Who's Your Daddy? (9 page)

Despite the fact I was so creeped, I picked up the CD and looked at the front, and I was SO shocked. GUESS WHOSE CD IT WAS??? This really ultra-sweatworthy young blues musician named Bobby Slade. I don’t know if that means anything to anyone else, but to me it was like a big whack-a-mole bop on the head from the universe saying, “Wake up, Caressa!”

Bobby Slade is super wicked hot! He totally recorded
his first album at age SIXTEEN!!! He’s a prodigy, according to my dad, and he’s twenty-one now and really successful. There is this one photo of him in the liner notes of the CD—OHMIGOD, SWOON. He’s wearing worn-out jeans, no shirt, no shoes, and holding his guitar all casual-like in front of his muscular chest. He has a tatt on his upper arm of some kind of Chinese symbol. It’s just … wow.

Anyway, I put the CD away and didn’t make the connection right away, but it finally hit me.

I burned the wish cards.

The supper worked!

I’m almost 100 percent sure that the universe was telling me Bobby Slade is the guy for me! I know what everyone will say when I tell them: CARESSA, YOU’RE NUTS! HE’S A FAMOUS PERSON! But, it all makes sense from my perspective. So many regular guys get all glazed over when they meet my dad, because he’s famous. They want to touch his Grammy statues and hear about his touring days. Whatever. But, Bobby Slade wouldn’t be all starstruck about my dad, because he’s a star himself! He has his own freakin’ Grammy statues!

Bobby Slade is exactly what I asked for in my
prayer/wish, even though I hadn’t realized it until that CD took a digger. Maybe, all along, I needed to find a guy who could hold his own in the fame department in order for my dad’s identity not to be an issue. Maybe THAT is what the dumb supper needed to tell me.

I started scribbling in my journal about Bobby, brainstorming different ways I could meet him in person. I’m still not sure about how to pull that off, but that’s not what the dumb supper was supposed to help us figure out. It was supposed to point us toward WHO we might date, and it did that swimmingly. I can work out the rest on my own.

I could totally fall in love with Bobby Slade!!!

I think I already have!

I was so freakin’ jazzed, I ran right upstairs to email Lila and Meryl.

When I woke up early the next morning, the house was still dim and quiet, thank God. I should’ve been tired, but I was too amped up about my inevitable punishment. I was SO dreading facing my dad, and the stress stuck in my stomach like a congealed clump of elementary school mac and cheese. GLURG. I decided I should take advantage of this time to check in with Caressa and Meryl before the long arm of the law reached out to crush me. I had no idea if my dad would restrict me from the phone, the Internet, the television, or what, but it seemed likely. It also seemed really unfair. I mean, unless you’re on
Survivor,
who can live without email access?!

But, I was absolutely dying to know what happened with the rest of the supperus interruptus, so I crept over
to my computer and turned my sound volume off, then quickly signed on. Neither Caressa nor Meryl were on yet, but both of them had sent email messages in the middle of the night. MeryPs was first, and I couldn’t wait to read it because she always had a calming effect on me. I double-clicked on it:

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected], [email protected]

SUBJECT. The WEIRDEST thing!

TIME: 1:45:17
A.M.
, MST

Lila—

I hope everything’s okay at home. I’m SO worried about you, and I’m SO sad that the dumb supper got messed up. I promise I won’t say I told you so about getting busted, either. I just hope you’re not grounded until after graduation. :-P Just so you know, we didn’t keep going with the ceremony. We can try it again another solstice or equinox night, assuming you aren’t on house arrest for the rest of your natural-born life. But, here’s the real shocker: despite the problems, I think the purpose of the dumb supper might’ve worked!

I paused in reading Meryl’s message to stave off a giant surge of nausea. Holy crap. Why hadn’t I seen this coming? If even-keel, logical MERYL thought the dumb supper might’ve worked, I was full-on hosed. HELLO, had she forgotten that the first guy I’d come face to face with was DYLAN freakin’-totally-not-for-moi SEBRING?!?! My throat squeezed, probably with the effort of holding back a panic puke. Dylan Sebring wouldn’t give me the time of day even if it was a direct order from my dad . Not to mention he had a GIRLFRIEND. This was ALL WRONG! Surely the dumb supper had to be OVER for the magic to happen, right? Dylan was NOT the rebel I wanted. He was a whole lot like my brother Luke … not to mention all my other brothers and my—horror of horrors—father.

If fate thought I was destined to be with a guy like DYLAN, then all I could say was, fate needed to back sloooooowly away from the crack pipe.

With more than a little effort, I shook off my selfabsorption and went back to Meryl’s email. I scanned it quickly, reading about how she’d gotten a flat tire on the way home,
blah blah blah
, and the first guy she’d seen was That Bosnian Guy. She wrote:

His name is Ismet, in case you didn’t know. Ismet Hadziahmetovic, and his sister’s name is Shefka. Her name is pronounced pretty much how it looks, but his is pronounced ISH-met, not IZ-met or ISS-met.

You guys, he’s SO sweet, and even though I’ve never really thought much about him before, he’s very cute. But the point is, there he was, totally out of the blue with NO explanation for it except the dumb supper. I can’t wait to hear what you both think about that.

L&K,

Meryl

I groaned, feeling truly ill, and fired off a quick response to Meryl:

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected], [email protected]

SUBJECT: re: The WEIRDEST thing!

TIME: 6:45:00
A.M.
, MST

Mer—

This is so cool about Ismet. I’m truly happy for you.
But please, please, PLEASE tell me that this could also be a coincidence and not a result of the dumb supper! :-0 HELLO, two words for you: Dylan Sebring. ACKKKKKK! If the dinner DID work, fate is evil and my life rots. But we knew that.

Update: Dad’s not up yet. I’m awaiting my sentencing. I feel all sick and nervous inside, sort of like Joan of Arc, waiting to be burned at the stake. (Or at least how I imagine she must’ve felt.) I’m afraid he’s going to take away my computer! I mean, I can’t think of a more heinous punishment, so what else? [FRET] Is that even legal anymore? Isn’t Internet access a basic human right?

www.LilaLivesInHell.com

www.WishMeLuck.com

—Lila

Next, I double-clicked on Caressa’s reply to Meryl, which she’d written hours ago. She hadn’t even left her house, as far as I knew, so she couldn’t have had a dumb supper epiphany. Surely she’d set Meryl straight about the Ismet coincidence.

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected],

[email protected]

SUBJECT: re: The WEIRDEST thing!

TIME: 2:23:43
A.M.
, MST

Meryl!!!!

A hottie for Mer—that rocks, girl! I, too, had an interesting experience after you left, Lila. (HANG IN THERE! I’m sorry for what happened, too. You have to tell us what your dad does to you ASAP.) My cool thing seems directly connected to the dumb supper, too. I might not have believed it, but now that I read your tale, Meryl, it all makes TOTAL SENSE!!!

Here’s what happened to me:

I was getting ready to clean up the rest of the feast room, when all of a sudden I decided, HEY, I might as well bless the supper and burn our prayer/wishes like we’d planned. Why not? I might be able to make things happen. Just call me
CHARMED
, [g] (Mer, it’s a TV show reference, don’t mind me.)

So, I placed my hands on the spirit chair, and closed my eyes. Lila, I really felt like your mom was there for us. I said a silent blessing for her and for the meal-that-never-was,
never-was, then I went from seat to seat and lit the votive candles. The black ones were really mondo kewwwwwl!

I let them burn for a few minutes, and then I went from plate to plate and torched our prayer/wish cards. It was so fun and, like, empowering!

When I was done, I went into the living room to write in my journal about the whole thing. That’s when the weirdness happened. I swear to you guys, I wasn’t anywhere NEAR our CD shelves when *IT* happened …

It? IT?! I read on, faster and faster, until I got to the really out-there part. A GUY ON A CD?!? I SO could not believe that Caressa truly thought she was destined to fall in love with a (1) famous (2) twenty-one-year-old (3) blues musician (4) whom she had never met. Had she suffered some sort of mental break?

I stared at the screen for several moments, my jaw sort of hanging open with this totally unattractive mouth-breather expression. The world had definitely gone mad.

I didn’t want to harsh on her mellow too badly, but I felt I needed to say something to Caressa about this little foray into psycholand. I clicked reply and typed: