I’m going to be 25 in a couple of weeks – a fact which is totally weird to me and (this is said without a shred of my usual conceit) everyone in my family. I actually really enjoy being the youngest person in the room and, save for the occassional teen angst/rebellion moments and periods of “but, it’s not FAIR!” when my brothers and sister had priveleges I didn’t, I always have. I like being the baby of the family.

I said something to the effect of “it’s all about me” a few days ago and my mom and dad responded, “It’s been all about you for the last 25 years.” Frankly, I like it that way.

And I actually have changed very little over the years. Take Jane at 12, for example. I really really liked Boyz II Men back in the day, and I ain’t gonna lie about it. I still rock out to On Bended Knee. I also loved borrowing my brother Jeff’s cd’s and sneaking in his room to play his video games. You have no idea how pleased I am now that we live together and he’s at work most of the day. And that he doesn’t care that I stole his gameboy. I also used to watch the same movies over and over and over and over again, and, if I found a book that I liked, I would read that book over and over and over and over again. Certain things about me have not changed at all.

In fact, here’s me at the pumpkin patch in 1992, rockin’ a super fly teal plastic headband:

And here’s me, about ten minutes ago.

Mmhm. Here’s one of me, at 10, wearing a Kraft Cheese and Macaroni Club sweatshirt (something that you are so. damn. jealous of!).

And here I am less than a year ago, showing my love for another brand name comfort food.

(Campbell’s, btw.) I also have a love for large sunglasses and fake moustaches. And my dad in fake moustaches, ’cause he’s 10 kinds of awesome.

Thankfully, my fashion sense has changed some over the years, because if it hadn’t, I’d be writing this post in a pair of pink sweatpants with a turtleneck tucked in, and deck shoes on my feet. And unbelievably dry hair that seriously looked like I had gotten a bad dye job, but I swear I never dyed my hair. Especially not at 10.

So, as far as essentials go, here is a little bit more proof. Witness me being obnoxious at my sister’s birthday in 1993.

I mean, it was 14 years ago. Sally’s thankfully changed wardrobe and hair stylings since then as well. And here is Sally and me back in January, out at a bar.

Mmhm. Sally still looks pretty and I still look obnoxious. That will never change.

Another thing about me around that age would be my love for young adult horror novels. I loved loved loved them. Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine were pretty good, but I never read Goosebumps, because I was so too grown up for them.

Sometimes, though, Christopher Pike’s books got too supernatural and there was too much going on with monsters and aliens and everything. And sometimes R.L. Stine’s dumb, flat, boring conclusions would annoy me. So, that is when I would look to Richie Tankersley Cusick.

Her books were really less about the murders or whatever and more about the sex! Well, not really sex, but, you know, the boys that the main charater liked. And I do mean boys, pluaral. There were always several. Her stories were more like soap operas, so I really liked reading them, and I’d read them over and over, despite the fact that, obviously, after the first time, I knew who did it and why. Although, the why was sometimes confusing, because she’s not a very good writer and doesn’t come up with very good explanations.

Anyway, one day I was telling Sally about the books and I told her how funny they always were to me and I was having trouble explaining, so I just opened the book and started reading funny passages (the location of which I knew because I read it so many times). And then I just kind of read the whole book to her.
That sort of evolved into me reading all of the RTC books to her, with different voices for each character.
And when we ran out of them, and weren’t sure what to read next, I read some of them over to her.
See? Some things never change.

Anyway, so my favorite book by RTC back in the day was called Fatal Secrets. It was RTC’s raciest because it involved drugs and naked people.

The cover of the book, as usual, gives not one clue to what the story’s about, and this is probably the worst cover. Not the ugliest cover. That honor goes to Help Wanted. This is just the dumbest. I mean, sure the main character works in a toy store, but it’s not like there are evil toys after her.

P.S. WHAT is up with that guy leaning against the house back there? Hahaha!

Anyway, so the stories all follow a sort of formula. The main character is a girl who’s initially described as plain-looking, and she always has a gorgeous glamarous looking best friend. She either lives with a single parent who’s constantly working and, thus, never home, or she’s on a vacation where there’s no parental supervision.
She meets some new people, gets sucked into some kind of scary situation which usually has nothing to do with her until she totally makes it all about her, and makes at least two, usually three guys fall in love with her. One will be a “bad guy” who turns out to be good. One will be a guy who totally comes off as sort of gay and turns out to just be a friend. And one will be a “good guy” who turns out to be bad. It almost always works this way, with only one or two exceptions.
Anyway, Fatal Secrets’s main character is Ryan, and her sister drowned in front of her about a year ago. Her single mother is not dealing well with it and is, therefore, fairly absent. Ryan’s best friend Phoebe is hot and is always going out on dates. Phoebe’s brother Jinx is kind of a pest, and kind of an asshole, and totally mean to Ryan all the time, so they’re obviously gonna get together. Ryan works at a toy store for a guy who’s name is Mr. Partini, but I always thought his name was Mr. Pantini, which is funnier. Her mother is also dating a guy named Steve.
So, it’s around Christmas time and this mysterious guy shows up at the house, claiming his name is Charles and he was a friend/boyfriend of Marissa’s (that’s the dead sister). The mother takes him in immediately and, of course, Ryan gets HYSTERICALLY suspicious about this, and keeps stomping over to Phoebe’s house to vent about him, where Phoebe and Jinx are all, “Why don’t you go out with him, you prude?” Charles is really nice to her all the time, but she hates him because he accidentally walked in on her once when she was getting changed.
So, here’s where things start getting weird for Ryan. She’s at the toy store and she sees this big fat guy staring at her through the window. And then she looks at the doll house which has been arranged in this vignette to look like a doll is drowning in the little mirrored glass pond outside. So, Ryan FLIPS OUT and starts screaming for help and then falls down and hits her head and passes out. It’s so stupid. And of course no one believes her because when she waked up, the vignette has been cleared away and Mr. Pantini’s all, “Eh, bambina, eh, eh, eh!” ’cause he’s Italian.
Then, suddenly, a million things start happening to Ryan. Like, she sees this guy in a Santa costume and he starts chasing her and she runs and slips on some ice and falls and gets all stunned, but he’s gone by the time Phoebe finds her. And she goes out to the car and hears Marissa’s voice asking her for help or something and sees a mannequin or something in Marissa’s coat, and she falls in the garage and hits her head and passes out. And she goes to this New Year’s Dance and gets drugged and, like, falls out of the van that they’re driving home in or something and stumbles around in the woods for a while and thinks she hears Marissa’s voice again and then passes out. She seriously passes out a lot, so it’s surprising she’s not dead by the end of the book.
But, anyway, all of the things have to do with Marissa. One of the Christmas presents Charles brought with him turns out to be the necklace M had on the day she dies, so Ryan flips out and screams at him, and then he neatly tells her that that wasn’t even a box that he came with. Someone’s setting him up. Ooh! She also gets trapped in the toy store after hours and thinks the fat guy’s after her again and busts through the glass door and wanders over to the gas station where Jinx (who’s seriously, like, 15 years old) is working, and everyone thinks she tried to slit her wrists. It doesn’t help that she keeps going, “I did this. I just had to get out,” instead of saying, “Don’t forget to board up the door that I just broke.” Then when she’s in her house resting after her hospital visit, she looks outside and someone has built a snowman that looks like it’s drowning (there’s an elaborate description, which I won’t repeat. Just trust me.).
So, throughout all of this intrigue, there were two parts of the book that I thought were the best, because they had nothing to do with Marissa’s death or Mr. Pantini or anything else going on.
First of all, the night that she passes out in the woods, she ends up being carted off by someone, and wakes up the next morning TOTALLY NAKED, laying in bed in the middle of, like, a living room. It’s crazy. She’s naked! Seriously! I’m not exaggerating!
And then this guy wanders in and it turns out that he goes to school with her (high school!) and his name (get this) is Winchester Stone. He tells her that he found her out there, she was soaked, and he brought her back to his house in the woods so she wouldn’t die of pneumonia. But, the issue of who stripped her naked and put her into bed is NEVER addressed! It was so scandalous. And there’s this dumb adding suspicions to Winchester thing where he tells her he couldn’t call her mom ’cause the phone was dead, and then his dad later says that there was nothing wrong with the phone, but that doesn’t even really matter.
And the other part I liked really was over several chapters and several locations, but it was all the same day. Anyway, Ryan gets all upset and calls up Phoebe, who’s on a date, but then she convinces Jinx to come to her rescue (I think she thought someone was stalking her as usual). He shows up and he suddenly starts being all nice to her and asking her what’s wrong, and then almost slips up and tells her that he’s, like, TOTALLY in love with her. Then they go back to his house so she can sleep. When she wakes up, Phoebe shows up and they go out for coffee, but when they’re out, someone slashes the tires on the car. But, it wasn’t Phoebe’s car! It was JINX’S car! And when they get home, he is so pissed that he calls up his parents (who are on vacation) and convinces them to punish Phoebe by not letting her go to the New Year’s Dance (oh, no!). Her retaliation is to humiliate Jinx by bringing up the fact that he’s in love with Ryan and has been forever, and he has a box with pictures of her and he wrote her a love letter, and he gets all embarrassed and almost starts CRYING and then doesn’t speak to Ryan again out of sheer embarrassment until the time that she finds him at the gas station with the slit wrists.
Intense! Or, anyway, it was when I was 12. I loved that part. I reread it, like, a million times all, “Someday, some boy that I kind of sort of like is going to be outed in his love for me, and it’ll be totally awful but totally awesome for me.” And that’s kind of formed my entire notion of romance to this day – awkward and unsettling embarrassment leads to love. JK JK!

Anyway, so the story has more to do with than romance, even though I don’t think it should have. It turns out that Marissa’s death was this multi-level conspiracy. Basically, Charles was a drug-runner for both Mr. Pantini (!!!!!) and Steve, the mother’s boyfriend (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). He’s actually not a bad guy, he was just sort of drawn into their evil drug scheme because he was a poor college student (inspite of his country club name: Charles Eastman) and needed some cash. Marissa found out and took some pictures of their sleazetastic operation and Charles found out and, unfortunately, kind of had to turn her in. She hid the film in Ryan’s purse (which she found and tried to develop, but her ambiguous name made it easy for Charles to steal the prints from the drug store), and then fell into the pond (duh), and tried to get Ryan in on the whole operation as she was dying by saying “Steve, Steve!” over and over again. But, Ryan was dumb and thought she was saying “sleeve”, like she wanted Ryan to grab onto her sleeve. Although, and forgetting the fact that the girl was drowning at the time, saying “Steve” wouldn’t have really clued Ryan in on what was going on. I mean, “Steve’s a drug dealer,” maybe.
Ryan finds all of this out when Mr. Pantini and Steve lure her to this old warehouse with some story about Charles being dead, or something (Jinx follows her because he knows something’s up because he loooooooves her), but they’re really trying to lure her to her death. But, not before they divulge their whole operation and how Marissa died. AND the fact that they would’ve killed her if she hadn’t stupidly drowned. The toy store is a drug front and the big fat man Ryan’s been seeing was Steve in a big giant coat!
Charles tries to get them to leave her alone (’cause he’s not really a bad guy!) and they shut him DOWN and kill him! They seriously kill him! But not before Charles sets fire to the warehouse and they have to escape. And then Winchester, the denuder, shows up, and it turns out that he’s been Mr. Pantini’s driver and kind of sort of knew that they were drug dealers, but he DIDN’T know that they were murderers, and the fact that they were going to kill Marissa, who, it turns out, was his girlfriend once upon a time, makes him go crazy and he tries to rescue Ryan and then almost gets killed himself!
!!!
But, he doesn’t die. Nor do Steve or Mr. Pantini. Winchester testifies against them and they go to jail and Ryan’s mother is still not even involved in everything that’s going on, but Jinx is! Jinx is there to pick Ryan up from the police station and playfully insult her and then kiss her the end.
Such a good book.

But, here’s the biggest problem I have with it. What they wanted from Ryan was to a) find the film that Marissa gave her, and b) find out how much she knew about Marissa’s death. So, doesn’t it seem like a BAD idea to make her suspicious by torturing her and stalking her and setting up spooky vignettes that resemble the way her sister died? Doesn’t it seem like she would then TRY to dig into the death? I mean, it just seems like bad business to be pushing the one link out there between a girl’s accidental drowning and a huge drug cartel to the brink of hysterical anger over what’s been happening to her and to KEEP BRINGING UP THE DEATH THAT YOU WANT KEPT UNDER WRAPS. Duh.