The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2011 by Kristen Tracy

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tracy, Kristen.
The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter / by Kristen Tracy. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Eleven-year-old Bessica’s plans to begin North Teton Middle School as a new person begin to fall apart even before school begins.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89738-2
[1. Self-perception—Fiction. 2. Best friends—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Middle schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Idaho—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.T68295Re 2011

[Fic]—dc22
2010004844

Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v3.1

For my mom, Pat Tracy,
who once made me
the fiercest set of bear paws
this world has ever seen
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to all my friends and family for your kindness and support: Dad, Julie, Joe (and awesome family), Mom, Doreen Leonard, Ulla Frederiksen, Michelle Willis, Rachel Howard, Cory Grimminck, Amy Stewart, Richard Katrovas, Mark de la Viña, Christopher Benz, Kathie Velazquez, Tracy Roberts, my gardening friends on Alcatraz, and Bunny. I keep getting older and you’re still there. Also, there are more of you. It’s fantastic. Thanks to Sara Crowe, my agent, for “getting” me and for helping my stories find their way into the world. Both matter. Thank you to the talented team at Delacorte Press who take my doc files and turn them into gorgeous children’s books. It’s a thrilling process that I tend to appreciate best once it’s over. And thank you so much to my amazing editor, Wendy Loggia, who supports, appreciates, and nurtures all my zaniness, bear plots included. How did I get so lucky?

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Things to Do Before Middle School Starts

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

About the Author

1. Destroy my collaborative diary
   
2. Get a brand-new look
   
3. Buy school supplies
   
4. Hang out with Sylvie
   
5. Spy on Noll Beck (when possible and convenient)
   
6. Find Grandma a new boyfriend (preferably one with a boat)
   

stared into the dark, cavernous hole with my best friend, Sylvie. I didn’t know what had made the hole or how far down it went or if its bottom contained dangerous sludge. To be honest, neither Sylvie nor I cared that much about holes. The less we knew about this one, the better.

“I’m not sure,” Sylvie said.

This was the sort of thing Sylvie Potaski always said. She wasn’t the kind of person who would go down in history for leading a revolution where people burned flags or bras. She was the kind of person who would check with other people (several times) about what they thought about burning flags or bras. Some people might consider
this a shortcoming. But I didn’t mind it. Or that she repeatedly licked her fingers after she peeled an orange. Sylvie Potaski was my best friend.

Sylvie stopped looking into the hole and started looking at our diary again. Every page was full. This wasn’t because of me. It was Sylvie. She was detail-oriented. She couldn’t just write in the diary that she saw a tree. She’d tell you how green the leaves were and how brown the bark was and how much shade the tree gave and if there happened to be a bird in it. I’d read every word she wrote in our diary. And she’d read every word I wrote. Because our diary was collaborative, which meant that we each paid for half of it and we both got to use it.

Writing in it had been a lot of fun. We’d passed the diary back and forth for three years. At one point, we thought about keeping a blog instead, but then we saw a story on the news about two girls in Utah who had one, and they posted lots of pictures of their cats, and they got over one hundred thousand hits a month. Sylvie and I didn’t want one hundred thousand hits a month, so we kept writing in our diary.

Except it wasn’t fun anymore. Because I didn’t want anybody finding what we’d written. Some of it was stupid. Actually, a ton of it was. And I regretted that. Especially the stuff I wrote in third grade about liking Kettle Harris. He turned out to be such a dork. And if I went to middle
school and somebody managed to find written proof that I liked a dork, I’d be bummed for the rest of my life. And ostracized. Which was what popular kids did to dorks and people who liked dorks. It basically meant that you lived inside an imaginary trash can and that nobody talked to you.

Sylvie held our diary over the hole, but she didn’t drop it. I hadn’t expected this event to take all afternoon. I sighed. I wanted to go to the big irrigation canal across from my house and observe the flotsam, and then go inside and watch television, and then beg my grandmother to drive us to the mall.

“What if I lock it inside something in my bedroom?” Sylvie asked.

“That’s a terrible idea,” I said. “Anytime you lock something up, you’re just begging for it to get stolen.” That was why criminals robbed bikes from bike racks. Didn’t she know that?

“Sylvie, remember the pages where we left our toe prints and then wrote poems to our toes?”

Sylvie blinked. Sylvie was always blinking.

“And remember all those awful pictures we drew of our classmates with fart bubbles near their butts?”

Sylvie nodded. Those particular drawings occurred in fourth grade. The fart bubbles had been my idea. But she was the one who sketched them.

“The diary needs to disappear. When we show up at North Teton Middle School, we can’t be haunted by our pasts. We need to walk down those halls like two brand-new people.”

Sylvie looked up at me and did more blinking.

“Just toss it,” I said.

She hesitated.

“But what if one day when I’m old, like thirty, I want to look back at how I was feeling and thinking when I was in elementary school?”

“That will never happen,” I said. “Trust me.”

I wanted the diary out of my life. In addition to its being embarrassing, I thought Sylvie had grown too attached to it. Sylvie held the notebook tightly as she stared down into the hole. The ground where we stood was about to have a storage lot built on top of it for farm equipment. And after that happened, after it was covered with a thick coat of cement, after front-end loaders and tractors and hay balers were parked there, our diary would be buried forever.

“Can I keep one part that means a lot to me?” she asked.

And even though I wanted her to throw the whole thing away, I also had a soft heart. And so I said, “Okay. But it has to be ten pages or less.”

Sylvie opened the diary and tugged at a group of pages in its center. After she ripped them out, she folded them carefully and put them in her back pocket.

“What did you save?” I asked.

“My drawings of the ocean,” Sylvie said.