Little Miss Red Read Free Page B

just might be your best Spring Break
ever
,” Mom said. “Now help me clear the table.”
    “Yo, what up?” Michael said later that night when he called. I was in my newly painted, lavender-colored bedroom supposedly working on a paper for English class about Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald (the author of
The Great Gatsby
) who ultimately went crazy and ended up in a mental hospital (most likely because she loved him so much). But really what I was doing was watching a special I had TiVo’d on SOAPnet called
The Top 100 Greatest Love Affairs in Soap History
. People were always talking about how romantic Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were, but they had
nothing
on Luke and Laura, this couple from
General Hospital
who fell madly in love in the eighties and managed to stay together through all sorts of crazy things like kidnappings and faked deaths.
    “Hey,” I replied from my bed with its serenity-friendlyyellow/pink/peach comforter as I saved my work on my laptop.
    “So, what up?” he asked, the TV blaring in the background.
    I looked at my watch. Yup. He was watching
MTV Cribs
. Just like he did every weeknight. I got off my bed and walked over to turn off the tinkling feng shui–approved, serenity-boosting fountain on my desk. I don’t know if it made me happy, but it
did
make me feel like I had to pee all the time. “Not much. So I guess we’re going to Florida together for Spring Break,” I said, trying to sound excited.
    It hadn’t always been like this—there
was
a time I was madly in love with him. In fact, the minute I set eyes on him at Faryl Reingold’s Bat Mitzvah in seventh grade, I knew we were meant to be together, just like Devon felt when she saw that sexy painter from Oklahoma standing at the top step of his Chelsea loft in
Doused by Desire
. After that day, we were inseparable. While all the boys I knew were into video games, Michael was different. Not only did my parents approve—because they knew his parents from temple and liked them very much—but Michael liked to talk for hours and watch TV rather than play sports. And because he was an only child and his mother was a shopaholic, he had spent his childhood sitting outside dressing rooms. So not only was he super-patient, but he could spot an amazing deal from fifty yards away.
    There was no answer other than the TV.
    “Michael?” I asked.
    Still no answer. Nowadays he did this all the time.
He
called
me
, but then he spent the entire call watching TV and not paying attention. The days where we’d talk for hours about nothing and everything were long gone.
    “Michael!”
I shouted.
    “Huh?”
    “I said, I guess we’re going to Florida together.”
    “Oh. Yeah. That’ll be cool, huh?”
    “Uh huh,” I agreed, plopping back down on my bed. I picked up my dog-eared copy of
Lassoed by Lust
that I kept on my nightstand and traced my finger across Dante Jackson’s jaw on the cover. All of the guys on the covers of Lulu’s novels were hotties, but Dante was the hottest of them all. With his perfectly faded Levis, and his tight white tank clinging to his ripped pecs, and his fingernails with just the
teensiest
bit of dirt underneath them (because he was a rancher and therefore a very hard worker), Dante was exactly my kind of guy. I
love
ranchers. Granted, because I’m allergic to horses I’ve never been anywhere near a ranch and therefore the only ones I’ve seen have been on television or in movies, but they seem to be a freakishly attractive group of people.
    “So, what else is going on?” I asked him.
    “Huh? Oh, nothing.” He was
so
not paying attention to our conversation. I bet when guys called Juliet DeStefano,they paid attention to
her
. And I
knew
they paid attention to Devon, because in
Bowled Over by Bliss
, the Indian customer service representative racked up a thousand-dollar cell phone bill one month after falling in love with the sound of her voice when she called with a question about her