How Nancy Drew Saved My Life. Lauren Baratz-Logsted

counter asked.

      “Yes,” I said, opening my wallet to pull out the necessary cash. “Me.”

      He raised a tastefully pierced eyebrow.

      “My childhood wasn’t so good and adulthood hasn’t been much better so far,” I said, “so I’m doing a do-over here.”

      He just shrugged. Apparently, he’d waited on weirder.

      Fifty-six books at $5.99 each came to…

      “Three hundred and thirty-five dollars and forty-four cents plus tax,” he said. “Cash or cre—?”

      I handed over the cash.

      Okay, so maybe I was an out-of-work and underpaid nanny looking to become an in-work and underpaid nanny yet again, but I did have cash left over from my commercial child-star days.

      So then why, you may well ask, was I living off of Aunt Bea’s meager largesse when I could have afforded a place of my own?

      Because when Buster had broken my stupid little heart, he’d shattered it completely, despite the justified anger I tried to cling to. I’d been absolutely shattered, having believed I’d found true love, only to have it smashed away—and the only place I’d had the strength to go to was home, such as it was; home to Aunt Bea.

      Nancy and I have nothing in common, I thought, absolutely nothing, as I read the beginning of #1.

      It said that Nancy Drew was an attractive girl of eighteen, that she was driving along a country road in her new, dark blue convertible and that she had just delivered some legal papers for her father.

      Apparently, her dad had given her the car as a birthday present and she thought it was fun helping him in his work.

      It went on to say that her father was Carson Drew, a well-known lawyer in River Heights, and that he frequently discussed puzzling aspects of cases with his blond blue-eyed daughter. Smug, I thought, Nancy was pleased her father relied on her intuition.

      Nancy was nothing like me. She was five years younger, for one thing. She also drove, a convertible no less; I couldn’t even drive a donkey cart, had never even bothered getting my license. Who needed a car if you’d lived all your life in the city? It would only be a nuisance here, even a convertible in the summer. Besides, I was kind of terrified of driving, would rather poke a needle through my own eye than be responsible for powering a vehicle.

      Nancy also had a father who trusted her to help him with things, while all I had was Aunt Bea to trust that I would fuck everything up and a father in Africa whom I rarely saw. I seemed to remember Nancy being motherless, like me, but somehow I doubted we’d lost our mothers in the same fashion.

      Finally, there was that whole thing about her being blond and blue-eyed—wasn’t she supposed to be famously titian-haired? I seemed to remember that, too, and remembered thinking the word sounded glamorous but then thinking it icky when I’d learned the Webster’s definition of it was “of a brownish-orange color,” which hardly sounded attractive—which was in direct opposition to my own curly black hair and brick-brown eyes.

      I hated her already.

      The bitch probably didn’t even have any cheesy cellulite on the backs of her thighs. It would be nice to be able to say I was too young to worry about cellulite, but genetics will out and mine had outed itself post-puberty in an unpleasant way. Oh, nothing too major, just enough to make the idea of appearing on a beach in a bathing suit somewhat less than confidence-building.

      Feeling more disgusted than I’d expected to feel, I put aside #1 and picked up #56, the one with the pagoda on the cover, and turned to page one again.

      Nancy was discussing some drink called Pearl Powder with friends Bess and George.

      I remembered being confused by George when I was a little girl. Obviously, George was a boy’s name, and yet whenever there were pictures of the girls with Nancy’s boyfriend Ned in the book, I’d always think Ned was George and wonder where Ned was and who was that other girl? It was years before I sorted George’s androgyny out.

      I grumbled. I didn’t have any friends.

      Before Buster, I’d had a few friends, at least people to do things with and people to talk to when times got rough. But after I succumbed to Buster’s charms, I committed the other cardinal sin that girls make: I made the man not just the center of the universe, but the entire universe, and I let everyone else drift off to different galaxies.

      So maybe I messed up that metaphor, but so what, because in that moment, I realized I no longer had any friends, not like Nancy did, not even a friend of not-readily-determinable sexual orientation like George.

      You could say I felt sorry for myself. I knew my own choices and actions had led me to where I was, but I still felt sorry for myself.

      If things had somehow worked out with Buster—not that I’d ever been able to define for myself, even before the bust-up, what would constitute things “working out” with a married man plus two kids—would I still be feeling sorry for myself at this point?

      Probably, I figured. Because I would have still reached that critical state in a relationship where you realize you’ve let all your friendships die and all you have left is the one relationship.

      Not that I’d had any other experience with relationships.

      Come to think of it, I’d had limited experience with friendships, too.

      I glanced down that first page of #56 and saw that—omigod!—Nancy was still eighteen! How was such a thing possible? I was pretty sure that even Sherlock Holmes, over the course of his many adventures, had aged a few years. So how had Nancy managed to age not one year over the course of fifty-six mysteries? I quickly did the math.

      Okay, I went to find my calculator.

      Figuring it wasn’t a leap year—because what are the odds? Something like one in four?—I did the division. Let’s see…365 divided by 56 is…6.5178571. 6.5178571??? This…teenager was solving mysteries at the rate of one every six and a half days? What kind of a girl was she? Oh, man, was I sooo not her.

      Talk about an overachiever.

      But then, after I was annoyed for a really long time, I started to think, How cool!

      Imagine having one incredibly long year, the most stretched-out year imaginable, with enough time to get right everything a person needed to get right. What would I do with such a year? I couldn’t change the past. But maybe in changing my present, I could change my future?

      I looked at the calendar on the back of my bedroom door, kittens in Greece, the sole present I’d received from Aunt Bea for my birthday: it was April 26. So, calculator time again, I had already lost 116 days so far that year—it wasn’t a leap year—meaning I’d already blown the chance to solve 17.846153 mysteries. But hey, there were still 249 days left, so there was still the opportunity for me to solve the remaining 38.153847 mysteries.

      Whatever they were.

      If only I could get up to speed real fast.

      Actually, I was beginning to think that even I should be able to solve .153847 mysteries. It was the 38 part, I suspected, that would be the problem.

      For the remainder of the two months until it was time for me to get on the plane to Iceland, I could read a book a day of Nancy Drew, leaving me five days at the end for shopping, packing and biting my nails to the quick.

      Except for the day I went for the job interview, of course. Even someone desperate for a nanny who was willing to leave her life and go to Iceland wasn’t going to hire that nanny without first meeting her in person…. No matter what kind of wonderful things Ambassador Buster had said about her.

      chapter 3

      Then came the call. It was by one Mrs. Fairly, definitely a Mrs. who would never allow herself to be addressed as Ms., who requested I come to her