed to protect the innocent, because how innocent are you really at four years old? At 28 I’m hardly much older, and yet I don’t see anybody trying to protect me. Okay, I’m a little older. Eat my dust, little girls!