#74 Kristy and the Copy Cat Part 1
Oh, Lord. Kristy and Karen are both making incredibly annoying faces and I kind of want to smack ‘em both. Kristy of the Cafeteria Comedy Hour looks like she’s just sniffed someone’s BO and needs some pearls to clutch, and Karen's smug sneer, like she’s a two-dimensional pictorial entity who is also fictional and I still just want her to shut the hell up. Also, I wish Hodges could have found a happy medium between putting people in clothes that are three sizes too big, and the shiny mile-long gams of California Girls.
Anyway, I know nada about sports, although I think I may know more than Ann and Nola. I’m not sure why I decided to snark this, except maybe to re-visit the peer dynamic-I’m not sure I ever read this as an adult, and definitely not since snarking Slam Book. Also, I do find it kind of amusing that there’s this whole run of “edgy” BSC books here- Dawn Commits Credit Card Fraud, Jessi’s Horrible [teacher supervised and sanctioned] Prank, Stacey’s Lie, Mary Anne Breaks the Rules [in the dullest way possible], and so on, leading, of course to the decadently glorious School Spirit Riots and Bad Girl Sock Wine incidents. Did Ann come up with these while starting to daydream about the possibilities of the California Diaries? Did some ambitious ghostie (lookin’ at you, Lerangis!) plead for something with actual stakes or conflict and get these instead?
I’m writing this mostly from the e-book, so I don’t have to tote the book with me, but my copy is really bad, so I will try to check any really bewildering moments against my copy when I’m at home. Or just point and laugh.
Chapter 1
Starts out gross, crashes directly into boring, and veers into nonsensical. K. Ron compares the school bus to a person with the flu, and then boasts about how awesome and efficient she is at using her school bus time to. . .name every member of her family in her head.
Her mind would be blown if she knew I did crossword puzzles, listened to NPR, AND worked on my grocery list simultaneously on my commute. Blah blah, “real life millionaire,” who has a mansion so spacious “we all have our own rooms (which are definitely not closets).” Just saying. Karen has a “world-class imagination” and Andrew can be “world-class shy” and thus will have no importance whatsoever. Kristy talks about Emily Michelle like a puppy, and is frankly weird about Nannie, saying she drives the Pink Clinker, belongs to a bowling league, and is an avid gardener. “Needless to say, we all think she is pretty cool.” O. . .kay. Nothing says cool like bowling, I guess.
Shannon has a “dog imagination” to rival Karen’s, and I don’t know what that means. She gets into stuff she shouldn’t? I mean, I tease my cats by asking them if they think they are lions, especially when they are fiercely stalking a moth, but I don’t know how you measure a dog’s imagination. “Boo-Boo, on the other hand, does not, I think, have any family traits. Boo-Boo is a big, fat, mean old gray cat with yellow eyes. He has a short temper and will bite and scratch if provoked. What constitutes provocation is a mystery to all of us.” Yeah, that doesn’t sound like anyone I know, ahem ahem. Also, I’m pretty sure having to live in a house with Karen is a state of perpetual provocation.
Kristy claims her family might be the reason she’s so efficient and organized, which doesn’t make much sense in terms of her backstory, but then again, she claims it’s efficient use of her school bus time to sit around blandly rehashing basic character traits and backstories, so whatever. Then, in a blatant show of disrespect for the reader, she claims to have been thinking about the Krushers. Nola. Ann. You cannot have a first-person narrator awkwardly info-dump for a whole chapter and then claim she was thinking about something else the whole time. We were inside her head, dammit! Fiction. . .point-of-view. . .narrative structure. . .it doesn’t work that way.
Whatever. Kristy says she needs to put a new spin on her Krushers drills because she’s feeling a bit blah about the whole thing. She hops of the school bus and races off to prepare for Krushers practice, because she lives to make her life more unnecessarily dramatic. Speaking of efficiency, God knows the map of the Brook makes no sense to me, but wouldn’t it be MORE efficient for Kristy and David Michael to stay in the old neighborhood, rather than be bussed back to Millionaire’s Row and then walk back to SES? I’m sure Richard would let you leave your equipment in his barn, K. Ron-it can’t be worse than the thousands of crappy festivals and events he puts up with. But then, I never knew dully rehashing the names of every member of my family counted as being an organized multitasker making use of my time, so what do I know? Also, super-sitter is super-proud of herself for carrying a first aid kit in her equipment bag. The bar for brilliance is really low here.
Krushers and various BSC members show up, except weirdly, the charges seem not to be Krushers players but people who are just there to watch. I think. It’s pretty confusing. If Andrew and freakin’ Gabbie Perkins can play, I don’t know why Mathew and Johnny Hobart can’t. K. Ron’s feeble mind is blown by Claudia’s sunglasses. “The frames were plain round wire rims, butthe green plastic lenses were square, stuck into the frames by their four corners. I had to smile.”
Kristy begins practice, and in a confusingly written passage “Right away, a ball skipped up and hit the bill of Jackie Rodowsky's hat, flipping it off and nearly giving me a heart attack. Jackie didn't seem to notice.” I think Nola means Jackie didn’t notice Kristy’s heart attack, not the ball, but where the hell was the editor? Also, I don’t get why this causes more than a moment’s start for Kristy, who makes a big deal about having to take deep breaths before talking to Jackie. I mean, the ball clearly didn’t hit him in the face, so why is she still freaking out about it after the fact, even after practice ends? Except, you know, to make a big goddamn deal out of everything Jackie does.
Karen slides into home plate and skins up her palms, and MA patches her up with the first aid kit while Karen blathers about how she’s prepping to be a famous ball player. Nola drops some baseball knowledge by having Kristy send Karen to right field to take it easy on her hands, since fewer balls get hit there.
Claudia compliments Kristy’s coaching after practice ends, and Kristy ungraciously grunts an acknowledgment, triggering MA’s famous “sensitivity.” Logan asks if she’s have a pre-season slump, and for whatever reason, this causes Kristy to have an epiphany that she misses actually playing, not just coaching. Super-sensitive MA is unable to comprehend this, because she doesn’t like sports, and because Ann and Nola can’t fucking fathom that it doesn’t take great sensitivity to understand that some people like different things than you do.
Claudia stiltedly suggests Kristy try out for the SMS softball team, which has apparently NEVER OCCURRED to super-genius Thomas before. Kristy skips over the “insignificant detail of tryouts” to imagine herself kicking softball ass, but then pouts she could never play and coach at the same time, it’s IMPOSSIBLE. MA obsequiously reminds her how organized she is, but Kristy claims that some things even her organizational skills cannot conquer. Woe is her.
Except pretty obviously she’s going to change her mind, so whatever, Nola.
Chapter 2
Shenanigans with Gummi worms. MA is grossed out that bird eat worms, I guess. Claudia asks if eating worms is like eating meat and jokes they should check with Dawn, and Stacey says condescendingly Gummi worms don’t count, although since they do contain gelatin, if Dawn had any actual principles besides screeching self-superiority they might.
Blah blah “not bragging, just being honest,”the BSC is bigger than Jesus. Kristy claims MA might be more stubborn than she, Kristy, is. Claudia outfit: “: a big yellow shirt with red X-shaped buttons, enormously baggy white pants, and big red Doc Martens double-laced with black and yellow shoelaces. Her long straight black hair was pulled up on top of her head with more black and yellow shoelaces braided together. Her earrings said "stop" and "go" - "stop" in her left ear and "go" in her right.” Did she get those at Claire’s? In more sloppy editing, Kristy explains again about Shannon the puppy following in the pawprints of Louie, which we already heard in Chapter 1. Not very efficient there, K. Ron.
Lisa calls with a job for Karen and Andrew, and MA takes it after Jessi and Mal bow out on account of a science project. Shannon mocks them a little by asking if the project is on the care and feeding of horses (because even though she barely knows them she knows their creepy, “delicate nostril” obsession) and Mal grumbles that the meanie-mo teacher had the nerve to actually assign relevant projects. K. Ron uses this as an awkward segue of Karen’s “project” of wanting to be thirteen, because in Annlandia, everyone wants to be thirteen. There’s no mention of how Mallory obviously should take the job so they can covet socks and nose jobs together, nor does Mal have the slightest sense of irony when she and Claudia joke they should tell Karen being a “grown-up” is hard. Yeah, not that any of you twerps would know it.
Claudia jokes they need to “carbo-load” with more gummies and pretzels-I mention this because basically the same joke gets used again in two pages. This book is so damn lazy. At the end of the meeting, Kristy says she’s still thinking about the softball team, and they tell her she should just fucking try out already, and she whines that when she tried running for class president, she had to drop out because it was too hard, and Stacey says even the “most organized person in the world,” couldn’t have done it. Now, I’m no athlete, but I cannot in the least imagine a scenario where being on student council is going to be more time-consuming or labor-intensive than playing a team sport, so what the hell ever.
Kristy says the only way she could manage would be to drop something else, and the only thing she could drop would be the Krushers (since God forbid she baby-sit fewer hours-that’s unthinkable!), and she can’t do that, but Stacey says she just needs to find a substitute coach, and she and Claudia volunteer. Kristy thinks this is dumb, not because they know nothing about softball and it's kind of crappy to bait and switch the kids like that, but because “it was hard to reconcile the image of the two most fashionable girls at SMS with the image of a Krusher softball practice: running bases, fielding balls, pitching, talking strategy.” Because you cannot like fashion AND sports. That’s way too many traits! Shut up, Ann. Nothing says feminism like saying you have to conform to gender stereotypes.
Before Kristy can say something insulting, Jessi suggests she try out and see if she makes it, possibly having temporarily internalized something of this quality humans call “humility” from the Peter Pan debacle. It won't last. (Also, pretty sure starring in a stage production takes more time than being class president. Seriously.) Stacey and Claudia assure her she’ll make the team, and promise “not only will the Krushers be the best kids' softball team in Stoneybrook. But they'll have a whole new style to go with it!" Ugh.
Chapter 3
Stacey is appalled by K. Ron’s school lunch, consisting of two servings of mac and cheese, two rolls, and blueberry pie, and Kristy claims she’s carbo-loading. Claudia “unexpectedly” chimes in to agree, despite the fact that she made the same joke two pages ago, so how is it unexpected?
Personally, the idea of running around after eating all that makes me feel nauseated, but apparently Kristy thinks of this as fuel for her softball tryout that afternoon. She asks if anyone knows anything about the softball team, like, why would the BSC know about that? It involves neither baby-sitting or their individual character traits, except Logan, who says Coach Wu is maybe one of the toughest coaches in the state. Sure. MA and Stacey say encouraging things, blah blah blah passage of time.
She doesn’t recognize most of the girls trying out, except one, in this bizarre nonsense comment: “. One of them, Bea Foster, was another eighth-grader who was in my math class. Like Stacey, Bea seemed to be a math whiz, but unlike Stacey she was neither thin nor blonde nor did she seem as strong-willed.” Uh. . .does Kristy think math skills are on the blonde gene? Or that being good at math makes you burn more calories? How on earth would math class show how strong-willed you are? And if Bea is such a whiz, why isn’t she in the super advanced leet class with Stacey anyway? Seriously, how dumb is that passage?
Haha, Kristy has the nerve to complain about Coach Wu’s whistle. Blah blah drills, Kristy notices a lot of the girls pairing off seem to already be friends and she figures out they were on the team last year, and they are actually good. You mean, people in the Brook accomplished something without K. Ron’s blessing? Kristy whines that they aren’t paying attention to any of the new people, although I genuinely don’t know what kind of socializing she expects in the middle of drills and tryouts.
Kristy makes a good catch or throw or something and gets a compliment from Coach Wu. After tryouts she hears the returning players stage-whispering about an “initiation,” but decides that can’t mean anything. Coach Wu says she’ll post results on Friday.
At dinner, Charlie calls her slugger and she says “That’s Ms. Slugger to you,” which Sam thinks is a sick burn. They talk about tryouts and Nola shows off more of her baseball knowledge by explaining how a batting average is calculated, sort of. Sam says she’d better be ready and brings up initiations, but everyone else blows him off, instead of asking if he’s speaking from personal experience or anything. Watson tut-tuts that surely initiations can’t be practiced in these modern times, and Charlie says it’s probably just talk, although he did hear about a girl who had to spend the night in a haunted house. Of course, K. Ron gets all superior about that, since they spent the night in a (non) haunted mansion, and also in Chapter 1 she counted Ben Brewer’s ghost as part of the family. Charlie counters with another girl who had to wear the same clothes every day for a week without washing them, but I’m pretty sure K. Ron already does that. Kristy says Coach Wu wouldn’t stand for anything like that, and Charlie agrees, but if she didn’t know. . .Kristy claims she’s not falling for that, no matter how tired she is, and Sam offers to “pinch-hit” her turn to do the dishes, which is nice. She crawls off to bed, so I guess she did no homework that day. She’s really got this time management thing down.
Chapter 4
Kind of a cute bit where MA shows up to where the tryout results are being posted and then makes Kristy go see for herself, but totally had already looked and seen Kristy made it. Kristy fantasizes about “a league of my own” and meets up with Bea and two other girls, Tonya and Dilys, and man, that named Dilys irked me when I was little. Thanks to the power of Google, I think it may be Welsh, and pronounced more like “Elise” than “Phyllis,” but even though I really like most Welsh names, I still think it’s not a very pretty one. They are the only four new members of the team, and Dilys is the only sixth-grader. Kristy says she doesn’t look like a sixth-grader, but based on her befuddlement that Bea could be good at math and not look like Stacey, I suspect Kristy thinks all sixth-graders are either awkward redheads or black.
Marcia and Tallie, two of the returning players from tryouts saunter up and ask the girls “You think because your name was put up on the board with ours that you've got it made? That you're a member of the team?" Tallie calls them the Four Musketeers and Kristy tries to be cool by claiming that’s a good nickname and Tallie withers her with A Look of Her Own. Tallie says they need to pass the initiation. Oh noes! Charlie and Sam were right! Kristy says SMS doesn’t allow hazing, but Tallie says the softball team does, and if they don’t do it, they won’t play. Kristy says it’s not up to them, and Tallie says if they don’t do the initiation, the other players will sabotage them with bad signals, tricky throws, and what not, with a “truly evil grin.”
I feel like K. Ron is a little turned on right now.
Anyway, the stupid initiation is to spray paint an old equipment shed. Kristy protests more, and Marcia calls her a chicken, but before they can throw down, Coach Wu wanders by and dismisses them all to class.
At the BSC meeting, the sitters got an ice cream cake for Kristy, and Mal asks if this is the carbo-loading she’s heard so much about. NOLA. IT WAS BARELY A JOKE IN THE FIRST PLACE. LET IT GO. Claudia jokes she and Stacey now know the secret coaching ingredient, and K. Ron says condescendingly it’s not all ice cream cake so they ask for “other tips.” It is actually still kind of shitty to hand over the Krushers to people who have no knowledge or interest, especially since she didn’t even try to find anyone else. Kristy asks if they’ve even played softball and Stacey is all indignant that Kristy thinks there is no place to play softball in New York, because of course she is. Stacey and Claudia have both played in gym class, and drop some knowledge, like “A full count is two strikes and three balls,” and Kristy says that’s too advanced for the Krushers. She then describes their drills, and everyone is bumfuzzled except Mal, because apparently life in the Pike household isn’t hellish enough, “when you have so many kids, you figure you might as well do some real practicing instead of just throw the ball around.” For people who love kids so much, they sure are scared of children having unstructured play time. Note that at no point will they ask Mal to help coach, even though she’s the only one who seems vaguely competent.
Stacey takes notes as Kristy describes drills, and Claudia draws pictures. Also, despite “knowing the basics,” Kristy has to explain that the field is called a diamond. Okay then.
Lolcat might be a better coach.
Chapter 5
Mary Anne entry in which she tries to suggest Karen’s new obsession with being thirteen is cute and not irritating. Also, there’s some real meta in how she says Karen is acting “at least theway Karen thinks a thirteen-year-old 'grown-up 'would act! Did we ever act like that?” You mean when you won the lottery? Or foiled a dog-napping ring run by the richest man in town? Normal thirteen-year-old stuff like that?
Lisa and Seth are off to a “garden party,” which is an elaborate ruse of an orgy, especially since they took the time to get all decked out in “garden clothes” like a linen suit and a big hat with a flower on the brim before peeling them off each other’s naked, trembling bodies. Andrew yawns and with great docility takes a nap, leaving MA to Karen’s conversational gambits and creepy mirroring of her every gesture.
Karen demands to know if MA is also thirteen, and if so, can she stay up late and pick out her own clothes and dissect frogs and why aren’t her ears pierced. MA tries to answer fairly and honestly, in her own goody-two-shoes way, but Karen will not be sated, and spits out more questions ending up on whether MA has a boyfriend. Karen lowers her voice to ask if he’s. . .cute, which I guess is an imitation of something but comes out sounding like cute is a euphemism for something. Mary Anne blathers about what hot stuff LB is, and Karen sighs with pleasure, and then Andrew is awake. Since Karen began interrogating MA the minute she came back downstairs, Andrew seems to have enjoyed a restoring nap of about four minutes.
They go outside and Andrew, “still slow and cranky from his nap” starts digging holes for worms. Mary Anne is way too squeamish to participate in such shenanigans, so she sits down and Karen plonks down besides her and after saying “Good grief!” and calling Andrew childish, asks what MA thinks of the weather. This must be after she went to charm school. MA asks Karen about school, and Karen complains it’s babyish and she wishes she could do something exciting and pointless like pretend an egg is a baby, like the youth of SMS. Mary Anne says they both have math and art, which is weird, because I don’t think anyone besides maybe Claudia actually does have art class at SMS. Karen has no truck with these comparisons and asks more about Logan, and whether Mary Anne was wearing something “sophisticated” when she met him. Headdesk. Mary Anne says she doesn’t remember what she was wearing, although he sure does! And the cities skirt for the dance was pretty dope. I mean chilly fresh.
Karen claims she likes green eyes best, and her husband does not have them, so he’s probably going to find himself in Stoneybrook Academy Divorce Court soon. You can do better, Rickster. Karen claims when she is thirteen her boyfriend will have green eyes and a fancy car, and MA points out thirteen-year-olds can’t drive. Karen says perhaps her boyfriend will be a much older man, and Mary Anne says with the voice of wisdom older man are less fun as boyfriends. She bases this conclusion not on creepster Travis with the hair combs and wardrobe tips, but on Stacey’s crush on poor Wes. HE WAS NOT A BOYFRIEND, YOU GUYS. (Although Shannon may still give him crabs.)
Karen patronizingly asks Andrew if he is having fun, and settles back to copy Mary Anne for the rest of the day, but thankfully we are spared.
Chapter Six
Marcia, Tallie, and some chick named Coreen accost the Four Musketeers and remind them about their initiation. Kristy and Dilys refuse, Kristy because she can’t make sense of a world in which she’s the hazee, rather than the hazer, and Dilys because Vandalism is Wrong. Marcia says the shed already looks so crappy any paint would improve it, in which case I kind of wonder why no one has done it on her own. Man, that town needs a Cary Retlin. Also, while I’m no fan of vandalism, spray painting a beat-up school shed is not raising my “oh horrors!” meter. Tallie applies some pressure by saying it’s a team initiation selected by the team, and if they don’t do it, that’s saying they don’t want to be on the team. Whatever. Practice, Kristy is sore and tired, although she claims after just four practices she’s already stronger and smarter and faster and has better stamina. But even her own awesomeness can’t make her feel better. Marcia stops her on the stairs during the day to bug her about doing the initiation, and Kristy says she feels like she’s in a scene from Grease, although I don’t remember any scene like that. Besides, Lerangis already did the Grease knock-off, and it was fucking amazing. Possibly my favorite snark ever. So gloriously goofy and gay.
Then Tallie tries to play good cop, commiserating about how Coach Wu is tough but fair, and how it just wouldn’t be fair if some members of the team got special treatment, would it? They all had to pass an initiation (no one is bright enough to ask what it was-I’m dying to know, if spray-painting an old shed no one cares about was the scariest, raciest thing Nola and Ann could come up with). Dilys says “So what you're saying is that if we don't spray paint the shed, we're not part of the team."
Um, yeah, they’ve been saying that pretty much from the beginning. Dilys and Kristy play really badly that afternoon, I think out of intimidation/distraction rather than actual sabotage, although Bea and Tonya are fine. Bea and Tonya also seem to be avoiding Kristy and Dilys, which of course is a sign of EEVIL, and not good common sense.
Kristy has a dramatic inner monologue about how she hates being pressured, but then talks herself into thinking she’s being “picky” and blah blah blah Nola’s attempts at Grey and Grey morality are about as convincing as Lerangis’s grasp of hip teen slang. But she agrees to go ahead with the initiation. Bea and Tonya are all excited and have assigned different spray-paint colors to each person, because everything in the Brook has to be made stupidly complicated. Tallie and Marcia nod their approval and they all walk out together.
Somehow this requires spending “most of Thursday night” on the phone making plans, and on Friday Kristy is all grumpy and rattled. She’s conned poor put-upon Charlie into driving her to Bea’s house for a softball team newbies get together, because clearly he has nothing better to do on a Friday night. She wails in her head about how it’s all LIES-she’s actually meeting Bea, Tonya and Dilys under a tree! She’s so distracted she forgets to end the BSC meeting, and if slightly-less-brainwashed Shannon hadn’t been there, they all probably would have sat there like lumps for hours until she snapped out of it.
Chapter Seven
It’s gonna get real, y’all. In the sense of not.
Kristy’s all dolled up in dark clothes, and Charlie tries to make pleasant reassuring small talk about playing on a team before agreeing to pick her up at eleven. Charlie is responsible enough to wait until she pretends to ring the doorbell, but not to wait until she actually goes inside, and luckily no one at the Fosters notices a kid loitering on their porch.
She trots over to SMS and Bea gives her some burnt cork to rub on her face for camouflage. No softball vandals here! For no particular reason, Dilys hums the theme from “the old television show” The Twilight Zone. That is a sacred theme, Dilys; you shouldn’t hum it when NOTHING weird is happening! Talk about vandalism.
They spray paint nothing in particular, Kristy whines about the smell, and then they stop.
Bea and Tonya bust out some cigarettes and Kristy and Dilys are appalled. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who sees less appeal in smoking than I do (I’ve never even wanted to try one), so it’s pretty impressive how much I want to roll my eyes at Kristy when she prissily pontificates “Athletes don’t smoke. In fact, people with any intelligence don't.” Bea and Tonya are both pretty bad at it, logistics wise so I don’t know who they are trying to impress. Kristy stomps off with Dilys, and the two other girls follow, “smelling like cigarettes.”
Charlie picks up Kristy from the porch, and again, the Fosters don’t notice their daughter and another kid milling around out there, or the headlights in their driveway. He pleasantly asks about her evening and tells her to hang in there.
The next morning, Kristy wakes up to the radio because she forgot to leave her alarm off for the weekend. It’s a beautiful day in the Stepfordhood, but then! Breaking news!
“An old equipment shed at Stoneybrook Middle School burned to the ground last night," she said. "A neighborhood man who saw the fire phoned it in, then rushed to the scene to attempt to contain it. He was badly burned and is now in the local hospital where he is listed in critical condition. Authorities are investigating.”
Aw, yeah.
Will Kristy be apprehended as an aspiring arsonist? Will the BSC be shamed, shunned and disbanded in disgrace? Will Karen burn down a dollhouse and shriek “I learned it from you, Kristy! I learned it from you!” Will anything that happens in this book have any consequences whatsoever? The answer to all of these questions, obviously, is no. But I will provide more lolkittehs.