Little Miss Red (2 page)

If I couldn’t have Devon’s life (at least not until I graduated from college and moved to New York City or Paris or London), I would have settled for Juliet’s. Jordan was always saying I was completely obsessed with her, but that wasn’t true. I was only
mildly
obsessed with her. I mean, how could a person
not
be? From the very first day she arrived as a transfer student back in December—when I, as a member of the Castle Heights Greeters, was assigned to give her a tour of the school—I just
knew
the story that she had moved here from Wichita, Kansas, because her dad was transferred was just a cover for something else. Okay, maybe it was just an honest mistake when Mrs. Winkler, the school secretary, kept calling her Julia instead of Juliet in the office that morning—but maybe not. Maybe Juliet had changed her name from Julia because she was on the run like Devon in
Fueled by Fear
, when Devon’s affair with the Olympic swimmer ended and he started stalking her. And what about when, in making small talk during the tour, she revealed that she had moved six times since third grade? She said her father was a college professor and that’s why she kept switching schools, but there was something about the story I found a little fishy.

Also, she only ever spoke to Phan, a Cambodian exchange student. Ali thought that this was either because Juliet was shy or because all the other girls were
completely jealous that she was a super hottie, but I didn’t buy it. I thought she was afraid that if she made friends for whom English was their first language, she’d have to weave a web of lies to cover up her past and wouldn’t be able to keep them straight, ultimately having a nervous breakdown like Devon in
Crazy with Control
. Regardless, Jordan and Ali were right; she was definitely sexy sexy. With the body and face of a Victoria’s Secret model and the way she could take her long, silky brown hair and, with the flick of her wrist, twist it into a messy-yet-sexy bun, every boy in school was in love with her. Whether the rumors about her and the football team were true, no one knew, but it
was
true that they stopped dead in their tracks and their jaws fell to the floor when she walked down the hall. Like Devon, she had the ability to turn men into “quivering masses of desire.” I mean, who
wouldn’t
want to be Juliet DeStefano?

I put down my sandwich. “Maybe I
want
to be objectified,” I announced.

Jordan gave me the same kind of horrified look as when I ordered a hamburger during her Vegans Unite phase.

One of my Grandma Roz’s favorite sayings was, “The grass may be greener on the other side, but you still have to mow the lawn.” Maybe, but a lot of the time I felt like my patch of lawn was dry and brown and dead, whereas people like Devon and Juliet had green and dewy lawns filled with exotic flowers like birds-of-paradise.

“Okay, maybe ‘objectified’ isn’t the right word,” I continued. “What I want is to be
seen
.”

“We see you,” Ali offered. “Especially now that the eye doctor changed my prescription.” She pushed her new glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“Yeah, but no one else does. I just…blend in.” I motioned to the cafeteria. “Look at us—we’re not popular,” I said, pointing to the Ramp where all the A-listers sat. “And we’re not
un
popular,” I said, pointing to the video game geeks, goths, and stoners sitting around the periphery. I sighed. “We sit smack in the middle. We just…
are.
”

“But what if ‘just being’ is the whole point of life!” said Ali, whose mom was a Buddhist.

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to just
be
—I want to
do
! I want to
live
! I want to
stand out
!”

Jordan pointed to the magenta streak in her blonde hair that was peeking out from underneath the bandana she started wearing when she became a Young Feminist.

“I still have some dye left if you want to color your hair,” she offered.

“No thanks,” I sighed. That wasn’t the kind of living I was looking for. I wanted something bigger. More, I don’t know,
dramatic
.

WWDDD?
I thought. I wasn’t entirely sure, but I had an idea of where she might start: break up with Michael Rosenberg, my boyfriend of three years who I loved, but was no longer
in
love with.

“No offense, Sophie,” Jordan said after school as we were getting manicures at Kathy’s Nails on Ventura Boulevard, near where we both lived. “But Michael’s the only boyfriend you’ve ever had. So how do you know you’re not
in
love with him?”

“You just know,” I replied. “It’s like in your mom’s book
Seduced by Seduction
, when Devon meets the Saudi Arabian sheik at the Cannes Film Festival and he gives her a 22-carat diamond engagement ring the next day. That’s
in
love.”

“But Michael’s great,” Jordan said. “I mean, what other guy are you going to find who likes going to the mall and isn’t gay?”

She did have a point.

“And Jeremy would be beyond bummed if you guys broke up,” she added.

Jeremy was my nine-year-old brother. He loved Michael, and would even hug him, which for someone with Asperger’s syndrome said a lot.

I flinched as Kathy pushed down the cuticles on my short nails. “I just don’t know if that’s enough anymore, though,” I said. “I want
passion
. Not someone to go shopping with or play Go Fish with me and my little brother.”

“What color you want?” asked Kathy when she was done massaging my hands with hand cream.

I pointed at the bottle of Dark as Midnight that I had
picked out. Dark as Midnight was so…dark. And sultry. And sophisticated. Devon kept a bottle of it in every one of her designer handbags.

Kathy shook her head like she had water in her ears. “I tell you every time—make your stubby fingers look even shorter!” she brayed.

“But—” My iPhone buzzed.

“Watch out!” Kathy barked as I knocked over a bottle of remover while grabbing for the phone.

“Sorry,” I replied, clicking into the text.
Yo what up? Can’t come for dinner—SAT prep class. M.
it said. Although he was a white boy from Encino, Michael was very into rap. Which is why every conversation with him had lots of “Yo’s” and “Check it’s.” I sighed. I had been hoping that maybe if we spent more quality time together it would reignite our passion, but apparently that wasn’t going to happen tonight.

“Plus, the dark colors look horrible when they chip,” Jordan added. Her nails were being painted clear, which was the only color the Young Feminists were allowed to wear. “My mom has to get hers done like every other day for that very reason.”

Kathy picked up a bottle of boring pale pink. “We do Cotton Candy, like always,” she announced. “You just not Dark as Midnight kind of girl!”

I had learned long ago it was useless to try and fight with Kathy about nail color. Rumor had it that pre-
Friends
,
she was always talking Jennifer Aniston out of Dark as Midnight as well.

“Fine,” I agreed half-heartedly. But as soon as I moved to the side of the lawn with the birds-of-paradise it was going to be Dark as Midnight on my fingers
and
toes.

“I think you should wait until after Mexico to make your decision about Michael,” said Jordan.

“Good idea,” I agreed. I was going to Puerto Vallarta for Spring Break with Jordan and her mom to spend the week at the cliffside villa Lulu had bought after selling the movie rights to her second book,
Ravished by Regret
, the one where Devon falls in love with the Italian count who was also a billionaire dot-com guy who had come up with an Italian knockoff of Facebook. It would be the perfect place to search my soul and decide whether the fact that I’d rather do my trig homework rather than make out with my boyfriend was a passing thing, or if we really weren’t meant to be.

Unfortunately, as Grandma Roz also liked to say, “You make your plans and God laughs.”

Like when the person who owns the vacation house cancels the trip after finding out she has to do a major rewrite of her latest book because her editor has accused her of plagiarizing herself.

“So Daddy and I have a surprise for you,” cooed Mom at dinner a few nights later, as she plunked a piece of liver down on my plate that night. (A typical conversation with
my mother: Mom: It’s for your anemia. Me: But I’m not anemic. Mom:
Exactly
—because you eat your liver!)

Mom only cooed like this when she was trying to get Jeremy to turn off the TV or when she was about to tell me something I wasn’t going to like.

“What is it?” I said warily, shading my eyes from the glare that was coming off the freshly painted yellow walls of our kitchen. Mom had recently redecorated our entire house to make it more “serenity-friendly.” Because it was like every other Spanish-style house in Studio City, wood and darker colors worked best, but that hadn’t stopped her from choosing so-called happy colors like yellow, lavender, and peach. I felt like I was living in a tub of rainbow sherbet. When I grew up, I was going to paint my entire New York City penthouse apartment red, just like Devon did. All the magazines said that red was the most passionate color.

After plunking down a piece of liver on Jeremy’s plate (which he immediately pushed away before going back to making ruler-straight rows of peas), she sat down and took my hand in her own Cotton Candy–painted one. Even though I had seen the video of Mom holding me in the hospital right after I was born, I still sometimes wondered if it had been a switched-at-birth situation. My parents were great, but as an accountant (Dad) and a shrink (Mom) they were both so…normal. I knew at my very core that I was supposed to have a page-turner kind of life, so wouldn’t it
make more sense for me to come from a family full of CIA agents or something?

“I talked to Grandma Roz this morning,” Mom started to say, pushing her auburn hair off her face. (Mine was the same shade, so I guess there was no denying we were related.)

The back of my neck started to itch. Just hearing Grandma Roz’s name made me nervous. Unlike other grandmothers who were sweet and cuddly and who did things like tell you how brilliant you are and sneak you five-dollar bills, Grandma Roz was like the poster person for cranky old people.

“Did she call with a new burial outfit update?” I asked. At seventy-five, Grandma Roz was still in perfect health, but that hadn’t stopped her from spending every day for the last fifteen years talking about who was going to get what when she died.

Mom let go of my hand and reached over to Jeremy to try and get him to eat some of his liver, but he was having none of it, which made sense for a kid with an IQ of 165. Unlike me and Mom, Jeremy took after my dad—darker hair and a big nose.

“No. She called to say she wants the silver candelabras back,” Mom said.

The candelabras were the only thing of value that my great-great-grandparents had been able to take with them when they left Poland. Legend had it that getting them to
America involved a train, a ship, and a mule. They had been passed down from generation to generation as a wedding gift and now lived in our dining room, where Jeremy liked to compulsively polish them (which, Dad said, was one of the few pluses of Asperger’s).

“Why does she want them back?” I asked.

“She says that because she has so little in her life that makes her happy, having them around as she gets ready to die might make her feel better.”

Dad looked up from his liver, which, he too wasn’t eating. “And you wonder why I’m a glass-half-empty type of person,” he grumbled to Mom.

She turned to him. “Larry, please don’t take out your resentment toward your mother in front of the kids. You know how children mirror what they see, and I don’t want them to be talking about us like this down the road.” She turned back to me and took my hand again. “Anyway, I told Grandma I’d ship them to her—I told her I’d even send them FedEx, even though they’re so heavy it would cost me more than your Bat Mitzvah did—but she says that the worry during transit time would kill her. So when I mentioned that your Spring Break plans had gotten cancelled—”

I pulled my now-clammy hand out of hers. “You’re going to make me spend Spring Break in the Garden of Eden?!” I squawked. It may have sounded fancy, but the Garden of Eden—located in hot and humid Delray
Beach—was probably the least luxurious retirement community in all of Florida. Unfortunately, even though Grandma Roz was superrich because her father was the founder of TeePeeMatic, the company that invented the little tube that holds toilet paper rolls in the holder, she worried about money all the time.

Mom nodded and gave me The Smile, the one where the corners of her mouth reached up so high they almost hit her eyes. It was the smile she used when she was trying to talk me into something I
really
didn’t want to do. Like visiting my grandmother. “Aren’t you excited?” she cooed. “You’re going to have so much fun!”

I could tell from the way she squeezed my hand to the point where I started to lose feeling that there would be no discussion. Instead of hanging out at home and going to the movies during my vacation, I’d be surrounded by bottles of aspirin and Tums.