Little Miss Red Read online

  I flinched as Kathy pushed down the cuticles on my short nails. “I just don’t know if that’s enough anymore, though,” I said. “I want passion. Not someone to go shopping with or play Go Fish with me and my little brother.”

  “What color you want?” asked Kathy when she was done massaging my hands with hand cream.

  I pointed at the bottle of Dark as Midnight that I had picked out. Dark as Midnight was so…dark. And sultry. And sophisticated. Devon kept a bottle of it in every one of her designer handbags.

  Kathy shook her head like she had water in her ears. “I tell you every time—make your stubby fingers look even shorter!” she brayed.

  “But—” My iPhone buzzed.

  “Watch out!” Kathy barked as I knocked over a bottle of remover while grabbing for the phone.

  “Sorry,” I replied, clicking into the text. Yo what up? Can’t come for dinner—SAT prep class. M. it said. Although he was a white boy from Encino, Michael was very into rap. Which is why every conversation with him had lots of “Yo’s” and “Check it’s.” I sighed. I had been hoping that maybe if we spent more quality time together it would reignite our passion, but apparently that wasn’t going to happen tonight.

  “Plus, the dark colors look horrible when they chip,” Jordan added. Her nails were being painted clear, which was the only color the Young Feminists were allowed to wear. “My mom has to get hers done like every other day for that very reason.”

  Kathy picked up a bottle of boring pale pink. “We do Cotton Candy, like always,” she announced. “You just not Dark as Midnight kind of girl!”

  I had learned long ago it was useless to try and fight with Kathy about nail color. Rumor had it that pre-Friends, she was always talking Jennifer Aniston out of Dark as Midnight as well.

  “Fine,” I agreed half-heartedly. But as soon as I moved to the side of the lawn with the birds-of-paradise it was going to be Dark as Midnight on my fingers and toes.

  “I think you should wait until after Mexico to make your decision about Michael,” said Jordan.

  “Good idea,” I agreed. I was going to Puerto Vallarta for Spring Break with Jordan and her mom to spend the week at the cliffside villa Lulu had bought after selling the movie rights to her second book, Ravished by Regret, the one where Devon falls in love with the Italian count who was also a billionaire dot-com guy who had come up with an Italian knockoff of Facebook. It would be the perfect place to search my soul and decide whether the fact that I’d rather do my trig homework rather than make out with my boyfriend was a passing thing, or if we really weren’t meant to be.

  Unfortunately, as Grandma Roz also liked to say, “You make your plans and God laughs.”

  Like when the person who owns the vacation house cancels the trip after finding out she has to do a major rewrite of her latest book because her editor has accused her of plagiarizing herself.

  “So Daddy and I have a surprise for you,” cooed Mom at dinner a few nights later, as she plunked a piece of liver down on my plate that night. (A typical conversation with my mother: Mom: It’s for your anemia. Me: But I’m not anemic. Mom: Exactly—because you eat your liver!)

  Mom only cooed like this when she was trying to get Jeremy to turn off the TV or when she was about to tell me something I wasn’t going to like.

  “What is it?” I said warily, shading my eyes from the glare that was coming off the freshly painted yellow walls of our kitchen. Mom had recently redecorated our entire house to make it more “serenity-friendly.” Because it was like every other Spanish-style house in Studio City, wood and darker colors worked best, but that hadn’t stopped her from choosing so-called happy colors like yellow, lavender, and peach. I felt like I was living in a tub of rainbow sherbet. When I grew up, I was going to paint my entire New York City penthouse apartment red, just like Devon did. All the magazines said that red was the most passionate color.

  After plunking down a piece of liver on Jeremy’s plate (which he immediately pushed away before going back to making ruler-straight rows of peas), she sat down and took my hand in her own Cotton Candy–painted one. Even though I had seen the video of Mom holding me in the hospital right after I was born, I still sometimes wondered if it had been a switched-at-birth situation. My parents were great, but as an accountant (Dad) and a shrink (Mom) they were both so…normal. I knew at my very core that I was supposed to have a page-turner kind of life, so wouldn’t it make more sense for me to come from a family full of CIA agents or something?

  “I talked to Grandma Roz this morning,” Mom started to say, pushing her auburn hair off her face. (Mine was the same shade, so I guess there was no denying we were related.)

  The back of my neck started to itch. Just hearing Grandma Roz’s name made me nervous. Unlike other grandmothers who were sweet and cuddly and who did things like tell you how brilliant you are and sneak you five-dollar bills, Grandma Roz was like the poster person for cranky old people.

  “Did she call with a new burial outfit update?” I asked. At seventy-five, Grandma Roz was still in perfect health, but that hadn’t stopped her from spending every day for the last fifteen years talking about who was going to get what when she died.

  Mom let go of my hand and reached over to Jeremy to try and get him to eat some of his liver, but he was having none of it, which made sense for a kid with an IQ of 165. Unlike me and Mom, Jeremy took after my dad—darker hair and a big nose.

  “No. She called to say she wants the silver candelabras back,” Mom said.

  The candelabras were the only thing of value that my great-great-grandparents had been able to take with them when they left Poland. Legend had it that getting them to America involved a train, a ship, and a mule. They had been passed down from generation to generation as a wedding gift and now lived in our dining room, where Jeremy liked to compulsively polish them (which, Dad said, was one of the few pluses of Asperger’s).

  “Why does she want them back?” I asked.

  “She says that because she has so little in her life that makes her happy, having them around as she gets ready to die might make her feel better.”

  Dad looked up from his liver, which, he too wasn’t eating. “And you wonder why I’m a glass-half-empty type of person,” he grumbled to Mom.

  She turned to him. “Larry, please don’t take out your resentment toward your mother in front of the kids. You know how children mirror what they see, and I don’t want them to be talking about us like this down the road.” She turned back to me and took my hand again. “Anyway, I told Grandma I’d ship them to her—I told her I’d even send them FedEx, even though they’re so heavy it would cost me more than your Bat Mitzvah did—but she says that the worry during transit time would kill her. So when I mentioned that your Spring Break plans had gotten cancelled—”

  I pulled my now-clammy hand out of hers. “You’re going to make me spend Spring Break in the Garden of Eden?!” I squawked. It may have sounded fancy, but the Garden of Eden—located in hot and humid Delray Beach—was probably the least luxurious retirement community in all of Florida. Unfortunately, even though Grandma Roz was superrich because her father was the founder of TeePeeMatic, the company that invented the little tube that holds toilet paper rolls in the holder, she worried about money all the time.

  Mom nodded and gave me The Smile, the one where the corners of her mouth reached up so high they almost hit her eyes. It was the smile she used when she was trying to talk me into something I really didn’t want to do. Like visiting my grandmother. “Aren’t you excited?” she cooed. “You’re going to have so much fun!”

  I could tell from the way she squeezed my hand to the point where I started to lose feeling that there would be no discussion. Instead of hanging out at home and going to the movies during my vacation, I’d be surrounded by bottles of aspirin and Tums.

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

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

  “I tal
ked 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.

  two

  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-fo
ur 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.