Blacklisted

I was nine years old and walking myself to school one morning when I heard the unfamiliar sound of a prepubescent boy calling my name. I had heard my name spoken out loud by males before, but it was most often by one of my brothers, my father, or a teacher, and it was usually followed up with a shot to the side of the head.

I turned around and spotted Jason Safirstein. Jason was an adorable fifth-grader with an amazing lower body who lived down the street from me. I had never walked to school, had a conversation with, or even so much as made eye contact with Jason before. After lifting up one of my earmuffs to make sure I had heard him correctly, I nervously attempted to release my wedgie while waiting for him to catch up. (A futile effort, as it turned out, when wearing two mittens the size of car batteries.)

"I heard you were going to be in a movie with Goldie Hawn," he said to me, out of breath.

Shit. I had worried something like this was going to happen. The day before, I had forgotten my language arts homework, and when the teacher singled me out in front of the entire class to find out where it was, I told her that I had been in three straight nights of meetings with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, negotiating my contract to play Goldie Hawn's daughter in the sequel to Private Benjamin.

The fact that no sequel to Private Benjamin was in the works, or that a third-grader wouldn't be negotiating her own contract with the star of the movie and her live-in lover, hadn't dawned on me.

"Yeah, well, that was kind of a lie," I mumbled, recovering my left mitten from in between my butt cheeks.

"What?" he asked, astounded. "You lied? Everyone has been talking about it. Everyone thinks