Crazy in Love Read Free

before my senior year of high school was especially bad. For the very first time Rachel’s family went away for the entire month of August. Her father is a doctor—a dermatologist, as a matter of fact, good news during the pimple-prone years—so he has a pretty flexible schedule . The Glass family usually spreads its vacations over the year, a week here and a week there.  But for some reason, Dr. Glass suddenly got the idea of renting a house near the ocean for half the summer. Rachel was ecstatic. Not only did she get a terrific tan; she also perfected her breast stroke. Of course, she could only do it in salt water, which wasn’t very useful when it came to our school swim team since it only operates in water that’s seventy-five percent chlorine.
    While Rachel was combing seaweed out of her hair and flirting with cute blond lifeguards, I was busy being miserable. I moped around the apartment for the whole month. That is, when I wasn’t working my butt off as a waitress at Peppermint Park. That’s an ice cream parlor I used to love before I went to work there for the summer. Now, the mere thought of a Rocky Road parfait makes me gag.
    Anyway, even my sister Jenny gave up on trying to drag me places with her and her friends. So by the time September came around, I was thrilled that my best friend was back in town. Even the idea of another whole year of tests and French grammar and gym class couldn’t get me down.
    I remember the day the Glass family rode back into the city.  Their car was almost bursting with suitcases and boxes and plastic beach balls that had just about lost all their air. I barely recognized Rachel when she climbed out of the car.  She was carrying an empty KFC bucket in one hand and a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the other. She had that dreamy look she often gets when she’s been daydreaming or reading or thinking really hard. I figured it was Sir Clifford who was responsible this time. Anyway, she was very deeply suntanned, and she looked thinner. She wasn’t actually any thinner, she told me later, but all those hours thrashing away in the waves had turned her into solid muscle.
    Also, her hair was shorter. Rachel has thick, wavy hair, such a dark shade of brown that it looks almost black. That is, until you get a glimpse of her in the sunlight and you get a chance to check out all those neat red highlights. It had been really long, but somewhere between New York and Virginia she’d gotten it chopped to shoulder length. Her eyes are really dark brown, too, and her tan, combined with her coloring, made her look wonderful.
    To top it all off, she was wearing this totally cool outfit: sunshine-yellow cloth jogging shorts and a striped orange-and-yellow tank top. She was the picture of health. All of a sudden I felt pale and sickly, like some unfortunate city kid who’d been forced to spend the summer frolicking in the gushing waters of illegally opened fire hydrants. You know, like the ones in the posters soliciting contributions for the Fresh Air Fund. Not that I’ve ever had a tan in my whole life. Even when my family went to Florida eight years ago, everyone else turned a nice healthy, toasty brown without even trying. They all got tan just from hanging around the pool a couple of hours each day and walking through the parking lot from the air- conditioned rented car to the entrance of the wax museums. Not me. All I got was sunburned eyelids and six huge freckles, four on my nose and one on each forearm.
    The critical factor here is the fact that I have red hair. Not red-auburn or red highlights, like Rachel. I’m talking bright orange-red. And freckles, lots of freckles, even when I haven’t seen the sun for ages. I would have freckles all over my face (and, confidentially, all over my entire body) even if I’d grown up in Siberia and only saw the sun for about two hours once a year. I am basically your fair-skinned, green-eyed redhead.
    No one else in my family has that