Free Have a Nice Guilt Trip by Lisa Scottoline, Francesca Serritella Page A

you, and I’d never tell a soul.”
    Now that’s friendship.
    It’s also insane. I got us safely away from the computer, but my bff/enabler continued to make her case as we walked my dog outside.
    “Maybe you could just order it, and we could try it on in your bedroom, and then you could return it,” she said. “After we take pictures, obviously.”
    I laughed. “I should get my hair done for it.”
    “Yes! You will get a blow out, and we’ll take pictures in it.”
    We’ve had a lot of Lucy and Ethel schemes in our time, but this was definitely the worst. “What if something happens to it?”
    “Like what? They have free returns!”
    “But what if it tears? What if I take it out and it’s defective, but they don’t believe me? What if I try to send it back and it gets lost in the mail?”
    “I’m sure they have a procedure for that.”
    “Yeah, like charging me fifteen grand that I don’t have!”
    We took a few steps without talking, our wheels silently turning.
    A fellow writer herself, my friend came up with her strongest argument yet. “It’d make a great column.”
    I didn’t buy the dress.
    But I did put it on my wish list.

 
    I Know It When I See It
    By Lisa
    You may have heard that pictures of a topless Kate Middleton were published on the Internet.
    Did you look at them?
    Fess up.
    I looked.
    You might think I’m a perv, but I admit, I was curious.
    So what do Kate Middleton’s breasts look like?
    I can tell you exactly.
    They’re round, and each one has a nipple.
    Just like my breasts, and most breasts you’ve ever seen.
    Okay, maybe not my breasts, of late.
    Late being since I turned thirty.
    Which was when my breasts turned sixty.
    I cannot explain why my breasts became a senior citizen before I did. All I know is that my butt is already on social security.
    I’m here to tell you that if my breasts looked like Kate Middleton’s breasts, I would not be complaining when they showed up on the Internet. In fact, I would email pictures of my breasts to everyone in sight, until people blocked them as spam, and then I still wouldn’t stop.
    When I saw Kate Middleton’s breasts, I got breast envy.
    By the way, no woman I know has penis envy.
    Freud was totally wrong about that.
    Women envy men’s power, paycheck, and ability to take the lid off any jar.
    But their penises, men can keep.
    Not interested.
    I have a tough enough time zipping my jeans.
    Of course, I understand why it was an invasion of privacy to show the photos, and why the royal couple is upset.
    But the royal pair is great.
    It was a French magazine that published the photos first, and an Irish newspaper published them next. And finally the Italians, and being Italian-American, I’m very disappointed.
    Why did they let the French get the jump?
    What about la dolce vita and all that?
    After all, Italians practically invented breasts. The proof is any fountain in Italy. The water ain’t squirting out of fish mouths.
    Who wants to drink anything from a fish?
    Perhaps to make up for their tardiness, the Italians intended to publish two hundred photos of Kate Middleton’s breasts.
    Way to go.
    That’s four hundred breasts, which is plenty for all of Europe. Its economy may be sagging, but guess what’s perky?
    Right.
    Interestingly, the brouhaha, or brahaha, over the photos of Kate Middleton’s breasts occurred in the same week that the U.S. Embassy in Libya was attacked and four of its staff slain, including our Ambassador, Christopher Stevens. I was reading the article about the attack online and was clicking through the photos, when all of a sudden, one was a photo of Ambassador Stevens, murdered.
    There was no warning at all.
    No NSFW.
    Not even a NSFHB. Or, Not Safe For Human Beings.
    To me, if photos of murdered people are Safe For Work, I don’t want to work there.
    There are spoiler alerts for a plot twist in Breaking Bad, but there’s nothing when something breaks as bad as it gets.
    Because, for some reason,