Friends Forever #10: Stacey’s Problem

The problem with Stacey is that she doesn’t really have a problem. She and Claudia are now best friends again, and the two spend one night making pizza with her mom. Maureen is in a good mood, joking with the girls and making slices with anchovies. She even agrees to play a game with them before suddenly developing a headache and eating in her room.

Stacey goes to NYC for a weekend with her dad and meets with Ethan. She mentions that she still likes him and might be in love with him but they need to take their time together. She spends a lot of time with Ed and his girlfriend Samantha. They check out a designer clothing exhibit, and get along really well. Ed tells her that they got engaged and Stacey realizes that she doesn’t really know Sam.

Ed decides to call Maureen and tell her about his engagement. When Stacey gets back in town though, she breaks down and tells her mom herself. She later hears her mom crying and Maureen tells her that it’s just because things are changing. She then takes the step of calling Ed and congratulating him on his news.

Stacey talks things over with the BSC and they decide that her mom needs to start dating again. Claudia gets her hands on a dating tape, and they all watch it together. No one can agree on any guy for her mom and they give up. It turns out that Maureen got a date for the weekend with a guy she knows from work and he’s taking her to a fancy dance. Stacey helps her mom pick out an outfit and then heads off to NYC again.

She sneaks away a few times to call her mom during the weekend and she even tells Sam about her concerns. On Sunday morning, they go out to eat and she sees Laine in line. Laine acts like nothing happened between then and tries to get Stacey to join her group before telling her to call and walking away. Stacey finds out that her mom’s date didn’t go well and wants to rush home, so Sam agrees to drive her.

Stacey spends the next few days worrying about her mom. Then she comes home and finds her mom cooking. She sits her down and gives her some big news: she decided to go back to using her maiden name since there will soon be a new Mrs. McGill. She also tells her that she might quit her job and open her own clothing store, which gets Stacey excited.

While all this is going on, Mallory comes home from boarding school. She feels really left out because Byron took over her role as the oldest child. She wants to sign up for a bunch of summer classes at the rec center with Jessi, but she has a full dance schedule. Stacey tells her to just give it some time until everyone adjusts to her being back and until school lets out so they can have more time. Mallory does find some information for them online, and she decides to keep finding new things and sending it back to them.

*Mallory started an internet club at school to help girls who didn’t know how to use the computers. Naturally she was so good at everything that she became president.

*Vanessa thinks that Mallory is just pouting because they kept going on without her and didn’t drop everything when she came home.

*It would be nice to see a few other divorced people not find someone new/get married so fast. It hasn’t even been a year (technically) and Ed is engaged while Maureen just had a bunch of bad dates. Then again, Dawn’s dad got engaged, broke up, engaged again, married and had a kid in a year.

*Stacey kept worrying about what to tell her mom or what to say to her, so she was glad that her dad agreed to do it. But, she just blurted out the news anyway.

*Ed is kind of a dick. He actually wanted Stacey to deal with telling his ex-wife about his engagement until Sam said he should call her.

*Um, Stacey didn’t even know what Sam did until this book. Shouldn’t your only child know things like that before you propose to someone?

*Oh, and Samantha is actually a fashion photographer. She says that she worked as a model until she got too old and then started taking pictures. Yup, that totally sounds like how you become a photographer.

*She’s getting ready to leave on a longer assignment to Alaska. Given what we know about Ed, it doesn’t sound like something he would be happy about.

*The entire BSC wants to work at Maureen’s new store, but she points out that it violates child-labor laws. That’s funny because it never did before.

*Laine actually mentions King! She says that they “grew apart” since she saw Stacey last, which given that everything in the series happened in a year, was like two months ago.

*Laine is also a little goth, or at least that’s what I picked up from the book. She has blue eyeliner on and the way she talks makes it seem like she’s goth. I wonder if she can rock that look while working her fancy summer job.

*I thought that when they switched to the FF series, the girls agreed to meet less often. In this one, Stacey mentions that they still have three meetings every week.