But I’m a Cheerleader,
Bring It On,
Saved!.

Internets, you know I’m a Jane Austen nut. But before I read a word of Austen, I saw the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and Amy Heckerling’s adaptation of Emma. They both came out in 1995, the year I turned fourteen.

Yes, Internets, my very first teen movie was:

Clueless.

I was not alone. Clueless was almost effortlessly influential on teenage fashion and vernacular for years to come.

Hahaha, what am I saying, effortlessly? Amy Heckerling, who wrote as well as directed and is not incidentally a massive role model for me, sat in high school classes for weeks researching teen interactions, not to mention the literal years she spent on vocabulary. But she didn’t like the mid-90s grunge fest that was the fashion of the time, so Mona May, the costume designer, worked her ass off designing a specific colour palette and style chart for each major character, taking inspiration from European catwalks, rather than American sidewalks.

Those costumes were awesome, and suddenly every girl at my school with pretensions of cool was wearing knee-high socks. That was about as much as we could get away with, given we were all in uniform, but at least our skirts had plaid.

What Happens?

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her…

Like you don’t all know, although I tended to shock people when I told them I hadn’t seen Heathers*, so there’s probably someone.

Valley queen Cher is fifteen years old, and, along with her best friend Dionne, named after “singers who used to be popular and now do infomercials”, rules her Beverley Hills high school. Chic, rich, and beautiful, Cher is ready to make anyone do what she wants, despite the sardonic commentary of ex-stepbrother Josh, who keeps suggesting there might be more to life than being charming and popular. As if!

Cher successfully argues her way to better grades, matchmakes her teachers, makes over a slobby new girl into a valley princess, and manages her father’s eating, but she can’t charm her way into a gay boy’s bed nor out of a failed driver’s license test. She’s losing her grip on popularity, and she’s starting to think that maybe… just possibly… she’s clueless. Worse, she has fallen majorly totally butt crazy in love with Josh! What if she’s lost his good opinion forever?

Whatever! All is revealed, a happy ending results, and Cher has finally found the boy to whom she’s going to lose her virginity. You can’t be too careful about these things – she’s way picky about her shoes, and those only go on her feet.

The Message?

Other people are real.

Okay, so you’re probably going, “Is this like a Noxzema commercial or what?” But seriously, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl.

It’s worth noting that, like Emma, Cher is really not stupid. Her debates may be “unresearched”, but they are hardly unstructured, and she has an excellent memory – even for the parts of Hamlet that Mel Gibson didn’t say. She just, as her father points out, lacks direction and the motivation to apply herself – much as Emma makes lists of reading material to improve her mind, and then never reads them, and neglects to practice the piano when a little more time would make her really good at it.

So Cher is smart, charming, sweet, and largely well-mannered, but Josh is not wrong when he names her a “superficial space cadet”. Cher “lives for makeovers” and views befriending a new girl and raising her social status as a “project” to be accomplished with clothing, makeup, and hairdye. She’s not entirely wrong to pay attention to appearances. A concern with the superficial is vital to Cher’s social success – in her milieu, what people wear, their makeup, hairstyles, homes and cars are all important messages that Cher can read and manipulate. But as her unsuccessful seduction of Christian shows, she might not have enough life experience to decode all of them. And Cher’s charm can’t win over an unimpressed DMV tester who will not overlook her driving deficiencies, no matter how serious a shirt she wears.

Moreover, this superficiality can be dangerous when applied to matters of the heart, where a deeper connection is usually thought of as a better deal. She got lucky with Miss Geist and Mr Hall, who clearly have genuine mutual respect on their side. But Cher sets her sights on Christian because he is “brutally hot”, fitting her own sense of aesthetics. This isn’t to say she doesn’t genuinely like him, but it’s clear that her decision to make him her first lover is based on superficial concerns – and hasn’t got as far as considering something as basic as whether he’s actually into girls.

“Would you call me selfish?” “No, not to your face.”

Even worse is her manipulation of Tai’s heart. Cher decides to set Elton up with Tai because he dresses well and is in the right social crowd. She engages in real manipulation here, lying to Tai that Elton thinks she’s sweet and giving her instructions as to how to attract his attention (“Pretend Travis is saying something really funny!”). But despite Cher’s hopes, Elton is a shallow snob who betrays his own unsuitability for anyone at all by hitting on Cher and rejecting even the idea of Tai – “Don’t you even know who my father is?” he demands, before sexually harassing Cher and then abandoning her in a parking lot, where she is consequently mugged**. Cher then has to pass on the news that he doesn’t like Tai after all, and after all the work she’s done to make Tai interested in Elton, Tai is devastated.

In fact, Cher’s disdain of Travis’s stoner style and status have temporarily prevented Tai from seeing the nice guy with whom she hit it off right away. Inspired by Cher’s own superficial assessment of Travis’ clique, Tai brutally rejects him, and tells him to join the stoners “on the grassy knoll over there” – the phrasing Cher had formerly used to point out where Travis “belonged”.

Cher has such a loose grasp on her own interiority that it’s little surprise that she largely treats other people like puppets to be maneuvered for her own interest and entertainment. As Roz Kaveney puts it: “There is genuine kindness in the way Cher takes Tai on as a project – and yet there is also a fundamental lack of respect. Cher is someone who selects her own outfits by using a computerised dress-up doll of herself, so it could hardly be expected that she entirely acknowledge another person’s autonomy.” She misreads Elton’s attraction to her and Christian’s lack of it, but crucially, it is Cher’s inability to recognise her own feelings for Josh until the last moment that provides the impetus she needs to realise that she is totally clueless.

You’re a virgin who can’t drive.

In thinking about Josh, and trying to puzzle out why she’s buggin’ about the potential Josh/Tai relationship, Cher sticks to the surface at first: “What does she want with Josh anyway? He dresses funny, he listens to complaint rock, he’s not even cute – in a conventional way***.” But then she considers what Josh might want, on a less than superficial level: “Josh needs someone with imagination, someone to take care of him, someone to laugh at his jokes… in case he ever makes any. Then, suddenly: Oh my god! I love Josh!”

Because she is sweet and well-intentioned, having recognised the superficiality problem, Cher does what she can to fix it: “I decided I needed a complete makeover. Except this time, I’d makeover my soul.” She tries to work out what makes someone a better person, and assesses the people around her on more than a surface level.

This time, instead of giving Dionne “snaps for her courageous fashion sense”, she praises how considerate Dionne and her boyfriend are of each other. Instead of assessing Christian’s personal style, she likes the way he “always wants everything to be beautiful and interesting.” And the subject of her first setup, social do-gooder Miss Geist, formerly assessed as a mess with lipstick on her teeth and a slip that’s always showing, is noted as someone who always tries to get her students involved in the world, “no matter how much we resist.”

And Cher stops resisting. Watching Miss Geist talk about the (fictional) Pismo Beach Disaster, Cher announces that she wants to help. As captain of the school’s Pismo Beach Disaster Relief fundraising efforts, Cher leverages her good looks and popularity to rally the troops and gather vital supplies. “This your influence, Josh?” her father asks, watching Cher give up her clothes and sporting equipment to the cause. Josh shrugs – and he’s right to do so, because, although he’s pointed out Cher’s superficiality many times, it took her own awakening to really make the change. While that awakening was inspired by Cher’s own feelings for Josh, he doesn’t know that yet.

He finds out, though, when a nasty lawyer yells at Cher’s attempts to help with her father’s case and storms out. Comforting Cher, Josh lets slip that he thinks Cher’s father is the only one who care about him. “That’s not true,” Cher says. “Are you saying that you care about me?” Josh asks, and then THERE IS KISSING and it’s adorable and then she catches the bouquet at Miss Geist’s wedding and it’s pretty clear that they’re going to have sex although Cher is now sixteen and I think that’s still not legal age in California so no one actually SAYS it.

Anyway, Cher is still not totally clued up, but she is certainly less clueless, and for a rich, white, beautiful sixteen-year-old, that is not an insignificant step. So she gets rewarded with a cute boy with more clues, and, major bonus, since her father was hardly even married to his mother, my incest squick is triggered not at all. Happy ending for everyone!

Other Things:

- Amy Heckerling’s insistence that the cast speak in complex, multi-syllablic, slang-laden sentences proved frustrating for a few of them. Donald Faison had particular trouble with, “Okay, but street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression. Most of the feminine pronouns do have mocking, but not necessarily misogynistic undertones.” In the special features of the Whatever special edition, which I super recommend, he wonders, “How come I can’t just say, ‘My bad?’ ‘My bad, baby, kiss me.’” But I have little sympathy, because in the movie, he spits it out, smirks, and pokes his tongue out, and it’s SO CUTE.

- Stacy Dash, who plays Dionne, was 28 when the movie was shot. She played Dionne in the series, and later turns up in the ALSO awesome Amy Heckerling movie, the romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman, where Dash plays… an adult actress playing a teenager on a popular high school comedy (where Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, Rosie, is a writer). Dash’s character is romanced by a dweeby nerd PLAYED BY PAUL RUDD. I nearly fell off the couch. I Could Never Be Your Woman was never theatrically released in the US because of distribution bullshit. I highly recommend it. There is a great scene where- wait, footnote ****

- For the longest time I thought that was how you said “Haitians”.

- God, I could talk about this movie forever, but I want to include two secondary sources: This archived People article that talks about Cher’s style and makes fun of other young stars (gross). And this essay about Emma vs Clueless by Suzanne Ferriss (I don’t agree entirely with her conclusions, but it’s a fun comparison piece.)

- Heck, one more: this AFI interview/panel with Amy Heckerling:

The movie, Fox movies, bought the pilot from the TV company for me to develop as a film. And then I went back and read Emma and started to work out the structure. They were really worried about girls being the main characters. They kept saying, Let’s see more about what the boys are doing, let’s see this boy in his home and this boy with his car and this boy doing this and that. And I said, But this is an inner monologue in the girl’s head, so what does her head know about what’s going on with him at his house with his car?

What have I missed, Internets? What have I got wrong? Let’s talk teen movies!

* I watched Heathers a couple of days ago. I don’t like it, but now I know where “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw” and “I love my dead gay son” come from!

** I just realised I fully stole the structure of that scene for one in Guardian of the Dead, complete with love interest turning up to be helpful, only with would-be rapists and creepy patupaiarehe instead of a mugger. AHAHAHAHAHA, GO ME, GOOD TASTE IN THIEVERY.

*** Yeah, this doesn’t work when you’ve cast the very cute Paul Rudd (currently being hilarious and handsome on Parks and Recreation)

**** This happens:

Older TV exec: Courtney Love?
Producer: Drugged-out hag.
Older TV exec: Faye Dunaway?
Producer: Don’t call us, we’ll call you!
Older TV exec: Sharon Stone?
Producer: Hag.
Older TV exec: Geena Davis?
Producer: Hag.
Older TV exec: Sigourney Weaver?
Producer: Hag.
Older TV exec: Kim Basinger?
Producer: Hag.
Older TV exec: Emma Thompson?
Producer: Brit hag.
Older TV exec: Susan Sarandon?
Producer: Red-state-alienating hag!
Older TV exec: Meg Ryan?
Producer: Too much plastic surgery.
Older TV exec: Melanie Griffith?
Producer: WAY too much plastic surgery.
Older TV exec: Patricia Heaton?
Producer: *Pointless* plastic surgery.
Older TV exec: CHER.
Producer: *Insurmountable* amount of plastic surgery!
Rosie: [who's been overhearing all this from the next chair & getting increasingly annoyed, swings round & grabs the Producer by the chin] Listen, you little bird of a man, where do you come off insulting these women? How many hit songs did you sing? How many Oscars do *you* have? Could you look cute next to Warren Beatty? Or live with Don Johnson? Or act with Ted Danson? You’re not worthy of kissing Cher’s tattooed ass!

Oh man, I wonder if it’s on iTunes?

1: When We Wake First pass pages: SUCCESS

[Transcript: A pile of printer paper bound with heavy duty rubber bands, many post-it flags indicating changes in the top left corner. The top page reads WHEN WE WAKE in a delightfully futuristic typeface]

Typically nervewracking work, because what if you don’t like the book anymore? Turns out I do, excellent, send it off on Monday.

2: First ever creme brulee: MOSTLY SUCCESS.

[Transcript: A creme brulee in a grey terracotta soup bowl, looking mighty fine if I do say so myself.]

Me: Where are those ramekins you said you had?
Mum: Oh, hmmm, let’s see, how about these?
Me: Those aren’t ramekins.
Mum: They’ll be fine!
Me: They’re soup bowls, they’re too big. The custard won’t set.
Mum: How about these two mismatched containers that are different sizes and made out of different materials?
Me: I will take the soup bowls.

They didn’t set. But the resulting thick custard was very nice!

3: Would you like me to critique your short story or novel synopsis plus first chapter? You can have that happen! You just have to promise the most money in the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers auction.

It’s probably worth noting that, if we are not good buds – and even then I regularly have to prioritise other things – charity auction bids are pretty much the only way I critique others’ work, so this is a rare opportunity.

My item is here, but there is plenty of other super neat stuff up for grabs, and all the money goes to financially underprivileged young writers to assist with attending the workshop. A most worthy cause!

Sometimes they involve men who are actually related:

Sometimes they involve bros who are unrelated:

But the bromance goes beyond friendship or fraternal affection. Importantly, however, there is no canonical explicit sexual or romantic relationship in a bromance. That would be a romance. Fandom will often flock to bromances and create fan products presenting them as romances, and that is fine – more than fine! – but when I speak of the bromance, I speak of it in canonical terms.

The Vampire Diaries, in fact, has three canonical bromances – Damon and Stefan (actual brothers), Klaus and Stefan (unrelated and in the past) and Alaric and Damon (unrelated and having a few relationship issues on account of Damon got mad and killed Alaric [he came back!] but they are totally making up). But Stefan and Damon is the bromance to End Them All. It’s amazing.

Unfortunately, the lady equivalent is not there. In The Vampire Diaries, Bonnie, Caroline, and Elena are nearly as dedicated to each other, and in fact the show has made gestures towards that triad’s bond being almost as strong as Stefan and Damon’s a few times. The bit where Bonnie and Elena come around to comfort Caroline in her new vampiness was just ADORABLE and I totally cried. But it’s not enough! They don’t get to have the same kind of affirmations of love, or talk to each other as often or even always appear in the same episodes! Elena is in every one, but Bonnie and Caroline are frequently not.

Also, Bonnie was kinda ready to let Vamp!Caroline die. It’s not really a b/sromance until you’re ready to cut through an army of innocents to keep someone alive.

So the other day I was talking to Sarah Rees Brennan about the extremely excellent Parks and Recreation, a show I am pleased to say I made her watch.

“LESLIE AND ANN ARE THE BEST,” she proclaimed a few weeks later.

“Yes!” I said. “Basically they are a lady bromance. Hrm. Sismance? Soromance?”

“Sromance?” Sarah said.

“Yes! And that’s rare. There are not enough sromances!”

So, how come?

I think part of it is that there are so relatively few ladies in our media, and there are so relatively few ladies who talk to each other. That is why we have the Bechdel Test.

For a movie to pass the Bechdel Test, it must contain:

1) More than one woman, who
2) talk to each other,
3) about something other than men

This test is not a be-all-and-end-all foolproof test of a thing’s lady-awesome rating, but it is illustrative that it is sometimes very difficult to find things that pass it.

Also, often ladies are set up, in fiction and in real life, as in competition with each other. Competition for male attention, competition for jobs, competition for being the Most Attractive By Very Narrow Standards Of Beauty. Often ladies are portrayed as hating each other as a result of that competition.

It is impossible to have a sromance if there is only one lady in a thing. It is impossible to have a sromance if the ladies don’t talk to each other. And it is hard to have a sromance if the ladies are in competition with each other – not impossible, but difficult.

This must change! We, the people, demand more sromances, for they are awesome. But in the meantime, here are a few superb sromances to be getting on with:

Parks and Recreation

Boo fucking yah. I love these ladies. Leslie! A passionate government employee who is amazingly good at her job and kind of terrifying. Ann! A kind and beautiful nurse who is amazingly good at her job and much less terrifying.

Canonically, Leslie loves Pawnee, Parks, and then Ann. Here is a word cloud of Leslie’s email account:

See how much smaller the name Ben is? That’s Leslie’s boyfriend, whom she loves to distraction, to the point of risking her job AT the Pawnee Parks and Recreation Department. But of all the people in the world, she talks about and to Ann most.

Xena: Warrior Princess

Do I even have to talk about this? Xena and Gabrielle are amazing sros. They love each other, fight for each other, raise a kid together, and kind of vaguely get together in the finale only they’re reincarnated and Xena’s spirit is in a male body so… while that episode is a romance and the series in general goes right up to the sromance/romance line and then dances the tango on it in an extremely sexy way, I am saying that for the MAJORITY of the series it is an epic sromance.

The Middleman

Lacey is a performance artist. Wendy is a painter and also a trainee secret agent type fighting weird things. They illegally sublet an apartment, make art, fight bad guys, watch terrible zombie movies, and be forever there for each other. Wendy and Lacey: sros for life.

Birds of Prey

She’s a hacker extraordinaire. She’s one of the best martial artists in the world. THEY FIGHT CRIME.

Barbara Gordon (Oracle) and Dinah Laurel Lance (Black Canary) are the ultimate sros of superhero comics. How many times have they saved each other’s lives? Oh only a ZILLION. Probably they would not cut through an army of innocents for each other, because superheroes, but they have contemplated killing bad guys to save the other, and that is a BIG DEAL.

The Bible

Ruth 1: 15-17: And [Naomi] said, Behold, thy sister in law is gone back unto her people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister in law. And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

Some people read lesbians, the same way the historical bromance of Jonathan and David is read as gay, but I am going back to my core definition here. No canonical romance? Biblical sros.

Josie and the Pussycats

Okay, here is where I just talk and talk because NO ONE CAN MAKE ME SHUT UP ON MY OWN BLOG. This is often a comfort.

Josie and the Pussycats has brilliant commentary on branding and commercialism, tight writing, catchy tunes, hilarious dialogue and it’s criminally underrated. 5.1 on IMDB? What is wrong with people?

Not coincidental in my enjoyment is that this movie features my favourite movie sromance. The Pussycats, Josie, Val and Melody, are musicians with a dream. Sure, they’re currently playing in the gutters – literally, at the local bowling alley – but they have faith in their craft and each other.

“Who’s a rock star?” Val asks a forlorn Josie, after some Mean Girls have been Mean. “Who’s a rock star?”

“I am,” Josie replies, smiling a big huge Rachel Leigh Cook smile and then Val hugs her and kisses her forehead while Melody beams.

SROS.

Of course, there is about to be trouble in Poor But Honest paradise, and it comes in the form of evil producers who take the girls to number one, but are Secretly Brainwashing teenagers into buying stuff through subliminal messaging in their hit singles!

But that is not the main bad thing. The main bad thing is that they brainwash Josie into thinking she doesn’t love her friends! They brainwash her into thinking the sromance is gone! And it is overcoming that and loving her friends again that provides the emotional climax of the film.

Josie, having discovered the Evil Brainwashing, challenges the producers, refusing to play in their debut gig. But Val and Melody are held hostage against her good behaviour, and for love of them, Josie agrees to play.

Melody: “See, Val, she still likes us!”

Josie: “Of course I still like you! You guys are my best friends on the planet! Look, I know that friends don’t treat each other the way I treated you guys, but you’ve got to believe me, if I could just go back in time I’d take it all back.”

Mel: “That’d be cool. If I could go back in time, I’d wanna meet Snoopy.”

Josie: “Mel, I love that about you! I love that you think everything is possible and this world is such a great place, because you know what? It is. And I’m so sorry if for one second I made you think that it wasn’t. And Val! Val. You bought me my first guitar. And you know, we may have started this band together, but the only reason we’ve come this far is because of you. Now look, I don’t care if we’re Josie and the Pussycats, or Valerie and the Pussycats, or whoever and the Pussycats. It doesn’t matter, as long as we’re together. You’re my

Val: “I love you too, Jos.”

Mel: “And I love you, Val.”

Val: “And I love you, Mel.”

Mel: “And I love you, Josie!”

SROS.

With the handy distraction of a badly injured boy band, the Pussycats get a chance to fight back. They triumph, naturally, and it turns out that Evil Fiona is only brainwashing people because… she wants sros of her own!

Then the Pussycats do the concert after all, with a message of being yourself and loving your sros and I grin for a solid week.

There is a romance, and it’s cute and all, but the boy in question is like Liv Tyler in That Thing You Do. He is the nice eye-candy extra to the story of a band Making It, Faking It and Breaking Up. But the Pussycats, unlike the Wonders, get back together after the Breaking Up, because they are total sros and they believe in sisterhood forever.

And Rosario Dawson clothelines Alan Cumming! It’s beautiful.

In conclusion, sromances are the best, I definitely have to write some, and I wanna see more on my TV and movies. If you have suggestions, I should love to hear them. Internets, bring me your finest sros!

1: Read all of Shakespeare’s plays that I haven’t read.

Even the really boring history plays that go on forever and everyone is named after their title not their name and it gets super confusing because later on there are different people with the same title and omg do we hate Gloucester or like him right now?

I want to do this because, what the hell, why not, I have read about half of them anyway in the course of my nerdy education/drama days. So fill out the course! Get my Shakespeare merit badge! Discourse knowledgeably on King John!

2: Read the Brontes.

Internets, I have tried to read Jane Eyre four times. The first three times I stalled out somewhere in the “being tormented by my cousins” chapters, and decided that I hated it. But I could not give up, because numerous people I respect have told me that honestly, Karen, honestly! It gets better! One day, you will be in the right head space for this book and you will love it.

This week, I have made it to Thornfield Hall.

Internets, I love Jane Eyre.

And I am assured that I will love Villette and Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and that I can get through Wuthering Heights by mocking the hell out of it. So okay! Yeah! Bronte merit badge, here we come.

3: Blog every day

Oh boy. Okay.

Internets, in 2011, also known as 20-don’t-let-the-door-hit-your-ass-on-the-way-out-11, my blogging fell by the wayside a bit. Not that I didn’t blog, but I didn’t blog often. I also feel I blogged a little less substantially than I have done in previous years. I have been blogging since 2000 – although obviously everything I wrote before 2005 was total shit which is why it will never see the light of day again – and I feel I have more or less got the hang of it.

SO I am going to try to say something every day that it is possible (ie, 24 hour plane trips obviously rule that out, also if I get the flu, also my day starts when I get up and ends when I go to bed, which does not mesh with the 24 hour “day” cycle very often). But under normal circumstances, I think that I have at least one thing a day that is worth saying.

And that is it!

Internets, I solemnly swear to you that I will keep to these resolutions unless I get super bored or don’t like doing them.

Did you make any resolutions, Internets?

I had planned to go to Christchurch and join friends for New Year’s Eve, but the recent quake and heavy aftershocks prompted a schedule change. Instead, I brought in the season playing cards with my mother and youngest brother, who insisted, after a few false starts, that we hold hands and sing Auld Lang Syne.

There are many worse ways to greet the New Year than safe, warm, well-fed and singing with one’s family. And there may not really be any bad way to bid goodbye to 2011, a year that sucked most heartily on a number of levels for a vast number of people.

There were certainly good things in my life: my oldest brother got married to a wonderful woman; my second book came out; I was able to attend ALA and the World Fantasy Convention; I spoke at Reading Matters and had a blast; I watched a lot of great TV and read a number of great books (some detailed in this guest post at The Book Smugglers”); and I had a wonderful time mentoring an exceptional young woman (hi, Laura!) through the Big Brother Big Sister program, which I am finally able to talk about.

But on the whole, 2011 was pretty damn awful, and I wanted to see it out with some grand gesture. Here, then, is the song that increasingly became my anthem as I clung to the certainty that this, too, would pass:

And this is the song I wish to be my anthem for 2012:

May you all have a fabulous year.

I mean. I love them. I love spending time with them.

But my Dad has spent his married life making the family meals, and he’s got the menu down to a fine art: Roast meat, steamed fish, or cold cuts, accompanied by boiled potatoes, steamed silverbeet and cauliflower, and occasionally carrots and peas. There might be a gravy. There might be a cheese sauce. There will be a green salad for the rabbit food eaters.

And this is a fine menu! But it becomes progressively less fine when one is served it every day.

Now that Dad is out of the kitchen, it is unquestionably mine. Dinner tonight was fajitas and potato salad, and coconut milk rice pudding for dessert. Tomorrow we’re barbecuing some venison, which I am currently marinating in garlic, cumin, salt, pepper, and a lot of a really nice merlot. Not sure what I’m doing after that. Maybe I’ll make a curry! Maybe I’ll put together a risotto! The possibilities are endless, and carb-tastic.

In between establishing my dominion over the kitchen, I have been cruising through my journal and finding my favourite posts this year in order to make a Best Of list. Internets, several of them are about food! I know that you are shocked.

February 3rd: I DO Love A Good List.
February 24th: What To Do With Words.
Feb 26th: A Message From Christchurch.
March 4th: Smiling at Grief.
April 1st: NEW Shattering Cover!
April 18th: Karen’s Top Four Novels Guaranteed To Prompt a Massive Session In The Kitchen.
April 22nd: Teenagers, Sex, and Young Adult Fiction.
June 7th: How To Make A Birthday Cake.
August 23rd: Thursday watch the walls instead.
August 28th: Past and Present.
October 15th: Creepy Cake N Bake: Dark Chocolate Teacup Puddings.
November 9th: And All For One (incredible movie).
November 19th: Problems, Awesomeness, and Not Being Alone.
December 25th: Faith in foxholes.

Also I am cheerful from killing the first person in Mysterious New Novel today. Well, second, but the protagonist got better.

ALSO I am cheerful because I was watching Adam Hills in Gordon St Tonight, which featured the awesome Hannah Gadsby, on whom I have an inappropriate crush, and the voice of Josh Thomas, on whom likewise.

This prompted some thought.

Karen’s Inappropriate Crushes On Australian Comedy/Analysis TV People:

Reasons for Inappropriate Crush:

- Tall, gangly, chatty.
- Hilarious.
- Adorable, unplaceable accent.

Why Crush is Inappropriate:

- Has boyfriend.
- He’s not into girls.

Reasons for Inappropriate Crush:

- Short, curvy, laconic.
- Hilarious.
- Hella sharp dresser.

Why Crush is Inappropriate:

- I’m not into girls.

Reasons for Inappropriate Crush:

- Tall, gangly, chatty, brunet.
- Regularly skewers immorality of certain ads during panel discussion.
- Adorable accent.
- Co-created Earth Hour. Co-created Earth Hour.

Why Crush is Inappropriate:

- Married.
- With kids.
- Two of them.

Prior commitments and non-compatible sexual identities, why must you get in the way of certain true love?

Oh well. Bread will always love me!

Mild spoiler warnings, of course.

I got home just as Mum was leaving for work. “Morning, Keri. How was dinner?”

“Good,” I said. “The snapper was good.”

“Oh, lovely. Is Janna’s friend nice?”

“Yeah. Bit flash, maybe. He’s staying at the Chancellor.”

Mum nodded, a gesture that might have meant she wasn’t paying attention, but could equally have meant she was taking it all in for use at some later date. “Your dad called while you were out. He sends his love.”

Dad was at a major roadwork site three hours into the center of the island, on one of the mountain passes. It was too far away for easy commuting, so he and his mate Hone were staying in Hone’s RV.

“Oh. Good.”

“And I said hello from you.”

“Won’t you be late?” I said, making motions toward the door. All this conversation was starting to wake me up, and I had plans to sleep for another hour. I sure didn’t want to do any more lying on my back and looking up. I’d already memorized the position of every glow-in-the-dark star.

Mum patted her French roll and gave me a professional smile. I didn’t like the face she put on for work: smooth foundation, pale pink lipstick, and carefully arranged dyed hair. With her laugh lines and crow’s-feet neatly concealed, she seemed much less my mum and more a construct of some sort — a champagne-blonde Chancellor cyborg.

“Keri, love . . . are you sure you don’t mind about Christmas?”

No Christmas this year, she’d said when Nanny Hinekura asked us about it after the burial. No, I can’t do it, no.

“I don’t mind.” This was sort of a lie. I understood what it was to want everything to stop, but even if we didn’t have a tree in our own house, we couldn’t avoid Christmas, because it was everywhere else. The streetlights had their tinsel decorations, and the hotel lobbies all had massive displays, and all the trees along the waterfront were strung up with lights. Christmas came up every time we turned on the TV or the radio or stepped into a shop. We’d even gotten two days into our own home Advent calendar, opening the little cardboard doors for the chocolates inside.

One for me. One for Jake.

After we got back from the tangi, I took the calendar into my room and ate every piece, including the big chocolate manger behind the door for Christmas Day. It made me sick, which felt right. The crumpled calendar was the only piece of Christmas left in the house, and it was lying under my bed like a piece of trash.

“I hadn’t gotten around to getting presents anyway,” I added, and that was completely the truth.

“Me, neither,” she said, which I knew for a fact wasn’t true at all. “But I mean . . . you can still go down to your grandmother’s, if you like. It’s not too late. All the cousins would be happy to see you.” Mum and Nanny Hinekura did not see eye to eye, so this offer was a big deal.

But now I had to stay to find out who’d murdered Jake. Even before, I hadn’t wanted to go. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being surrounded by all those family members, so conscious of the one who was missing.

“Nah, it’s okay,” I said.

“Well . . . I’m working on the twenty-fifth.”

“But you had the day off.”

She checked the fold at the back of her collar. “It’s triple time. We could use the money.”

She didn’t meet my eyes, and I thought, Whoever did this to my mother is going to pay.