{"product_id":"pretty-little-dirty-isbn-9781400096824","title":"Pretty Little Dirty","description":"\u003cb\u003eA dazzling, racy, and exuberant debut--Amanda Boyden tells the story of two Midwestern girls of privilege in the late 70s and early 80s and their shared plunge from innocence. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003ePretty Little Dirty\u003c\/i\u003e takes a classic coming-of-age tale and turns it inside out, then gives it a few kicks in the head for good measure. Funny, sexy, inventively told, and scary as hell—a gutsy debut.\"–Dani Shapiro, author of \u003ci\u003eFamily History\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLisa sees the life of her gorgeous best friend Celeste as just about perfect: she  has a gigantic house, two older sisters to coach her through the hazards of high  school, and loving, lively parents. As Lisa's own home has long been a place devoid  of joyful noise—her mother has shut herself off in her bedroom for years—Lisa joins  the Diamond household, slipping into their routine of sit-down suppers and soaking  in the delicious normalcy of Diamond family life. But what begins as the story of  two young women living a charmed adolescence, one of mastering dance moves and the  protocols of male-female interaction, soon swirls into an intoxicating novel of art,  music, and self-destructive impulses as Lisa and Celeste dare each other ever onward.\"A glorious, modern, satirical and funny reimagining of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. . . . Boyden is poetic with her prose, without being purple, and her short sentences read like stab wounds, puncturing opportunities for pretense.\" —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003ePretty Little Dirty\u003c\/i\u003e takes a classic coming-of-age tale and turns it inside out, then gives it a few kicks in the head for good measure. Funny, sexy, inventively told, and scary as hell—a gutsy debut.\" \u003cbr\u003e–Dani Shapiro, author of \u003ci\u003eFamily History\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Boyden cracks open the vulnerable world of the adolescent girl today. Racy, dangerous and very captivating, \u003ci\u003ePretty Little Dirty \u003c\/i\u003epaints a hypnotic portrait of two girls spinning perilously out of control.” \u003cbr\u003e–Colleen Curran, author of \u003ci\u003eWhores on the Hill\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Amanda Boyden’s white-hot prose surprises and scorches the reader with her disarming candor about sexual hunger, friendship compromised by envy, and ambition lacking focus.\" \u003cbr\u003e–Fredrick Barton, author of \u003ci\u003eA House Divided\u003c\/i\u003e, winner of The William Faulkner PrizeBorn in Northern Minnesota, Amanda Boyden grew up, the eldest of three daughters, in Chicago and St. Louis. Currently she teaches in the English department of the University of New Orleans. Previous positions include elderly companion, artist’s model, gutter cleaner, dishwasher, science lab assistant, cancan dancer, tutor, stuntwoman, and bit part actress. Until recently, Amanda worked as a contortionist and professional trapeze artist. She proudly lists hanging high over the heads of Galactic and 311 in her life accomplishments. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe is married to Canadian author Joseph Boyden. \u003cb\u003ePretty Little Dirty\u003c\/b\u003e is her first novel.One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I met Celeste in one of those lucky years of childhood you get before  anybody significant dies-before Grandma goes, before your dad's secretary  doesn't beat breast cancer, before the pharmacist gets into the car wreck.  Celeste fit those years perfectly: me with my illusions of everyone living  on into some hazy infinity of old age, Celeste with her surreal beauty, her  otherworldly trust, her yellow eyes more gold than green, her skin, her  lips, her-god!-her grace. You wouldn't believe how beautiful a sixth-grader  could be until you saw her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Having long known how babies were made-woman and man share love and bodies-I  sometimes daydreamed about Celeste's parents procreating in a nonspecific  way, making my friend before she existed. I had a lot of trouble imagining  mine making me, my mother perpetually medicated by the time I was two, my  father entirely asexual as all fathers are in eleven-year-old daughters'  minds. But Celeste's parents had done the miraculous; they had made her, and  I couldn't figure out the genetics of it all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Celeste's mother, Mrs. Diamond, her face forever defiant (of what I had no  idea), stood small and tight and brown as a nut. Mr. Diamond, a booming god  of a man, not handsome but there in a sure, ever-present kind of way, danced  instead of walked and encouraged you to eat beans and read the newspaper no  matter how old you were. You couldn't ignore Celeste's father any more than  you could ignore the fact that some wondrous girl actually lived up to the  improbable name of Celeste Rose Diamond. No joke.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Diamonds and my family both moved to Kansas City, Missouri, just days  before the start of the new school year, hers from New York, mine from  Chicago, both with the intent of placing their incredibly gifted children  into the best private school the city had to offer. Celeste and I took our  placement exams at the same time. We were coincidentally both young for our  class, and there seemed to be some question as to whether or not we could  live up to our parents' lauding. Fill in circles with pencil lead. I'd done  it my entire young, non-death-filled life. Celeste, apparently, had not.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In a spare schoolroom expressly reserved for such test taking, I lifted my  head from my booklet and answer sheet for the first time when the door latch  clicked shut and the asthmatic proctor departed with a distinct fart.  Celeste laughed out loud. I blushed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Hi,\" she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I glanced nervously at the closed door. I wanted to shush her. \"Hi,\" I  barely mouthed at the table. I hadn't really seen her yet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"She doesn't care,\" Celeste said, throwing a hand up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I drew the corner of my lower lip into my mouth and started to chew  nervously. Studying my booklet in earnest, I shrugged and raised my  eyebrows. I held my finger on my question.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"What's number twelve?\" she asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Judas, I thought. Doughnuts. One short of unlucky. I was in test mode.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Number twelve,\" she repeated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I looked up then, and that's when I saw her, when I first truly saw Celeste,  the sixth-grade goddess-to-be just sitting on the other side of the table,  staring. I stared back. Years later, when I'd eaten one gram too many of  hallucinogenic mushrooms and wasn't sure that what I saw made any sense, I'd  blink and stare at a breathing wall in the same way. That way. Blink, blink.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Hell-o,\" the beauty said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Um,\" I spurted. \"Twelve is D. All of the above.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And so it began, with a perfect dozen of sorts. I had never cheated in my  life, but from that first moment on I never denied Celeste an academic  answer. Nor she me. I don't believe she thought that we were cheating.  Somehow over the years I think she decided we were sharing. Just sharing  information, maybe in the way she shared her beauty: \"Take it; it's yours.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Celeste's own opinion of her physical appearance is exactly what saved her  and what doomed her. Her beauty had no more to do with her inherently than a  stray dog might. \"Yeah,\" Celeste seemed to say, \"Beauty likes me, but  really, more, she just follows me around. She hangs out and we play fetch.  Beauty drinks out of the park fountain.\" If her beauty left, certainly  Celeste would have noticed, but her mourning would have been minimal. She  had no sense of propriety about it. Astonishing, too, when you actually  looked at her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For all the years I knew Celeste her appearance changed as many times, but  no matter the dye job, the ugly clothes, the awful choice of eye makeup, she  remained undeniably gorgeous. I hated her for it, and I wanted to be her. If  I had no other option-and ultimately I didn't-I would simply possess her.  She would let me, finally, put a collar on her and call her mine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I should begin at the beginning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"D for twelve? Thanks.\" The girl smiled at me and went back to her circle  filling. I glanced at her answer sheet, full of gaps like missing teeth,  seemingly marked at random. She was far ahead of me but obviously not doing  it the right way. I wanted to tell her that: \"You're not doing it the right  way.\" I didn't, though, of course, and thought about skipping ahead  suddenly, an idea that had never occurred to me until that very moment.  Ever. How had I not figured that out in eleven years of life? Look at how  far ahead she was. Hurry up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Not a minute later, the proctor still absent, this beautiful girl said, \"I'm  Celeste. What's forty-three?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I looked at my answer sheet. I'd just colored in a B for thirty-nine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"What's your name?\" she asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"I don't know,\" I whispered, embarrassed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The girl, Sellest-what kind of a name was that?-laughed again. \"You don't  know your name or the answer?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I smiled back this time. She seemed very grown-up. I told her, \"I'm only up  to forty.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"What's your name?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Lisa.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Lisa What?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Lisa Smith.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"That's so nice and normal. What's your middle name?\" I watched as she  casually closed her test booklet like an adult closing a magazine in a hair  salon. \"Lisa What Smith?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Michelle.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Wow. Lisa Michelle Smith. How normal.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She seemed to mean it as a real compliment, but my name sounded from that  moment onward as bland as cornflakes with no sugar. \"Yeah,\" I said, my voice  in my own ears tinny and false. The way her face presented itself, then,  right there on the front of her head, was hard to explain. She looked like a  live painting. She made you stop what you were doing and pay attention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"I can't tell you how many times I've had to spell mine or correct teachers  and stuff.\" Her voice dropped off at the end of her sentence, and I could  have sworn her cheeks colored. I wanted her to spell her name for me because  I was sure that I didn't understand it any better than any of those teachers  did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Instead I asked, \"What's your middle name?\" and that's when the proctor  returned, the door swinging open into our fledgling conversation. I looked  down, my finger still on question forty. I didn't look up. I heard Celeste  open her test booklet and turn pages like that woman in the salon, flipping  leisurely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The proctor cleared her throat and sternly said, \"Girls.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Hi,\" Celeste answered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I continued on with my test taking but could not help glancing at the girl  across the table from me more often than I should have. Certainly the  proctor suspected bad behavior. But I couldn't catch Celeste's eye again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We found out later that we'd both ended up in the ninety-ninth percentile.  They were easy tests back at the start of the sixth grade.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I learned how to spell Celeste's name and how to inform other curious  students as to its source, how Celeste's parents met of all places at the  top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the most romantic place imaginable. How  Celeste was French for \"heavenly,\" for \"of the stars.\" In 1976, few kids our  age had unusual first names in Kansas City. In Cowtown. The Dweezils and  Moon Units were out there on the West Coast. Still, Celeste's name had a  touch of the exotic and more than some glitter about it, and the hometown  kids, both the mean ones and the not-so-mean, took a liking to Celeste right  from the start. As her sidekick, I fit in well enough under the easy, wide  protection of my friend's quick popularity. I wasn't ugly. On the contrary,  I was cute and bright, quiet but witty, a fast runner and good dodgeball  player. Celeste and I were lean and strong alike. We were both still  flat-chested. Without even looking, though, you knew we would always be  different.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Celeste had two older sisters in high school already. Being newcomers, too,  Diana and Rachel commanded more than their fair share of male attention.  Within a month of moving to Kansas City, both of the older Diamond daughters  had landed steady boyfriends and would remain regularly attached to some guy  or another for the rest of their stays before heading off to equally good  colleges.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As it happened, Diana and Rachel helped prepare Celeste and me for our first  truly tactile encounters with the opposite sex, and they are forever linked  in my mind to Celeste's and my sixth-grade wilderness camp experience.  Besides telling us how not to gross out when kissing for real, these wise  older girls provided us with ammunition of the non-garden variety to use  with our female classmates when need be. They prepped us well, gave us lots  of good stuff. Gave me lots of important information.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mom had become a ghost of a mother by the time my family moved to Kansas  City. I didn't even really need her permission to go to camp-only Dad's-but  she signed her name in her neat script anyway, right beneath his. Experts  today might know better what happened to my mother after she gave birth to  me and my younger brother just ten months later. But back then, in the  waning years of the seventies' sexual and feminist revolution, nobody really  knew what her deal was. I truly believe that delivering the two of us  destroyed something in my mother. Postpartum depression in the next-to-last  degree, just this side of suicide. My mother had no bravery in her, or she  would have killed herself at some point in my early life, and then I would  have trouble remembering her at all. As it is, she simply haunts my past, a  filmy figure behind my father, behind Celeste, even behind those two older  sisters, who helped my best friend and me through the gauntlet of growing up  female. And so armed with crazy, nearly unbelievable information about male  and female bodies, about reproductive systems and mating rituals, Celeste  and I departed for camp.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    John McFarland flirted his ass off, you could say. No, really. For some  reason mooning out bus windows would soon be de rigueur in 1976 in Missouri,  and John McFarland proved himself a trendsetter. Celeste and I sat next to  each other in a seat near the middle of the bus. My twelfth birthday was  going to fall during the week at wilderness camp, and I remember we talked  about losing our digit repetition-we would have to wait till we turned  twenty-two before our digits repeated again. Celeste said she would find a  way to have a cake for me. I wanted to believe her, as she truly seemed to  believe herself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mainly I just looked forward to going for days without washing my hair. And  I couldn't wait to rappel. We hunkered down and propped our knees up on the  black vinyl back of the seat in front of us. I picked at my chipping nail  polish. A round of \"99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall\" had started earlier.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"What flavor?\" Celeste asked loudly over the song, only in its twenties.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"I don't care,\" I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Yes, you do. What's your favorite?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I liked almost all cake. I'd had little of it, as my mom never baked, and  Dad didn't eat sweets. He said they rotted the brain. \"I don't know. Carrot  ca-\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Suddenly a loud whoop went up in the bus a few seats behind us, and we  craned our necks around. John McFarland stood on his seat dancing, lifting  his shirt. Next to John, Peter Alpert clapped and whistled. My first  reaction was to look to the front of the bus, where the driver was already  frowning, his reflection a pinched face in the large flip-down rearview  mirror. The gym teacher, Mr. Rahdart, sat behind the driver and swiveled  into the aisle, standing. Celeste started yelling beside me, and I turned  just in time to see John McFarland pull down his pants and underwear and  stick his bare butt out the open window.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Cruising in the fast lane of a four-lane highway headed straight into the  heart of the Ozarks, the bus overtook two sedans, both of which honked at  the sight of John's white-cheeked greeting. Probably as a reaction to better  hide the little jerk of a kid, the bus driver moved into the slow lane. John  McFarland bounced and made kissy-mouth faces, winking directly at Celeste.  All of us screamed and laughed. How daring! What a weird thing to do! John  was the first in our class to drop trou out the window of a moving vehicle,  and none of us could even believe what he was doing as he did it. How could  he think-why would he think-to do something like that? Continuing to stare  in his mirror, the driver drifted right. I watched as a large brown object  loomed on the side of the road ahead, a half-crumpled thing that listed into  the road like a drunk. I should have called out, but I didn't. And then,  just like that, a sign for the Pomme de Terre campgrounds sliced a chunk off  John McFarland's ass the size of a twice-baked potato half.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mr. Rahdart reached John McFarland a split second late, yanking the boy out  of the window right after the big warbling clunk of the metal sign. Peter  Alpert was the first to react in a way that didn't mean hilarious, in a way  that wasn't funny at all. \"Jesus Christ, son!\" the gym teacher yelled as  Peter Alpert scrambled backward off the seat and onto the bus floor. When  Mr. Rahdart held up his bloody hands, all the rest of us quit laughing and  closed in, sixth-grade hyenas to injured prey.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    John McFarland, his face now a slack-jawed mask, slumped as if to sit, but  Mr. Rahdart held him up under his armpits. \"No! No, no, son, no!\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The bus slowed, gravel pinging on the undercarriage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Oh, my god,\" Peter Alpert said, eyes wide as a doe's. I couldn't stop  staring at John McFarland's penis and his testicles, soft-surfaced as fresh  apricots, left hanging above his lowered underpants. As I stared, Mr.  Rahdart seemed to notice, too, and awkwardly pulled on the waistband of  John's underwear. John tugged too, helping the gym teacher, and then cried  out like a girl as the backside of his pants scraped his bloodied butt.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305397080293,"sku":"NP9781400096824","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400096824.jpg?v=1767735081","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/pretty-little-dirty-isbn-9781400096824","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}