Little Miss Red (18 page)

I had gone to Arturo’s Chateau of Beauty the last time I came to visit, and the manicurist’s hand shook so much she ended up making my cuticles look like I was starring in a horror movie.

“In fact,” she said, waddling over to the file cabinet, “I think I have a coupon.” After rifling around, she gasped. “Look at that—it’s your lucky day! For the entire month of April, they’re running a “Princess for a Day” special: manicure, pedicure, wash, set,
and
makeup application for only $59.99.” She looked at me and smiled. “Would you like to be a princess for a day, Sophela? It’s a splurge, I know, but you can consider it an early graduation gift.”

This was not my grandmother. It was like the “cheap”
chip had been surgically removed ever since Jack came into the picture. “That’s really nice, Grandma, but you don’t have to do that,” I said quickly. “I was thinking maybe I should try and get a little studying done for this trig test I have the week I get back.” Wow. Once I started lying, I couldn’t stop. The lies were just pouring out of me. What I
really
wanted to do was some Googling about whether there were any documented cases of physical reactions to drama.

“Oh, Sophie, you need to lighten up a little bit!” Grandma Roz clucked. “Have some fun. You know, walk on the wild side every once in a while!” I nearly did a double take. Who was this lady?

“That’s exactly what I keep telling her, Roz,” Jack said with a sigh. He reached over and squeezed my hand. “Go on, Red. Go have a day of beauty so I can take you out on the town tonight.”

So he could take me out, or so I could take him out and add it to his tab? From the looks of things, I could tell they weren’t going to let up.

“Okay. Fine. I’ll take a walk on the wild side,” I replied, getting my purse. Plus, it would give me a chance to finally paint my nails with Dark as Midnight.

If they only knew how wild my life already was. Scratch that. It wasn’t wild…it was
epic
. A little more than a week ago, my biggest decision was whether to start with my chemistry or my English homework. Then I had become
an Urban Dictionary definition, been put on pause, and had ridden on a motorcycle. Now I was torn between two men.

How much wilder could it get?

My iPhone buzzed again.

Talk about an e-mail—or three—that could change your life.

An hour later I was sitting across from Gladys, the manicurist, with a head full of curlers, my cowboy hat safely beside me. It seemed that every woman over the age of sixty in the greater Boca Raton area wanted to be a princess for a day, because when we got there, Arturo’s was packed. I had tried to tell Rafi, the cornrowed, half-Cuban/half-Dominican “fabulousness operator” (according to the sign over his chair) that I was into a more natural look, but he had this way of selectively understanding English and just muttered in Spanish as he curled away.

“Grandma, can I ask you a question?” I asked impulsively as I massaged my neck with my free hand. Who knew curlers could be so heavy?

She glanced over from where she was getting her manicure. “What?”

“Remember a few days ago you brought up Jean-Pierre?”

Underneath the bronzer that always gave her an orange glow, like one of those people you read about who OD’d on carrots, I could see her start to pale. “Yeah?”

“You never finished the story. What happened with him?” I asked.

She pointed at the three bottles of nail polish on the table: Pale Pink, Icy Pearl, and Neon Blue. “What color are you going to get?” she asked, flustered. “Personally, I like the Icy Pearl.” I had never seen her so nervous.

“Do you have Dark as Midnight?” I asked Gladys.

She shook her head. “Nope. Every time we get a bottle in, someone rips it off.”

Yet again I was at a turning point. Was I going to keep making the same safe choices—whether it was nail polish or boys—or was I finally going to take a risk?

“So what ended up happening with Jean-Pierre?” I asked again, my hand hovering about the three bottles.

She sighed. “What happened was over the course of three weeks he touched my heart at its very center,” Grandma Roz said, “at its very
core
—awakening in me a passion I never knew existed—and then…I went back to your grandfather and my suburban housewife existence full of carpooling and bridge games and low-cholesterol chicken recipes.”

Wait…what? I put the polish choosing on hold and turned to her.

“C’mon, sweetie, pick a color. I don’t have all day,” Gladys said, annoyed.

Grandma Roz sighed. “He did give me the candelabras as a parting gift.”

I gasped even louder. “But I thought those were Greene family heirlooms that had been brought over from Poland by a mule!”

She shook her head. “No. I made that part up. Didn’t want to set a bad example for your father by letting him think his mother was a hussy.” She shrugged. “Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jean-Pierre—probably because I have so little time left, you know—and how alive he made me feel. That’s why I wanted the candelabras.”

Who knew Grandma Roz was a romantic?!

She shook her head sadly. “I got a letter from him about a year later. He had fallen in love with an Italian fashion designer, and they were in the process of opening up a bed-and-breakfast in Tuscany.”

I looked up from the nail polish bottles. “After such an incredible connection like that, he fell in love with another woman?”

“The fashion designer was a man.”

“He turned out to be
gay
?” I gasped again.

She shrugged again. “I hate to be the one to tell you, but that sort of thing happens more often than you would think.”

That was true. A girl named Cindy Gold at my school had fallen for her SAT tutor, only to find out he was gay. But then she ended up with Adam Silver, a total hottie, so no one felt too bad for her. But this…this was a different
story—this was my grandmother. My velour-tracksuit-wearing, Mylanta-drinking grandmother had a
past
. Not just a past, but a pretty torrid past. And no one knew! I didn’t even want to think of what else she was hiding.

“But if he touched you so deeply—if he made you feel so
alive
—then why did you go back to Grandpa Max?” I asked. As much as Michael’s e-mail had made me realize that I really did miss him, I didn’t know if I could give up the feeling of freedom I had felt when riding around on the motorcycle with Jack.

She shot me a withering look. “You mean, just because every time Jean-Pierre looked at me and I felt little electric shocks on the bottom of my feet, why didn’t I give up my entire life as I knew it and uproot my son and move to a foreign country where I barely spoke the language so I could live with a man whose mood swings were off the charts and who liked to start arguments over the littlest things just so we could then have make-up sex? And to top it all off, he likes men?”

I cringed. Talk about TMI. “Okay, I guess when you put it that way, the pros don’t exactly outweigh the cons,” I agreed, “but what about the touching-your-heart part? That’s, like,
huge
.”

For probably only the fourth time in all my sixteen years on the planet that I could remember, Grandma Roz took my hand in hers. “Sophie, I’m about to share with you the single most important piece of advice you’re ever going
to get. Not only is it going to save you a lot of heartache, but it’ll keep you off the couch of one of those overpriced headshrinkers like your mom. Are you ready?”

I nodded.

“You sure?”

I nodded again.

She leaned in and looked around to make sure that no one was listening. “A man should always love you just a
little
bit more than you love him,” she whispered.

“Huh?”

She rolled her eyes. “What am I, speaking Yiddish? I
said
a man should always love you just a little bit more than you love him. Those—what do you call them?—
hotties
, like Jack and Jean-Pierre? Sure, they’re exciting and every girl should experience them at least once, but when it comes time to settle down, you want to be with someone like Grandpa Max or Art.”

I sighed. Sure, other than the few times I caught him staring at other girls when we were out, Jack had been faithful, but what if the stray dog thing kicked in when got back to L.A.? I could only imagine what kind of allergic reaction I’d have to
that
kind of drama. But as I imagined myself fifty years from now with a guy like Art who jiggled the change in his pocket, I shuddered. “But I thought you liked Jack?”

“I do. He’s a very nice boy. That being said, I hate to tell you this, but I don’t think he’s the kind of guy who’ll hold
your hair back from your face when you’re bent over the toilet with food poisoning or go to the pharmacy at midnight to get you feminine napkins or Rolaids,” she replied. “That Michael, though—he would.”

As if he were psychic, my iPhone buzzed again with another e-mail from Michael.

I flashed back to the time that I got sick from a burrito at Michael’s house. While he hadn’t hung out in the bathroom with me while I puked my guts up, he
did
go to 7-11 and get me some ginger ale to help my stomach. But did that mean he loved me a little bit more than I loved him, or did it just mean he was afraid I was going to hurl in his just-washed car when he drove me home? I’m not sure if Jack would’ve gone to get me ginger ale. If he did, though, I knew I’d be the one who paid for it.

I had thought I was destined for an Excitement-with-a-capital-
E
life, but maybe a small
e
life could be okay too. Well, a small
e
with a couple of big
E
moments thrown in there.

Gladys stood up, pulling her too-short shirt down over
her leopard-print leggings. “Since you’re going to take your time like this, I’m gonna go have a smoke. Maybe when I get back you’ll have made your decision.”

“Take it from me—those stray dogs may get your heart pumping,” Grandma Roz continued, “which, at my age, is a good thing, but you’re going to end up spending all your time worrying about how to get that one foot they always have out the door back into the room. Chemistry is important, but it’s not the
only
thing.”

Did
everyone
know about this stray dog thing except for me?

I thought about it for a moment. “But the stable ones,” I said, “they’re just so…”

“Boring?” Grandma Roz suggested.

“Well…
yeah
.” I had to admit, getting all these e-mails from Michael was a thrill, but if I got back together with him, I’d bet anything he’d go back to his super-short texts.

She shrugged. “They may be, but unlike the other ones, you can depend on them to stick around for more than a month and be there for you through the tough times. Which means that you have a chance of it turning into a real relationship instead of just being a hot, passionate fling that burns out, like the ones that Delilah girl’s always having.”

“Who’s Delilah?”

“The girl in those books you like.”

“Devon,” I corrected.

She shrugged. “Delilah, Devon. All those
shiksas
sound alike to me. The point is, do you want to end up like her? Running around the world like a chicken with her head cut off, having meaningless affairs with men who refuse to grow up and settle down? You think she sleeps well at night?”

I shrugged. She
did
have superexpensive, thousand–thread count sheets and fancy silk nightgowns. And took sleeping pills.

“Take it from me, Sophie—she doesn’t,” Grandma Roz said, waving her now-pearl-painted nails around. “I’m old. I know these things. Devon is
miserable
. She feels empty inside, especially during the holidays when everyone is with their families and she’s sharing a Lean Cuisine with that little dog of hers.”

“How do you know about Miu Miu?” I asked suspiciously.

She looked down. “So maybe I’ve picked up one or two of your books over the years when I’ve come to visit,” she admitted. “I can’t remember everything I read—I’m an old woman, for crying out loud. But the point is, sometimes you have to sit through the boring parts to get to the good parts.”

Gladys came back and sat down, reeking of cigarettes. “Did ya decide?”

I stared at my choices. Was I going to continue being a Cotton Candy girl—spending my Saturday nights with Michael, who fifty years from now would be jiggling his
change in his pocket like Art? Or was I going to finally bite the bullet and live on the wild side with Jack—but with the stress of worrying that at any minute my stray dog might bolt?

“I’ll go with…the blue,” I finally said.

“The
blue
?” said Grandma Roz. “What are you, crazy?”

I shrugged. Apparently so.

Once Rafi was done with my hair and makeup, I looked like an extra in
The Sopranos
, this TV show that Dad used to watch about people in the Mafia. Not only was I about three inches taller once he teased my hair out, but my face was itching from the makeover, complete with blue eye shadow to match my nails. I could already tell it was going to leave me with a war zone of pimples.

“I sure hope you have a hot date tonight,
chica
,” he said as he finished painting my lips with what felt like glue. “Cuz you are
muy
caliente
, baby. Believe me, if I were buyin’ what you’re sellin’ I’d be all over you.”

It may have just been a bribe so that I wouldn’t blab the truth about the candelabras to my parents, but after we were done at Arturo’s, Grandma Roz took me to the mall to buy me a new outfit for my big night out with Jack.

After convincing her that while, yes, Talbots had some cute things, I’d probably have more luck at Always 16, we
made plans to meet at the food court a half hour later so that she could go to Bed Bath & Beyond and use the coupon that had come in the mail that morning to buy a new humidifier.