Free BFF* by Judy Blume Page B

different ways of showing it. They like to tease her, the way Eric Macaulay does, calling her Thumbelina and shooting rubber bands in her direction. Rachel says it’s demeaning to be called Thumbelina. She says Alison should put a stop to it right now, before it gets out of hand.
    â€œHe only calls me that because I’m small,” Alison said the other day at my house. “You know that fairy tale about the girl who’s smaller than a thumb … there’s even a song about her.” Alison began to sing and dance around my room. She’s a very good dancer. She must take afterSadie Wishnik. When she finished she fell back on my bed, laughing. I laughed too. Finally, so did Rachel. Alison has a way of making people feel good.
    Soon all three of us were singing the Thumbelina song and by the time Rachel went home she said, “Well … maybe it’s not so demeaning.”
    Alison also knows how to flirt. I’ve been watching to see how she does it. She kind of teases the boys and giggles. You can learn a lot by watching a popular person in action. You can learn how to act and how not to act. Mom is always telling me to be myself but there are times when I don’t know what being myself means. Sometimes I feel grown up and other times I feel like a little kid. I seem to be more than one person.
    That’s exactly how I felt last Wednesday. It was raining really hard. Alison came to my house after school. Rachel couldn’t come because she had a music lesson. We were sitting in the kitchen, eating doughnuts and playing Spit, when we got to talking about the games we used to play when we were little. It turned out we’d both collected Barbies. So I got the idea to go down to the basement and dig out my old Barbie dolls, which I haven’t seen since fourth grade. I found them in a carton marked
Steph’s Old Toys
. I carried the Barbie case up to my room, closed the door and Alison and I played all afternoon, dressing andundressing my three Barbies, while we made up silly stories for them to act out.
    One of the stories was
Barbie Is Adopted
. After we’d finished, I asked Alison how it feels to be adopted for real.
    â€œHow would I know?” she asked. “I was adopted when I was four months old. I don’t know what it feels like not to be adopted.”
    â€œBut do you ever think about your biological mother?” I asked. I had seen this movie on TV about an adopted girl and when she was eighteen she decided to search for her biological mother.
    â€œSometimes I think about her,” Alison said, “about how young and poor she was. She was just fifteen when she had me. But I’m happy with Gena and Leon. If I had to choose parents I’d choose them.”
    â€œI’d choose mine, too,” I said, “except I’d make sure my father got a job where he didn’t have to travel.”
    â€œWhat does he do anyway?”
    â€œHe’s in public relations.”
    â€œWhen’s he coming home?” Alison asked.
    â€œNot until Thanksgiving.”
    â€œYou must really miss him.”
    â€œYeah … I do.”
    Later, when we packed up my Barbies and put them away, we vowed never to tell anyone we had played with them that afternoon.

    The next day I was sitting in French class daydreaming about Alison. About how her life sounds just like a fairy tale. It would make a good movie, I thought. It would be called
The Alison Monceau Story
. It would star Gena Farrell as Alison’s mother and Alison as herself and I would play her best friend.
Stephanie Behrens Hirsch
it would say on the screen. Maybe Rachel could play Alison’s biological mother. With makeup and a wig she could probably look Vietnamese and she could certainly look fifteen. Jeremy Dragon could play …
    â€œStephanie!” Mrs. Hillerman shouted. “Will you please wake up!”
    â€œWhat … me?”
    The class