Don't Call Me Baby Read online

  I roll down the window, which I do only for effect, since it’s a convertible and the top is currently down.

  I yell, “I needed to get to school early, so Grandma’s taking me!”

  “But . . . ,” my mom starts to call.

  We can’t hear the rest of what she says because Grandma Hope has already pressed hard on the accelerator, and we’re flying down Mullet Lane, the street I’ve grown up on since I was born. (Mullets are a local fish.)

  I twist around in my seat just long enough to see my mom holding her camera up and taking a picture of us zooming into the distance.

  I can almost hear the click.

  That’s not going to be pretty, I think as I turn back around in my seat.

  “Your mom will get over it,” Grandma Hope says. She takes her right hand off the wheel and gives my knee a tiny squeeze. “Your mom seems to think the blog is a way to keep you hers forever, but you’re growing up, and she finally needs to learn to give you some space.”

  I watch my mom get smaller and smaller in the side mirror. As much as I detest my mom’s blog, I also still hate disappointing her. I only wish she had a career other than exploiting me.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  Chapter Two

  THIS YEAR WILL BE BETTER, RIGHT?

  I TEXTED SAGE, MY BEST FRIEND, THAT I’D BE GETTING TO SCHOOL early, so she’s already waiting for me in front of St. Augustine Academy when Grandma Hope’s car pulls in. By pulls in, I mean her convertible zooms into the parking lot like it’s a speedboat full of cocaine and we’re running from the Drug Enforcement Agency. And even though the lot is nearly empty, Grandma chooses one of the few spots clearly labeled FACULTY ONLY.

  My grandma definitely doesn’t work at my school.

  I wish I had inherited her fearlessness, along with her straight, thick hair and long, skinny fingers.

  Sage’s holding her phone in a tight fist, and she looks pissed. At five feet zero inches tall, Sage is the shortest girl in our class; she always has been and probably always will be. She has a theory on why this is: “If only my mom would let me eat food with fat, I wouldn’t be this tiny.”

  Sage marches right up to the Green Whale (that’s my name for grandma’s car, although Grandma Hope calls it Green Sherbet Delight). By the time Sage reaches us, she has relaxed her scowl and plants a peck on my grandma’s cheek.

  Despite being small, Sage is a force to be reckoned with. Her unruly dark brown ringlets take up a lot of surface area, and nobody ever forgets her. Whenever anyone teases me about my mom’s blog, Sage always has my back. “Imogene can’t choose her mom’s job. She wishes her mom wasn’t a mommy blogger as much as you wish your dad wasn’t a gynecologist,” she told Todd Waltman, an annoying kid who thankfully moved to Omaha, Nebraska.

  “Morning, darling,” Grandma Hope sings out to Sage. “I just can’t believe that you girls are in the ninth grade. It seems like I was in ninth grade only a day or two ago. I was major trouble that year.”

  Grandma Hope is always referring to her youth and how wild she was, but she never tells any actual stories. My mom says that it’s all an exaggeration, but the way Grandma drives and the way she golfs, I’m not so sure.

  Sage flashes her memorable gap-toothed smile and waves good-bye to Grandma Hope, who’s already jerked her car into reverse.

  “Bye, Basil,” my grandma teases Sage. Every time my grandma sees Sage, she calls her by a different herb. Last week, it was thyme. The week before, it was rosemary.

  As soon as the Green Whale drives out of sight, Sage re-furrows her dark, thinly plucked eyebrows.

  “I have a serious problem,” she says, and huddles close to me. Sage points at the touchscreen on her phone. It’s on her mom’s Facebook profile.

  Zoey Carter’s (Sage’s mom’s) status reads: “Sent Sage off to her first day of ninth grade with this spinach and kale smoothie. Yum!!! I know . . . I’m the best mom ever! Just say adios to sugary cereals and hola! to veggies. Join my revolution!”

  Linked to the post, there’s a photograph of a Sage drinking a giant green smoothie out of a milkshake glass with a stalk of celery sticking up like a straw. In the photo, Sage’s making a face that looks like she’s a contestant on Fear Factor and she’s being forced to eat cobra eyes.

  Except unlike on Fear Factor, there’s no prize.

  Sage’s mom is also a blogger.

  Her online moniker is VeggieMom because she’s a vegan blogger. She photographs and blogs every single item of food that she and Sage eat. Believe it or not, there are lots of bloggers like her; they’re usually called food or healthy-living bloggers, and their entries are called food diaries.

  Ms. Carter and my mom were actually “blog friends” before they met in real life. That means they met over the internet and became virtual “friends” before ever meeting in person. My mom hasn’t met many of her readers, or “friends” as she prefers to call them, but our moms met in real life after Sage and her mom moved from Minneapolis to Florida. Sage’s mom was new to the area and lonely, so she emailed my mom, who she knew also lived in Naples. They became fast real-life friends, so Sage and I have grown up both on the internet and in real life together.

  Because our moms are both bloggers, sometimes I think that Sage is the only person who at least sort of understands me . . . except I’d gladly switch places with her, because at least VeggieMom only blogs about food, and my mom blogs everything about me.

  After staring at the large glass of greenness on Sage’s iPhone, I start to feel a bit nauseous, so I press the home button to exit out of the screenshot.

  “I thought she promised no more Facebook updates or Tweets about you. Isn’t the blog enough?”

  Sage shakes her head and takes her phone back. “Exactly. This is only day three, and she’s already broken the agreement. But I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s so her to do something like this.”

  “Totally annoying,” I say as we walk toward the school’s entrance. “I escaped with Ace from this morning’s photo shoot. I just couldn’t do it today. The idea of posing and smiling for my mom’s camera makes me want to gag nearly as much as thinking about that green goo you had to swallow.”

  “You’ve got to stand up to her,” Sage says. “She might not hear you, but at least you can get it out of your system.” Sage’s always been so much better at telling her mom how she feels. Most of the time, I’d just rather change the subject and avoid talking about how I feel.

  “That’s pretty much what my grandma said this morning.”

  I playfully bat Sage’s hand. “Sage, stop picking at your fingers.” Sage is a competitive piano player who tears at the skin around her nails when she’s nervous. “You don’t want to be known at Juilliard as the girl with the messed-up fingers.”

  Sage throws up her scabby hands. “Imogene, you know that just because I’m good at the piano, doesn’t mean I’ll get into Juilliard, right? That only happens in the movies. If I really wanted to get into Juilliard, I’d be playing the piano right now. I’d have to even play when I was supposed to be asleep.” She mimics playing the piano with her eyes closed, and I laugh.

  Sage sighs. “Maybe at the very best, I’ll get into a college with a solid piano major, but I’ll never get into a conservatory. And besides, how are my mom and I going to afford any college?”

  Sage’s mother is a single mom, and her blog is much less well known and visited than my mom’s, so she makes a lot less income from it. Money in their family is always tight. Recently they had to sell their house, which had the most amazing Hass avocado tree in the backyard. They moved into an apartment complex, which was tricky because they had to make sure their new neighbors were okay with hearing classical piano three to four hours a day. Luckily, this is Naples, Florida, and the median age here is sixty-four years old. They found a place where the neighbors in nearly every
direction turned out to be both ancient and hard of hearing.

  “Well, I totally think you could get into Juilliard or any other college,” I tell her honestly. “You’re the Nicki Minaj of the piano minus all the costumes, wigs, and expletives . . . but college is a long way off. Let’s just focus on having the best year ever before we all go off to high school. Maybe this year I can finally be known as someone more than Babylicious, the girl on that blog.”

  “Here’s hoping,” Sage whispers. “And maybe this will be the year I finally get to decide for once what I ingest and what I expel.”

  * * *

  The first half of the day, I spend worrying about what my mom’s going to say when I get home. When our wireless goes down or I spoil a photo op, like I did this morning, she goes into a total tizzy. I guess that saying “Don’t take your work home with you” isn’t easy to live by when you blog about being a mom. When we eat dinner, it’s “How did you like that new Dip & Squeeze Heinz ketchup? I need to review it.” We even take sponsored vacations. Our lives move around the blog like it’s like a permanent fixture. Even though it’s usually sunny in Florida, it’s always the one cloud in my sky.

  I sigh with relief when it’s time for my English class, which is the final class of the day and my favorite subject. I love reading books about other periods in history, specifically the Time Before the Internet. I love English class because I get to read about people who just lived without documenting every minuscule detail to share with the whole wide world. My mom claims blog wasn’t even a word until she was twenty-five years old, but I’ve never known the world without the internet. According to Mommylicious lore, my first word was even blog.

  Ms. Herring greets all of us as we come into the classroom. “Hello, Imogene,” she says.

  Our school is tiny, so everyone knows everyone, especially if you’re the girl whose mom writes a blog about her.

  Ms. Herring’s our school’s youngest teacher by about a century. All the girls love her because she’s fashionable, and all the boys love her because she’s beautiful. (Some of our teachers are nuns, so it’s hard to get a good gauge of what they actually look like under their habits.) I’ve been excited to have Ms. Herring since she moved here from Missouri five years ago, so I walk into class with a huge smile on my face—and not just because Dylan Mulberry, my biggest crush of all time, stared at me from across the lunchroom earlier. Or at least, I think he did. He could’ve been looking at the wall behind me instead.

  I take a seat next to Sage in the front row, and I pull out a notebook that someone sent my mom. Companies send her all free products in hopes that she’ll write about them on her blog—basically, on any given day, I’m a walking billboard. Today I’m a wearing shoes donated from Sears (gold penny loafers that are thankfully cute), and this morning I actually washed my hair with those Bubble & Bee products we received last week. (In my opinion, organic is not always better. There were some serious tangles.) I know that I should be happy we get free things, but we don’t need or want half of them anyway. Our front closet looks like a fancy 7-Eleven.

  “Class,” Ms. Herring says in a soft voice. Everyone’s chatter stops, and all eyes go to our teacher.

  Behind me, I hear the door shut, and I turn to watch Dylan glide into an empty seat in the back row. He’s the cutest guy in the ninth grade—or at least, he’s got my vote. With eyes the color of green sea glass, sandy blond hair, and a tan that doesn’t even fade in January, he could be on a postcard for Florida. Maybe he and Mickey should team up as our state’s ambassadors. Dylan would definitely lure quite a few tourists in with his smile.

  I count silently and realize that I have three classes with Dylan this year; that’s two more than in eighth grade. Hopefully, this will help facilitate my plan to get him to ask me to the Halloween Pirate’s Booty Ball. It’s our first date dance ever.

  Ms. Herring pulls down the projector screen. “I just love the first day of school. Bobby, please get the lights.”

  The classroom darkens, and Ms. Herring sits down at her computer desk. “A new school year means new ideas,” she says. “I like to it switch up. Otherwise, it gets boring and stale for all of us. Déjà vu isn’t a good feeling when it comes to learning.” She taps away at her keyboard and then a website that I’m way too familiar with pops up on the projector: It’s a website site that helps people create blogs.

  “This year, instead of writing in journals or typing essays, each student is going to write and maintain his or her own blog. I think it’s going to be an awesome project.”

  Whenever a teacher uses awesome, students everywhere should be terrified.

  She smiles at both Sage and me. Everyone, including Ms. Herring, knows that our moms are bloggers. Not only do our moms give presentations about blogging at career day every year, but they also plug their blogs to anyone who will listen. My mom even has a magnetic Mommyliciousmeg.com decal that takes up the entire left side of our car. (I know, mortifying, right? I always sit on the right side of the car to avoid seeing the curious stares from other cars’ passengers.)

  Why would either Sage or I need any more blogs in our lives?

  To my left, Ardsley Taylor raises her hand with the perfect posture of a beauty queen. If our school were cast in a teen movie, Ardsley would play the popular girl who everyone wants to be, even though she’s not very nice.

  “Ms. Herring, do Sage and Imogene have to write blogs too? Or can they just turn their mothers’ blogs in for credit?”

  The class begins to snicker, but Ms. Herring puts her finger to her lips and the class quiets. “Ardsley!” Ms. Herring scolds.

  “I was just asking a question,” Ardsley says in a singsong voice.

  I refuse to turn around and acknowledge Ardsley. Ever since she was allowed to use a computer, she’s been ragging on me about my mom’s blog. My mom said Ardsley would grow out of it, but of course, she hasn’t. Despite what parents tell us, people rarely seem to grow out of who they are. And I can’t exactly blame Ardsley for teasing me. My mom keeps giving her too much good material. Take my mom’s post about my first period, for instance. Two years later, the headline “Babylicious is now a woman” still loops in my nightmares. The day after the post went viral, someone (I suspect Ardsley) decorated my locker with a CONGRATULATIONS sign, the silvery, shiny kind you buy at Party City for someone’s new baby or retirement.

  Totally humiliating.

  I turn toward Sage. She looks nearly as green as her morning smoothie. Does Ms. Herring not comprehend how a blog can ruin a childhood?

  As class ticks on, Ms. Herring details exactly how our blogs will work. On one group blog, we will post papers and assignments for class. This way, Ms. Herring explains, “We can learn from one another.” Aside from our class blog, we are each responsible for writing our own blog, which we can make private with only Ms. Herring able to see it or make public for everyone on the internet to see. Of course, this prompts a “dangers of the internet” discussion, during which Ms. Herring explains how to be safe online.

  Why doesn’t anyone ever tell grown-ups to be safe online? It seems like every night on the news, there’s a story about kids being dumb on the internet, but there are never any stories about the ridiculous things parents do online. Namely, join Facebook, friend their own children, and write blogs.

  At the end of her spiel, Ms. Herring reminds us that our private blog is extremely important, and drops the bomb that it’s worth 25 percent of our entire grade.

  Superlicious. That’s Sage’s and my sarcastic way of saying something is terrible.

  After class is dismissed, Sage leans over and whispers, “We need to do something about this, stat. I don’t want a blog. It’s bad enough that my mom has one.”

  I nod furiously. There’s no way I’m starting a blog either. This assignment has the potential to make the ninth grade officially the worst, and it’s only day one.

  So much for the best year ever.

  Mommylicious

  “M
Y BABY IS GOING TO HAVE A BLOG!”

  You read it here first!!! Mommylicious’s Babylicious, Imogene, is starting her own blog! It’s for her English class, and I’m thrilled that this is something we can share. Lately she hasn’t seemed as interested in my blog (as you might’ve noticed in the re-created “after” back-to-school shots), so hopefully this will bring us closer again.

  According to the email from her English teacher, the blog will have two functions: 1) It will be where she posts papers on books that the class is reading. 2) It will act as a journal of her year.

  Basically, I get to read my daughter’s diary, and y’all can too! Brilliant! Not to mention that I’m delighted that the school is teaching kids internet skills. Remember the days of blackboards and chalk? Talk about torture in the Old Ages. I <3 the internet.

  I think it’s so progressive of the school to have students start blogs. As we all know, blogs and blogging communities are majorly powerful. Who would I be without Mommylicious?

  Imogene hasn’t given me her blog’s URL yet, but I know she will soon!

  Anyone else’s kids have blogs? Here’s a philosophical question to chew on: If your baby has a blog, does that mean she’s not a baby anymore? Since Imogene deactivated her Facebook account last year, I haven’t had a way to connect to her online! I know. A blogger whose own kid isn’t even on Facebook . . . Talk about irony. So, obviously, this blog project is reason to celebrate, and I’m so excited that I can now proudly call my daughter a fellow blogger.

  Unfortunately, in other ironic news, my mom is still refusing to get an email account. “The Golf Channel is all I need,” she says. “And a good newspaper.” Yup, it’s official. . . . I have a dinosaur living in my basement!

  Read my review of Bounty’s newest line of super-duper absorbent paper towels HERE. They really are the quicker picker-upper.