Free Who's Your Daddy? by Lynda Sandoval

quickly signed on. Neither Caressa nor Meryl were on yet, but both of them had sent email messages in the middle of the night. MeryPs was first, and I couldn’t wait to read it because she always had a calming effect on me. I double-clicked on it:
    FROM: [email protected]
    TO: [email protected], [email protected]
    SUBJECT. The WEIRDEST thing!
    TIME: 1:45:17 A.M. , MST
    Lila—
    I hope everything’s okay at home. I’m SO worried about you, and I’m SO sad that the dumb supper got messed up. I promise I won’t say I told you so about getting busted, either. I just hope you’re not grounded until after graduation. :-P Just so you know, we didn’t keep going with the ceremony. We can try it again another solstice or equinox night, assuming you aren’t on house arrest for the rest of your natural-born life. But, here’s the real shocker: despite the problems, I think the purpose of the dumb supper might’ve worked!

    I paused in reading Meryl’s message to stave off a giant surge of nausea. Holy crap. Why hadn’t I seen this coming? If even-keel, logical MERYL thought the dumb supper might’ve worked, I was full-on hosed. HELLO, had she forgotten that the first guy I’d come face to face with was DYLAN freakin’-totally-not-for-moi SEBRING?!?! My throat squeezed, probably with the effort of holding back a panic puke. Dylan Sebring wouldn’t give me the time of day even if it was a direct order from my dad . Not to mention he had a GIRLFRIEND. This was ALL WRONG! Surely the dumb supper had to be OVER for the magic to happen, right? Dylan was NOT the rebel I wanted. He was a whole lot like my brother Luke … not to mention all my other brothers and my—horror of horrors—father.
    If fate thought I was destined to be with a guy like DYLAN, then all I could say was, fate needed to back sloooooowly away from the crack pipe.
    With more than a little effort, I shook off my selfabsorption and went back to Meryl’s email. I scanned it quickly, reading about how she’d gotten a flat tire on the way home,
blah blah blah
, and the first guy she’d seen was That Bosnian Guy. She wrote:

    His name is Ismet, in case you didn’t know. Ismet Hadziahmetovic, and his sister’s name is Shefka. Her name is pronounced pretty much how it looks, but his is pronounced ISH-met, not IZ-met or ISS-met.
    You guys, he’s SO sweet, and even though I’ve never really thought much about him before, he’s very cute. But the point is, there he was, totally out of the blue with NO explanation for it except the dumb supper. I can’t wait to hear what you both think about that.
    L&K,
    Meryl
    I groaned, feeling truly ill, and fired off a quick response to Meryl:
    FROM: [email protected]
    TO: [email protected], [email protected]
    SUBJECT: re: The WEIRDEST thing!
    TIME: 6:45:00 A.M. , MST
    Mer—
    This is so cool about Ismet. I’m truly happy for you.But please, please, PLEASE tell me that this could also be a coincidence and not a result of the dumb supper! :-0 HELLO, two words for you: Dylan Sebring. ACKKKKKK! If the dinner DID work, fate is evil and my life rots. But we knew that.
    Update: Dad’s not up yet. I’m awaiting my sentencing. I feel all sick and nervous inside, sort of like Joan of Arc, waiting to be burned at the stake. (Or at least how I imagine she must’ve felt.) I’m afraid he’s going to take away my computer! I mean, I can’t think of a more heinous punishment, so what else? [FRET] Is that even legal anymore? Isn’t Internet access a basic human right?
    www.LilaLivesInHell.com
    www.WishMeLuck.com
    —Lila
    Next, I double-clicked on Caressa’s reply to Meryl, which she’d written hours ago. She hadn’t even left her house, as far as I knew, so she couldn’t have had a dumb supper epiphany. Surely she’d set Meryl straight about the Ismet coincidence.

    FROM: [email protected]
    TO: