Gorgeous Read Free Page B

you’re gorgeous.”
    Tyler Moss immediately sprang to mind, but I altruistically countered, “What about the whole world-peace thing?”
    “You don’t even get decent Internet on this,” he said, using both thumbs and making my phone beep and buzz like it had never done before.
    “Fine, I don’t have to be gorgeous. Everybody can just think I’m gorgeous. Come on. It’s apparently got a ton of ring tones…”
    He scrolled through my phone book. “Isn’t seeming gorgeous the same as being gorgeous?”
    “No,” I said.
    He smiled to himself. “Damn close, though. Fine, choose three people who will forever think you are gorgeous.”
    “Ten,” I countered. “The keys are so springy.”
    “Five.”
    “Eight. I already lost a cell phone once this year,” I explained. “If I have to go to my mother and say I lost this one too, she’ll give me hell.”
    He grinned, looking up from the phone.
    “No offense.”
    “On the contrary; I’m flattered.” He held the phone toward me in his open palm. It looked tiny, lying there. “But you won’t have to tell your mother anything. You’ll have the phone. I’ll just possess it.”
    “Isn’t having the same as possessing ?” I asked.
    “No,” he said.
    “Oh, the other kind of…Right. So I’d keep the phone?”
    “Yes,” he agreed, his arm still outstretched with the phone resting in his big hand. “And I’ll meet you in the middle. Seven. Seven people will think you are absolutely gorgeous.”
    I got a little distracted, is my only defense. Seven is obviously closer to eight than to five. I won is what I was thinking when I said, “Deal.”
    He said, “Deal,” and disappeared, or else I just stopped dreaming about him. Well, whatever. I woke up the next morning having forgotten about it completely.
    Until my cell phone started freaking out.

3
    “L EMON !”
    My eyes flashed open as Dad knocked on my door and added, “Rise and shine!”
    I saw my clock and started cursing.
    It was too late for a shower, which I desperately needed. It was also too late to figure out a better costume for my presentation or, obviously, a change of topic and thesis for my end-of-year twenty-percent-of-my-grade social studies project. Not that I was ever considering dumping Gouverneur Morris, my one-legged slutty brilliant hideous hero, but still. As if it’s not bad enough to have my paper (another twenty percent of my grade) dissed by the teacher in front of the class yesterday—well, and then shredded by me—I now had to present it, in all its B–glory, to my whole class.
    In costume.
    As the one-legged hideous slutty genius himself.
    A normal person (Phoebe) would have done somebody easy. Actually, Phoebe would probably do a movie star so she could go in looking even more beautiful than usual. Quinn did Galileo last year. She just wore her hair in a bun and held a pendulum. She had hers totally memorized, of course, having practiced it in front of Mom and Dad a thousand times.
    Not only was Jade’s Eleanor Roosevelt costume perfect, she even had a great bonus prepared. I had helped her make little business cards to hand out to everybody after her project with a quote: “Do one thing each day that scares you.” E. Roosevelt. Did I have handouts? No. I had a plunger.
    “Why didn’t you wake me earlier?” I yelled to anybody who was listening. Or wasn’t.
    I whipped open my closet to find my loose brown cords and the white blouse I had “borrowed” from Quinn, who sometimes does dress, luckily, like an eighteenth-century guy, all frills and velvet. Usually just for piano concerts, but I am convinced she actually enjoys it.
    “Who took the plunger?” I screamed, when I realized it wasn’t beside my couch where I’d left it. “I need the plunger!”
    Dad wandered by with some crack about stuffing up the toilets. He thinks he’s such a guy, so laid-back and cool.
    “It’s for my costume, dude! I have a project today?” If it had been Quinn’s