The Sunset Strip Diaries Read Online Free Page B

sweet day…my luck changed. Let me start by saying that spending so much time in my room had allowed me to figure out how to do my hair (Aqua Net sprayed into my bangs and the sides of my hair to make them stick out like puppy ears). It also gave me a lot of time to practice my eighties makeup and change things around a little (pale metallic pink lipstick and peach cream blush). I got some better fitting clothes in light pinks and light blues. I laid off the body spray. I got a little bit of a tan. I didn’t look as much like a Dance Party USA cast off.
    The next thing I knew….( drum roll )….my crush… Mark Poletti…. ( screams ) appeared to be interested in me!  ME! I thought… No…this can’t be! I like a guy and he…likes me BACK? This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me! No way!
    One of the popular girls, Christy Schmidt, tried making conversation with me. She said, “What do you think of Mark?”
    I don’t remember what I said- I probably said something safe, like, “He is nice.” I thought I must have misunderstood, that she couldn’t really be talking to me.
    Mark and I had lockers on the bottom row. His was only a few down from mine. I remember getting my books out of my locker and smelling something like cinnamon. I sniffed harder. Was that... aftershave I smelled? I looked over at Mark and he appeared all shy suddenly. He was no longer acting like the class clown, or the social guy cracking jokes. He looked at me and said, in a deepened voice, “Hi.” It dawned on me at that point that he did like me. My first thought was Cool! And my second thought was Shit. What do I do ! ? I was mortified at the thought of dating him. What if he wanted to kiss me? I didn’t know how to kiss! How would we see each other? I would have to tell my parents in order to go anywhere with him.
    I pictured myself in the backseat of our brown car, driving to his nice house over by the Country Club. My dad would act weird and embarrass me and my mom would get awkward. Screw that ! It would be so embarrassing! I didn’t see any way it could work. I knew I would be too frightened to kiss him because I couldn’t even talk to him without stuttering. I also decided that it was too embarrassing to let my parents know I liked a boy in my class. I shut down out of fear and decided to ignore him completely. I was so glad summer vacation was only weeks away, because I wouldn’t have to see him all summer, and the whole thing could blow over by fall. So I tried waiting it out and pretended I didn’t get the signals.
    On the last day of school, Mark came up to me, kind of defeated, and was like, “See you next year,” in his forced, low ‘man’ voice. He was looking me in the eyes. I wished I were not so chicken. I wished I would have gone for it. But I lost him, and moved on into the summer even more boy crazy. I daydreamed of him saying that line, over and over. It was like fuel, keeping me going, giving me something else to concentrate on besides my parents and the house of crazy. “Live to Tell” by Madonna was on MTV a lot around that time. I listened to it as if it was the deepest thing I had ever heard, like it was written by the Dalai Lama or something, while fantasizing about making out with Mark.
    My sister Becky was two years younger than I was and did not talk about boys, so I was often drifting off into my own world. It saddened me that boys were taking over my brain, but it was not controllable. I pictured doing it with Mark, but I didn’t know what that really entailed. I just knew white stuff came out and I pictured it like the white chocolate pouring out of the pan in the Nestle commercial, in slow motion. I thought it would be at least a half-gallon of liquid.
    That summer, Karen and I watched either a) The Roller Derby b) The Big Spin or c) this movie called Desert Bloom with Annabeth Gish. We watched and rewatched that damn movie over and over again, quoting the lines. I think I memorized that entire