Little Miss Red Read online

  “Yeah?” Jack said.

  “So what if we’re changing the tire and one of them crashes into us!”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve never changed a tire before, have you?” Even I knew how to do that, thanks to that Driver’s Ed/defensive driving course I took last fall.

  “I have so,” Michael said defensively.

  From the backseat, I stopped trying to call Grandma Roz and looked up. “What, on your Big Wheel when you were five?”

  He turned and gave me a dirty look. “It wasn’t my Big Wheel. It was my Tiny Trike.”

  Jack reached across Michael and opened the passenger door as well. “It’s about time you became a man. Believe me, you’ll thank me for this one day.”

  “Why will I thank you after ending up with grease on my shirt?” Michael asked.

  After they got out of the car, I locked the doors and went back to calling my grandmother so I could let her know about the flat. Oddly, the phone just rang and rang. Even if she was sleeping, she should have heard it, because she always slept with the phone right next to her ear in case someone called in the middle of the night with news that someone had died.

  I heard the guys rummaging around in the trunk, then a loud thump followed by Jack screaming, “My foot! My foot!”

  “It’s not like I did it on purpose,” I heard Michael say.

  There was more thumping, and when I looked up I saw Jack hopping back to the car while Michael trailed behind. “Who has a bowling ball in their trunk but no jack?” I heard him say.

  “You need to elevate that,” I said, pinching my nose as I examined Jack’s foot. A foot that had been in a motorcycle boot all day smelled really gross, especially when it was in a car with the windows closed.

  “I do?”

  “Yeah. Or else it’ll swell.”

  “Wow, Red—you are really smart.”

  I shrugged. “Girl Scouts.”

  We went with Michael’s original plan of calling AAA (“Too bad no one bothered to listen to me in the first place,” he grumbled), then settled in and waited for them to arrive. When they wouldn’t stop fighting about what radio station to listen to, I made Michael switch seats with me and I took control—landing on a talk show where a guy talked about how he had been abducted by aliens a few months before and how, ever since then, he could see people’s inner thoughts in a cartoon bubble above their heads.

  Unfortunately, none of us remembered that listening to the radio when you have the engine off drains the battery. Which meant that even after Luther, the AAA guy, changed the tire, we couldn’t go anywhere because the battery was dead. And the Buick was so old, it wouldn’t take a jump start. Which meant that the three of us had to pile into the front seat of Luther’s truck and have the Buick towed.

  Smooshed in between my two ex–soul mates—one with a smelly foot and another with a rumbling stomach thanks to all the junk food he ate—I thought about fate. What if I had gone to Mexico with Jordan? Would I have met a different soul mate? Someone whose eyes I would have been staring into this very minute as the tropical breezes gave my hair a cool windblown look and we ate guacamole? Or was my fate that my Spring Break was supposed to have been exactly like this—in humid Florida, with frizzy hair, learning the painful lesson that there wasn’t such a thing as a soul mate. That no matter how good someone’s butt looked in faded jeans, or how good their fashion sense, they were just human, with smelly feet and gassy stomachs, and all that other icky stuff that wasn’t romantic but was part of real life.

  Was my fate that I was supposed to learn that guys like Dante didn’t exist in real life? That he was just a character who had been made up so that people could escape reality every once in a while? And that the hot guys who rode motorcycles were overrated and not much better than the ones who used hand sanitizer all the time?

  I turned to Jack, who had fallen asleep with his head against the back of the seat and was snoring quietly. Then I turned to Michael, who was also sleeping, with his head against the window, and also snoring quietly.

  Then I turned to Luther, who was softly singing along to some cheesy love song about how some guy was going to love this girl until the end of time, before he took his index finger and started rooting around in his right nostril.

  Yup. At the end of the day, humans were all just really…human.

  “Luther?” I whispered.

  He quickly took his finger out of his nose and turned to me. “Yeah?”

  “Are you married?”

  He nodded and held up his left hand where I could see a big gold ring. “Thirty-nine years,” he sighed.

  “Is it hard?”

  “Hard?! Sometimes I wake up and turn to her and I think, ‘Man, you again?’”

  “So she annoys you sometimes?”

  “Sometimes?! Try most of the time.”

  I could feel my stomach start to clench. Love wasn’t supposed to be a jail sentence, was it?

  “But I wouldn’t trade a minute of it,” he went on. “I love her just as much as the day we met.”

  My stomach unclenched. “You do?”

  He nodded. “Yup. I’m not sayin’ I believe in soul mates or any of that junk, but if I’m gonna spend my life bein’ with just one person, I’m sure glad it’s her.”

  Maybe that’s why I was supposed to come to Florida— to hear Luther say that.

  Or maybe I was supposed to come to Florida to find out that nothing was what it seemed—not supposedly hot bad boys who may or may not have been criminals, not perfect boyfriends, and especially not arthritic old men who jingled their pocket change.

  We pulled up to Grandma Roz’s condo, and I saw three police cars with flashing lights out front. My heart started to race. All these years I had joked that Grandma Roz was a hypochondriac—but what if something had finally happened to her? As we got closer to the condo, however, I saw her standing outside wiggling her finger in front of a policeman’s face, and I breathed a sigh of relief. She was fine.

  As the three of us got out of the truck, I realized this might be my last time with Jack where we weren’t separated by a bulletproof partition of glass. I put my hand on his arm and turned to Michael. “Do you think Jack and I can have a moment?”

  He yawned and nodded, shuffling off to sit on the curb and eat his taco from Taco Bell. I guess whatever jealousy he had been feeling had officially sizzled out after he had convinced Luther to go through the drive-through on the way back.

  “What’s up, Red?” Jack asked, also yawning. Obviously, he hadn’t seen the cops and had no idea that life as he had known it was officially over. I wondered if they had Pizza Fridays in jail like they did in middle school.

  I tipped my hat up so I could get one last look at his face and, like Devon had done with Dante, “memorize every last curve and crevice of his rugged countenance” (and, in Jack’s case, the big red zit on his forehead that had popped up during the drive back from Pablo’s). Maybe he was a super-self-involved human, with oil glands and everything, but he’d always hold the space in my heart marked “First Big Dramatic Adventure.” My hat was so big, it kept flopping down and ruining the moment, so I finally just took it off. “I just wanted to say,” I began, “no matter what happens when we walk in that door…” I grabbed his hand and tried not to cringe at how sticky it was from all the junk food he had eaten. “I don’t regret a single moment we’ve had together.”

  “So you really are breaking up with me, huh?” he asked.

  I nodded. Even if I had wanted to be with Jack, I didn’t think I could do the long-distance/convict thing.

  “Wow. No one’s ever broken up with me. Either I break up with them, or I just end up splitting without an explanation.”

  Suddenly, Grandma Roz came barreling toward us. “Ach! Thank God you’re here!” she bellowed, pulling Jack and I into a bear hug and smothering us between her boobs. I didn’t know what was freaking me out more: that she was hugging a criminal, or that she was wearing a fuchsia silk nightgown wi
th black lace that was so low-cut her boobs were almost falling out.

  “You have no idea what I’ve been through these last few hours. I’m surprised I haven’t dropped dead from a heart attack,” she said once she let us go.

  Just then two cops walked out, one on either side of Art, who was in handcuffs.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “That…animal,” she replied, pointing at him, “was the one who broke into the condo.”

  “No he’s not,” I blurted out. I pointed at Jack. “He’s the one who broke into the condo.”

  “Huh?” Jack said, confused.

  I reached for his wallet and opened it, yanking out the hundred-dollar bill. “See? This is the only thing he managed to get before we walked in and caught him.”

  “That’s not mine,” Grandma Roz said. “I keep all my cash underneath my mattress, and when I went to check this afternoon, all 75,562 dollars and 33 cents was there.”

  Jack looked so upset, you’d think I had accused him of murder. “That’s the hundred-dollar in-case-of-emergency bill my grandmother gave me,” he said.

  “I told you!” Michael said from the curb.

  “But…but…but the whole trip you made me pay for everything. You said you didn’t have any money!” I exclaimed.

  Jack shrugged. “Well, lunch at Denny’s doesn’t exactly qualify as an emergency.”

  Jack wasn’t a criminal—he was just cheap. I should have known.

  “It’s a good thing you broke up with me, Red,” he sighed dramatically. “’Cause I don’t think I could be with someone who would think I could ever do something as horrible as steal from a senior citizen.” He flashed Grandma Roz his trademark grin. “Especially someone as wonderful as your grandma.”

  I rolled my eyes. Not only was he cheap; he was a suck-up to boot.

  “You can’t put a man in jail without his hearing aid!” Art was screaming as the cops dragged him toward the squad car. When they got to Grandma Roz, he stopped.

  “This doesn’t mean you’re going to stop loving me now, bubelah, does it?” he asked anxiously.

  She paused and thought about it for a second. “I don’t know, Art. I’m going to have to really search my soul about that one.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. Just let me know when you decide,” he said as the police pulled him along to the car.

  After Grandma Roz changed into a more respectably grandmotherly velour tracksuit, the four of us hitched a ride in one of the cop cars to the precinct. After an hour, a detective came out of the interrogation room and filled us in. It turned out that over the last few years, not only had Art stolen thousands of dollars in bonds from Grandma Roz, but when he wasn’t shuttling her around to early bird special dinners or senior citizen–priced matinees, he was with his other lady friends—stealing from them!

  “Oy gevalt!” Grandma Roz cried. “The money I may have been able to forgive—but he had other lady friends?! What—I wasn’t enough for him?”

  “Huh. So that’s why he kept asking if I knew where he could get a fake ID,” Jack said. “And that explains why I found him online on Craigslist checking apartment listings in Buenos Aires.”

  “He was?” I asked. Jack and I had hardly spent a moment apart for days, but I hadn’t seen any of that. Here I was, upset that Jack and Michael were all about themselves and their dramas, and I was so wrapped up in my own world that I had totally missed this drama. Which was pretty juicy.

  While the detective helped Grandma Roz fill out a mountain of paperwork, Jack went to go flirt with the cleaning lady and Michael and I started up a game of Go Fish. I was winning when Jack ambled up to me.

  “Hey, Red, can I talk to you a sec?”

  “Okay,” I shrugged.

  We walked over to the corner. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think us breaking up is the right way to go.”

  Um, great. Hadn’t I already said that?

  “The truth is you deserve a lot better than me.” He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know—it must be that stray dog thing. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to settle down.”

  He looked so vulnerable just then. Some of those old feelings almost came flooding back, but I willed myself to stay strong.

  “I guess when I finally meet the perfect person, it won’t be an issue,” he went on. “When I meet her, I’ll be so happy I could be locked in a doghouse and be happy about it if she’s with me!” He hugged me. “Thanks, Red.”

  “For what?”

  “For helping me get more clear on what I want in a girl.” He gave me one of those sweet smiles that, up until that afternoon, had made my blood-sugar level shoot up. “You’re really great, you know that?”

  I had helped him decide what he didn’t want. Talk about a backhanded compliment. I unstuck my hand from his and sighed. I knew I had made the right decision.

  I debated going off and enlightening him about everything I had realized in the last few hours—about his self-obsession; about how perfect people only existed in books and movies; and that, like Luther said, relationships were work. Maybe it wasn’t super-exciting every moment, but the feeling of knowing someone so well that you could finish their sentences for them was actually pretty cool. Almost like you became psychic or something.

  Then I realized that if I had to go through the pain of learning all that firsthand, Jack should too. It’d be good for him.

  “Thanks, Jack. That’s really sweet,” I replied.

  He nodded. “Well, I think I’m gonna get going now.” He motioned to the cleaning girl who had finished up and was putting her coat on. “Lori says there’s a Denny’s not too far from here, so we’re gonna go get something to eat. I hope she’s got some cash on her.” He hugged me. “Thanks for everything, Red. It’s been really fun hanging with you.”

  I hugged him back. That soup smell had gotten stronger. “Good-bye, Jack.”

  “Hey, you didn’t happen to get that Carmen girl’s number by any chance, did you?” he asked.

  “No. Sorry,” I said.

  “Oh well. Probably better that way. I’m trying not to do the long-distance relationship thing anymore anyway. Those things can drag on forever.”

  As he walked toward Lori, he turned back around and pointed at my boots. “I’m glad I got you those, Red. Even though things didn’t work out with us, I hope you’ll still wear them. And that when you do, you’ll think of me.”

  I nodded. I would. As much as I thought I was over him, I could still feel my eyes fill up. Jack may have been a cheap, self-involved suck-up, but he did have a sensitive side.

  I headed back toward Michael, who, along with about five cops, was engrossed in an Animal Planet documentary that was blaring from the TV mounted on the wall.

  “You don’t have to stay, you know. Grandma Roz and I can get back on our own,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “It’s okay,” he said, not looking away from the TV.

  “Yeah, but it’s three o’clock in the morning.”

  He shrugged again. “It’s only midnight L.A. time.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve been sick,” I said. “Why don’t you just call a cab and go back to your grandmother’s?”

  He turned to me. “Why do you always have to ‘yeah, but’ me?” he snapped. “Police stations can be dangerous, and unlike some people, I’d never just take off and leave you surrounded by criminals.”

  I looked around. Other than a man wearing tight jeans and a hot-pink polo shirt, who was demanding that someone do a sketch of his lost Chihuahua, and a few cops (including a policewoman who I saw was reading Lulu’s book Flushed with Fantasy), there was no one else in the place. I opened my mouth to say, “Yeah, but…” and stopped myself.

  “Okay, maybe there aren’t any here at this very moment, but you never know,” he said. “A bunch of them could come in any second.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “—you’re not my boyfriend anymore,” I said s
oftly. “You don’t have to do this kind of stuff.”

  “Sophie, did you ever think maybe I want to do it?”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. I thought about it. “No.”

  “Well, maybe I do.” He turned to me. “I…I want to be here for you, okay?”

  “You do?”

  He gave one of his overly loud, overly drawn-out sighs that he saved for when he was really annoyed with me. “Yes. I do.”

  “Oh.” I said softly. I was surprised to feel the tingling in the bottom of my spine that I had felt when I saw him walking over to me the day we met at Faryl’s Bat Mitzvah.

  “Is that okay?” he asked.

  I felt my face get hot. “Sure. I guess so,” I said shyly.

  “Okay then,” he said. “But will you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  He pointed to my hat. “Do you think you can take that thing off? It’s—”

  “It’s what? Stupid? Silly-looking?” I demanded angrily. “No, Michael, I can’t take it off. It completely symbolizes my innermost self, and if you can’t accept that”—I pushed the hat up so I could actually see him—“then I guess there’s nothing to talk about.”

  “All I was going to say was that it’s hard to see your eyes when you have it on, ’cause it’s too big for you,” he replied. “And you have such great eyes, I thought you’d want people to see them.”

  My eyes narrowed. He had never said anything like that before. Had being around Jack rubbed off on him? Was he trying out some line? “What color are they?” I said suspiciously.

  “They’re green. The same shade as the Notre Dame Fighting Irish green.”

  Huh. I had no idea Michael could be so poetic.

  He lifted the hat off my head. “You know what? I know I said you weren’t a red cowboy hat kind of girl back at the Dell, but it’s sort of growing on me.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah, but it’s way too big. If you want, when we get back to L.A., I’ll go with you to that western store on Sunset Boulevard so you can get one that actually fits.”

  “You will?”