Girl Goddess #9

Meet Tweetie Sweet Pea and Peachy Pie, Jacaranda and Rave and Desiree...Meet Lady Ivory and Alabaster Dutchess, who interview their favorite rock star, Nick Agate, only to discover the magic and power in themselves. Meet Tuck Budd, who is happy living in Manhattan with her two moms, Izzy and Anastasia, until she begins to wonder who her father is. Meet La, who faces the loss of her mother with an imaginary androgynous blue friend who lives in her closet. Zingingly bright and dreamily dark, full of wonder and gritty reality, these stories by acclaimed author Francesca Lia Block show the reader that in every girl there truly is a goddess. The cutting-edge author of Weetzie Bat once again breaks new ground with Girl Goddess #9, nine stories about girl goddesses of every age and shape and color and size, wearing combat boots and spiky hair or dressed all in white. One girl has two moms, another has no mother at all but a strange blue skinned creature that lives in her closet. One is a rock star groupie, another loves dancing and reading poetry and having picnics in the backyard when the moon is full. These are stories about girls discovering that the world is not a simple place and that there is more than one way to live'all in Ms. Block's rich, lyrical language that fans have come to adore and that Sassy magazine called ‘a dream.'

Girl Goddess #9
Nine Stories

Chapter One

In the morning, her mother helped her put on the bathing suit with the cartoon bird baby on it.

"You look just like Tweetie Bird," her mother said.

"Tweetie," she repeated.

She had tufts of white hair, big blue saucer eyes, a little round tummy and skinny arms and legs.

Her sister, Peachy Pie, came in.

"Doesn't she look just like Tweetie

Peachy Pie solemnly nodded.

"Go show your dad."

Peachy Pie took her sister's hand and they went through the apartment. It was an obstacle course of funny props that their father brought home from the studios-masks, models of cities, a robot, a suit of armor, marionettes, a giant stuffed spider in a web, a pair of angel wings. Outside it was so hot that the roses in the courtyard already smelled as sweet as if it were afternoon and the springer spaniels, Digger and Tugger, didn't leap up to greet the girls; they just beat their stubby tails on the sidewalk along with Ringo. The Beatles were playing on their father's boom box as he stood under the palm trees in front of the Spanish bungalow washing his Jeep.

"She's Tweetie," Peachy Pie said.

"She is!" said their father. He wiped his hands on a towel and kissed the tops of their heads.

"Spray us with the hose!" squealed Peachy Pie, and he did.

They giggled and wriggled in the rainbow water. Then Tweetie sat in a bucket and Peachy Pie wrapped a Snow-White-and-the-Seven-Dwarves towel around her. Tweetie liked the way it felt to fit her whole self into the bucket and watch her father washing his car. He wore baggy plaid shorts that hung low on his narrow hips and sunglasses that looked like two tiny old Beatles records.

"Time for breakfast, kidlets their mother called.

Tweetie didn't want to get out of the bucket where she fit so perfectly. Her father had to pick her up, kicking and wiggling, and deliver her into a chair that was too big. She missed her bucket. She might not fit into it as well in a few days. Her mother brought bowls of oatmeal with bananas and honey.
Yuck, thought Tweetie Too hot for oats. If she had been able to stay in the bucket she might have eaten them. She slid out through the back of the chair.
"Where are you going?" her father asked.

"Come sit back down and eat your breakfast like a big girl," said Peachy Pie as if she were the mother.

Tweetie ran across the blue-and-white kitchen floor to the refrigerator. She pulled on the door with both hands. She climbed inside, using the vegetable bins as stairs, and reached up. The bag of frozen peas hit her on the head as she fell backward onto the floor. It didn't hurt much but she cried anyway.
Her mother ladled her up.

"Now why did you do that?" her mother said, kissing the tufty top of Tweetie's head where her pink scalp showed through her hair.

"Peas," said Tweetie

Her mother sat Tweetie on her lap and fed her frozen peas until she stopped crying. Tweetie thought they tasted like candy, while unfrozen peas were mushy and not as sweet. She tried to offer some to her mother, her father and Peachy Pie, but no one wanted any.

"Tweetie Sweet Pea," her father said. And that
was how she got her name.

After breakfast Tweetie Sweet Pea and Peachy Pie played Beauty and the Beast because it was Peachy Pie's favorite game. Tweetie always had to be the Beast. Peachy Pie always got to be Beauty. Tweetie could have complained, but she never did because it seemed to mean a lot to Peachy Pie to be Beauty. Tweetie contemplated the fact that she and Peachy Pie were blonds, while their mother and Beauty had luscious brown curls. She thought that her father and the Beast must especially like brown hair. Her own hair was, as everyone had pointed out today, the color of a baby bird. Her grandmother had called it floozy blond, which wasn't, she gathered, a particularly good thing.

"You be the Beast," Peachy Pie said.

Tweetie thought, Oh surprise surprise.

She held the Beast doll and made him hop around. He had a hairy head with horns and tusks, a padded back, soft paws and a bushy tail. Tweetie thought he was cute like that. She wished that Peachy Pie would let him keep his Beast outfit on.

Peachy Pie took off Beauty's plain blue dress. It was hard to get it off over her pointy plastic breasts, hard plastic hands and steep plastic whereare-my-pumps feet.

Peachy and Tweetie examined naked Beauty. She sure looked different naked than they did.

"I'll put on her married dress," Peachy Pie announced.

She opened the ballerina music box and took out the gold lame ball gown, closing the box before the music started to play. Tweetie always hated the fakey-sweet smell of that dress. Peachy put it on Beauty.

"Okay. Now we dance," Peachy instructed.

She opened the music box again. This time a little twinkling tinkling song flew out of it like a fairy. The ballerina spun on one pink toe in front of her mirror. Tweetie Sweet Pea held the Beast up to Beauty and they danced. Everything got very still except for the tune playing over and over. A light breeze came in through the window, warm and

rosy.

"Now ask me to marry you," Peachy Pie told Tweetie as she danced Beauty.

Peachy Pie's teeth showed when she was bossy. They reminded Tweetie of Dig's and Tug's tiny front teeth that she could see when she pulled their dog lips back.

"Will marry me?" asked Tweetie Sweet Pea.

"No. Say it like this," and Peachy Pie growled the words.

"Will marry me?" squeaked Tweetie again.

Peachy Pie rolled her eyes. "No. Not unless you take off your clothes."

"No," said Tweetie

Peachy Pie got mad. She took the Beast away from Tweetie and undressed him. Under his Beastly costume Tweetie thought he was dumb-and-naked The only good thing about him was his hair. It was nice and long like their father's. When their father had seen it he had said, "I don't remember my sister's Ken doll ever having such long locks. It must be a grange Ken."

"He's not Ken. He's the Beast," Peachy Pie told him.

"Oh, that explains it," he laughed.

Sometimes their father wore his hair in a ponytail. Sometimes he let it out and Tweetie played with it. It was blond like hers, and like Beast's. Sometimes he grew a goatee which made him look a lot like Beast, but Tweetie wouldn't have told him that. It might have hurt his feelings.

Their mother came in wearing a blue flowered sundress and her big, clunky, lace-up boots. She looked like Beauty except for the shoes.

"What's going on?" she said, squatting down next to them.

"The prince is marrying me," Peachy said.

"Now you girls shouldn't expect a handsome prince to come along and make it all better. I grew up on those fairy tales and it didn't do me any good"
Tweetie thought, Just let Peachy Pie enjoy her handsome prince. It makes her happy. Besides, you did find a prince.

When her father held her it made everything all better, just for then, but all better for then was pretty good. No one had to tell her and Peachy Pie that not all fairy tales come true. They knew more than they let on.

Girl Goddess #9
Nine Stories. Copyright © by Francesca Block. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Girl Goddess #9 Nine Stories by Francesca Lia Block, Block
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.