Foreign Exposure Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Letters

  Touch the Monkey

  Bedbugs or Bust

  Willkommen in Berlin!

  May Contain Nuts

  Wyomophobia

  Ships at Night

  How to Go from Crazy to Craziest in Sixty Minutes

  Emotional Ear Wax

  A Sunny Day in London Town

  Among the Astronauts

  Baby Greens and Grown-Up Snogs

  The Curious Incident Chez Scissors Thompson

  Slap and Tickle

  Not Quite Bagels

  At the Altar of the Soul Cathedral

  How I Grew Arctic Ferns Under My Arms

  Bridezillas in Our Midst

  Kings and Queens

  On the Master’s Couth

  Home to Roost

  The Other Side of Father Christmas

  Hide-and-Go-Stalk

  Loose Ends

  Buttercup Belle

  Battleship Down

  Noddy & Co.

  Perfect Plan

  Back to the Wilderness

  About the Authors

  Copyright © 2007 by Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-66379-8

  eISBN 978-0-547-34909-1

  v2.0614

  To our mothers, for giving us the world.

  With boundless gratitude to

  Eden Edwards and Tim Rostron.

  Mimi Schulman,

  Even though you’re a total weirdo, I am SO glad you came to Baldwin this year. Remember what I told you on the first day, about how the Baldwin scene’s needed some social spice forever? Well, it was true, and you sure didn’t disappoint! Have an AMAZING summer in Berlin, and if things ever get stressful, just think of me sailing on the Cape. You HAVE to come visit next summer, OK? Lobster and ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and no better seashell-collecting on earth.

  Hugs and kisses,

  Amanda

  Dearest Miriam (ha!),

  Hope you don’t mind I’m claiming the Brazilian Dance Club’s page. I’ve always felt a certain bond with the group. It’s a wonder I haven’t joined yet—you should see me at home grooving to my new drumming CD. Magical moments. So . . . you’re my oldest old-school friend, the girl I knew way back in the day, the chick who used to try to peek through the crack of the bathroom door and watch me pee in kindergarten. Ten years later and things haven’t really changed, have they?

  OK, you can kick me now. Ouch!

  I was getting used to your ass being in Texas and it’s been a little weird having you back in New York. Sometimes it feels like we’re strangers and other times like we’re related to each other. Relax—I’m about to say something nice. We’ve had our share of good times this year and I’ve enjoyed my spot on your living room couch. I hope you survive the summer with your mommy dearest and professor stud muffin and that I didn’t make a mistake when I decided to go to the summer studies program at Bennington. When you come home from Berlin and I come back from granola camp, I’m hoping things will be back to normal. And you know exactly what I mean.

  Your friend,

  Sam

  Dear Mimi,

  You’ve been a pleasure to have this year in creative writing. I’ve so enjoyed watching you blossom from a timid transfer student into the class’s resident pistol. You’ve brought so much insight and constructive feedback to the group discussions, and your writing has never failed to dazzle. I’ve relished everything you’ve handed in, from your first essay about your cat to the science fiction story you wrote last week—talk about a kinetic voice! Don’t forget to bring a notebook with you everywhere you go this summer.

  Kim

  P.S. I’ll be staying at the Jennings Artist Colony upstate from mid-July until the end of August. Feel free to drop a line if you’re so inspired.

  Yo,

  It’s been nice being locker neighbors with you this year. Sorry I’m such a slob. When I cleaned my locker out this week I found a hard-boiled egg from October.

  Nastily,

  Pete Lombini

  P.S. Have we ever even talked before?

  Whassssssssssssssssssssssup, Lady?

  What am I going to do this summer without our World Civ class? Life isn’t worth living if I can’t reenact history for my fellow scholars. You have been my everything—my wind, my fire, my beef jerky. I’m going to try to get Ms. Singer to teach The Return of World Civ next year. You in, Ho Chi Minh?

  Yours,

  Julius Caesar a.k.a. Zoroaster a.k.a. Aristotle a.k.a. Hammurabi a.k.a. the one and only ghettofabulous Arthur Gray

  Mimi,

  It’s been great bumping into you everywhere I go this year (the bakery with my grandmother, art openings, Hot Bagels during assembly, etc.). You sure you’re not following me?

  Stay cool and don’t forget to show up for school next year.

  Max-a-million

  (That weird thing to the left of this is a drawing I made for you. It started out as the Brooklyn Bridge, but I don’t know what it is anymore so don’t ask.)

  Mimi,

  You’re such a loser for making me write this. How many times have I told you I don’t do yearbooks? Since you insist, here goes the formulaic cheesy note:

  I’m glad Baldwin’s new girl ended up being so cool, not to mention good-looking and rich. Oh wait—that’s me. Haha. Yearbook rules stipulate that I’m supposed to list all my favorite memories here. Too bad I don’t do memories. I’ll say this much: I’ll miss you and the gang over the summer, but I suspect it’ll fly by faster than a private jet.

  Let’s keep in touch like little stalkers, mkay?

  Yours in Eurotrash,

  Pia xxx

  Dear Mimi,

  Life at Baldwin is always a little insane, but this year has been by far the craziest one yet. I blame you. I’m so glad you came up to NYC. You’re one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. You’re supersmart, you’ve got killer (if sometimes slightly questionable) style, and best of all you make me smile even when my face is covered in tears. Your Bugle articles always crack me up, and when you nailed Serge Ziff, I realized you were more than just a comic genius. Now the Ziffster is a has-been and you’re practically famous. Thank God Zora let you back into school—the student body was running low on celebrities.

  Sucks you won’t be around this summer, but I promise I’ll send you letters to tide you over in Germany.

  Love,

  Jess

  M,

  How weird is it when you’re writing in somebody’s yearbook and they’re sitting right next to you, writing in your yearbook? There’s literally two inches of the red staircase’s carpeting between us and we could just be talking, but you won’t look up from whatever you’re writing. I hate writing—it’s so stressful. What am I supposed to say? Is this all we’re going to have left of each other when we’re 99 years old? Sorry so morbid—I’ve been reading the Jim Morrison diaries.

  I have three more yearbooks to sign before the bell rings, so here’s a list of this year’s highlights, in no particular order.

  1. Chilling in my apartment, drinking all of Mom’s iced green tea and looking at photography books. Apart from your thing for those Edward Weston pepper pictures, which I’ll never understand, you have excellent taste.

  2. . . . um . . .
r />   Bell just rang. List kind of sucked, but oh well.

  Peace. Love. C ya.

  V

  My little dumpling,*

  I’m touched! Merci for saving the back page for me. Empty except for my parting letter and the senior class photo.** Aww, will you look at the 12th graders? They’re so excited to be heading off to the land of free love and 584 keg parties a week. Now it’s our turn to be “upperclassmen,” whatever that means.

  This year has had its share of ups and downs. The downs: that idiotic journal of yours, my mom’s oh-so-ready-for-Lifetime-adaptation breakdown, Jess’s boy-related freakouts. But the ups by far outnumbered those low points: working together on the paper and having Ulla Lippman*** to amuse us, dancing to Bulgarian techno in my apartment at three a.m., watching self-help talk shows instead of studying for our “interpretative performance vocabulary review,” planting organic cabbage you-know-where, hitting the squash courts with Amanda France and her preppy posse, and calling you whenever I was on the verge of a mental meltdown.

  I don’t know what I’ll do without you this summer. How unfair is it we’ll both be in Europe but in different countries? What if I need your love and guidance? You’d better cave in and get a cell phone. I’ve come to depend on you.****

  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoLily,

  *That is, my supermodel-tall little dumpling.

  **Random aside: Is it just me or does Simon Daffow have his eyes scrunched up in every single picture in this book?

  ***Check her out at the top right. Don’t you feel bad that she didn’t get her braces off in time for the picture?

  ****You’re the only one who brought me a jumbo bag of peanut butter cups during my mom’s nervous breakdown.

  Touch the Monkey

  Top three people I’d give anything to spend my summer with:

  Boris, the boyfriend I never see

  Lily, light of my social life, fire of my lunch hour

  Dad

  Top three people I’d give anything not to spend my summer with:

  Mom

  Mom’s boyfriend, Maurice

  Mom and Maurice together

  I USED TO LOOK FORWARD to the last day of school, back when summer was all about improving my backstroke and kicking back with my cat, Simon. But not this year. As the final days of tenth grade ticked by, I watched with growing envy as my friends pranced around in flip-flops and oversize sunglasses. I would’ve gladly taken summer school, or even one of those military-academy-cum-fat-camps advertised in the back of the New York Times Magazine, over the nightmare that awaited me.

  Apart from DNA, my mother and I have very little in common. I’m five-eleven and growing; she’s well below the national average for women’s height and, therefore, has never suffered the humiliation of being called “sir” by inattentive clerks and waiters. Self-consciousness and bewilderment, my specialties, are completely foreign concepts to her. Once, when I asked her if she ever feels insecure or depressed, she chuckled and said she believes in positive thinking. Mom is a psychology professor, and an expert on denial.

  Though usually too wrapped up in thinking positively about her own life to notice any developments in mine, she will occasionally descend from her cloud of self-absorption to hurt my feelings—inadvertently, of course. I often remind myself that, deep down, she loves me a lot; she just has a quirky way of expressing it. I let it slide when, after watching me fumble through a duet from Anything Goes at my eighth-grade talent show, she mentioned a position paper she’d read on female adolescents’ voice changes. When she scrutinized the beautiful gold heels I was wearing to the ninth-grade winter dance and declared that I needed “three extra inches like a hole in the head,” I brushed it off. But when, late last spring, she kicked my saintly father out of the house to shack up with Maurice, the roly-poly physics professor she claimed to be her “existential companion,” my patience ran out. If she could live without Dad, then she’d have to live without me too.

  But in exchange for letting me hightail it to New York to spend this past school year with poor Dad, Mom extracted a promise in return: that I’d spend the summer with her in Houston. Or so I’d naively assumed. As it turned out, Mom had landed a summer fellowship at the Teichen Institute and expected me to tag along while she conducted spatial-memory experiments on rhesus monkeys.

  The Teichen Institute, I should point out, is located in Berlin, a huge European metropolis where I’d know exactly two people: Mom and the aforementioned puffball physicist who’d replaced Dad.

  With the school year drawing to a close, I began to dread the experience, and moped around the house accordingly. In the weeks before school let out, Quinn, Dad’s delightful darkroom assistant and an honorary member of our family, kept trying to cheer me up by describing Berlin as decadent and fabulous—a city where nobody works or gets up before noon. Quinn was unable to be serious about anything for longer than five seconds, and was a world-class expert at pulling Dad or me out of a funk. One night in late May, he even lured me to the couch and removed a red Netflix envelope from his messenger bag, announcing, “If you don’t love Germany after this masterpiece, I’m taking you to Bellevue for a mental health checkup!”

  And so I was subjected to Satan’s Brew, an unbelievably pretentious German movie about a deranged anarchist poet named Walter who’s obsessed with a prostitute. Later in the film, Walter becomes convinced he’s the reincarnation of a gay nineteenth-century poet and loses interest in the streetwalker. It was a preposterous movie that solidified my suspicion of all things German, but I couldn’t tell that to Quinn, who was gasping from start to finish. “This was fun,” I said gamely after the movie was over. “Maybe you should come visit this summer. You can show me all the other German things that deserve a chance.”

  “You’ll be fine without me,” Quinn promised, inserting the DVD back in its envelope. “I think your dad would decompose if we both left him.”

  On the last day of school, my friends and I cut second period to hang out in Cadman Plaza Park, but the huge rectangle of dirt in downtown Brooklyn that served as Baldwin’s soccer/baseball/Frisbee/Brazilian dance field had been cordoned off for grass planting, so we sat on a bench in the shade. While the girls entertained themselves deciphering the senseless profanities carved into the bench (my favorite: “eat my burrito”), I was anxious—even more so after I looked at my watch and realized that in exactly twenty-four hours I’d be on a plane. A loud sigh sailed out of my mouth.

  “Cheer up,” Pia said. “It’s only a few months. We’ll be here when you get back.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “It’s just . . . there are so many things I’d rather do with my summer than study German.”

  “Like what, study Russian?” Lily ventured, an unsubtle reference to Boris Potasnik, my so-called sort-of-not-quite boyfriend.

  Her joke only increased my gloominess, for Boris, too, had become a sore subject in recent weeks. In private, he played the part of boyfriend well, laughing at my jokes, complimenting my hideous freckles, and stashing Belgian chocolate bars inside my laptop case. It was how he behaved in public that troubled me. Whenever we hung out with other people, Boris didn’t just ignore me, but made a grand show of doing so. He’d avert his eyes and address everyone else in the room except yours truly, even if I was saying something supremely interesting, which, quite often, I was.

  The problem was that Boris and I shared more than a love for smoked salmon and fancy chocolate. We also shared a close friend, Sam Geckman, and Sam and I had a highly complicated relationship, mostly thanks to a few brief and regrettable hookup sessions during the fall semester. Claiming that Sam had a crush on me, Boris thought it inappropriate to “flaunt” our relationship and insisted we “maintain a low profile” as a couple. “Just keep it cool,” he told me whenever I vented my growing frustration. But Boris was Russian, and his idea of cool was as cold as caviar on ice.

  “It’s stupid to be depressed,” Jess told me. “It’s the last day of school, w
hich means no more Zora Blanchard, no more Bugle melodramas, no more loopy assignments from Yuri Knutz. Three whole months of liberation are just an hour away! Next summer, we’re going to have to fill out college applications and visit campuses, so this is really it for us—the last free ride.”

  Jess grinned, so moved by her own motivational speech that she suggested we go around in a circle and name the one thing we were most looking forward to that summer. I rolled my eyes, though I did love Jess for her optimism. While less financially blessed than her friends—she lived with her mother in a shabby walkup apartment in Park Slope and never had more than ten dollars in her piggy bank—she had us all beat for good humor.