Little Miss Red (24 page)
Authors: Robin Palmer
“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 softly. “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?”
He nodded. “Sure.” He pointed at my feet. “Oh, and I’m digging the boots. I never would have thought they’d work, but they’re very you.”
“Thanks,” I said with a smile. I stood up. I had an idea. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I walked over to the policewoman. “Excuse me—would you like this?” I asked, holding the hat out to her.
She looked up and gasped. “Oh my. That hat—it’s just like—”
I pointed at the book. “—the one Devon’s wearing in the book. Minus the feathers.” I shoved it toward her. “Try it on.”
She took it from me and placed it on her rather large head.
“It fits perfectly. You sure you don’t want it anymore?” she asked. She reached up and squeezed it. “This is grade-A felt.”
“I know, but it’s time for me to find one that’s a better fit,” I replied, turning to make my way back to Michael.
The first thing I did when I got back to L.A. was take all my Devon books, box them up, and put them in the garage. I’d already read them all, and after everything I had been through, it didn’t feel like I needed them anymore. As I set the box down, I was tempted to start reading some of the other books Mom had stored out there—especially one called
Hollywood Wives
by Jackie Collins, because when I flipped through, it seemed to have
a lot
of really juicy scenes. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I should be living my life for a while, rather than reading about someone else’s. In fact, instead of “WWDDD?” I decided to make my new motto “WWSGD?”—
What would Sophie Greene do?
Sure, it might take a little longer to come up with an answer, since there was a big difference between what a sixteen-year-old girl would do and what a thirtysomething, jet-setting, fling-having, jewelry-designing woman would do, but I knew it would be worth the effort.
And when it came to Michael Rosenberg, it turned out that what Sophie Greene would do was give him another chance. It wasn’t like Florida had turned him into a brand-new person—he still paid more attention to the TV than to me when we were on the phone—but he
was
more affectionate. He even came up with a nickname for me, Motorcycle Mama, because of the boots that I continued to wear all the time (after Mom took one look at them and sent them to the shoemaker to have them disinfected).
But when, a few weeks later, word spread through the cafeteria that Juliet DeStefano was moving again (the rumors covered everything from pregnancy to getting offered a job as Angelina Jolie’s stand-in—but because we were now friends, I knew it was because her dad was being transferred) and Michelle Goldman told me that they had to rework the calendar and that Miss April was mine if I wanted it, I knew that Devon and I would both say the same thing—yes.
By then, I was officially off drama for forty-five days (no Devon, no SOAPnet—cold turkey), so I was crystal clear that drama was overrated. And I knew that being Miss April wasn’t going to drastically change my life or anything. But still, you never knew—it might change it a
teensy
bit. Like by, say, pushing me over the edge with the admissions committees who reviewed my college applications.
When the day of the photo shoot came, I decided to still wear the milkmaid dress, but I ditched the cute little cardigan and added my new red cowboy hat—the one
that Michael and I picked out, which actually fit—and my motorcycle boots.
When Michael saw the pictures, he said I looked phat. Which, according to UrbanDictionary.com means “pretty hot and tempting.”
And that’s exactly what the Nigerian prince-slash-cabdriver called Devon in
Infatuated by Intrigue
.
It was the Thursday after Memorial Day and the entire day had been a walking nightmare: snickers, whispers, conversations that ground to a halt whenever I entered the room. The kind of stuff that really pumps up a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl’s self-esteem. As you can imagine, with the name Cindy Ella Gold, I was used to a fair amount of teasing, but nothing like what I experienced that day.
There I was thinking I was being of service to my fellow nonpopular/nonpromgoing classmates by being the official “We’re Not Going to Take It” poster girl, but instead of gratitude and respect, all I got were dirty looks and a schoolwide silent treatment. Even the weirdest kids in school—like Eliza Nesbit, who wore reindeer sweaters all winter, and Maury Scheinberg, who spoke in video-game-speak instead of English—wouldn’t look me in the eye. Within the course of a few hours, I had gone from being just another average kid to the most untouchable Untouchable of Castle Heights High.
“Why’d
this
have to be the letter they finally printed?” I moaned to my two BFFs, India and Malcolm, as we sat under our bougainvillea tree that day eating our lunches. The smell of clove cigarettes wafted over from a group of girls dressed in black who were taking turns reading their Sylvia Plath–lite journal entries aloud. “Why couldn’t they have printed the one about how the cafeteria should be demolished so no one has to go through the awful experience of figuring out where to sit?”
“You don’t think you’ll have to be homeschooled now, do you?” asked Malcolm.
I ignored him. He could be such a drama queen at times. “I mean, I knew what I wrote would piss the popular kids off,” I said as I took a bite of my sandwich and watched a big glop of tuna fall onto my brand-new
CULTURAL ICON IN TRAINING
T-shirt. “But I honestly thought everyone else would be thrilled that someone was finally taking a stand about how the prom is just one more attempt by the establishment to keep us down.”
“What are you talking about?” Malcolm stopped his lunchtime ritual of inspecting his khakis for the tiniest speck of dirt and looked up, sighing as his eyes zeroed in on my latest attempt to accessorize with tuna.
“You know, how the prom separates the haves from the have-nots; the popular from the unpopular—” I stopped, as Malcolm started frantically rubbing at the blossoming stain on my nonexistent boobs.
“Those who take deep full breaths from their core instead of quick shallow ones,” finished India, whose parents owned a chain of yoga studios in town called Blissed Out. “Cin, you spoke the truth—but unfortunately it’s one of those dirty little truths that people don’t like to think about. They’d rather remain ignorant than search within for answers.” She stood up and stretched before settling into a down-dog pose. “A tree doesn’t grow branches with water alone, right?” she said. With her long blond hair covering her face, she looked like a supergorgeous version of Cousin It from
The Addams Family.
Malcolm and I looked at each other, baffled. “Huh?” we said. Even though I’ve known India for years, and even worked part-time at one of the studios on Sundays, and was therefore used to hearing this kind of Zen mumbo jumbo on a regular basis, it still tended to go over my head.
“Never mind.” India sighed from behind her hair.
“Look, what it comes down to is that no one who’s unpopular wants to be reminded of that,” said Malcolm. “They want to believe that if they just hold on long enough, they, too, can pull a Farmer Ted.” Farmer Ted was the character that Anthony Michael Hall played in
Sixteen Candles
who went from geekness to greatness in ninety-one minutes. Malcolm processed everything in life by comparing it to eighties movies. Ms. Highland, our guidance counselor, was convinced it was some sort of personality disorder.
India rejoined us on the ground. “Hey, Wally, I’m so
with you in spirit!” she yelled out to Wally Twersky, Castle Heights’s resident tree hugger, as he strummed “We Shall Overcome” on his guitar for the tenth straight lunch period as part of his protest against the fact that the school had uprooted endangered trees from across the country and replanted them here in an attempt to spruce up the campus grounds. She patted me on the knee. “I’m sure it’ll all blow over by Monday,” said India. “Especially after Danny Miller’s party this weekend. And
especially
since Jessica Rokosny just got out of rehab.”
Malcolm let out a relieved sigh and started inspecting his loafers for scuffs. “Brilliant. With Jessica back, you’ll definitely be in the clear.” Not only was Jessica a self-taught “pharmacist,” she was also the senior-class slut, so the chances of her doing something outrageous to take the focus off of me were pretty good.
“I guess,” I said glumly.
“Hey, no matter what happens—you know, if you do end up having to leave school because the teasing gets so bad or what not—you’ll always have us,” he promised.
Malcolm was right. I
did
have them, and for that I was very grateful. I had met India on the first day of fifth grade when I moved to L.A. from New Jersey, and Malcolm, on our first day at Castle Heights. Malcolm lives in South-Central L.A., so he has to take three buses every day just so he can go to our school, which is supposed to be one of the best in the city, although I have no idea who exactly
decides those things. So that they wouldn’t be accused of being too elitist, Castle Heights gave out scholarships to underprivileged youth and Malcolm was one of them, even though you’d never be able to tell by looking at his wardrobe and iPod library. But I don’t feel sorry for him, because while he may be one of my best friends, he can also be a total diva. He puts La Lohan to shame at times. However, I tend to cut him some slack when he starts to have a meltdown. Finding yourself in a predominantly white private high school after growing up in the ’hood is enough to cause anyone some angst.
The three of us made up what we called the Outsiders’ Insider Club. Malcolm’s black and gay, so it’s pretty obvious why he’s an outsider. And India—well, even though we live in L.A., where there’s a lot of boho-lite going on, people aren’t all that tolerant when it comes to the old-school hippies like India who follow strict hundred percent vegan diets and don’t shave their armpits.
And me? In a way I’m even more of an outsider because I’m just normal. I’m not gay and I’m not a hippy. I’m not ugly and I’m not beautiful. I’m thin (more like scrawny), but I have no muscle tone. I’m not remedial-math-class dumb, but I’m not egghead brilliant.
I’m just…
average
. At least by L.A. standards. Now, if I lived someplace like Twin Falls, Idaho, maybe I’d be considered kind of special. But here in L.A., where everyone’s a size two, looks like an Abercrombie model, and has been
on the road to Harvard since preschool? Forget it. At least Malcolm and India are dramatically different. But for me, the normal one who kind of blends into the crowd, growing up in L.A. can be hard. Because here, “normal” equals “invisible.”
But that Wednesday I sure wasn’t invisible. As I skulked down the hall after lunch, trying to tune out the snickers and whispers that had become the sound track to my life, I prayed that Jessica Rokosny hadn’t completely cleaned up her act in rehab.
Are You there, God? It’s me, Cindy,
I thought as I wiped off the “Cindy Ella’s just pissed ’cuz she’s a freak and no one will EVER ask her to prom” graffiti that someone had scrawled on my locker during lunch.
Listen, I’m cool with You keeping Jessica clean and sober,
I thought,
but can You make it so that she ends up making out with at least one inappropriate guy or girl at Danny Miller’s party this Saturday so that people will be talking about
that
on Monday and not me?
I didn’t know where I stood on the God thing, and whether I was just wasting my time asking for divine intervention, but I did know that it sucked being a non-prom girl in an all-prom world.