Our package had made it to the desk of Jean MacCurdy, and since we never bothered to include a phone number on our letter, she had to hunt for one. Information wasn’t a great deal of help at first — there were a lot of Carters in our area — but she asked if there was a number for Renee Carter, and there was. This was because my parents, in their wisdom of having already raised two teenagers, had long since gotten the kids their own phone line so we weren’t constantly tying up the main one.

It’s a Friday night. Sarah was having a surprise slumber party for her birthday… Since I was sick, I didn’t go to the slumber party. And it was a good thing I didn’t. Because that night at about 8 PM, I got a call from Jean MacCurdy…

(Full disclosure: I may or may not have actually been sick, as I did have a history of using that sort of excuse to get out of slumber parties or other kinds of parties. The life of a teenage introvert often involves such ethical dilemmas.)

She said that our story had been sent to her, and that they liked it and that Steve — yes, Steve — had been thrilled with it. Then she said that they were planning future episodes. And then she said that they might be calling me back.

Well, Sarah and everybody else were at that slumber party. So I tried to call Sarah, but everybody wasn’t there yet.

So I hung up and literally paced my room.

I don’t remember much of that first conversation, though in the 20/20 interview, Jean playfully recounted my responses as an flat, almost underwhelmed “Yeah…?” When you tell a story again and again, as we had to when answering interview questions over and over, in time the story can replace the memory. (Remember, even this journal entry was written a couple months after that first call had happened.)

Sarah said that I was talking so fast, she could hardly understand me. But I got my message across.

“I don’t believe it!” she said.

Meanwhile, Amy and the others didn’t know what the heck was going on. Amy kept saying “What? What?” Finally Sarah turned around and told everybody what was going on. I could hear Amy screech in the background.

Thing was, we had never even told our parents what it was we sent in. So it was kind of fun, filling our parents in on what we had done. (Good thing we hadn’t robbed a bank, huh?)

Honestly, we weren’t really expecting another call. A week or so later, I got a little padded envelope in the mail with some Tiny Toons postcards and pins, plus a followup letter:

Letter from Jean

At that point, we figured that was it. We were all ecstatic that, yes, they had received it, and yes, they had read it, and yes, they had liked it. That was enough for us to feel awesome about the whole thing. Day by day the excitement died down, and we went on with our regular eighth-grade lives.

Then my phone rang again.

Up next: From Hollywood to Waynesboro