How It All Goes Down
Deanna Lambert is just thirteen when her dad catches her getting busy in the back of seventeen-year-old Tommy Webber's Buick. Tommy is Deanna's brother Darren's best friend (read: drug buddy), and Darren quickly administers a smack down. But it's too late: what's done is done, and Deanna's dad proceeds to stop talking to her for the next three years.
Okay—they still have minor conversations, like her dad telling her to stay out of trouble every time she goes anywhere, but their relationship is pretty much ruined. Deanna can't even go over to her best friend Jason's house without her dad suspecting something:
I imagined my dad watching us on a surveillance camera, staring in surprise as we innocently watched TV instead of making out or snorting coke or piercing each other's nipples or whatever it was my dad thought I did with my spare time. (3.159)
Speaking of Jason, even though they've been friends forever, Deanna's just realized she's in love with him. The realization came too late, though; before she figured out her feelings for him, Deanna introduced Jason to her friend Lee, and now they're a couple. Deanna feels like a third wheel whenever she's around them, and this is a girl who can use all the friends she can get. Everybody else believes Tommy's version of what went down that night three years ago (which is, in a nutshell, that Deanna's promiscuous and she asked for it), so most kids at school either bully her or don't speak to her.
Not having friends wouldn't be quite so awful if Deanna had a decent home life, but home's even worse than school. Her mom never stands up to her dad, and her teenage brother Darren lives in the basement with Stacy, the girl he got pregnant, and their baby daughter April. It's nonstop fighting and chaos at the Lambert house, mostly between Stacy and Deanna's dad, who isn't happy about the April situation and wants nothing to do with her. Deanna says:
Sometimes I wonder, you know, what's wrong with some families […] I realize how f***ed up it is to not be talking to each other and to be blaming each other and not wanting to know anything about your own grandkid. (7.15)
Deanna's dream is to get out of her dilapidated house in dilapidated Pacifica, CA, a small town where everybody knows each other and is always up in everybody else's business. She knows Darren and Stacy want to move out, so she hatches a plan to get a summer job, save all her money, and get an apartment with them.
The problem is that there aren't many jobs in Pacifica, so Deanna ends up at Picasso's Pizza, a dark, dingy joint that has definitely seen better days. Unbeknownst to Deanna, Tommy Webber (dude of the fateful Buick) also works there. But Deanna's determined to get out of her house, so she suffers through Tommy's obnoxiousness, and even ends up making out with him again (thankfully, she comes to her senses, stops, and tells him off).
Ultimately Deanna manages to fix (sort of) her relationships with her dad and her friend Lee, whom she's betrayed by kissing Jason. As she gets out of Darren's car on her first day of junior year, Darren reminds her—referring to their angry, grudge-holding, miserable dad—"We can be different from him." Deanna survives her bad experiences and manages to come out of them an intact, relatively hopeful person, rather than a bitter, angry grouch who always acts like she just stepped on a Lego. (Seriously, have you ever done that? Those things hurt.)