Little Miss Red (3 page)

“But that’s not the best part,” Mom said.

“
Best
part?!” I cried. “I’m still waiting for the
good
part!”

“I talked to Marci today”—Marci was Michael’s mom—“and she’s decided to send Michael to visit
his
grandmother too, so you’ll be able to spend Spring Break
together
! With lots of sunscreen, obviously.”

Michael’s grandmother Rose lived one town over from Delray Beach, in Boca Raton, in the superdeluxe Fountain of Youth Senior Living Village. Not only were there two
pools instead of one, but there were four water aerobics and Yoga for Seniors classes a day.

“Isn’t that
great
?!” Mom asked.

I know I was lucky that my parents trusted Michael and me so much, but that was part of the problem. We could have been in my bedroom with the door locked—not that we did that—and they would know that all we were doing was watching TV. So much for having some time apart to figure things out. “Yeah. I can’t wait,” I mumbled, dragging my fork over my peas and making a mess before glancing over at Jeremy, who looked like he was going to cry. Disorganization freaked him out. “Sorry,” I said, patting him on the arm. “I’ll stop.”

Mom turned to my dad. “Larry, you know that Dr. Heath said that it’s very important that we present a united front to the kids,” she hissed. Dr. Heath was their couples therapist. “So help me out here, please.”

“Okay, okay.” He cleared his throat and turned to me. “Honey, you make it sound like we’re sending you to one of those wilderness camps,” he said. “It’s Florida. People love Florida.”

“Yeah, old people and serial killers,” I mumbled. I glanced at my iPhone, praying it would buzz with an e-mail from Jordan saying the trip to Mexico was miraculously back on.

“
And
—you’ll love this,” Mom said, ignoring me. “Marci was even able to get you seats next to each other on the same flight!”

Obviously, I had no say in the matter, as the tickets were already booked. “That’s great,” I replied. I sounded about as excited as Jeremy when he was told he had to go to school. Basically, my Spring Break would be the same as my weekends: watching television with the boyfriend I was not
in
love with. The only difference was that instead of Michael’s giant plasma screen and the good snacks, we’d be sitting on my grandmother’s plastic-covered couch eating Coffee Nips.

“I have a feeling this just might be your best Spring Break
ever
,” Mom said. “Now help me clear the table.”

“Yo, what up?” Michael said later that night when he called. I was in my newly painted, lavender-colored bedroom supposedly working on a paper for English class about Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald (the author of
The Great Gatsby
) who ultimately went crazy and ended up in a mental hospital (most likely because she loved him so much). But really what I was doing was watching a special I had TiVo’d on SOAPnet called
The Top 100 Greatest Love Affairs in Soap History
. People were always talking about how romantic Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were, but they had
nothing
on Luke and Laura, this couple from
General Hospital
who fell madly in love in the eighties and managed to stay together through all sorts of crazy things like kidnappings and faked deaths.

“Hey,” I replied from my bed with its serenity-friendly
yellow/pink/peach comforter as I saved my work on my laptop.

“So, what up?” he asked, the TV blaring in the background.

I looked at my watch. Yup. He was watching
MTV Cribs
. Just like he did every weeknight. I got off my bed and walked over to turn off the tinkling feng shui–approved, serenity-boosting fountain on my desk. I don’t know if it made me happy, but it
did
make me feel like I had to pee all the time. “Not much. So I guess we’re going to Florida together for Spring Break,” I said, trying to sound excited.

It hadn’t always been like this—there
was
a time I was madly in love with him. In fact, the minute I set eyes on him at Faryl Reingold’s Bat Mitzvah in seventh grade, I knew we were meant to be together, just like Devon felt when she saw that sexy painter from Oklahoma standing at the top step of his Chelsea loft in
Doused by Desire
. After that day, we were inseparable. While all the boys I knew were into video games, Michael was different. Not only did my parents approve—because they knew his parents from temple and liked them very much—but Michael liked to talk for hours and watch TV rather than play sports. And because he was an only child and his mother was a shopaholic, he had spent his childhood sitting outside dressing rooms. So not only was he super-patient, but he could spot an amazing deal from fifty yards away.

There was no answer other than the TV.

“Michael?” I asked.

Still no answer. Nowadays he did this all the time.
He
called
me
, but then he spent the entire call watching TV and not paying attention. The days where we’d talk for hours about nothing and everything were long gone.

“Michael!”
I shouted.

“Huh?”

“I said, I guess we’re going to Florida together.”

“Oh. Yeah. That’ll be cool, huh?”

“Uh huh,” I agreed, plopping back down on my bed. I picked up my dog-eared copy of
Lassoed by Lust
that I kept on my nightstand and traced my finger across Dante Jackson’s jaw on the cover. All of the guys on the covers of Lulu’s novels were hotties, but Dante was the hottest of them all. With his perfectly faded Levis, and his tight white tank clinging to his ripped pecs, and his fingernails with just the
teensiest
bit of dirt underneath them (because he was a rancher and therefore a very hard worker), Dante was exactly my kind of guy. I
love
ranchers. Granted, because I’m allergic to horses I’ve never been anywhere near a ranch and therefore the only ones I’ve seen have been on television or in movies, but they seem to be a freakishly attractive group of people.

“So, what else is going on?” I asked him.

“Huh? Oh, nothing.” He was
so
not paying attention to our conversation. I bet when guys called Juliet DeStefano,
they paid attention to
her
. And I
knew
they paid attention to Devon, because in
Bowled Over by Bliss
, the Indian customer service representative racked up a thousand-dollar cell phone bill one month after falling in love with the sound of her voice when she called with a question about her computer.

“Then why’d you call?” I asked.

“Because I always call you at nine,” he replied. That was true. The good news with Michael was that there were no surprises. The bad news with Michael was that there were no surprises. If he said he’d call at nine, he called at nine. If he said we were going for pizza, we’d go for pizza. Mom says I should consider myself beyond lucky to have a boyfriend who “provides me with consistency”—that hopefully getting into that habit so early in my life will make it so that when I grow up I don’t end up choosing men who are “emotionally unavailable” like most of her patients seem to do. But ever since junior year started, it was as if that…
thing
—the thing that Devon called
je ne sais quoi,
which is French for “I do not know what”—has been gone from our relationship.

“But I’m gonna go now because this is one of my favorite
MTV Cribs
episodes. I’ll call you tomorrow at nine.”

“Okay,” I sighed. That was the problem—not just with Michael, but with everything in my life. It was all just so…
scheduled
. Between French club and yearbook staff and SAT prep classes and piano lessons there was no room
for what Devon called “happy accidents,” a.k.a. fate, to intervene. Just
once
I would have liked to mix it up and do something out of the ordinary.

I picked up
Lassoed by Lust.
“I bet you don’t even
own
a watch,” I said to Dante.

Because it was Spring Break season, there was a massive amount of pre-tanning going on in L.A. Over the last few weeks, the brightness level in the city had been dropping every day.

“That girl looks like a leather chair,” said Jordan as we sat in the Farmer’s Market the next afternoon waiting for Michael before going over to the Dell, a mall. I had originally been planning to get some stuff for Puerto Vallarta, but now that I would be stuck with Grandma Roz, I figured I’d focus on finding the perfect outfit to wear for the calendar photo shoot. The winners wouldn’t be announced until the day before Spring Break, but because I had voted for myself fifty-four times using made-up e-mail addresses (obviously, it if was against the rules I never would have done it, but there was nothing in there about multiple voting), I was pretty sure Miss April was mine.

The Farmer’s Market was a collection of tons of
different restaurants and food stands that had been there forever, as had most of the people who walked around there. Even though you could get everything from tacos to Korean food to cookies, I always went for the same thing: an apple cider donut from Bob’s Donuts. The one day I tried to shake things up and asked for a Boston cream, Al, the guy behind the counter, just shook his head and said, “Nah, you’re not a Boston cream kinda girl, kid. Too messy for you.”

“Look—there’s Dylan Schoenfield,” Ali said, pointing to a girl with long, blond hair who was a senior at Castle Heights. She was leaving Du-par’s restaurant with Josh Rosen, another senior. Her dad owned the Dell. “I’d do anything for my hair to be as blond and straight as hers,” Ali sighed, as she ran her hand through her own dark, frizzy curls.

“I heard it’s because she gets that Japanese straightening thing done to it,” Jordan said. “That’s what my mom does,” she went on. “It costs almost a thousand dollars.” Jordan was always complaining that ever since Lulu had become successful, nothing about her mom was real anymore—not her hair, not her nails, not her boobs. Not even her name was real. Her real name was Barbara Meyers, but she had it legally changed to Lulu Lavoie after
Lassoed by Lust
was published.

“I wish mine was as long as Juliet DeStefano’s,” I replied, tugging at my own auburn bob as if that would make it grow
faster. No matter how much mousse I put in it, my hair just hung there, like it had just dried after a downpour. “Or at least long enough to put up in a messy bun.”

Jordan rolled her eyes. “I bet she wears extensions. My mom had extensions once. They’re way nasty.”

My eyes widened. “Maybe it’s a wig,” I gasped. That first day Juliet’s hair looked real enough, but it wasn’t like I was paying that much attention. “Maybe the witness protection program people bought it for her.” I made a mental note to take a closer look next time I was near her.

“Yo, what up, girls?” said a voice behind me as the hand attached to it grabbed for a piece of my donut.

“Hi, Michael,” Ali and Jordan said in stereo.

As he leaned in to give me a kiss on the cheek, not even the lemony smell of the dermatologist-prescribed antibacterial soap that he used—which used to make me swoon—did anything. Instead it just reminded me of the stuff our cleaning lady, Marita, used to wax the kitchen floor.

“Hi,” I replied, again trying to sound more excited than I felt, which wasn’t difficult due to the fact that I felt close to nothing.

Without even asking, he popped the last of my donut into his mouth. “Ready to shop?” he asked, as he took out the travel-size bottle of hand sanitizer he kept in his pocket at all times. After squirting some onto his palm, he held the bottle out to me. “Want some?”

I couldn’t help thinking of Dante, and the dirt under his
fingernails. Was a little bit of dirt or Boston cream
that
bad? Didn’t traces of dirt or sticky stuff show that you were actually
living
your life? Usually, I would say yes to the sanitizer, but it was time to start living on the edge a little more.

“No thanks,” I said. Maybe I wasn’t ready to be as rebellious as Devon in
Consumed with Controversy
, when she moved into a tree house to protest the killing of baby seals and ended up falling in love with a CNN anchorman, but not being germfree 24/7 was a step in that direction.

“What about this?” I yelled over the techno music that was thumping away in Always 16 as I held up a zebra-striped tank dress.

“If you want to look like one of those hookers on Hollywood Boulevard,” Michael shouted back as he grabbed it from me and put it back on the rack.

Julia Roberts had been a Hollywood Boulevard hooker in
Pretty Woman
, my favorite movie of all time, and she didn’t do so bad for herself. But the more I thought about it, Michael was right. Zebra was pretty dramatic. I may have been able to pull off leopard—at least in scarf or headband form—but you had to be Devon Devoreaux or Juliet DeStefano to rock zebra. Plus, after Julia Roberts met Richard Gere, he took her on a huge makeover shopping spree, so she stopped wearing the zebra.

“Here, try this on,” Michael said, thrusting a red- and white-flowered sundress into my hand.

“Maybe if I were a milkmaid,” I replied, putting it back on the rack next to the zebra print.

“Trust me—it’ll look great,” he said, picking it up again.

I took it from him and started toward the dressing room. The spark may have been gone between us, but I knew better than to fight with him when it came to clothes.

As usual, he was right. Instead of looking babyish, the red and white looked sweet and feminine, and although the dress wasn’t fitted, it had this way of making it look like I had some curves under it. I don’t know how, but the dress even made my hair look less flat. It was perfect for Miss April.

“Yo, do you have it on?” Michael was yelling from the dressing room entrance. “Let me see.”

I walked out and stood in front of him. “Please don’t say ‘I told you so.’”

“Okay. I won’t.”

Even Jordan liked it, and for the last year she’d been wearing the unofficial Young Feminist uniform of baggy camouflage pants and T-shirts that said things like
WOMYN ROCK
.