by Meg Cabot
4:34 PM
I’m sorry I had to tell you about it, but as you are my employer, I was obligated to.
But don’t take your mother’s actions personally. She was highly stressed. I’m sure she’ll feel better in a few days when she sees how much better the house looks without all this clutter. I’m going to have the floors professionally cleaned, so the cat smell should be gone by then, as well.
And really, you shouldn’t drink at Bud’s. It’s gotten very dicey over the past few years. There was a fight there not too long ago. One trucker broke a pool cue over the head of another after a disagreement stemming from the ownership of a Blake Shelton CD.
Reed Stewart
4:35 PM
Come with me to that new place on the square, then, Authentic. I highly doubt anyone’s ever been in a fight there over a country music CD.
Becky Flowers
4:36 PM
Thank you, but no. My boyfriend owns that place.
Reed Stewart
4:36 PM
Why would that be a problem? You said we have to keep this strictly professional, so wouldn’t he know that’s what this is?
Becky Flowers
4:36 PM
I think you need to stop slacking off and work harder.
Reed Stewart
4:36 PM
I beg your pardon. I’ve done a lot already. Have you seen the boxes I sorted from the dining room alone? By size and color, ready for removal by “your guys” to the POD.
I give you exhibit A.
Becky Flowers
4:37 PM
That is really not very impressive considering how much more of the house we have left.
Reed Stewart
4:38 PM
Look. Look, Becky. Gelato has come in and is sitting on my lap. Gelato likes me. Why don’t you?
Becky Flowers
4:38 PM
Well . . . I will admit, Gelato is quite discriminating. So if Gelato likes you, I suppose I could have one drink. At Matsumori’s. At 7.
But only as friends to discuss this problem with your family’s finances. Nothing more.
Reed Stewart
4:38 PM
“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
Becky Flowers
4:38 PM
*Emma*?
Reed Stewart
4:38 PM
Forsooth, Flowers, that’s from *Northanger Abbey*. You’re slipping.
Becky Flowers
4:38 PM
Isn’t that your dad I hear calling from the basement? I think he wants to show you something. I hope it’s another box of gavels! Too bad there’s no cell service down there.
Reed Stewart
4:38 PM
Wow. And I used to think the women in LA were the cattiest in the world.
Becky Flowers
4:38 PM
See you at 7
Authentic Wine and Cheese Boutique
added an event
13 hrs
St. Patrick’s Day Wine and Cheese Tasting
Tomorrow between 6pm and 10pm!
Sample some of our prize-winning
Irish Cheddars, Beara Blues, Clover Reds,
and Concannon Crimsons!
10% discount for any members of law enforcement
or the Armed Forces!
Henry de Santos, Tony Antonelli, Summer Hayes, Nicole Flowers, and 179 others like this.
TOP COMMENTS
Henry De Santos—Really cool of you to honor the Men and Women in Blue, bro!
Today at 2:16 PM
Graham Tucker—It’s my pleasure! Thanks for all that you do!
Today at 2:37
Nicole Flowers—Save me some of those ice wines.
Today at 2:45
Graham Tucker—You know I will! Is your sister coming?
Today at 3:12 PM
Nicole Flowers—I’m not my sister’s keeper, but I’m pretty sure she’ll be there.
Today at 3:15
Graham Tucker—Well, that’s good. It’s just that I haven’t heard from her much lately.
Today at 3:30
Nicole Flowers—Well, she got some new clients, so she’s been kind of busy.
Today at 3:45
Graham Tucker—Oh, I see! Well, let her know I’m thinking of her.
Today at 3:47
Nicole Flowers—I sure will!
Today at 4:05
Tony Antonelli—I’ll be there!
Today at 4:45 PM
Graham Tucker—Great, see you then.
Today at 4:50 PM
Trimble Stewart-Antonelli—Actually Tony and I won’t be able to attend. We have that award ceremony tomorrow night, don’t we, Tony?
Today at 6:15 PM
Tony Antonelli—Whoops! Sorry, I forgot.
Today at 6:20 PM
Graham Tucker—It’s all good. Next time!
Today at 6:40 PM
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Sweetie Ty
Reviewer ranking: #1,162,357
13% helpful
votes received on reviews
Reviewed:
Equi-Tussin Cough Syrup for Horses, 1 qt.
An effective decongestant and expectorant for horses, formulated for the treatment of the equine cold, flu, allergies and stable cough.
As pictured
March 16
My idea of a fun party is not to have a bunch of people come over to my house and drink punch with horse syrup in it.
No, that would be my idiot brother Tony Jr.’s idea.
But he busted me with Mom’s credit card (whatever. I was going to buy this totally hot Marc Jacobs beach cover-up for Spring Break and he walked in just as I was about to hit Order Now).
Tony Jr. said he’d rat me out unless I help him whip up a batch of lean, which—for all my classy readers out there who don’t know—is a mixed drink that immature high school kids who think they’re OG and can’t get proper party beverages consume.
So now I have to buy this disgusting horse cough syrup.
It hasn’t arrived yet, so I can’t tell you how it is.
I won’t list all the other ingredients of lean here because this is an upscale site. The fact that one of them is cough syrup should give you a clue.
But it isn’t supposed to be HORSE COUGH SYRUP.
I tried to argue with him, but Tony Jr. is Tony Jr. He still wears his baseball caps backwards. Enough said.
Anyway I have no choice but to attend this horrible soirée (which means party. I have straight As in French) because it’s tomorrow night on St. Patrick’s Day when our parents will be at the Kiwanis Club because they are giving our dad some kind of medal (which, lol, whatever) and I don’t trust Tony Jr.’s idiot friends unsupervised in our home.
I own over six pairs of Christian Louboutins and three Pradas and a signed Harry Styles poster. I’m not about to let some Tussed-up tweaker barf horse cough syrup and green Jolly Ranchers all over my perfect Harry.
And I still haven’t seen my uncle Reed, even though my friend Sundae texted that she saw him just now at Matsumori’s Tiki Palace with a lady.
Sundae says she couldn’t get a good look at the lady because she and my uncle Reed were at the bar, and you aren’t allowed at the bar at Matsumori’s unless you’re 21 or over, and Sundae couldn’t use her fake ID because she was there with her parents.
But she said the lady def wasn’t Ava Kuznetsov.
Ugh, my life SUX. I wish I had been born in London, England, instead of boring Bloomville, Indiana. There is nothing to do here at all, even if you aren’t grounded, which is why people like my brother make drinks like lean, which by the way caused L’il Wayne to be hospitalized. Allegedly.
And he didn’t even use horse cough syrup.
1 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
From: Dolly Vargas [email protected]
Dat
e: March 16 8:42:10 PM EST
To: Reed [email protected]
Subject: Lyrexica Offer
Are your ears ringing? Because I’ve been talking about you all day, darling. Lyrexica has upped their offer again:
Seven figures!
That’s right. One million dollars for your beautiful, shaggy head.
I know. I can hardly believe it myself. I’d like to think it has something to do with my amazing negotiating skills.
But I think it probably has more to do with the fact that your old buddy Cobb Cutler has made a complete jackass of himself on social media. Who is stupid enough to post that his divorce from a woman he barely lived with is more painful than the loss of his own father, let alone the death of his beloved dog? That’s simply un-American.
A guy with parents who tried to hoodwink a waitress with a phony stamp looks pretty good in comparison!
Be sure to get back to me soon, though. You can only ignore these big pharma phonies for so long.
Oh, and I finally figured out where I’d heard of Bloomville: A former colleague of mine, Tim Grabowski, left a successful job in IT to open up an antique shop or a bookstore or something ridiculously quaint like that. So be sure to tell him hi from me when you see him!
Anyway, did I ever tell you that you’re my favorite client? You and that brilliantly shiny head of hair of yours.
XOXOX
Dolly
Dolly Vargas
Vargas Talent Management
Los Angeles, CA
From: Reed [email protected]
Date: March 16 11:27:21 PM EST
To: Lyle [email protected]
Subject: Her
Dear Uncle Lyle,
I tried what you said in your last email about going back and reexamining decisions made when one was in one’s youth, then changing one’s behavior.
It didn’t work.
In fact, it was a huge disaster.
I saw Becky again today, and I actually convinced her to spend time with me alone—well, not alone, exactly. We went to Matsumori’s for drinks, and somehow drinks turned into appetizers, and then appetizers turned into dinner, and before we knew it—well, before she knew it, anyway, because I was hoping for it all along—we’d spent the whole night together.
Not like that. Get your mind out of the gutter. Ha, kidding, I know you’re not like that. Well, of course you ARE like that, but you keep it to yourself like a gentleman. We spent the evening together, but it was only dinner.
It was exactly like it used to be, only better, because neither of us had a curfew and we didn’t have to worry about finishing our homework (not like I ever worried so much about that).
It was like no time had gone by at all since we’d last been together—she’s exactly the same, only sadder, I guess, because of her dad dying, and her having had to take over the family business. Did you know she’s only ever been out of the state a couple of times? And never out of the country. She never had the money or the time. She wanted to know all about my trips to Scotland and China.
It made me feel good, thinking about taking her overseas. I could see us traveling together, showing her things she’s never seen before, being with her when she tries haggis and dim sum for the first time. Well, maybe not haggis, but you get what I’m saying.
Is it weird that I feel this way? Is it weird that I’ve traveled the whole world and met women from nearly every country, and the one I still have the most fun with and am most excited by is the one from my hometown, whom I’ve known since kindergarten?
Is it wrong that I want to take her away from her terrible job cleaning up other people’s messes and show her what she’s been missing? There’s an incredible world out there that she’s never experienced.
She’s never seen Paris. She’s never seen your orchids. She’s never seen the month of March without snow!
But somehow I think I managed to fall for the one woman who is more into books and binders than she is into private jets and beaches.
Still, after we left the restaurant tonight (which didn’t happen until closing time—they started putting the chairs on the tables, so they could sweep beneath them, which goes to show how deep into our own conversation we were: we didn’t even notice we were the only two customers left in the place), and started walking towards our cars, something came over me.
Maybe it was because the moon was shining and the air was so crisp and sharp in that way it never gets in LA because it so rarely dips below freezing. Someone somewhere in Bloomville had a fire going in their fireplace, and I could smell that good clean scent of burning pine.
Anyway, even though I know now that it was the worst idea in the world, I did something terrible:
I went in for a good-night kiss.
(Look, you’ve told me what went on in the Seventies on Fire Island. You can bear with me for this, which is tame in comparison.)
I was just feeling so happy and free and hopeful about the future . . . and, okay, maybe a little drunk from the sake and the smell of the burning pine.
And she looked so beautiful in the moonlight, and she was smiling, and I didn’t think it would be a bad thing.
So I reached out and took her hand and pulled her over to me, and she didn’t stop smiling, or anything. She just looked up, kind of inquisitively, like, “Yes?”
I couldn’t help myself. I cupped her face in my hands and I kissed her, the way I’d kissed her a thousand times before, back when we used to go out.
Only this time there was something different about it.
This time it wasn’t sweet and pleasant and fun, like I remember it being, the way I’d wanted it to be.
This time it was deep and dark and serious.
She didn’t turn it that way. I did. The minute I touched her, this . . . longing just about kicked me in the solar plexus. I don’t know any other way to describe it. All I knew was that this time, I wasn’t letting her go, and that this was a kiss for keeps, because even though it wasn’t like old times, it was. All the old memories of those nights in the boathouse and her bedroom and my bedroom came flooding back . . .
. . . only this was no trip down memory lane. It was a rocket ride.
I don’t think I ever would have let her go, either, if she hadn’t suddenly pushed me away—recoiled, maybe, is a better word for it. She recoiled from me—and gasped.
When she’d staggered what she must have decided was a safe distance (about ten feet away, which is nice to know. She feels like she needs to keep a ten foot parameter between us), she cried, her eyes blazing in the moonlight, “I’ve got a boyfriend, remember?”
Can you believe it? She boyfriended me!
I nearly lost it. Boyfriend? What boyfriend? We spent the whole evening drinking sake and eating spicy tuna rolls, while her best friend’s mother brought out special after special, such as miso-marinated black cod and hamachi kama, telling us how glad she was to see us, especially since “Leeanne” was on her way home and was going to be so glad to see us, too.
The implication was “see us back together,” as in “a couple,” and Becky never batted an eye.
Then, after we have the most explosive kiss in the history of time, the boyfriend suddenly matters?
And this boyfriend, let me tell you, I checked him out. You bet I did! He owns just about the lamest wine and cheese place you’ve ever seen. If it were in Palm Springs, you and all your friends would drive right past it since it would be filled with trophy wives in their yoga pants drinking pinot noir because their neurologists told them it won’t give them migraines.
Plus, he’s got a beard, and wears slim fit crewnecks to show off his biceps.
But she likes him anyway!
“Besides,” she goes on. “I thought we agreed to keep this professional.”
This was the best kiss of the century, and she wants to keep it professional!
What could I say? What could I do?
I know I’m the one who messed it all up.
<
br /> But how could I have stayed ten years ago? I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t.
And deep down, she knows it, too. Just like she knows I couldn’t have asked her to come with me. Unlike me, she was college material. She got that great scholarship. She had to go.
That’s the real reason I couldn’t answer any of her phone calls or letters. What was I going to say? Ask her to wait for me? I had no idea how long it was going to take me to make something out of myself. That wouldn’t have been fair to her. It was better to make a clean break of it.
Enrique—you know Enrique—thinks I should have called her years ago, and that I don’t have a snowball’s chance of getting her back now.
He’s probably right. I’m sure he and the other caddies are taking bets on how badly I’m going to lose at the Palm because of all this. There’s no way I’m ever going to get my swing back or my head on straight in time for the tournament after this.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I told her I wasn’t here to rescue her. So what was I doing? It’s obvious she loves her life here. The way she talked about it tonight . . . she was interested in the places I’ve been, but more the way someone is interested in the plot of a movie they’d like to see someday, but aren’t feeling deprived for having missed, because they’ve seen plenty of other good movies.
God, why am I telling you all this? You didn’t even ask. You wanted to know how Mom and Dad are doing.
Well, the answer is bad. You should see the basement. It’s like a black pit of despair. How does anyone let anything get that way? I never want to end up living like that.
But Becky is going to save them. Because that’s what she does. She thinks someone might even be defrauding them. She doesn’t understand how they could have so little money and yet so little to show for it. She wants us kids to look into it. Because that’s another thing she does—rights injustices, or tries to, when she sees them.