Who's Your Daddy? Read Free

debate team, but in the semifinal round that afternoon, she’d tanked in a big way when most of her topics dealt with the worst of all possible things—movies and television. Bummed didn’t come close to describing her mood. Meryl is so smart, we were bummed for her, too.
    Caressa, on the other hand, had what most people would consider a good day—on the surface. Even though she hadn’t formally auditioned, she’d been cast for the lead in the spring musical—
Beauty and the Beast
. The only problem was, Caressa didn’t
want
the lead. She had no desire whatsoever to sing—it was the whole totally “doing whatever your parents had done” thing. Blech.
    The coolio-factor of playing Belle and wearing kick-butt costumes weren’t even enough to drag Caressa out of depressionville. She had joined the theater clubbecause she likes
makeup
, not singing. No, she LOVES makeup—worships at the temple of Sephora.com on a regular basis, if you want the whole truth. She wanted to work behind the scenes, doing makeup and costuming for the various productions. But, of course, having Lehigh Thibodoux, aka Tibby Lee, for a father meant, once again, Caressa got jammed. The theater club sponsor, Mr. Cabbiatti, who is a celebrity-wannabe to an epic degree, couldn’t pass up the publicity opportunity. Now all the girls who wanted to play Belle were angry with Caressa for getting a part she didn’t even want, and Caressa was angry because she just wanted to put makeup on the beast. Go figure!
    We were all sitting around that night, painting each other’s toenails, complaining about our parents and our horrid luck, and bemoaning the fact that homecoming loomed and none of us had dates or even prospects.
    Surprising? No. Depressing? Uh, yes.
    Fiona Apple was playing on the stereo, because we wanted to feed our already depressed moods, and so far, no directives from Mr. Thibodoux to “keep it down.”
    Caressa was bent low over my feet painting my toe-nails with this sweet OPI shade she’d just bought, “I’mNot Really a Waitress.” It’s kind of a red with sparkly gold in it. I had a hard time deciding between that and another shade from OPI’s European collection called, “Amster-Damsel in Distress,” but the gold shimmer in “Waitress” really won me over.
    Caressa always has the best makeup.
    Anyway, she was concentrating on my pinky toe, left foot, when out of nowhere Meryl goes, “We need to change our lives. Homecoming is on the autumnal equinox this year.”
    As though those two comments were related.
    “Huh,” Caressa and I said in unison, not knowing what type of response was appropriate to the equinox-announcement-slash-life-change directive. I mean, we’d been talking about how much our lives sucked, but the equinox? All I knew for sure was that homecoming had been rescheduled and would commence the following Tuesday night. Yes, a freakin’ Tuesday, if you can believe that lunacy. The switch was the school district’s brilliant solution to avoiding a big, heinous snowstorm expected on Friday.
    Whatever. Tuesday, Friday. Equinox Schmequinox. You could only complain for so long, and Meryl alwayslaunched interesting conversations, so we went with it. That’s one cool thing about having a friend who’s completely Laura Ingalls Wilder-ish out of touch with the American entertainment scene (or any entertainment scene, really)—she has tons of time to read stuff the rest of the high school universe would pass up in favor of this week’s installment of
The Real World
. She’s always popping off bits of useless but nevertheless pretty interesting trivia.
    Meryl also works a couple of nights a week at the local metaphysical shop downtown, since Mr. Morgenstern put the giant kibosh on her first choice job at Blockbuster. Frankly, I think the metaphysical shop is a much better place to work anyway. It always smells good in there from the flickering candles and essential oils, and the tinkling bells and gurgling