Little Miss Red Read online

  I guess I was breathing louder than I thought, because after a while Lulu looked toward the door and smiled. “Hi, honey. Come on in,” she said.

  “Oh. I don’t want to disturb you from your creative midwifing,” I sputtered, my cheeks turning red. In the interview with Lulu that had run on RomanceWriters.com last month, that’s how she had referred to her writing: “creative midwifing.” A midwife was like a very exotic form of nurse who helped you give birth.

  “You’re not. I was just e-mailing this guy I met on Soulmates.com,” she replied. “He’s a carpenter-slash-screenwriter,” she said, dreamily. “The screenwriter part I can do without, but I do love men who work with their hands.”

  “Like Dante. He works with his hands,” I said just as dreamily.

  It was hard to believe that someone as successful as Lulu had to go online to meet a guy. Probably because she was so busy writing all the time. According to Jordan, although Lulu had sworn she was only going to do online dating for a month, it was now going on six. When I mentioned it to Mom, she said that it didn’t surprise her, because a lot of her own love-addicted patients seemed to be obsessed with Internet dating as well. I don’t know why she thought Lulu was an addict. So what if she craved romance? Was that such a horrible thing? I mean, I craved romance too. Did that make me an addict as well?

  Lulu put her laptop aside and patted the chaise. “Come sit,” she ordered.

  I balanced myself on the corner and crossed my legs, trying to look as sophisticated as she did—which, in jeans and a Castle Heights sweatshirt, wasn’t easy.

  My iPhone buzzed in my pocket, and I almost fell off the chaise scrambling to pull it out. “Sorry,” I apologized, “you just—”

  “—never know if this is going to be the e-mail that changes your life,” finished Lulu. “Is it from a secret admirer professing his love?”

  I looked at the screen. “No. It’s from Old Navy, announcing an upcoming sale,” I replied, disappointed.

  “So, how are things with you and Michael?” she asked.

  “They’re…fine,” I replied.

  Her penciled-in right eyebrow shot up. “Uh oh.”

  “What?”

  “‘Fine’ is not a good word when it comes to love,” she clucked. “In fact, ‘fine’ is a four-letter word when it comes to love.”

  With brilliant lines like that, it was no wonder why Lulu was one of the greatest writers of the twenty-first century. I gave my own long, hard sigh. “I know.” It felt so good to be understood.

  “So tell Lulu the Love Doctor what’s the matter.”

  I started fiddling with the leopard-print cashmere blanket on the chaise. “I just…I don’t know…I just…” Sometimes when I was filled with chaos and confusion my entire vocabulary went out the window.

  “He doesn’t make you feel nauseous when you see him, like you’re having a panic attack and your heart is going to explode into a thousand pieces because it’s beating so hard?”

  “Exactly!” I cried. It felt so good to spill my guts. Or, rather, to have Lulu spill my guts for me.

  “And sometimes, when he’s talking to you, his voice sounds like the teacher from Charlie Brown—you know, womp-womp-womp—and instead of listening to what he’s saying, you’re thinking about whether the size-ten, feather-encrusted mules with the five-inch heels you’ve been drooling over will still be at Saks if you go back for them?”

  “Yes!” I cried. “I mean, no! I mean, yes, I’m not listening, but I’m not thinking about shoes. I’m thinking about how I’m going to divide my time studying for my midterms.”

  “Same thing,” she shrugged. She took my hand. “The fact of the matter is that your heart isn’t in it. You’re not propelled by passion the way you once were. You’re not insane with lust like you used to be.”

  Some people may have found it weird that my best friend’s mother talked to me like I was a grown-up, but I was beyond flattered. Obviously, Lulu saw the real me and knew that although I was only sixteen in real time, I was an old soul.

  “Well, because I’m only sixteen and still a virgin, I’m not sure I even know what lust feels like, but, yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not in the picture,” I replied.

  “You want something…more,” Lulu said, twirling her dyed jet-black hair around her Dark as Midnight–painted finger. Even though two of Lulu’s nails were broken, they still looked great. “Something…deeper.”

  Listening to her was like listening to this guy I once saw on an infomercial for “How to Hypnotize a Person and Get Them to Do Whatever You Want, or Your Money Back.” “Yes,” I agreed dreamily, my eyes fluttering.

  “You want to be truly, madly, deeply in love,” she said.

  I nodded, my eyes now closed as I thought about Dante and his strong arms. Lulu knew exactly how I felt!

  I heard the click of the lighter as she lit yet another cigarette. “Yeah, well, good luck. I don’t know what to tell you other than if you find a guy that you still feel like that with after the third date, lemme know.”

  My eyes snapped open so fast I’m surprised they didn’t turn inside out. “Huh?” What was the woman who had been crowned the “Queen of Romance” five years in a row talking about?

  She exhaled impatiently. “Honey, you do know that all that soul mate crap isn’t real, right?”

  “What?” I said, dazed.

  She laughed. “That’s just fairy-tale stuff. It doesn’t exist.”

  The thud I heard was my heart hitting the floor. I felt more betrayed than Devon in Deceived by Deceit. “But what about your books?” I cried. “That’s what you write about better than anyone!” I picked up a copy of Riddled by Remembrance and pointed to the back cover. “You’re the Romance Gazette’s ‘best-selling Queen of Romance’—it says so right here!”

  As she took a drag off her cigarette, a big piece of ash fell on her shirt. She shrugged. “I write what people want to read. And people like to read fairy tales. It’s not like they want to read about real life. If they wanted that, they’d just read the ‘Stars—Just Like Us!’ part of US Weekly.”

  “So you don’t really believe in love?” I whispered. How could this be? I was crushed. It was like finding out the truth about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny in one sitting.

  She stubbed out her cigarette. Instead of looking sophisticated, the lipstick marks on the end of the filter now looked disgusting. “Oh, honey, it’s not that I don’t believe in it. Of course I do, or I wouldn’t have had to go to that rehab for codependency last year.” Romeo, her ancient, half-blind black cat, made his way into the room and bumped over to her lap. She snuggled him to her chest and started petting him. The way the light was hitting her face, I could see the wrinkles through the caked-on makeup on her face. “It’s just that that kind of intensity can’t sustain itself. Maybe it’s there for a few months—or, in my case, a night—but then one morning you wake up and it’s just…gone.” Her face hardened. “And soon enough, you’re having these vicious arguments about whether to have Italian or sushi for dinner, but it’s not really about Italian or sushi—it’s about the fact that yet again, you’ve gotten into a relationship that has allowed you to re-create your childhood all over again because he’s just as emotionally unavailable and inconsistent as your alcoholic father was,” she said bitterly.

  I moved back a bit. She was starting to scare me.

  She put on the smile that she wore during bookstore signings. “But that’s, just, you know, one person’s take on it.”

  I smiled back at her and stood up. It was the same smile I gave the homeless woman who stood outside my neighborhood Starbucks babbling about the fact that she used to be someone back in the seventies when she guest-starred on a sitcom called One Day at a Time.

  “I should probably get going,” I said. “We’re having macrobiotic food tonight because it’s supposed to cure cancer, even though none of us have cancer.” I held up the book. “Thanks again for this.”

 
“Do you want me to autograph it for you?” she asked.

  “Oh. I guess so,” I replied. What was the point, though? Anything she wrote would just be another vicious lie.

  She took the book from me, walked over to her desk, got one of her custom-made pink ink markers that smelled like strawberries, and scribbled something in it.

  “Here you go, honey,” she said, handing it back to me.

  I opened it.

  Always remember that you can’t go wrong by following your heart.

  Best wishes,

  Lulu Lavoie

  Not only was it a lie, but I knew from looking at the autographed copies in bookstores that that’s what she always wrote. And the dedication? “Whose passion for romance is surpassed only by my own?” Ha! Lulu didn’t believe in love or passion. She just wrote about it so she could buy five-hundred-dollar pairs of shoes! I was seriously considering sending an anonymous e-mail to her publisher to let them know their star writer was actually a fraud.

  Lulu may not have believed in earth-shattering, world-rocking, once-in-a-lifetime true love, but I, Sophie Rebecca Greene, did. It existed. I knew it.

  And I was going to follow my heart and find it.

  three

  After my conversation with Lulu, I sent Michael a “we need to talk” text. There was no way I could spend a week with him, living a lie, now that I was committed to proving Lulu wrong and finding true love. Everyone on the planet knew that next to “You blew your SATs,” “We need to talk” were the four scariest words you could ever hear. Everyone but Michael, that is, because he didn’t even bother to respond—which, once Ali came up with her brilliant idea, turned out to be not such a bad thing.

  “You should do an Operation Remotivation,” Ali panted as Jules, our Pilates teacher, barked orders into her headset microphone for us to squeeze our glutes. This year Castle Heights had started offering Pilates and yoga classes as part of gym class. I thought Pilates would be a piece of cake, which would be good for me since I wasn’t a big fan of exercise, but it turned out to be harder than running the six-hundred-yard dash. The only good part about it was that Juliet DeStefano was in the class, so I got to spend the hour watching her to see if I could pick up any clues about the mysterious past that she was hiding. The way she pulled her hair into a ponytail made me think it wasn’t a wig, but what was she whispering in Phan’s ear? Was she telling her that the guilt had become too much and she needed to confess that she had accidentally murdered some guy in self-defense when he had been overcome by her beauty and tried to take things too far? Phan’s English wasn’t very good, so Juliet would’ve known her secret was safe with her.

  “Higher, people! Higher!” screamed Jules into her headset. “The toddlers in the Mommy and Me Pilates class I teach have more stamina than you wimps!”

  “What’s Operation Remotivation?” I panted back. Hopefully, all this exercise would make me look great for the Miss April photo shoot.

  “Okay, people—take five,” Jules barked. “Little Andrea over here is having another asthma attack.”

  A class-wide sigh could be heard as we plopped down on our backs.

  “When Rachel starts getting on my mother’s nerves and it gets to the point where the way she chews her food makes Mom feel like she’s going to go postal on her,” Ali said, “she has this whole ritual she does to get remotivated about the relationship.”

  Rachel was Ali’s mom’s girlfriend. Apparently, it didn’t matter if you were straight or gay—every relationship seemed doomed. “Yeah, my mom does the same thing,” I said. “Except she calls it ‘withdrawing projections and loving the person for who they are, rather than who you want them to be.’”

  Ali wrinkled her nose. “Huh?”

  I shrugged. “It’s shrink talk,” I replied. I stood up as nonchalantly as possible and arranged myself into a half-yoga, half-Twister-like move.

  “What are you doing?” asked Ali.

  “Trying to check out what Juliet’s doing,” I whispered.

  Ali squinted. “She’s just sitting there biting her cuticles.”

  “It may look like that’s what she’s doing,” I said, “but I bet what she’s really doing is deciding whether to turn herself in.”

  “Turn herself in for what?” Ali asked, confused.

  “Forget it,” I said. “So back to Operation Remotivation. What exactly does your mom do?”

  “Well, first she makes a list of all the good things about Rachel—you know, about how she’s smart, funny, pretty, a good listener, not a psychopath like Lisa, her last girlfriend. And then she plans a special evening—takes off her baseball cap and blow-dries her hair, wears a dress instead of yoga pants, lets Rachel win at Scrabble.”

  I could do that. Although it would be Wii bowling instead of Scrabble. And if I let Michael win, I’d never hear the end of it.

  “She says there’s this prayer she learned in yoga called the St. Francis prayer: ‘It’s better to love, than be loved, give than receive.’” Ali went on. “It’s like that Buddhism stuff about getting rid of your ego and helping other people.”

  “I guess it can’t hurt,” I agreed. At this point anything was worth a try. Although it was hard to remember, once upon a time, Michael and I had had that same deep connection that Devon and Dante did. I’d hate to find out from a psychic years from now that Michael was my eternal soul mate and I wasted an entire lifetime not being with him.

  That night, after watching the Top 100 Craziest Femme Fatales special that I had TiVo’d on SOAPnet (I’m sorry, but Sydney from Melrose Place so deserved to be in the top five rather than number thirteen), I made a list.

  I wrote Michael Rosenberg: Pros at the top of my notebook paper.

  1. Funny (but thinks he’s funnier than he actually is)

  2. Good kisser (but have not kissed anyone else other than Toby Braverman a.k.a. Camp Guy when I was twelve, and that was only for three seconds, so not sure if he’s actually good or if it’s just because I don’t have any other reference)

  3. Excellent taste in clothes (even though he doesn’t think I should wear dramatic accessories such as red cowboy hats or fake Chanel sunglasses because they’re quote-unquote not me)

  4. Jeremy loves him

  Then I wrote Michael Rosenberg: Cons on the next page.

  1. Love, but not in love with him

  2. Interrupts a lot

  3. Love, but not in love with him

  4. Calls, but then doesn’t have anything to say and doesn’t pay attention

  5. Talks like he’s a rapper

  6. Love, but not in love with him

  7. Won’t share his fries because he says he has issues with people’s hands near his food. But he doesn’t have a problem taking any of my fries

  8. Love, but not in love with him

  9. Says “I told you so” a lot

  10. Love, but not in love with him

  I could have kept going, but I figured that was enough. I sure was glad there was a second half to Operation Remotivation. Otherwise, I would have had to break up with Michael immediately.

  I picked up my cell and pushed his name on speed dial.

  “Yo, what up? It’s not nine yet,” he said when he answered.

  “I know. I just…missed you so much, I couldn’t stop myself from picking up the phone and calling you.” Okay, so it was kind of a lie, but it felt like a remotivating thing to say.

  “Oh. Well, thanks. So, what’s up?” was his reply.

  I cringed as he did #5 on the “Cons” list. “Nothing. How are you?”

  The only response was the blare of the TV in the background.

  “Michael?”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, how are you?”

  “Fine.”

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I made a mental note to add “doesn’t like to chitchat” to my list.

  “Oh, and in addition to missing you, I wanted to see if you wanted to come over tomorrow night,” I said.

&n
bsp; “For what?”

  “To hang out.”

  “With you and Jeremy?”

  “No. Just with me,” I replied. “Tomorrow night is the Asperger’s support group.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay. I guess so.”

  He sounded as if he was about to get a cavity filled.

  “You don’t want to hang out alone with me?”

  There was a pause. “Of course I do.”

  Dante once told Devon that being apart from her was as painful as when he had an impacted wisdom tooth. Was it too much to ask for a boyfriend who felt that way about me? I made another mental note to add “no interest in making out when parents aren’t home” to the list.

  I decided to go all out. “I was thinking I’d get us some sushi,” I said. Even if I had to go behind my mother’s back and use a month’s worth of allowance.

  “Sushi?” he perked up. “From Nozawa?”

  I sighed. If only Michael got as excited about me as he did about an inside-out yellowtail roll, we wouldn’t be in this situation. “Uh huh,” I said.

  “Okay,” he replied.

  “Good. Want to say six thirty?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

  “Okay. Bye,” he said as he hung up.

  My heart sank. I thought back to the night a few years before when we stayed on the phone so long we both fell asleep mid-conversation and woke up to find our batteries had died. Why couldn’t it be like that again? Grandma Roz was always saying, “The only constant is change,” but why couldn’t just the bad things change and get good? Why did the good things have to change too?

  I picked up Propelled by Passion and started tracing Dante’s biceps. “Oh, Dante,” I sighed. “Why can’t you be real and ten years younger and not a male model?”

  Jeremy hated the Asperger’s support group meetings (“How would you like to spend two hours surrounded by people who won’t look you in the eye and who spout random facts about things you don’t care about?” he’d say to me every time I tried to get him excited about it), which is why Mom and Dad always tried to bribe him by taking him to the Olive Garden for dinner first. As soon as they left the house at five o’clock, I went up to my parents’ bathroom and started a bath. I had a bathtub in my bathroom, but I figured it would help get me in the right mood if I took a bubble bath in the big sunken tub. Because it was a special occasion, I decided to use some of Mom’s expensive bath oil.