Little Miss Red Read online

  There’s no way Michael’s going to be able to resist me now, I thought as I slid into the tub. Especially because the oil was called Irresistible. Just to make sure, I used three quarters of the bottle. That probably explained why, as I reached for a washcloth, my butt slid on the bottom of the tub and my head ended up underwater.

  “Whoops,” I sputtered when I was upright again.

  “What’d you do—wash your hair with vegetable oil?” Jordan asked when she and Ali showed up with the sushi and I emptied out my “Savings Fund for Unnecessary, yet Wildly Dramatic Accessories” that I kept in a shoebox in my closet.

  “Is it that bad?” I asked, running my hand through it. I didn’t have to work hard; my hand just slid right through.

  “Um—” Ali said.

  “—kind of,” Jordan finished.

  Ali sniffed. “How much perfume did you put on?”

  “Just a few sprays,” I said. I held my wrist out to Jordan. “Do you like it? It’s my mom’s. It’s called Eau de Desire.”

  “Well, on its own I bet it wouldn’t be that bad, but mixed with the bath stuff, it kind of gives off a Lysol smell,” Jordan said.

  “Um, you guys? You’re really not helping here,” I said. “This is Operation Remotivation—not Operation Make-Me-Want-to-Stick-My-Head-in-an-Oven-Before-He-Gets-Here.”

  “You know why Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven?” Jordan asked. “Because she knew that no matter what, her stupid poet husband was always going to be seen as the talented one. Because that’s the kind of evil, patriarchal society we live in!”

  Ali and I ignored her and started cleaning up the family room. The good thing about Jeremy having Asperger’s was that he was a neat freak, so, really, all we had to do was straighten the piles of Psychology Todays (Mom’s), Golf Digests (Dad’s), and TV Guides (Jeremy’s).

  “What is that?” I asked as Ali took a bottle out of her knapsack and started spritzing it around the room.

  “It’s an essential oil thing called Nights of Passion. You spray it, and it’s supposed to,” she looked at the label and read, “‘magnetize your beloved to you.’ I stole it from my mom’s night table drawer.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “It smells like the locker room at school.”

  Ali shrugged. “You only get one chance at Operation Remotivation.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “Keep spritzing.”

  It was already six fifteen by the time we had finished straightening and spritzing and putting some baby powder in my hair in hopes of soaking up some of the oil (a trick Jordan had read in Allure back before she had become a Young Feminist). After Jordan and Ali left, I brought my iPod down and cued up my “Best Romantic Songs Ever” playlist. I usually only played it when I was reading Lulu’s books, but tonight I needed all the help I could get.

  At six thirty the doorbell rang. That was another thing about Michael—he was always on time. I used to love that about him because I felt like it meant he didn’t want to miss a single moment with me, but now it really took away the mystery. For instance, in Leveled by Longing, it drove Devon insane with passion when the Brazilian samba dancer would say he’d call her right back and then she wouldn’t hear from him for weeks.

  “Yo, what up?” Michael asked when I opened the door.

  I tried not to cringe. Would I fall back in love with him if he talked normally? And didn’t he realize a HIP-HOP HEEB T-shirt was so not sexy?

  “What happened to your hair?” he asked.

  “I got a little bath oil in it,” I replied.

  As he walked in, he started sneezing. “Are you wearing perfume?”

  I nodded. “A little.”

  “Why? You never wear perfume.”

  I shrugged. “It’s a special occasion.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  Obviously, I couldn’t tell him that the special occasion was Operation Remotivation. “Never mind.”

  I started toward him to give him a kiss, but before I could do it, he walked into the family room and plopped down on the couch with the remote.

  I moved in front of the screen. “So what do you think of the dress?” I asked, modeling it.

  He kept clicking the remote. “I like it,” he said, barely looking at me. “Remember, I helped you pick it out?”

  When he stopped clicking, I turned around to see what he was watching. A girl with blonde cornrows was shaking her butt in a music video.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s okay, I guess.” But from the way he kept leaning to the right to see the screen, it was clear he thought she was more than okay. Was that the problem? Did he want a hoochie mama instead of a nice Jewish girl like me? Finally, he tore his eyes away from the TV. “Did you get the sushi?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can we eat it in here? Best Rap Videos of the Last Decade is on at seven.”

  “I was thinking we could eat in the dining room,” I replied. “I have a surprise for you.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”

  “I guess,” he said, standing up. “So can we eat now? I’m starved.”

  “Yeah. But wait a second.” I reached into my pocket and took out a tie that I had borrowed from my dad’s closet. “First, you have to put this on.”

  “You want me to wear a tie to eat sushi?”

  “No. You have to wear it as a blindfold¸” I said, as I put it around his eyes.

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  I took his arm and started leading him to the dining room. “Crazy about you,” I replied, which is what Dante always said to Devon.

  He stopped and lifted the tie off of his left eye to look at me. “What has gotten into you?”

  I ignored him and kept leading (more like yanking) him to the dining room. When we arrived, I removed the tie. “So what do you think?” I said excitedly.

  I had taken every candle I could find in the house and put them on the table. Because there were about twenty of them, lighting them had been a huge pain in the butt—especially since I had singed the tips of my hair a few times in the process. The way I had taken all the pieces of sushi and edamame and put them in the shape of little hearts gave it a superromantic effect. I would have liked to be able to take credit for the idea, but the truth was Dante had done the same thing for Devon, except instead of sushi, he had used Hot Tamales.

  “It looks cool,” he replied. “But you don’t think any of the wax dripped on the sushi, do you?”

  That was it. It was too much. I tried to hold it together, but like Devon, I had a passionate nature that made it difficult to hide my emotions at times—especially when I was PMSing, which I was. As I sat there watching Michael inspect a piece of spicy tuna for candle wax, I burst into tears.

  He looked up from the sushi, confused. “What’s the matter?”

  Operation Remotivation was a bust. It wasn’t working. It was never going to work. At least not with Michael. I realized that the moment to have The Talk had arrived. To tell Michael that as much as I loved him, I wasn’t in love with him, and because of that, we should probably go our separate ways—which is what Devon had told the hippie rain forest activist she had met in Costa Rica in Riddled by Remembrance.

  But I just…couldn’t. Literally. Because when I opened my mouth to tell him, I choked on the mint I had been sucking on to make sure I had minty-fresh breath when we kissed. When I could breathe again, I started crying again.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked, puzzled.

  “I’m not,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I mean, I was, a second ago, but now I’m not. Now I’m just sniffling. I think I’m just PMSing.”

  He put down the sushi and walked over and gave me a hug. Michael’s kisses no longer set my loins aflame with passion, as Devon would say, but he did give awesome hugs. He used just the right amount of pressure. “I’m sorry,” he said as he squeezed me. />
  How was I going to give that up? I started to cry again.

  “What’s the matter now?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I’m fine,” I said, willing myself to buck up.

  After a few more squeezes, he let go of me. “You sure you’re okay?”

  I nodded as I swiped at my eyes some more.

  “Good. Do you want to go fix your makeup?”

  “Why?” I sniffled.

  “I don’t know. Because you look a little bit like a raccoon?” he suggested.

  I could tell he was trying to be helpful, but it didn’t stop me from bursting into tears again.

  “You don’t have to,” he said, patting me again. “I just thought, you know, you might want to, before we eat. Not because it would gross me out or anything while I was eating, but because, you know, you have such pretty eyes.”

  I started crying harder. This was why I was so confused. What was I supposed to do when he went and said something so romantic?

  “I’ll be right back,” I sniffled as I walked toward the bathroom.

  After I splashed some cold water on my face and ruined one of my mom’s good guest towels with mascara streaks, I stared at myself in the mirror. “Why are you throwing away something so rare and precious?” I said to my greasy-haired, puffy-eyed reflection in the mirror. “Michael loves you. Maybe he only said it once, on your fifteenth birthday, because you refused to let him have that second piece of cake unless he did, but that’s just because, like a lot of guys, he has trouble talking about his feelings.” I blew my nose. “Millions of girls would kill to have someone like him,” I said. Okay, maybe not millions of girls—maybe just Annie Bellamy, who went to Buckley, his high school, with him and always freaked me out when I saw her because last year she had gotten into Wicca and I was afraid she was going to put a spell on me.

  When I walked back to the dining room, I found that Michael had blown out the candles and moved the sushi to the family room, where he was watching Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew on VH1.

  “Is this cool?” he asked with his mouth full of yellowtail.

  “Sure,” I sighed, plopping down next to him and plucking a piece of freshwater eel off the plate.

  We spent the rest of the evening like we usually did—stuffing our faces while Michael channel surfed.

  Operation Remotivation was a bust, but the second red velvet cupcake that I let myself have for dessert helped soften the blow a little bit.

  four

  Friday was the first of April, a.k.a. Horoscope Day. I can’t stand being late, so Thursday night I had to set my alarm for fifteen minutes earlier than usual so that when I woke up I could log on to HoroscopeAddicts.com and still make it out the door at exactly 7:16 a.m. That would get me to school anywhere between seven and nine minutes before the first bell rang. There were a lot of great astrology columns on there—Alistair Allbright’s “Destiny Awaits You” and Natasha Romanoff’s “The View from Venus,” for instance—but my favorite was one called “The Stars Never Lie” by a little old Irish woman named Wanda McManus. From the picture on her site, Wanda looked to be about seventy-five, and the “About Wanda” page said that she was descended from a long line of astrologers and psychics and had a bit of faerie in her from her mother’s side as well.

  The reason I liked Wanda so much was because, like me and Devon, she was a true romantic. Instead of focusing on money and career stuff, her horoscopes talked only about love and soul mates and the best days of the month for falling in love and meeting your soul mate. For $24.95, she also did personalized compatibility charts. Last year I had used some of my birthday money to get mine and Michael’s done. It had said that we were indeed soul mates, but that “fate would first deal us a myriad of twists and turns and trials and tribulations that would need to be conquered before we could live in eternal bliss.” That seemed fair enough. Except that I then used the rest of my birthday money to get my compatibility chart with Dante done. (I’m not crazy—I mean, I know he’s not a real person or anything like that—but Lulu had once written that his birthday was December 5th and I wanted to see how we would have matched up had he actually existed.) It ended up saying the same exact thing, except that instead of “twists and turns and trials and tribulations” it said “trials and tribulations and twists and turns.”

  I had also noticed that the seventh and the seventeenth seemed to always be listed as the “Best Days for Love This Month,” and the month of April was no different. The seventh was the day that Michael and I were flying to Florida, so I’m not sure how romantic that could be, but it also said that the seventh was a new moon solar eclipse, which I knew from my horoscope research was a very dramatic thing as it only happened a few times a year.

  What Wanda didn’t put in April’s monthly column was, “On the fifth, your entire world as you know it will start to come crashing down.”

  The day started with Michael’s mom calling to say that the bugbite he complained about before going to sleep the night before had turned into full-blown chicken pox. Obviously, he wasn’t going to Florida.

  “So I guess this means I’ll have to cancel the trip, right?” I asked hopefully after Mom hung up with her.

  “Of course not,” she said, as she started to wipe the counter, pour some pomegranate juice for Jeremy, and cut up some cantaloupe for me (Mom: Lots of vitamin A to help with poor eyesight. Me: But I have 20/20 vision. Mom: Exactly—because you eat your cantaloupe!). “Why would you have to cancel?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Because I can’t carry both candelabras by myself?”

  “Well, Daddy will just have to wrap them up and pack them in a box with peanuts, and you’ll check it,” she replied. She put her hands on her hips. “You’re going. You don’t know how much more quality time you have to spend with your grandmother.”

  “But you’re always saying she’s in perfect health!” I cried.

  “She is, but you never know. Plus, we decided last night to send Jeremy to your cousin’s for the week, which means it’ll be the first time your father and I will be alone in years—and I am not giving that up.”

  Little did I know that forty-eight hours later I’d be very grateful to get out of town—even if it was to an old people’s village in Florida.

  That night, as I was figuring out what to pack, Michael called.

  “We need to talk,” he said. He must have been really sick, because the TV was off.

  I put down my bathing suit. Wait a minute. “We need to talk” was my line! “About what?” I asked. I could feel the color drain from my face.

  “About us,” Michael replied. “But I think we should do this in person. Can you come over?”

  In person?! It was getting worse.

  “But you have chicken pox.”

  “Yeah, I know. I was thinking you could stand outside my door or something.”

  “Michael, I am not driving over to your house and standing outside your door,” I huffed. “If you have something to say to me, say it right now.”

  “Forget it then,” he replied.

  That was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. How could a person just forget a “we need to talk” situation?

  “You want to what?!” I yelped twenty minutes later as I sat outside Michael’s bedroom door.

  “I want to push the pause button on our relationship,” came his muffled response from the other side.

  “You’re breaking up with me?” I cried. How could this be happening when I was the one who had spent the last few weeks tortured with tumult about breaking up with him?

  “No,” he said. “I told you—I just want to push the pause button.”

  “Michael, I’m not a…DVD player!” I cried. “You can’t just turn a person on and off like that!”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to turn it off and push eject,” he said calmly. “I just want to push the pause button. Look, Sophie, you’re awesome, but three years with someone at our age is a long time. Percentagewise, it’s—can you do
the math on your calculator?”

  I took out my iPhone. “Eighteen point seventy-five percent of our lives.” Wow, that was a lot. Had I just wasted my life with the wrong person? I’d be seventeen next January—it wasn’t like I was a kid anymore.

  “I just want to, I don’t know, see what else is out there. You know, try another station at the buffet. Being so sick has made me think about a lot of things,” he said.

  “You have chicken pox, Michael,” I replied. “Not cancer.”

  “My fever was all the way up to one oh two point seven at one point!” he said defensively.

  I stood up. It was depressing enough that I now had to spend an entire week alone with my grandmother, choking on the fumes of Bengay mixed with stewed prunes. I didn’t need to sit on the floor while my on-pause boyfriend told me he wanted to see if anything better was out there.

  “Good-bye, Michael,” I said to the door. “I hope…I hope you spend the week really, really itchy!” I huffed before stomping down the stairs and out to the car.

  As I stopped short at a yellow light (I had seen enough videos in Drivers Ed to know you were just setting yourself up for major tragedy by going through one), I realized that maybe Michael semi–breaking up with me was just the “manicured hands of fate,” as Lulu called them, in action. Once they announced the calendar winners the next morning and I became Miss April, my life was going to take off so fast that even if I had still been in love with him, our love probably wouldn’t have been able to survive.

  It always took Mrs. Anton, our principal, a long time to get through the morning announcements because of her stutter, but the next morning it seemed to take extra long.

  “And now,” she finally said, “French club president Michelle Goldman has some important news about the first annual French club calendar that will be available for purchase next fall.”