eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Related collections and offers
Overview
The two people Tracy loves most are Rabbit O’Shea, a smooth-talking bad boy, and Ross Perlman, an innocent young man with a golden voice. She could never choose between them, and she’ll never have to, because Rabbit is a TV character, and Ross is the actor who plays him. When Ross announces a concert in Tracy’s hometown, she pledges to do whatever it takes to meet the real-life Rabbit—a decision that could cost her everything she holds dear.
She and her best friend, Andrea, make a pact that they will meet Ross together or not at all. But when one of them gets the chance to meet him alone, it threatens to tear their friendship apart. Suddenly, Tracy finds herself longing for the days when Ross Perlman was just another poster on her wall.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497681965 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/03/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 107 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Susan Beth Pfeffer wrote her first novel, Just Morgan, during her last semester at New York University. Since then, she has written over seventy novels for children and young adults, including Kid Power, Fantasy Summer, Starring Peter and Leigh, and The Friendship Pact, as well as the series Sebastian Sisters and Make Me a Star. Pfeffer’s books have won ten statewide young reader awards and the Buxtehude Bulle Award.
Read an Excerpt
The Friendship Pact
By Susan Beth Pfeffer
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1986 Susan Beth PfefferAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8196-5
CHAPTER 1
For the past two years, I have been hopelessly, completely in love with Rabbit O'Shea. And for all my life, I have hated to sew.
As far as love goes, I'm also every bit as much in love with Ross Perlman. And up until last Friday, I wasn't sure which one I loved more.
Of course all the pictures I have up on my walls of Rabbit are pictures of Ross, too, since Rabbit's the character Ross plays on Joyride, my favorite TV show. Only Ross really isn't anything like Rabbit, so I have lots of pictures of just him on my walls. Ross, after all, went to Dartmouth, which is the only thing my father likes about him. Not that they ever met. But Dad went to Dartmouth, too. He didn't like it very much, but he has a sentimental feeling about other people who went there. Anyway, I didn't love Ross because he went to Dartmouth, although I admit it gave me a little thrill to realize he went there and not to Harvard or Yale. The thought that Ross was in the same buildings, the same dorms, maybe even the same room as my father, made me feel almost as though I knew him.
But I loved Rabbit, too, and Rabbit never went anywhere to college. My father hates Rabbit. As a matter of fact, every time Joyride is on the air, my father leaves the room, after saying all kinds of insulting things about it. I just let him talk. I love Joyride. It's my absolute favorite show in the whole world, because of Rabbit. He's sort of the main character. There are other characters who are very important, but nothing would happen on the show if it wasn't for Rabbit. Rabbit talks tough and he gets into trouble a lot, but he always straightens things out. That's how his character got his nickname; Rabbit is always hopping in and out of jams. And lots of times, Rabbit gets a chance to sing, too. That's practically my favorite part of the show, when Rabbit gets to sing. But basically Joyride is a comedy, and I always laugh when I watch it. So does Scott, my brother. He's fifteen (I'm twelve), and he says Joyride is just for kids, and he can't understand why I love Rabbit so much, but he watches it, too. So does my mother. Whenever Dad acts like he's mad that Mom watches it, she just shrugs her shoulders and says, "I can't help it. Rabbit's kind of cute." And that from a mother.
My best friend Andrea Todd and I were sitting in homeroom a few weeks ago when Caroline Earle came in and sat down with a flounce. Caroline does everything with a flounce, and she doesn't even care when the boys make fun of her, which they do all the time. I don't blame them. Caroline acts like she's royalty. That's because her father is mayor and her mother is this big shot who plans every cultural event that takes place in our town. We have about eight cultural events a year—concerts or plays that are on tour—so eight times a year Mrs. Earle is a real big shot, and all year round Mr. Earle is. And that's why Caroline flounces.
This time she flounced with more excitement than usual. "I have something fabulous to tell you," she whispered in my general vicinity.
Caroline likes me. I don't have the slightest idea why, since she must know I don't really like her. She's my friend, though. We've been friends since kindergarten, she and Andrea and Mary Kate Donahue and I, and I haven't liked her all that time. Caroline doesn't seem to care.
"What?" I asked. Caroline always has something fabulous to tell me. Usually it's about some dumb law her father signed, or some big present her parents bought her. My mother, who doesn't like Caroline either, says she's spoiled rotten.
"Rabbit is coming here to give a concert!" she whispered, loud enough for me and Andrea to hear her.
I nearly fainted. "Not the Rabbit?" I said, trying to sound cool. "Not Ross Perlman?"
"What other Rabbit is there?" Caroline said. "He's going to give a concert right here, in our auditorium."
Our school has the biggest auditorium in town, so all of Mrs. Earle's cultural events take place here. Still, Rabbit didn't exactly seem like the string quartets she usually brings into town. "Did your mother arrange it?" I asked. If Caroline's mother had actually talked to Ross Perlman, I thought I would die.
Caroline shook her head. I guess she didn't much like the question. "No," she admitted. "Mr. Thomas arranged it all. It's a benefit for hemophilia."
Ross Perlman's cousin has hemophilia, so Ross gives benefits for the National Hemophilia Foundation. All the articles said so. They said not only was he multitalented and very cute, but dedicated to eradicating the evil of disease. I made sure my parents gave some money to the National Hemophilia Foundation the year before, without telling them why. I guess they figured I was dedicated to eradicating the evil of disease, too.
Mr. Thomas is very important in the National Hemophilia Foundation, so it was probably no big deal to him to ask Ross Perlman to give a concert here. But it made me feel weak in my knees. I was awfully glad I was sitting down. If I ever fainted because Rabbit was coming to town, the boys would never let me live it down.
"When's the concert?" Andrea asked.
"Three weeks from Friday," Caroline said. "Let's all get tickets together."
"Me, too," Mary Kate said. She sits two rows down, so I could tell Caroline's whisper was traveling pretty well. My mother says Mrs. Earle knows how to make a lot of noise just being quiet, and Caroline's like that, too.
I was about to agree with everybody, when the first wave of my wonderful idea hit me. It wasn't like I thought about it, the way you work out an arithmetic problem. It just struck me, and I practically gasped when I thought of it. Only I couldn't say anything about it until I had a chance to be alone with Andrea.
Everybody loves Rabbit, but nobody loves him quite as much as Andrea and I do. We have to be his two biggest fans in the world. Take the time our movie theater showed a horror movie Ross Perlman had been in before he got famous playing Rabbit. It was a terrible movie, even though Ross did get to sing two songs in it, but that didn't stop Andrea and me from seeing the movie together four times that week. Andrea's walls would be full of pictures of Ross, except she lives in an apartment and her parents won't let her load the walls with photographs, so she just has four of them on her bulletin board. But they're really good pictures, and she has a scrapbook all about him, too, that she's filled with articles. I would have had one myself, except Andrea thought of it first, and I didn't want to seem like a copycat. Besides, I get to plaster my walls with Rabbit pictures, and I don't want to be greedy. So I help Andrea find articles and we Scotch-tape them in together, and it's almost like the book belongs to both of us.
Andrea and I are in the same homeroom, so we have the same classes, which gives us plenty of time to talk and write notes during the school day. Even so, we have a signal which means, This is so important that we can't talk about it in public; I'll talk to you after school. What we do is cough twice and wink our right eye. I'm not a very good eye-winker, but Andrea always gets the signal.
I had just finished coughing and winking when Mr. Carpenter, our homeroom teacher, came in, and we had to stand up and say the pledge of allegiance instead. At first I was glad I had the whole day in front of me, because I still felt flattened from the wave of my idea, and wanted a chance to think about it before I let Andrea know.
By lunch, it seemed half the school knew about Rabbit, and the cafeteria was buzzing. Andrea, Mary Kate, Caroline, and I did our share of buzzing. We discussed exactly what we'd wear and whether we should bring our Ross Perlman albums to the concert and hold them high over our heads so he'd know he had fans there. Caroline said she'd do that but she was absolutely not going to squeal. I made a bet with her right then and there that she'd squeal just like the rest of us. Caroline might be pretty obnoxious, but she loves Rabbit, too. She doesn't have any pictures of him hanging in her bedroom because her parents won't let her, but she has a huge color picture of him plastered on the front of her looseleaf notebook.
I didn't pay very much attention to anything else at school that day. I'm a pretty good student, and I don't daydream very much, but my mind was on Ross Perlman and how he was going to walk through the same halls I walk through. It was like Dartmouth, only a thousand times better, because he'd be breathing the very same air I do, and not just whatever air was left over at Dartmouth from when my father was there. I wasn't alone daydreaming. Two of my teachers complained that none of the kids paid any attention to anything they were saying all day. My science teacher even threatened to give us a test on rabbits, right then and there, since that was all we were thinking about.
By last period I was dying for school to be over, so I could tell Andrea my wonderful idea. Last period is home ec, which is my least favorite class, anyway. We have it every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while the boys have shop. That's just for the first half of the year. Then we have shop and the boys have home ec. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we have art together, which is better. In home ec all you learn how to do is cook and sew. Cooking isn't too bad. We learned how to make cookies, and French toast, and pizza. All pizza was, was white bread with cheese and ketchup on it warmed up together. Real pizza is a lot better.
But cooking was a thousand times better than sewing, which is what we'd been doing lately. It isn't like I'm weird for hating to sew. Everybody in my family does, so we never do any. Mom has this arrangement with her friend Mrs. Katz, that every time something needs sewing, Mrs. Katz does it for her, and every time Mrs. Katz needs something baked, Mom does it. Mom says it balances out in the end.
Miss Collins, our home ec teacher, loves sewing, though. I think if she had to choose between sewing and eating, she'd pick sewing. Of course if all she knows how to make are cookies and French toast and white-bread pizza, I don't blame her.
"Girls, I have an assignment for you," she announced after looking at the hems we were sewing. She frowned when she looked at mine. She always does. My mother says it's miracle enough any child of hers can thread a needle, and doesn't mind at all that my hems run diagonally.
We all groaned when she said "assignment." Home ec doesn't have homework like the rest of our classes, but those assignments could drive you crazy.
"It's going to be due two weeks from Friday," Miss Collins said. "So write it down in your assignment books now. I won't be reminding you of it every day, you know."
We all took out our assignment books and prepared to take notes.
"Each one of you will be expected to make an apron," Miss Collins said, then paused dramatically.
None of us said anything. I might have sighed, but Mrs. Collins didn't notice.
"I want each of you to go out and buy two yards of cotton," Miss Collins instructed us. "Any color you want. A print, even, if you feel like it. The only instructions I have about the apron are that it be hemmed, have at least one pocket, and, of course, sashes to tie around your back. Naturally I hope you'll apply your imaginations and make your aprons more decorative than that."
Caroline murmured agreement. Caroline does needlepoint.
"Originality will be a factor in grading," Miss Collins continued. "But I'll give a good grade to a simple apron well-made. Three weeks should give you more than enough time to make up a design and execute it. And, of course, after I've graded them, I'll give you your aprons back, and you'll be able to use them when you cook."
I looked down at my assignment book and realized that instead of taking notes about the apron, I'd been doodling pictures of rabbits. It didn't matter. I could write notes about aprons for the rest of my life, and I'd still be lucky to make one come out in one piece.
Just when I gave up hope that the bell would ever ring it did. We all jumped out of our chairs, but it was only the warning bell, so we spent the next five minutes putting the needles and thread away and straightening out our school things. Miss Collins came up to me while I was returning the thread.
"I expect you to work extra hard on your apron, Tracy," she said to me. "Frankly, I'm surprised a girl as smart as you does so poorly in sewing."
I thought about explaining about heredity, but it didn't seem worth it. "I try," I said, which was true enough. I do try. Not very hard, maybe, but still I try.
"Then I think you'll have to try just a bit harder," Miss Collins said. "I want you to make an apron we'll both be proud of. Do you think you can do that?"
I nodded because I had to. There was no way I could make a decent apron. I knew my limitations.
Miss Collins probably would have told me even more about the apron she expected me to make, except that the final bell rang and I seized my chance to escape. Andrea and I ran out of the room as fast as we could, so we'd beat Caroline and Mary Kate to our lockers, and get a head start. We beat them by a clear five seconds, and before they had the chance to say anything to us, we were out of the hallway and halfway down the front steps.
Andrea began running toward my house, so I ran to keep up with her. We got home in record time, but we were so winded we couldn't talk for a moment. Instead, we threw our books on the living room sofa and collapsed on the floor next to it.
"Andrea," I said, still huffing.
"What?" she panted.
"What's the most important thing that's ever happened in our lives?" I asked her.
"Rabbit's coming to town," she said.
"Right," I said, and I felt as excited by my wonderful wave of an idea as I had when it first hit me. "But just having him here isn't important enough. Andrea, we just have to meet him!"
CHAPTER 2"Tracy, you are totally and completely insane," Andrea said. "How can we possibly meet him? They'll probably guard him with every policeman in this town."
"There's got to be a way," I said. "We just have to think of one."
Andrea was silent for a moment. "What would we say to him?" she asked finally.
"We'll worry about that when we meet him," I said. "You're willing to try?"
Andrea nodded. "I'll try. But let's make an unbreakable pact that if one of us gets to meet him, so does the other one."
Andrea liked unbreakable pacts, but this one I was more than willing to agree to. For all my determination to meet Ross Perlman, I'd never know what to say to him if I was alone. My mouth would probably just drop open and stay that way. "I agree to this pact," I said, just the way Andrea liked.
"And let's not tell anybody else about our pact," Andrea said. "If we tell people we're going to meet him, they'll want to join us."
"More likely they'd just laugh at us," I said.
"Either way, let's keep it to ourselves. We don't want Mary Kate to interfere. Or Caroline. Especially Caroline."
"You're right," I said. "Caroline would probably want to sew him an apron. We'll keep it to ourselves."
"Great," Andrea said. "But how can we meet him?"
We were instantly silent. It's one thing to decide to meet someone; it's quite another to figure out a way. "Maybe he'll get a flat tire right in front of your house," Andrea said doubtfully. "Then you could keep him here and call me."
"What should we do, strew the streets with thumbtacks?" I asked.
"Well ..." Andrea said.
"Come on, Andrea, we've got to be practical about this," I said. "Meeting Ross Perlman would be the most important thing that ever happened to us—ever. Maybe for the rest of our lives. We can't leave it to chance."
So we were silent again. Then Andrea said, "Your father's an editor at the paper. Maybe he could help us."
"Dad?" I said. "Dad hates Ross Perlman. He wouldn't help."
"Not even for you?" Andrea said. "His only daughter?"
"Especially not for me," I said. "His only daughter. He thinks the Rabbit's a bad influence."
"How about the reporters?" Andrea suggested. "One of them might be able to help."
"No, I have a better idea," I said. "Uncle Charlie."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Friendship Pact by Susan Beth Pfeffer. Copyright © 1986 Susan Beth Pfeffer. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.