You Have Seven Messages by Stewart Lewis

Gray, cut out the picture and taped it to the whiteboard. I don't usually feel famous myself, but I went to the premiere of his last film (the one that supposedly washed him up) and a couple months later there was a picture of us in Vanity Fair. Now some critics say he's washed up, but I think the reason people become film critics is because they failed to be film directors themselves. He was always shooting in places like Africa, Japan, Australia, and Canada. My real father is a film director who was at the height of his career when I was born, which is why he was never around. He seemed to know them all, a secret society of men in pressed black coats standing as straight as the buildings they protected. Sometimes he'd let me listen to NPR while he chatted with the doormen. He'd take me to school every day and make sure my shoelaces were tied. I grew up in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, and when I was really little, I thought my driver was my father. My cousin could've come up with a better name, and she's five and rides a tricycle. Who came up with that name, anyway? I bet the person who came up with the name Hannah Montana gets paid a quarter of a million dollars a year and drives a Lexus. That makes me feel like I'm trapped in some adolescent purgatory where I get force-fed Disney-themed cupcakes while watching Hannah Montana reruns-that stage is over. I don't have a subscription to Twist or Bop or Flop or whatever they call those glossy magazines full of posters of shiny-haired, full-lipped hunks.

I don't wear hair clips or paint my cell phone with nail polish, and I'm not boy crazy. I may be fourteen, but I read the New York Times. and western Massachusetts and frequents New York City. STEWART LEWIS is a singer-songwriter and radio journalist who lives in D.C.

You Have Seven Messages by Stewart Lewis