The Smart One and the Pretty One by Lazebnik Claire

Author:Lazebnik, Claire [Lazebnik, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Retail
ISBN: 9780446542760
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

The restaurant told them it would be a fifteen-minute wait for a table, and Daniel said he was in too much of a hurry to stick it out. He suggested they grab a quick bite instead at the Wahoo’s Fish Taco restaurant that they had passed on the way there. Lauren looked down at her dressed-to-kill outfit with a good-natured sigh and let him take her to Wahoo’s. They ordered burritos and Coronas and settled down in a corner booth with their drinks.

Lauren looked around the room. “I feel unusually old,” she said.

Daniel scanned the room, taking in the teenagers who were spread out around the entire restaurant, halloing to one another and touching fists and running from table to table. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Would you want to be a teenager again?” Lauren said. “Hang out with friends, do homework, hate your parents, resent your teachers . . . the whole thing?”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “No one wants to be a teenager. That’s the suckiest part of life.”

A server came up to the table and presented them with two comically enormous burritos. They thanked him and he saluted them before rushing back behind the counter.

“I liked high school,” Lauren said, studying her burrito, trying to figure out the best way to tackle it without making a huge mess. “I had great friends and played on a lot of sports teams and was totally happy.”

“There’s something deeply wrong with you.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Yeah, probably. But at least I didn’t enjoy being a teenager.”

Lauren picked up a plastic knife and cut a long slit into the burrito. “So what made those years so sucky for you?”

Daniel cut his own burrito in half, neatly, right across the middle. “Well, my father up and died, for one thing. Which, oddly enough, wasn’t the worst part of those years. I mean, it was awful, but in a big, overwhelmingly tragic, everyone-feels-sorry-for-you-and-you-get-out-of-doing-any-work kind of way. It wasn’t the soul-draining mind-suck of boredom and pettiness that the rest of high school was.”

“Good times, good times,” Lauren said jovially.

“Yeah, right.”

She flicked through the burrito contents with her fork, seeking out the rare narrow strips of red pepper. “What did your father die of?”

“It was a stroke. Quick and painless. For him at least. Nothing like the shit my mother’s going through now.”

She raised her head to look at him. “It must be awful.”

“It’s fine,” he said. He picked up a burrito half and took a big bite out of it, hunching his body forward over the table to get his mouth to it instead of raising the burrito higher.

“Come on,” Lauren said. “You know it’s not fine.”

“What do you know about it? Miss Happy Cheerleader with the perfect intact family?” He put the burrito down, wiped his mouth roughly with the napkin, and raised the beer bottle to his lips. “How could you possibly know what this is like for me?” He put the bottle down with a dull clunk on the hard table.

“I wasn’t a cheerleader,” Lauren said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.