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Chapter One My so-called parents hate my boyfriend, Shrimp. I'm not sure they even believe he is my boyfriend. They take one look at his five-foot-five, surfer-shirt-wearin', baggy-jeans-slouchin', Pop Tarteatin', spiked-hair-head self and you can just see confusion firebombs exploding in their heads, like they are thinking, Oh no, Cyd Charisse, that young man is not your homes.
Dig this: He is.
At least Shrimp always remembers to call my mother "Mrs." instead of just grunting in her direction, like most guys my age do. And no parent could deny that hanging out with Shrimp is an improvement over Justin, my ex, from my old prep school. Justin got me into trouble, big time. I'm so over the Justin stage.
Not like Sid and Nancy care much. I have done my parents the favor of becoming more or less invisible.
Sid, my father, calls me a "recovering hellion." Sid's actually my stepfather. You could say I hardly know my real father. I met him at an airport once when I was five. He was tall and skinny and had ink black hair, like me. We ate lunch in a smoky pub at the DallasFort Worth airport. I did not like my hamburger so my real dad opened his briefcase and offered me a piece of homemade gingerbread he had wrapped in tinfoil.
He bought me a brown rag doll at the airport gift shop. The cashier had made the doll herself. She said she had kept the doll hidden under her cash register waiting for just the right little girl. My real dad gave the cashier a one-hundred-dollar bill and told her to keep the change. I named my dolly Gingerbread.
Nancy and I were on our way to San Francisco to become Sid's family. My real dad was on his way back to New York, to his real wife and family. They don't know about me.
I'm fairly sure that my real dad's wife would not mind that I make scissors cuts on my arms and then pick the scabs. His real wife probably makes fresh gingerbread every day and writes Things To Do lists and does her own grocery shopping instead of having a housekeeper and a driver do everything for her, like Nancy does.
Nancy only met Justin once, at the expulsion hearing. The headmaster told her Justin and I were caught fooling around in a room loaded with Jack Daniels and prescription bottles. In flagrante delicto were the words the headmaster used. I failed Latin.
Nancy said Justin was from a "wonderful Connecticut family" and how could I shame her and Sid like that. It was Justin who was selling the ecstasy out of his dorm room, not me. It was Justin who said he pulled out in time. Sid and Nancy never knew about that part.
Nancy came into my room one night after I returned home to San Francisco. Sid and my younger half-sibs were at Father's Night at their French immersion school. "I hope your friends use condoms," Nancy said, which was funny because she knows Shrimp is my only friend. She threw a box of Trojans onto the lace-trimmed four-poster bed that I hate. Shrimp is a safety boy, he takes care of those things. If it had been Shrimp back in boarding school, he would have come with me to the clinic.
"Can I have a futon on the floor instead of this stupid princess bed?" I said. The thought of my mother even knowing about contraception, much less doling it out, was beyond comprehension, much less discussion.
Nancy sighed. Sighing is what she does instead of eating. "I paid ten thousand dollars to redecorate this room while you were at boarding school. No, you may not, Cyd Charisse."
Everybody in my family calls me by my first and middle name since my dad's name is pronounced the same as my first name. When she was twenty years old and pregnant with me, Nancy thought she would eventually marry my real dad. She named me after this dancer-actress from like a million years ago who starred in this movie that Nancy and real-dad saw on their first date, before she found out he had a whole other life. The real Cyd Charisse is like this incredibly beautiful sex goddess. I am okay looking. I could never be superhuman sexy like the real Cyd Charisse. I mean there is only room for so much grace and beauty in one person named Cyd Charisse, not two.
Nancy fished a pack of Butter Rum LifeSavers out of her designer jacket and held them out to me. "Want a piece of my dinner?"
Copyright © 2002 by Rachel Cohn
For Cyd, living with her step dad Sid and mother Nancy and her younger half siblings in San Francisco is more an a nuisance than paradise. Her richly decorated home, stylish mother, lenient step father and her relationship with her new awesome boyfriend Shrimp are slowly crumbling up into a black hole that she has dug up in her past, the spoiled relationship with her then boyfriend Justin who got her hooked on his dark lifestyle and got her pregnant without giving her any support. After her life changing decision to write her own future Cyd becomes even more cynical, witty, sarcastic and sometimes warm and human on her quest to fix her broken relations with her parents, Shrimp and her biological father in New York. Her last memory of him was when she was five years old and him giving her a doll that she named Gingerbread, carrying it with her to this day. The visit to the East coast opens her eyes in more ways than she has imagined and it's up to her to either find the light or slink away into the shadows with no helping hands to pull her up. The mystery of her parents split, her other half siblings and potential new boys are lined on up the horizon for the reader to grab onto and enjoy. It's all up to her whether she wants to grow up and change or act like a spoiled brat.
The writing was easy to read and made the book flow like an express train. I enjoyed the brief glimpse of Cyd before she was with Shrimp and how her current situation evolved. This isn't deep fiction but a fun romp though pages filled with growing pains and emerging roots of maturity. I'm all ready reading the sequel "Shrimp" and cannot wait to find out what happens when Cyd is back in San Francisco after her life changing summer in New York. This book is like a nice, light slice of cake; it's no dinner but still fills you up.
- Kasia S.