Little Miss Red (21 page)

Before he could finish my phone started ringing.

“You gonna get that?” he asked.

I shook my head and turned the ringer off to shut it up. It seemed rude to take a call when someone was about to
tell you that they were kind-of-sort-of falling in something with you.

“Kind-of-sort-of falling what?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“You said you were ‘kind-of-sort-of falling’ something before the phone rang.”

He looked confused for a moment. If I had learned anything about Jack over the past few days it was that he had close to zero short-term memory. Finally it clicked. “Oh right. I was about to say that I feel like I’m kind-of-sort-of falling in—”

The phone buzzed.

He sighed. “I gotta tell you, Red. I’m thinking you might end up in rehab because of that thing,” he said, pointing to the iPhone.

“I’m ignoring it!” I cried. Although I had to admit that in doing so, I felt like my mom said she felt when she started craving a cigarette—like my head starting buzzing and my heart started beating faster. I couldn’t win. My willpower gone, I picked up the phone. “Just—it might be important…”

I looked down.

Not that u care or anything, but Carmen and i are going to Pablo’s Putt-Putt Palace…M.

“Is it important?” he asked.

“
No
,” I scoffed.

Before I could stop him, Jack took the phone from me
and read the text. He looked up at me. “Who’s Carmen? And who’s M?”

I sighed. If Jack could sit across from me and bare his soul and tell me he was kind-of-sort-of falling in something with me, he deserved to know what was going on inside of me. I took a deep breath and told him about my relationship with Michael, about the uncomfortable yet exciting feeling of being torn between two lovers. His eyes started glazing over twenty-five minutes into my confession, so maybe the “honesty” and “communication” he had been talking about didn’t have to include every little detail, but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry.

“…and then when he started saying that I was only with you because you were the total polar opposite of him and I was doing it because my parents wouldn’t approve—”

Jack looked up from the inchworm he had made with his straw wrapper and raised an eyebrow. “Why wouldn’t your parents approve?”

“It’s not that they wouldn’t
approve
,” I said, starting to backpedal. “It’s just that, you know, you’re…
different
than the guys I know.”

“Because I have an accent and didn’t go to some fancy college?” he asked. “You know, I’m sick and tired of people trying to put me in a box and judging me by the way I look and sound,” he said angrily, slamming his hand on the inchworm and squashing it. “Ow,” he said, wincing.

“I’m not judging you,” I said.

“No, but your parents are!”

“But my parents haven’t even met you yet,” I replied, confused.

“Oh, so now you’re so embarrassed of me that you’re afraid to introduce me to your parents?” he scoffed.

I felt like this conversation was turning into a very complicated word problem, and I was totally lost.

He stood up. “That’s it. We’re going to Pablo’s Putt-Putt.”

“We are?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to kick your
boyfriend’s
butt,” he replied, stomping toward the exit. “C’mon.”

I couldn’t believe it—Jack was
jealous
, and he was going to fight for my hand! Or at least fight for the right to be the only guy I made out with. So what if Michael wasn’t technically my boyfriend anymore; that was just a minor detail.

As we walked back to the car, I thought about how hot Jack looked when he got jealous.

“Red, this is about self-respect and self-esteem and all those other ‘self’ things,” he said.

“Self-respect? Whose? Mine?” I asked, confused.

“Mine!”

I sighed as I opened the door. “So you wouldn’t, like, fight for
me
?”

“Well, yeah, of course I would. You’re my…”

“Girlfriend?” I suggested.

“You know how I feel about labels,” he reminded me. “I was going to say you’re my Red.”

A half hour ago I may have fallen for that line, but now it just sounded super-cheesy. Even though she wasn’t supposed to discuss her patients, Mom once told me about a guy who would literally have a choking fit any time he tried to say the word “girlfriend” or would sneeze whenever anyone else used the word. Which meant that for three years, Mom had to use the word “ex-something” when talking about his girlfriends.

“But the thing of it is, you wouldn’t want a…Jack…who let someone disrespect him like that. You’d want a Jack who stood up for himself.”

Then it happened.

There had been a few times in my life where suddenly I had a moment where it felt like a veil was being lifted off my face, and I could really
see
someone. It had happened when I was eight, when one day I looked over and saw Jeremy sitting so close to the television that his nose was almost touching the screen, and I realized that he was always going to be weird, but even so, he was always going to be a lot more interesting than my other friends’ siblings. Not to mention he could help me with math and organizing. It had happened with Lulu that Sunday when I realized that she was a total hypocrite.

And it happened at that moment with Jack.

Of
course
he was talking about
his
self-respect and
his
self-esteem. Of
course
it was about him. Wasn’t it always? How many times did he seem to react to something I had just said, only to then come back and say something about himself? And then there was that conversation yesterday where he was going on and on so much about himself that he didn’t even notice I had gotten up and gone to the bathroom, and then he was
still
talking when I got back? With him, it was “The Jack Show” 24/7. Granted he was hot enough to have his own series, but I didn’t want to be in a relationship where I was a minor character with only one line. I wanted equal screen time. I deserved equal screen time!

I could sit there and make up as many excuses for him as I wanted: he was just super self-reflective and I was super-generous and that’s why we spent so much time talking about him, or he had a bad memory and that’s why he never remembered anything that didn’t somehow have to do with him. But the truth of the matter was that he was totally self-centered and way too preoccupied with himself to ever be in love with another human being (i.e., me). Not only that—he was a mooch!

And right then, as if by magic, a spell was broken. Jack wasn’t a charming, wolfishly hot dream-guy. He was a regular old selfish whatever-guy, and I just wasn’t into him anymore.

I felt a little shaky, but oddly free. My soul mate wasn’t my soul mate anymore. He was just some
guy
. Mulling over the concept of Jack being anything other than special seemed mathematically impossible at first—like how the plural of “sheep” is “sheep,” or the plural of “shrimp” is “shrimp,” or the plural of “fish” is “fish”—but it was absolutely 100-percent true.

Not only was Jack just a guy rather than a god, but I could see him a lot more clearly. Literally. Now it was like I saw through his disguises. Like when I looked closer at him, I saw that his perfectly wolfish grin wasn’t nearly so perfect. In addition to his teeth needing a major cleaning, his front tooth was a little chipped.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

Had his voice always been so nasal? Had I just not noticed until that moment?

“Nothing,” I replied. That wasn’t a lie. Nothing
was
the matter. In fact, it was all good.

He scooted closer to me. “You sure?” he asked, suspiciously.

I nodded absentmindedly, but didn’t say anything. Somehow, I didn’t think “I’ve realized that you’re just a regular old human being and not a reincarnation of Dante or the guy I want to spend my next five lifetimes with” was a very polite thing to say.

“You positive?”

“Yeah. Why?”

As he put his arm around me, I sniffed. Was that soup? Had he always smelled like soup? How could I have missed the soup smell? “I dunno. You just seem…different. You’re not mad at me, are you?” he asked anxiously.

“No, Jack. I’m not mad at you,” I sighed. There it was again. He never cared about me, or anyone really. He just cared about what people thought about
him
. And the fact that I thought he was a thief? To be a criminal, he would have actually had to think about things other than himself, like getaway cars and where to buy black ski masks.

“I don’t know what it is, but girls are always getting mad at me,” he went on. He shook his head and sighed. “It’s like I just can’t win. You say something nice in the moment, and then before you know it they’re trying to cash the check at the bank and they get all mad at you when it bounces.” He raked his hand through his hair. “How am I supposed to know how I’m going to feel three weeks from now?” He shook his head. “Here we are, living in a society that’s always telling us to live in the moment, but when someone then actually
does
that?” He snorted. “Man, it’s like a federal offense.” He turned to me. “What do you think, Red?”

“What do I think about what?”

“About why all these girls insist on thinking that if I say ‘I love you’ at some point, it actually…
means
something.”

I looked over at him, flabbergasted. But he had caught a glance of his face in the side mirror and was too busy checking out his profile to see how my jaw dropped so
far you could’ve fit an entire motorcycle in my mouth. “Because, Jack, it
does
mean something,” I retorted. “In fact, it means a lot.”

He turned to me, surprised. “Look at you, all feisty!” He gave me one of his smiles that I’d once thought were super-sexy, but that now came off as just plain old creepy. “That’s kind of hot.”

My response was to scoot closer to the door in case he tried to kiss me. It was funny—not a half hour before I would have killed to hear him call me hot, but now it was just skeezy.

My iPhone buzzed again with another text from Michael.

We’re still at Pablo’s. Not that you CARE or anything like that, seeing that you’ve got some wannabe musician as your new BF.

Another text came through.

FYI, just so u know, in case u planned on coming here, Pablo’s is at 11482 Hwy 35, in between Hospital Supplies R Us and Applebee’s.

Jack snatched the phone away from me and read it. “That’s it,” he said, turning the ignition and revving the engine as Barbra Streisand filled the air. “We’re going to Pablo’s so I can kick his butt. No one calls Jack Andrews a ‘wannabe musician’!”

I yawned. None of this was exciting anymore. Now it was just exhausting.

Pablo’s Putt-Putt must have been written up in some guidebook for grandparents under “Top Ten Places to Take Your ADD Grandchildren When They Come Visit You in Florida,” because when we got there, the place was packed with kids freaking out. I didn’t know which was more annoying—having to walk behind old people who moved as slow as snails despite the fact that they were all wearing shiny white Reeboks, or being hit in the head by golf balls shot by screaming eight-year-old boys who couldn’t wait until they got to the clown’s mouth or dancing cancan girl to tee off.

“So where’s your
boyfriend
?” Jack shouted over the blaring salsa music as we made our way through the crowd. I guess it didn’t bother any of the old people because none of them could hear anyway.

I rolled my eyes. “I told you—he’s not my boyfriend,” I yelled, trudging behind him.

He stopped in front of the refreshment stand. “I’ll have a chili dog with extra onions, some cheese fries, and a grape Frosty Freez,” he said to the guy behind the counter. He turned to me. “I bet your
boyfriend
doesn’t eat chili dogs.
Or
onions.”

I sighed and ducked as a kid who looked like a pumpkin used his grandfather’s cane to whack a golf ball. “I
told
you—I don’t
have
a boyfriend anymore. He hit the stop button.”

“Yeah, and you wouldn’t let me push ‘play’ again,” came a voice from behind me. “What on earth are you wearing on your head?”

I turned around to see Michael standing there in his
HIP-HOP HEEB
shirt with a girl who—judging from the fact that she definitely had a “booty” and was wearing a pair of leopard-print short-shorts to show it off—had to be Carmen.

Carmen ran her fingers through her dark, curly hair with chunky blonde streaks and looked me up and down. “Wait—
this
is her?” she asked, snapping her gum.

Jack crossed his arms and gave Michael the once-over. Michael crossed
his
arms and glared at him.

Jack turned to me. “You’d rather be with this clown than me?”

“I never said I wanted to be with him! I don’t want to be with anyone—I just want to be alone,” I said. Sure, the kissing and cuddling part of having a boyfriend was fun,
but the other stuff that went along with it? Like, say, the human being part? I wasn’t too wild about it. I’d rather date someone I didn’t have to actually speak to. Like Dante.

Carmen blew a bubble. “Aw,
chica
, you can’t just give up like that! I mean, you might not be eye candy or anything, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna end up alone for the rest of your life with cats or something nasty like that. You just gotta practice the power of positive thinking.” She walked over and fixed my hat so it wasn’t covering my eyes. “You should read that book—whatsitcalled…the one that Oprah was goin’ off on…”

“
The Secret
?” Jack offered.

Carmen turned to him and flashed him a very white smile. “Exactly!” she said with a wink.

“That’s twelve bucks, dude,” the counter guy said, handing over Jack’s food.

“Hey, Red, can you…?” Jack asked, trailing off.

I was so used to paying, I automatically reached for my emergency fund, which had dwindled down to almost nothing. As I was about to hand over the cash, I thought about
Nestled by Need
, when Devon’s family held an intervention and sent her to codependency rehab in Arizona after they discovered she was about to harvest her eggs to pay off her Slovakian auto mechanic-slash-sculptor’s credit card debt. Would that be me in five years? No food to eat, my clothes hanging off my body—because I had given all my emergency fund money to yet
another guy. Would I be standing in front of a circle of people saying, “Hi, my name is Sophie, and I’m addicted to kinda-hot guys who ride motorcycles and are way into themselves”?