The Real Rebecca by Anna Carey

the door. I shouted, ‘Go away!’, but it turned out to be Rachel so I let her in. We are no longer enemies. We are fellow sufferers . Rachel has also read the book. She is almost angrier than me, which I didn’t believe was possible, but she really really is because there is something in the book which actually did happen to her. She won’t tell me what it is, but she says it is pretty tragic (of course, she said that this mysterious INCIDENT took place when she was ‘your age’, as if girls my age are automatically stupider than sixteen- year-olds , which is obviously rubbish, as one look at Rachel and her friends will prove). Anyway, she also said that she never told Mum about it, but she did, of course, tell Jenny about it on the phone, and as there is sadly no privacy in ourhouse Mum must have overheard her. She says there’s no chance that this is a coincidence because of ‘certain details’ (I have to admit that this all makes this book a lot more interesting – I must figure out what this story is).
    ‘So not only is she embarrassing us, she’s SPYING on us. Or she was in the past,’ said Rachel. The last time I saw her so angry was when Bumpers did a poo in Tom’s bag when he was in our house (Tom, of course, not Bumpers, who is always here). ‘And the worst thing is that this … incident doesn’t just involve me, it was Jenny as well. So she’s going to think I’ve been telling Mum about stuff and she’ll kill me.’
    ‘Surely she won’t,’ I said. ‘She’ll understand that our mother is an evil spy.’
    ‘Yeah, well, I hope so,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m going round to her house now to warn her in advance. What are you doing?’
    I told her I was planning on hiding myself away and that I needed something good to read to remind myself that all literature is not totally evil and life-destroying, but I didn’t know what I was in the mood for.
    ‘I know,’ said Rachel, and she went to her room andcame back with a copy of Pride and Prejudice. ‘There you go,’ she said, ‘read that.’
    I told her I didn’t know if I was in the mood for something old-fashioned right now, but she said, ‘Trust me, Bex. The heroine has a very, very embarrassing mother. Jane Austen understands our pain.’
LATER
    Oh my God, Jane Austen DOES understand my pain! Well, the pain of having a mother you kind of want to shoot, anyway. At least Mum isn’t trying to marry off me and Rachel. Unless that’s what happens in the next Ruthie book. Pride and Prejudice is about a girl called Lizzie with lots of sisters whose mother wants them all to get married and embarrasses them every time they leave the house, especially in front of Mr Darcy, who is this annoying rude but hunky man who’s just turned up in the neighbourhood.

LATER
    I am imagining Mr Darcy looking a bit like Paperboy.
LATER
    Although I can’t imagine Paperboy on a horse. But who knows what he gets up to when he’s not delivering papers? He could be quite the horseman for all I know.
LATER
    Finally got through to Cass, but I wish I hadn’t now. Some friend she is. I told her about what Rachel said about Mum putting something from her own life in it. Cass seemed more worried that there’ll be something about her in the book rather than about my public humiliation. She was so annoying I told her that there’s a bit in the book about that time she took off her glasses when we were in Tower Records so she’d look better in front of a very cute boy who was looking at some music magazines. She was posing away by the magazine racks until she realised she wasstaring straight at the porn section. I let her rave on for a while before I told her it wasn’t true (although I will have to be careful what I say on the phone from now on as apparently the walls have ears in this house of spies. Well, one spy. Unless she’s got Dad doing her dirty work and reporting to her on our conversations. You never know). Anyway, she calmed down a bit then and was a bit