Free Cupcake by Rachel Cohn Page A

casual, old-school hip-hop look, with green Adidas track pants slung low on the hips, and a short, tight white Grandmaster Flash T-shirt. Your long black licorice hair is tied in a bunch behind your head, to allow maximum attention on your bare vanilla shake midriff. You've got new curves to strut, and you know it.
    You do not answer a phone call from your mother on the way to this booty call.
    YOU DO NOT!
    Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I apparently am.
    85
    "Cyd Charisse, why can I hear so much noise? Where are you?"
    "Walking around the Village. I'm allowed."
    "It's one in the morning there!"
    "Which means it's ten in San Francisco. Shouldn't you be in bed by now, Mom?"
    "I'm in the last trimester of my fourth pregnancy. I have two children running me ragged." (False. She has a nanny and a housekeeper whom my younger siblings run ragged.) "I do not sleep." (Translation: The doctor cut off her Ambien supply until the baby's born.) "I try to keep Ash and Josh from killing each other, I worry about you flung out in New York City, and I go to the bathroom regularly." (Fair enough.) "But I do not sleep." (Clearly.)
    Silent pause followed by an audible sigh. On my part, not hers--though I'd just pulled off her signature move--the "Nancy Classic," as I call it. I swear, I am becoming her. It's scary. However, I further swear I won't end up like her, a fresh young thing who left home at eighteen to start a new life in Manhattan and wound up knocked up by a married man.
    "Mom, why are you calling me?" Don't ask me about the Plan, don't ask me about the Plan.
    "I wanted to hear how Danny's party for you went."
    Phew. I could be honest about that one. "I don't know. I left it."
    "You what? Isn't that a little rude?" A lot rude, probably. I had other things on my mind. Like that I was within a block of the Luis
    86
    meeting point, and I didn't need my mother ruining my mood. "CC, are you still there? I don't like the sound of this. You're not getting into trouble again, are you? I thought we were through with that. I thought--"
    Done. Click. Phone turned off. The CC signature move.
    Everybody's good at something. Danny bakes. Shrimp paints. Max composes. I ... don't know my own special skill yet, but if I had to nominate one it would probably be my ability to wear skirts that barely fall below my ass and yet somehow not come off looking like a skanky ho either. (I think.)
    My mother? Her special skill is never letting me forget that once upon a time I was a so-called bad girl, a little princess who was pregnant on her sixteenth birthday. Expelled from posh boarding school soon after the pregnancy was terminated--and all because of a bad ex-boyfriend, who not only didn't help out with the clinic visit, but was also dealing drugs out of his dorm room (with me in it). All the trouble that came before I went home to San Francisco, grew up a little, fished out a Shrimp, and then bravely threw him back into the sea.
    I'm on my own now. I don't have to answer to my mother. I made my sacrifice.
    As I approached the meeting spot, I noticed Luis's center court height first. I loved my pint-size surfer boy Shrimp, but there's something intoxicating about a guy taller than me. For one thing,
    87
    at my height there aren't that many of them dudes. For another thing, those extra inches towering over me somehow feel protective, and safe, and sexy--at least on the right guy. After Luis's height, my eyes honed in on the gold cross chain dangling over the black hair on his tank-top-attired chest's luscious cinnamon skin. The shine of the gold cross chain felt like a divine signal calling out to me, Hail Mary, how've ya been? Is this center court body the answer to your prayers, or what?
    "Damn," Luis said. His hands mimicked the outline of a curvy female silhouette. "You look good." I believed his sincerity. He looked like he was about to salivate, and not on account of the milk shake in his hands. "Different. All grown up and filled out.