Blog Tour Stop: The Only Thing Worse Than Me is You by Lily Anderson!

Chapter One

       Ben West spent
summer vacation growing a handlebar mustache.

       Seriously.

       Hovering over his
upper lip—possibly glued there—was a bushy monstrosity that shouted, “Look out, senior class, I’m gonna tie some
chicks to the train tracks and then go on safari with my good friend Teddy
Roosevelt. Bully!”

       I
blindly swatted at Harper with my comic book, trying to alert her to the fact
that there was a mustachioed moron trying to blend in with the other people
entering campus.

       “I know I should
have made flash cards for the poems that Cline assigned,” she said, elbowing me
back hard, both acknowledging that she wasn’t blind and that she hated when I
interrupted her monologues about the summer reading list. “But I found Mrs.
Bergman’s sociolinguistics syllabus on the U of O website and I’m sure she’ll
use the same one here.”

       The mustache twitched an attempt at
freedom, edging away from West’s ferrety nose as he tried to shove past a group
of nervous looking freshmen. It might have been looking at me and Harper, but its owner was doing
everything possible to ignore us, the planter box we were sitting on, and
anything else that might have been east of the wrought iron gate.

       “So,” Harper
continued, louder than necessary considering we were sitting two inches apart.
“I thought I’d get a head start. But now I’m afraid that we were supposed to
memorize the poems for Cline. He never responded to my emails.”

       Pushing my comic
aside, I braced my hands against the brick ledge. The mustache was daring me to
say something. Harper could hear it too, as evidenced by her staring up at the
sun and muttering, “Or you could, you know, not do this.”

 “Hey, West,” I called, ignoring the clucks of
protest coming from my left. “I’m pretty sure your milk mustache curdled. Do
you need a napkin?”

Ben West lurched to a stop, one foot
inside of the gate. Even on the first day of school, he hadn’t managed to find
a clean uniform. His polo was a series of baggy wrinkles, half tucked into a
pair of dingy khakis. He turned his head. If the mustache had been able to give
me the finger, it would have. Instead, it stared back at me with its curlicue
fists raised on either side of West’s thin mouth.

“Hey, Harper,” he said. He cut his
eyes at me and grumbled, “Trixie.”

       I leaned back,
offering the slowest of slow claps. “Great job, West. You have correctly named
us. I, however, may need to change your mantle. Do you prefer Yosemite Sam or
Doc Holliday? I definitely think it should be cowboy related.” 

       “Isn’t it cruel
to make the freshmen walk past you?” he asked me, pushing the ratty brown hair
out of his eyes. “Or is it some kind of ritual hazing?” 

       “Gotta scare them
straight.” I gestured to my blonde associate. “Besides, I’ve got Harper to
soften the blow. It’s like good cop, bad cop.”

       “It is nothing
like good cop, bad cop. We’re waiting for Meg,” Harper said, flushing under the
smattering of freckles across her cheeks as she turned back to the parking lot,
undoubtedly trying to escape to the special place in her head where pop
quizzes—and student council vice presidents—lived. She removed her
headband,  pushing it back in place until
she once again looked like Sleeping Beauty in pink glasses and khakis. Whereas
I continued to look like I’d slept on my ponytail.

Which I had because it is cruel to
start school on a Wednesday.  

       “Is it heavy?” I
asked Ben, waving at his mustache. “Like weight training for your face? Or are
you just trying to compensate for your narrow shoulders?”

       He gave a
half-hearted leer at my polo. “I could ask the same thing of your bra.”

       My arms flew
automatically to cover my chest, but I seemed to be able to only conjure the
consonants of the curses I wanted to hurl at him. In his usual show of bad
form, West took this as some sort of victory. 

       “As you were,” he
said, jumping back into the line of uniforms on their way to the main building.
He passed too close to Kenneth Pollack, who shoved him hard into the main gate,
growling, “Watch it, nerd.”

       “School for
geniuses, Kenneth,” Harper called. “We’re all nerds.”

       Kenneth flipped
her off absentmindedly as West brushed himself off and darted past Mike
Shepherd into the main building.  

       “Brute,” Harper
said under her breath.

       I scuffed the
planter box with the heels of my mandatory Mary Janes. “I’m off my game. My
brain is still on summer vacation. I totally left myself open to that cheap
trick.” 

       “I was referring
to Kenneth, not Ben,” she frowned. “But, yes, you should have known better.
Ben’s been using that bra line since fourth grade.”

As a rule, I refused to admit when
Harper was right before eight in the morning. It would just lead to a full day
of her gloating. I hopped off of the planter and scooped up my messenger bag,
shoving my comic inside.

“Come on. I’m over waiting for Meg.
She’s undoubtedly choosing hair care over punctuality. Again.”

Harper slid bonelessly to her feet,
sighing with enough force to slump her shoulders as she followed me through the
front gate and up the stairs. The sunlight refracted against her pale hair
every time her neck swiveled to look behind us. Without my massive aviator
sunglasses, I was sure I would have been blinded by the glare.

“What’s with you?” I asked, kicking a
stray pebble out of the way.

“What? Nothing.” Her head snapped
back to attention, knocking her glasses askew. She quickly straightened them
with two trembling hands. “Nothing. I was just thinking that maybe senior year
might be a good time for you to end your war with Ben. You’d have more time to study
and read comics and…”

       Unlike the tardy
Meg, Harper was tall enough that I could look at her without craning my neck
downward. It made it easier to level her with a droll stare. Sometimes, it’s
better to save one’s wit and just let the stupidity of a thought do the
talking.

She rolled her eyes and clucked
again, breezing past me to open the door.  

       “Or not,” she
said, swinging the door open and letting me slip past her. “Year ten of Watson
v. West starts now. But if one of you brings up the day he pushed you off the
monkey bars, I am taking custody of Meg and we are going to sit with the
yearbook staff during lunch.”

       “I accept those
terms,” I grinned. “Now help me think of historical figures with mustaches.
Hitler and Stalin are entirely too obvious. I need to brainstorm before we get
homework.”  

Here’s a little more about the book:

 SUMMARY: