Authors: Michele Jaffe
Kitty Kitty
Kitty Kitty
For Jennifer Sturman,
who is totally twenty-four karat
Dearest (in mostly alphabetical order) Meg Cabot, Holly Edmonds, Susan Ginsburg, Dan Goldner, Sarah Hughes, Elise Howard, Jennifer Langham, Amanda Maciel, Abby McAden, Laura Rosenbury, Jennifer Sturman, Josie & Sebastian Sturman, Eric Wight, Gelateria Nico, Gelateria al Sole, Harry’s Dolci, Pizzeria Ae Oche, Bar Bonifacio, Narwhals, Betsey Johnson, Agent Provocateur, Chocolate croissants, Cupcakes, Tacos, Pizza, Caffè latte,
I send you gigathanks from 1 Gratitude Villas, Thanksylvania, Planet of Seriously-I-Could-Not-Have-Done-This-Without-You in the galaxy IOU1.
Airkisses,
Michele
My best friend, Polly, thinks that people should come with…
Of course, I didn’t know that. Instead I went prancing…
Allow me to pause here for a moment to say…
Little Life Lesson 8: If the police already think you…
According to my translation program, this is the essay I…
“Arabella?” I asked.
Actually four horrifying things. As they approached our table, I…
As soon as I got up to my room I…
As I watched, they pulled a sheet over Arabella’s head.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Something profound, maybe…
I’d sort of figured Arabella just sent me her whole…
Little Life Lesson 26: If you are really interested in…
I’d been prepared to hit him with “I pity the…
I know it’s wrong to say, but I was sort…
I’d only been in one gondola before, and that was…
IT WAS POLLY, ROXY, AND TOM! POLLY, ROXY, AND TOM…
The knock was followed by a voice saying, “Calamity, open…
“Okay, let’s go over this again, just to be sure,”…
Okay, I might have mumbled it. And whispered. From behind…
At the time, though, all I knew was that my…
Little Life Lesson 36: If you are thinking to yourself,…
Camilla the concierge stopped us as we were going through…
The launch was piloted by an 800-year-old man with a…
I’d sort of imagined billionaires did Big Important Things at…
The very best way in the world to be roused…
Jack36 36 BadJas: I told you not to get too…
Here’s how we went to the masquerade ball:
Tom had his BlackBerry out, with a map of Venice…
I stayed up most of the night arranging and rearranging…
Little Life Lesson 57: If you have once run into…
While I waited for Dadzilla’s not-at-all-setting-my-kneesatremble arrival, I entertained myself…
When I woke up, Bobby was hovering over me with…
When I opened my eyes I was still a bit…
To: Jasmine Callihan
From: Office of the College Counselor
Subject: RE: Senior Questionnaire
Date: September 8
Dear Miss Callihan,
Thank you for your thoughtful wishes on the beginning of the school year. Although we miss having you here in person, I hope you are enjoying your time in Venice. I remember having tea at the Grissini Palace Hotel with my grandmother when I was just a boy and thinking it was a lovely spot. What an enviable place to call home.
I’ve thought very seriously about what you said, and no, I do not think it would be better if the Senior Questionnaire asked “How do you imagine your tombstone?” rather than “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Nor do I think you need to worry; I am quite sure that when the time comes, yours will have more to say than “Here lies Jas. She did what she could with her hair.”
Most sincerely,
Dr. James Lansdowne
College Counselor
Westborough School for Girls
Los Angeles, CA
To: Jasmine Callihan
From: Office of the College Counselor
Subject: RE: RE: RE: Senior Questionnaire
Date: September 15
Dear Miss Callihan,
Thank you for asking after my grandmother. She is, in fact, still living but I doubt she is considering a trip to Venice. If she is, I will be sure to warn her that the Grissini Palace Hotel is now “more like a tree than a hotel because it is filled with nuts.”
I am sorry that you found our list of Potential Work Environments on the Senior Questionnaire so limiting. Frankly it had not occurred to any of the faculty that we could be alienating a “sizable chunk of our students” by not including “Big Top” and “wherever taxidermists work” on that list.
Thank you for bringing that to our attention.
Sincerely,
Dr. James Lansdowne
College Counselor
Westborough School for Girls
Los Angeles, CA
To: Jasmine Callihan
From: Office of the College Counselor
Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Senior Questionnaire
Date: September 30
Miss Callihan,
Thank you for your suggestion that I call you Jasmine. As you know, it is school policy that all students be referred to by their last names.
While I see that it does strictly conform to the essay topic “Challenges I Have Faced,” I am not convinced that writing your college essay in the form of a screenplay entitled Dadzilla vs. Jas: Bloodfeud! Forever!strikes exactly the right note. Along the same lines, while explaining that you suspect insanity runs in your family does fall into the “challenge” category, I’m not positive that is something you want to highlight for a college admissions committee.
Yours,
Dr. L
P.S. I am unclear on what you are getting at when you say “Also would time spent in a foreign jail count as an extracurricular activity?” Please elaborate.
To: Jasmine Callihan
From: Office of the College Counselor
Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Senior Questionnaire
Date: October 4
Jasmine—
My weekend is going very well, thanks for asking.
Look, you really have nothing to worry about. Although you feel that you are “slightly dead inside,” I am positive that you can write a dynamite essay. You just need to find the right topic. What about some of your Little Life Lessons? You are still keeping up with those, aren’t you? You should have added at least sixty-five new ones since you’ve been gone. Some of the girls have shared theirs with me and they are very provocative. If you’d like to send me some of yours, we can discuss how to go about turning them into an essay. The advice that writers always give is to write what you know. I’m sure if you just put your mind to it and build on an episode or episodes from your real life, you will come up with something outstanding.
Best,
JL
To: Jasmine Callihan
From: Mary Pease
Subject: Thank you
Date: October 9
Hi, Jasmine!
It’s me, Mary, Dr. Lansdowne’s assistant. I just wanted to tell you how much we’ve all enjoyed your fake college essays. The entire teacher’s lounge was in stitches when we read “How Not to Steal a Limo” and “I Met Death in Las Vegas and He Was Wearing a Speedo (and a Turquoise Mesh Shirt).” What an imagination you must have to make all that up! Thanks for the great laughs and good luck with your real essay.
Mary
My best friend, Polly, thinks that people should come with warning labels, like mattresses. If they did, mine would be CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS.
Or at least it would have been, once. But not anymore. Not since Jas’s European Exile started. For the past six weeks, nothing had happened to me.
Even the horoscope I found while skimming the newspaper to do my current events assignment for Italian class, on the Saturday morning this all started, said:
“The Gobi Desert is one of the most inhospitable places in the world, and your sign is likewise right now. You feel battered by storms outside your control and beleaguered by a drought of change. Rest, meditate, and conserve your strength until this dry period passes. Any attempt to alter its course could have grave consequences.”
Yes. As though having to go to class on Saturday was not bad enough, my horoscope compared my life to the Gobi Desert. And said there was nothing I could do about it. Horrorscope was more like it.
As the full meaning of its words sank in, I realized I had two choices. I could either continue to soldier on, dead inside but wearing the mask while the fates Riverdanced over my whole life’s happiness. Or I could take action. Because as far as my eyes could see, there were no Graver Consequences than sitting around as my life ebbed from me a little more every day. My friends, my boyfriend, my whole world was 4,000 miles away, going on without me. If that horoscope told me nothing else, it was that things could not get any worse. (Yes, Fates, I hear you laughing. I know, I’m so, so funny.)
I’d been waiting patiently, but the time for patient waiting was over. It would have been jolly to email a friend for some moral support, but it was 11:00 on Friday night in Los Angeles and all my friends would probably be out doing something really fun. Without me. Plus, ever since my dad saw the bill for the day I spent fourteen hours hitting the GET MAIL button on my email screen praying to see Jack’s name pop into my inbox, I wasn’t supposed to go online from my room. As was always the way these days, I had to be an Army of One.
I took a big breath and marched next door to my father and Sherri!’s room at the Grissini Palace Hotel (& Insanity
Emporium), full of brave purpose, and knocked. But all the Brave Purpose in the world could not have steeled me against what I faced when the door opened.
My father was standing in the middle of the sitting area wearing a shiny yellow shirt and shiny black bike shorts with yellow piping.
To express the complete dreadfulness of it, you’ve got to understand that for the entire seventeen years of my life, my father has exclusively worn safari suits. Some people have a signature color, like my superchic friend Polly (pink). Or a signature scent, like my demon cousin the Evil Hench Mistress, Alyson (Bubble Yum). My father had a signature look. That of an explorer of the African outback.
If there is such a thing as the African outback.
True, he let me iron the sleeves on the safari jacket he wore for his wedding to my stepmother, Sherri!. And while we were in Las Vegas, he nightmarishly substituted khaki shorts for the long pants. But fundamentally, there was always a Ready for Safari feel to his look.
No longer. Unless they’d started holding safaris during the Tour de France.
I would not be lying even a little if I said that I would have taken the Nightmare on Khaki Street ensemble over what I saw before me. Because what I saw before me wasn’t just a code red toxic fashion disaster. It was another sign of what I had been trying to deny. My father and his mind had split ways.
I know, I should have seen it earlier. The writing was on the wall forty-four days before, when the happy Isle of Jas (population: me) had been brutally destroyed by the dread beast Dadzilla.
What? You have not heard of Dadzilla? Allow me to introduce you:
Behold!
I am Dadzilla, the
frightening & super evil
monster with big \/\/\/\/\/\/\/
fangs for crunching up the
cherished dreams
of young girls like
my daughter, Jasmine.
Whose are my most favorite and extra
good, washed down with a sip of
her teensy-tiny tears of girlish dismay.
(Tears of dismay are quite delicious.)
I know multiple sly tricks to coax forth
the small sweet tears, such as: The Why Not
Ruin Jas’s Life one, which, after years of hard toil
,
I have finally perfected. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Whatever can this mean? Ruin Jas’s life? Perfected? I will present Dadzilla’s action plan in a single easy-to-read chart:
FRIDAY BEFORE MY SENIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL STARTS: | | Learn that the guy of my dreams, who is a rock star and taller than me (Jack!!!), dreams of me too. |
SATURDAY BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS: | | More learning about that, plus KISSING! |
SUNDAY BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS: | | Father announces we are moving to Venice, Italy. In twenty-four hours. |
“And pack something warm,” Dadzilla adds. “I don’t know when we are coming back.”
Naturally, I asked what any normal-thinking person would ask: “Are you speaking in code?”
To which he replied: “Why is everything a joke to you, Jasmine?”
A joke. Of course. Because, which is more likely? That a father would pull his daughter out of her respectable high school the day before her senior year was starting, thus guaranteeing that the only college she’ll be able to get into is one with “——& Beauty School” in the name? Or that a father is speaking in code because the FBI has the house bugged?
That’s right. Someone was suffering from Acute Crazy in the room, but it wasn’t me.
I tried to plead with him, but that just made it worse. Not for Dadzilla the quaint arguments of reason and logic. My saying “But I can’t drop out of high school” was like a peanut-butter-and-cracker snack pack to him, just making him thirsty for more.
“Nonsense,” Dadzilla replied, gnashing his fangs. “You are not dropping out of school. You will just do your work from Italy. Six hours of Italian instruction a day, and for the rest of your classes, it will be like you are being homeschooled.”
I was just about to point out that it seemed to me one crucial part of being homeschooled was being AT HOME, when Sherri! came in.
Sherri! is the very best stepmother in the world, and I am not saying that just because her superpower is to be unhateable. For one thing, she is the only person I know who exclusively writes in glitter pen and dots her i’s with a heart (or butterfly, depending on her mood). It is also super fun to go shopping with her because she is always being mistaken for the movie stars she body-doubles for (last year, Sherri! won the Golden Breast, Thigh, AND Hand awards for her excellent work, and this year she is up for the Golden Ankle as well).
But more than any of that, or her quiet brilliance at the management of my father, I love her because she’s a beacon of hope in my sad world. The fact that—despite being young
and gorgeous and able to attract any male of any species in our solar system—she genuinely loves and wants to be with my father shows that we Callihans must have some special superpower that bewitches mates of whom we are completely unworthy. Since this is the only explanation apart from intense mental illness that I could come up with for why my boyfriend, Jack, might like me at all (and say that he wanted to be my boyfriend even though he was the hottest man on the planet and I was, well, me; and moving halfway around the world; and we’d only had two real dates, during which I’d been grounded, so they took place at my house), it was reassuring to see the phenomenon at work in my father and Sherri!’s case.
Also, of all the women my father dated after my mom died when I was six, Sherri! was the only one who talked to me like I was an equal. Which I guess isn’t that surprising since she is only eight years older than I am (yes! And with my dad! Callihan Super Attractor Beam is so strong), but it is still notable and has earned her a special plaque-with-silver-flower-holder attached in my Most Favorite People Hall of Fame.
So when she came into my room after my father’s life-shattering announcement, I was relieved. Yes, my father had lost his few remaining marbles, but here was Sherri! to help me look through the couch cushions and find them. Perhaps if we acted quickly, Dadzilla could be quelled and returned to his less terrifying supervillain persona, the Thwarter,
where he merely tried to thwart my girlish dreams, not snack on them.
Then Sherri! said, “Isn’t it thrilling, Jas? I’ve always wanted to visit Venice and now we’re going to live there! And Cedric is going to write the definitive book on the history of soap.”
She calls my father “Cedric,” I suppose because that is his name, but really that should have been enough to make her run away screaming from the beginning. I had bigger things to think about, though.
“Soap?” I repeated as hope died within me. “Did you say
soap
?”
“Soap,” my father confirmed. “Don’t pretend I never told you.”
Which was an easy command to follow because there was no pretending required. I was one hundred percent sure + shipping & handling that he had never mentioned this burning passion for soap to me. Still, that didn’t mean he wasn’t in its grip. In addition to being a professor of anthropology, my father is a certified genius, and geniuses are not like normal people. He’d done this whole uproot-our-lives-in-the-pursuit-of-knowledge thing before, four years earlier, so it was possible that soap really was the reason my life and my heart were ripped from me and we were moving to Venice.
But not, I suspected, the whole reason. Because later that night I’d overheard (by accident! I just happened to be leaning out the window at the time!) him saying “I have to be sure
Jas is safe, and I can’t do that with her running around Los Angeles.” Leading me to conclude that perhaps some part of our fleeing LA like mobsters on the lam had to do with the teensy adventure I’d had in Las Vegas. The one featuring that whole almost-getting-killed thing.
Which, I would like to note in passing, had not been my fault AT ALL. And the police departments of two states had THANKED me. And also, I had not ended up getting killed. But the idea that Vegas might have partially motivated our Venetian holiday did give me an idea: If we had moved because I had gotten into a microdot of trouble, then, by the inverse property, if I showed I could stay out of trouble, we could move back.
Simple, elegant. Practically a mathematical proof is what that solution was.
Okay, yes, I am aware that from time to time in the past I’d been the kind of girl that Trouble hung around seedy cafés waiting for. And that my cousin, the Evil Hench Mistress Alyson, referred to me not without reason as Calamity Callihan. But that was Ye Olde Dayes Jas, a Jas so distant from my new form it was practically the stuff of legends, like unicorns and wereponies. From that moment on, I vowed, I would be Innocent Bystander Jas. The Model Daughter that they modeled Model Daughter porcelain figurines on.
And I knew just how to make myself invisible to Trouble because I knew what had gotten me tangled with Trouble in Vegas. It was all because of my supposed superpower.
Not for me the couture superpower Polly has of being able to outdress anyone and identify every garment, accessory, and nail polish color by designer and season; or Roxy’s useful superpower to be able to build things, like the working satellite she once made out of a lemon and a piece of string (as well as her ability to pick anyone’s pocket without them knowing it); or Tom’s superpower to be the nicest guy in the world and also imitate anyone’s voice perfectly; or my boyfriend Jack’s superpower to disable people with his Super Smile. Or even Evil Hench Alyson’s to turn people into a piece of gum–slash–toilet paper she scraped off her shoe with just one look (or at least make
me
feel like she has). No, none of those groovy powers were mine. My superpower?
Attractive to cats.
Yes. And although this might sound nice (Cats! Furry and cute! Fun!), it’s actually a curse. But what it meant was that if there was one single thing I needed to do to avoid Trouble’s tractor beam in Venice, it was avoid cats. How hard could that be?
Not hard! So easy! It’s not like you run into cats all the time just randomly!
Except in Venice. Or, as I believe it should more accurately be called: The Lost Continent of Kittyopolis. Not only are there more cats in the streets of Venice than anywhere else I’d ever been, but the symbol of the city for, oh, the past nine hundred and three years, has been a winged cat. (Okay, a winged lion. But still.) So if you had been working to erect
a Jas-Not-in-Trouble Slalom Course, Venice would be it.
(And that doesn’t take into account the fact that the city pretty much oozes Mystery and Wonder which are like mind-altering Slurpees for a girl like me.)
Despite the fact that Venice was like a pitfall party just for me, and I was a broken girl who spent her time walking around with a hole in her chest where her heart should have been, I had surmounted these challenges and managed to steer clear of Trouble and his best friend, Lurking Menace, for six weeks. Having a million hours of Italian classes and all that nice away-from-home-schooling to do helped. I also worked to explore the non-cat beauties of the city. There are things in Venice that would cause people with weak constitutions to pass out and die on the street from beauty overload. Such as the slab of chocolate-hazelnut ice cream, which comes topped with whipped cream, a paper flag, a mylar pom-pom, and a cookie.
Yes. Mylar pom-pom AND cookie.
I know.
And, of course, any remaining free time could be filled by conjuring up images of all the supercute and nice and be-boobed and normal-haired and intensely fascinating girls my UNBELIEVABLY HOT boyfriend was meeting while I was away.