Bad Boy Read Free Page A

wanted to buy a dress with a fake fur bolero jacket for the junior prom. Tracie had absolutely forbidden it because (although she couldn’t say so) it made Laura look almost exactly like a gorilla.
    Tracie thought that they’d grown so close because they both were so needy at the time and yet so different. Laura was as tall as Tracie was short. Laura was big (God alone knew her weight) and Tracie was thin (104, but no more bulimia since she’d promised Laura not to throw up). Tracie was boyish, had almost no chest, and wore her hair short and streaked with blond. Laura was a brunette earth mother, had huge breasts and an unruly mane. Laura had always loved to cook; Tracie wasn’t sure there’d been a kitchen in her Encino house.
    “You can stay here as long as you want. As long as you don’t bake farm cakes,” Tracie told her girlfriend as they ended their hug. “I think you should move to Seattle permanently. But you do whatever you want as long as you don’t go back to Peter.”
    “Peter, Peter Woman-eater. Hadda neighbor, hadda eat her,” Laura sang.
    “Was that really what he was doing when you walked in on them?” Tracie gasped.
    “Sure was. Somehow, it was a lot worse than if they’d been fucking,” Laura said. She stopped unpacking and sat down on the edge of Tracie’s bed. “A guy can fuck a girl he doesn’t even like, but he doesn’t . . .” She paused and then shook her head. “Jesus, he hardly ever went down on p. 14 me .” She sighed, diving back into her bag to take out yet another perfectly folded T-shirt.
    “Well, it doesn’t matter,” Tracie told her. “You’re just never going to see him again. He’s going to miss you.”
    “I don’t know about me, but I do know he’s going to miss my short ribs with braised cabbage and mango-apple-cranberry coulis.” Laura laughed. “But enough about Peter. I can’t wait to meet the famous Phil.”
    Tracie waggled her eyebrows in a poor imitation of Groucho Marx. “Well, you’re not going to have to wait long. You finish unpacking while I work on this stupid feature. Then we’ll get something to eat. After that, I’ll take you to meet Phil at Cosmo.”
    “What’s Cosmo?”
    “It’s easier to take you there than to explain it,” Tracie told her friend. “You’ll see tonight.”
     
    Cosmo was jammed by the time Tracie and Laura walked through its black glass double doors. It was enormous ‌ —three separate dance floors ‌ —with neon lights running along the black-painted walls and strobes and black lights picking up the slack, as if there was any. Laura eyed the scene. “An epileptic’s nightmare,” she quipped as they made their way to the crowded bar.
    “Wait till you see the computerized light show,” Tracie yelled above the din.
    “They make it snow in here?” Laura yelled back.
    p. 15 “Light show ‌ —SHOW!” Tracie yelled, then saw by Laura’s grin that she’d gotten her. “Yeah, yeah.” Tracie grinned back.
    Cosmo was bustling with habitues, all under thirty, thinking they were terminally hep. Personally, Tracie always thought there was something weird about the jeunesse dorée of Seattle. They had a lot more money and a lot less style than people in L. A. or other places Tracie had been, but she liked them for it. They either looked like they had forgotten to dress up before they went out or as if they’d put themselves together for some convention. In fact, the majority of Seattle young people seemed like Trekkies who had recently transferred their manic interest to some other sphere. Now a swing band was playing and couples danced, many of them in forties zoot suits and period dresses. Tracie thought the dresses were kind of cool actually, but otherwise, she just didn’t get it.
    “Me, neither,” Laura said, as if Tracie had spoken her thoughts aloud.
    Tracie picked up her drink, tossed it back, and tried to order another. Phil was late, as usual.
    “Hey, how many of those did you have?