My Mother Was Never a Kid

Chapter One Getting to be thirteen turned out to be an absolute and complete anticlimax. I mean it. What a letdown. You wouldn't believe the years I wasted dreaming about how sensational everything was going to be once I was a teenager. The way I pictured it the change was going to be fantastic. Overnight people would stop treating me like some silly little kid. Instead I'd be respected pretty much as a pre-adult, practically running my own life. Sure, I'll still have to live at home, but mostly I'd be making my own decisions. Oh, occasionally my parents would ask me to do something, but it wouldn't be an order -- it'd be more like a suggestion.Hah!"Victoria, that room is a pigsty. I want it cleaned up immediately, or you can forget about sleepovers for a month." That's my mother suggesting. "And another thing," she says, adding three more little nuggets of friendly advice, "see that your laundry is put away before you empty the dishwasher and don't leave the house without walking Norman." That's our sheepdog. "And, Victoria?""Yes, Mother.""Put on your jacket. It's only May."Wow! I must have been some jerk. Truth is, nothing's changed except that maybe now I won't have to listen to that rubbish about waiting till I'm a teenager. Fact is, now they use it against me. "That certainly wasn't proper behavior for a teenager." And I'm still waiting. "A bike tour is a wonderful idea, but you'll have to wait until you're at least sixteen." Of course when I'm sixteen they'll have moved all the good things to eighteen, and when I get there, it'll be twenty-one. I'll always be waiting to be old enough for this or that until I'm ninety.Thenthey'll say, "That's something you should have done when you were seventeen or twenty." It seems like you're always the wrong age. What a relief to know that in just three weeks I'll have a birthday. Fourteen has got to be better.Except, of course, if you have a mother like mine. You wouldn't believe how overprotective she is. Do you know that I'm the only kid in the whole eighth grade who can't go to the movies at night? And then she takes every little thing so seriously. Like what happened yesterday at school. I can understand her being a little upset, but in my opinion she overreacted. After all, it was the first time in my whole life that I ever got suspended. For practically nothing. And besides, I wasn't the only one involved. There were eight of us, and just because I was the only one suspended doesn't mean it was all my fault. Which, in fact, it wasn't.Personally I think it was mostly Mrs. Serrada's fault. (In case you didn't know, she's the grossest English teacher in the Western Hemisphere.) But what can you expect at Brendon School? That's this really uptight private school I go to. The kind of yes-sir, no-sir place where they make you wear these horrendous uniforms every day. You should see them -- gray skirts with fat ugly box pleats and a vomity blue blazer with a scratchy gold emblem on the pocket that everybody always says looks like an eagle sitting on a toilet. It's all a terrible embarrassment, and of course I detest it like crazy. A lot of good that does. I've been going there since the third grade. Anyway, back to what happened yesterday. There probably wouldn't have been any trouble if dear old Serrada hadn't picked such a boring movie for our one and only class trip all term. Actually I've got nothing against Shakespeare; in fact I think he's pretty okay sometimes. He did a super job withRomeo and Juliet(the movie anyway), butRichard the Second?Spare me.Anyway, all we did was sneak up to the balcony, mess around a little, throw a couple of gum wrappers over the railing, and smoke one cigarette. That was the worst. The cigarette, I mean. I really inhaled it deep and it made me so nauseous and dizzy that I thought I was going to fall right into the orchestra. The thought scared me so much that I slid down to the flPascal, Francine is the author of 'My Mother Was Never a Kid' with ISBN 9780689859885 and ISBN 0689859880.