Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PEACE

  CHAPTER ONE - BACK IN THESWIMMING POOL AGAIN

  CHAPTER TWO - PEASANTS AND ROYALTY

  CHAPTER THREE - THE COLOR OF CONFORMITY

  CHAPTER FOUR - HOW DO YOU GET A HAIRY-LEGGED BLONDE OUT OF THE BATHROOM?

  CHAPTER FIVE - WHY BE A BLONDE WHEN YOU COULD BE A BEIGE?

  CHAPTER SIX - SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

  CHAPTER SEVEN - WHEN I GROW UP, I’M MOVING TO SEATTLE

  CHAPTER EIGHT - PERCOLATE THIS

  CHAPTER NINE - LITTLE GIRLS DON’T DRINK BRANDY

  CHAPTER TEN - SWEET ENOUGH TO EAT

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - ONE-WAY TICKET TO HELL

  CHAPTER TWELVE - KIM-HUE LOVES WORKING ON MAUREEN’S FEET

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - CONSIDER YOURSELF LUCKY

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - JUST DO IT

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - BIG SISTERS DON’T TAG ALONG

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - BOOBS OVER BRAINS

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - FULL MOON

  LOVE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - THE BOOK OF COLE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - UNLEASH THE BEAST

  CHAPTER TWENTY - A LIFE OF FAITH DEMANDS ACTION

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - WHAT BEE FLEW UP YOUR BELL-BOTTOMS?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - DAG: DUTCH FOR “HELLO”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - THINGS UNSAID

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - DUCKY-WUCKY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - SOUP CANS AND STOCKINGS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - PASHMINA IS SO LAST YEAR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - SANTA’S LITTLE HELPERS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - WHITE BOYS DON’T GIVE NOOGIES (TO ME)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - WHO CARES WHAT BRAND YOUR JEANS ARE IF YOU DON’T HAVE A BUTT?

  CHAPTER THIRTY - RIPPLE IN STILL WATER

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - P.S.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - IN THE BEGINNING

  BABY DUCKS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - JED CLAMPETT KICKS WONDER WOMAN’S BUTT

  CHAPTER THIRT Y-FOUR - WHAT A WAY TO GO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - THE BALLAD OF TED CLAMPETT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - Y’ALL COME BACK NOW, Y’HEAR?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - LOVE THE SINNER, HATE THE SIN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - REAL GIRLS WEAR SNEAKERS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - NOTHING IS MORE TACKY THAN BEING TACKY

  CHAPTER FORTY - VONZELLE IS NOT A COCKATOO

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - LUST IS A LOADED GUN

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - “FOREVER” CAN BE COMPLICATED

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE - A TRUE SOUTHERN BELLE IS A BULLDOZER DISGUISED AS A ...

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR - DON’T PAWN THE SILVER

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE - THREE HOT CHICKS

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX - LUCKY DUCK

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN - TRACY IS SO HILARIOUS

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT - HARD CANDY

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE - BYE-BYE BIRDIE

  CHAPTER FIFTY - DUCK , DUCK , GOOSE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE - BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO - WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS STAYS IN VEGAS

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE - THE NON-IRONIC LOVE BOODLE

  ALSO BY LAUREL MYRACLE

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  LET IT SNOW

  (WITH JOHN GREEN AND MAUREEN JOHNSON)

  THE FASHION DISASTER

  THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

  KISSING KATE

  TTYL

  TTFN

  L8R G8R

  BLISS

  RHYMES WITH WITCHES

  HOW TO BE BAD

  (WITH E. LOCKHART AND SARAH MLYNOWSKI)

  DUTTON BOOKS | A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by the Penguin Group | Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. | Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) | Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England | Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) | Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) | Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India | Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) | Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa | Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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

  Copyright © 2009 by Lauren Myracle

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Myracle, Lauren, date.

  Summary: Fifteen-year-old Carly’s summer volunteer experience makes her feel more real than her life of privilege in Atlanta ever did, but her younger sister starts high school pretending to be what she is not, and both find their relationships suffering.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-05715-5

  [1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3.

  Individuality—Fiction. 4. Atlanta (Ga.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M9955Pec 2009 [Fic]—dc22 2008034221

  Published in the United States by Dutton Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014 www.penguin.com/youngreaders

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  TO SISTERS

  IN ALL THEIR GLORIOUS FORMS

  (AND YES, SOUL-SISTERS

  ARE MOST DEFINITELY INCLUDED).

  SISTERS

  MAKE THE WORLD

  GO ROUND.

  “Life is short and we have never too much time for

  gladdening the hearts of those

  who are traveling the dark journey with us.

  Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind!”

  —HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL

  PEACE

  August 15

  Hola, Anna!!!!!

  Only one week until I come home—wh-hoo! I can’t wait, although there are things I’ll miss about the wilds of Tennessee. It’s been intense, I tell ya. Every morning we hike thirty minutes to the ridge of Lookout Mountain where our section of the trail starts. Then we put in an eight-hour day leveling the ground and chopping away undergrowth.

  EIGHT HOURS, Anna. Are you getting that?

  Are you fully appreciating the level of actual WORK I’ve been doing during this “fun summer enrichment experience”? Mom would die. Then again, so would you, my little ducky-wucky.

  JK. LOL. Enter. (Heh heh, do I sound like Peyton?)

  But the trail is almost done, thank God, because my boots are completely trashed. Yesterday I propped them against a campfire rock and took a picture of them. No people, just my work boots, all broken in and covered with mud. I am so tough.
/>   It feels good, though. I mean, it also sucks, because it’s work, and it makes me tired, and sometimes, as I’m heaving a rock or getting all mucky cutting through the creek, I find myself spacing out and wishing I were at home watching TV Land. With a big bowl of Doritos. And a Cherry Coke. And maybe ice cream . . .

  Yes, I fantasize about TV and junk food. Yes, I am that girl.

  But—and don’t say oh, there goes Carly, being weird—there’s a part of me that’s been, like, woken up while I’ve been here. Like, sometimes I’ll be off by myself, with NO CIVILIZATION AT ALL, just birds and the creek and the wind rustling in the trees, and I’ll think, Wow.

  And then I’ll wonder if a bear’s secretly watching and thinking I look like a Dorito, and I’ll come out of my daze.

  But I do like it. The stillness.

  And you? Been lounging around the pool, sipping daiquiris and eating bonbons? Ah well, we can’t all be as studly as me. I have muscles, by the way. Real, live muscles. I’m probably in the best shape I’ve ever been in, only it’s weird, because there aren’t any mirrors, so I can’t tell for sure. It blows my mind that I’ve gone for an entire month and a half without seeing myself.

  But it feels real, Anna. In fact, my goal for sophomore year is to hold on to this realness. Trees, sky, rocks—they’re solid, you know? (Well, not the sky. But you know what I mean.) Being here makes me realize how fake our Atlanta life can be. Buckhead especially. Holy Redeemer even more especially. I don’t want to fall back into all that.

  You, on the other hand! My little sister who is finally going to be a FRESHMAN!!! You won’t be a kid anymore, sweetcakes. Is that freaky or what? We’ll see each other in the halls! And during assemblies! And of course in P.E. Since I’m such agenerous sister that I waited a whole year so I could take it with you! But hey, someone’s gotta be there to look after you—especially when it comes time for the swimming unit. It would be a real drag if you drowned.

  JK. LOL. Enter.

  Okay, gotta go, because Park Ranger Chris is tromping down the hill. Park Ranger Chris is forty years old, stares at all the girls’ butts, and brings us candy. Mmm, candy . . .

  Peace out,

  Carly

  P.S.A water moccasin has taken up residence in the pond by our camp, so I haven’t washed my hair in days.

  P.P.S. Or bathed.

  P.P.P.S. And I probably won’t get a chance to until I’m home, so I might be a bit stinky when I first see you. Possibly a lot stinky. Is it a bad sign that I have fungus sprouting all over me?

  P.P.P.P.S. CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU, SIS! GET THOSE HUGGING ARMS READY!!!

  CHAPTER ONE

  BACK IN THESWIMMING POOL AGAIN

  I’m out by our pool with my sister Anna and my best friend, Peyton. Anna and Peyton are working on their tans; I, on the other hand, am carving a “peace” symbol into a potato. It’s not that I’m against reclining on chaise lounges and being a lazy butt, but I feel the need to do something that reminds me of my granola-girl stint on Lookout Mountain. Why? Because being back in Atlanta is weird. Good, but weird.

  I’m superskinny, for one thing. I’ve always been skinnier than Anna, but now I’m model thin. Tiny thin. And I like it. Only wouldn’t you know it? While I was off getting skinny, Anna was busy going through her own transformation. Meaning, she grew boobs. Bursting-from-her-bikini, Hooters-esque boobs. During the six weeks I was gone, she went from being “cute little Anna” to the kind of girl guys drool over, and I don’t know whether to be jealous or not.

  Well, no. I am jealous, but I don’t want to be. She’s my little sister. I love her.

  But she looks really good.

  “Hey, Billy Bob,” Peyton says to me from her chaise longue. “Pass me some chew, will ya?”

  “Ha ha,” I say. Peyton’s pretending I’m a redneck because of my farmer’s tan, which she finds hilarious. She and Anna are uniformly golden, of course. “The preferred term is chaw, and sorry, don’t have a pinch to share.”

  Peyton laughs. Her redneck jokes so far have involved: pickup trucks, deer hunting, Confederate flags, and overalls. Now she’s on to chewing tobacco. “Seriously, B.B.—”

  “B.B.?”

  “For Billy Bob. It’s your new nickname.”

  “No way, that’s a horrible nickname.”

  “It is,” Anna agrees from her chaise longue. She’s wearing a pink polka-dot bikini that she didn’t own before I left. She has cleavage, also un-owned before I left. “It’s like a BB gun. You shouldn’t call someone a BB gun.”

  “Unless that someone looks like she owns one,” Peyton says.

  “Ooo-baby,” I hoot. “You take funny pills to get so funny?”

  “Seriously, Carly. Your tan I can forgive. Almost. But you have got to shave your legs, or I swear I’ll call you B.B. till kingdom comes.”

  “Oh, we’re going there again,” I say. Peyton’s been riding me about my legs since she first noticed their hairiness, which was within minutes of joining us by the pool. I’ve been trying to stay glib—they’re my legs, who cares?—but it’s getting to me.

  “Even rednecks shave their legs,” she says.

  “Well, girl rednecks,” Anna clarifies.

  My eyes fly to her. Is Anna siding with Peyton?

  “Everyone knows you have this driving need to be a free spirit or whatever,” Peyton says to me. I could really do without her attitude, which is annoyingly patronizing. “Like roughing it in the woods for six weeks when you could have done that sweet internship at the Cloister.”

  She eyes me meaningfully. She had issues before I left about the fact I turned down the Cloister position, and apparently, she still has issues now. But the only reason she wanted me to work at the Cloister was so she could come ogle the hot rich guys and take advantage of the gourmet dessert bar.

  “I didn’t want to work at the Cloister,” I say. “The Cloister is full of the same overprivileged socialites as Buckhead, only in swimsuits.” Buckhead is the part of Atlanta we live in, where everyone has fancy cars, backyard pools, and maids. Yes, maids. And the maids are usually black, and wear crisp white maid uniforms, and it seems so wrong to me. Though Mom’s weary response to that is, “Well, do you think they’d rather be jobless?”

  “Oh, Carly,” Peyton says, adopting a here-we-go-again tone that’s scarily similar to Mom’s. “What you fail to realize is that while you see socialites in swimsuits and think, ‘Yuck,’ everyone else on the planet thinks, ‘Ahhh, the good life. Sure wish I were playing shuf fleboard and nibbling buttered crackers.’”

  “Plus, I was only offered the Cloister job because Dad knows the owner,” I say. “I didn’t want a Dad job. I wanted a me job.”

  “Which you didn’t even get paid for,” Peyton says dismissively. She sits forward on her chaise longue. “But, Carly, back to your legs. What I’m saying is that—in general—we accept your weirdness. Right, Anna?”

  “Sometimes,” Anna says.

  “We accept that you’re not into makeup—”

  “No, you don’t,” I say.

  “—just as we accept your extremely unnatural aversion to J.Crew. Although I ask you: What’s not to like about J.Crew?”

  “Besides the brain-numbing overload of pink and lime green? Besides the tiny printed whales?”

  Peyton shakes her head, her eyes full of disappointment. “It is very sad that you can’t appreciate the beauty of tiny printed whales. But as I said, you march to your own drum.” She leans over and plucks my potato from me. She places it peeling-side-down on the flagstone and takes my hands. “Only, sweetie? There comes a point when the drum marching goes too far.”

  “And you’ve reached it,” Anna says, giggling.

  Oh my God, Anna is siding with Peyton. I can’t believe it. Last night when I first showed Anna my hairy legs, she was impressed, if somewhat horrified.

  “Wow,” she’d said, tentatively running her hand up my shin. “I could never not shave my legs, even if I wanted to.” Then she asked wha
t Roger was going to think, and I told her he wouldn’t bat an eye, which is true, because Roger is awesome that way. And also, he’s Dutch. Everyone knows that Europeans are cooler than Americans when it comes to hairy legs. For that matter, when it comes to hairy . . . everything.

  “Just swear you’ll shave before Monday,” Peyton says. “’Kay?”

  Monday is the day school starts at Holy Redeemer, a “Christian Preparatory School for Girls and Boys.”

  “No,” I tell Peyton, jerking my hands from hers.

  “Carly,” she says.

  “Peyton,” I reply.

  “It’s gross.”

  “It’s not gross. It’s natural. My crew leader, Sydney, stopped shaving her legs when she started college. She goes to Wesleyan. She says no one there even notices.”

  “Yeah, and she probably kisses girls, too.”

  “Peyton . . .”

  Why is she being like this? I haven’t seen her for six weeks, and instead of reminding me of all the good things about being home, she’s doing the exact opposite. “There’s no rule that says you have to shave your legs. And there’s no rule that says that if you don’t, you’re a lesbian.”

  Peyton adopts a singsong voice. “If it looks like a lesbo and it smells like a lesbo . . .”

  Anna laughs, then claps her hand over her mouth.

  For a second I almost wish I were back on Lookout Mountain. I don’t really, because six weeks of camping out and eating sardines for protein was plenty. But suddenly I don’t want to be here, either.

  I stare at the pool. My vision blurs, as does the sun-sparkled water.

  “Carly?” Anna says uncertainly.

  I don’t respond.

  “I’m kidding,” Peyton says. “I’m fully, completely kidding, Carly. I know you’re not a lesbo.”