The Girl with the Wrong Name Read Online Free PDF

texts this morning, you avoided me at the Trout, and you didn’t find me after school. We were totally fine on the phone last night. What changed?”
    “You did,” I didn’t say. “ You drank the girly-girl Kool-Aid in Florence, and now you’re hunting meat-brained linebackers as sexual prey.”
    “Who is it, dear?” Mom asked.
    Lou peeked over my shoulder and announced herself with a smile. “It’s Louise, Mrs. Lane.”
    “Sort of,” I muttered. I scanned her tight red dress and strappy sandals.
    Lou laughed. “Is thatwhat this is about? My dress? Come on, Thee. My mom made me get this dress for the final concert in Florence. I thought it would be a funny outfit for the first day back.”
    “It’s not the dress.”
    “Well then what?”
    “Aren’t you coming in, Louise?” Mom asked pointedly.
    “I’m trying, Mrs. Lane.” Lou dug her hand into her new suede saddlebag. “Okay, look, I can prove it’s me. Look.” She put her glasses on and slipped them up the bridge of her nose. Then she pulled her hair back into its familiar ponytail. “Mr. Schaffler, this editing bay was built in the late ’90s !” she exclaimed earnestly. “We needto upgrade all the A/V equipment in this room. I cannot produce the Sherman News in these conditions!”
    I lowered my head so she couldn’t see me smile. Louise Cho was doingLouise Cho, and it was a damn good impression.
    “Admit it, Ms. Rinaldi,” she went on. “The Tchaikovsky concerto was invented to mangle the slender fingers of Asian teens—”
    “Okay.” I glared at my mom over my shoulder. See? I asked silently, eyebrows raised. Not an intruder.
    Lou grabbed my shoulder and steered me toward my room. “Thee, I need your brilliance. I needa Cyrano letter.”
    The Cyrano Letters had started in seventh grade. Lou would fall in love with some sensitive young geek in the viola section, or a fellow techie in the middle school production of Godspell , and she wouldn’t have the guts to approach him. Instead she’d beg me to help her compose a “Declaration of Romantic Intent.” (Not to be confused with a “Love Letter.” Lou felt that, much like the word genius , the word love was tossed around far too prematurely and far too often.)
    I’d developed an early obsession with Cyrano de Bergerac,based on Steve Martin’s modern adaptation Roxanne . I guess the idea of pining for an unattainable love hit home with a dour seventh-grader who was always planning her wedding day when she should have been planning her bat mitzvah.
    Now, as we sped down the hall to avoid one of Mom’s generic Lou interviews (“How was your summer?” etc.), a dark irony was dawning. Lou probably hadn’t even realized it yet, but substitute an impossibly huge schnoz with a hideous scar, and I was Cyrano de Bergerac.
    “I have some ideas for the first paragraph,” Lou said breathlessly. She knew exactly where to find the blank composition notebooks on my desk, even buried under a heap of Mountain Dew cans, half-eaten desserts, and memory cards. “But this has to be all you, Thee. You’re the wordsmith here.”
    “Yeah, and I have two words for you already,” I said, tossing the daisies onto my bed. “Hell, no.” I shut my bedroom door and flopped onto the mattress. I quickly realized my hair was hanging off my face—exposing said scar—so I slid back against the wall, holding a pillow between my knees and chin. “But thanks for the flowers. This room could use them.”
    Lou scowled. She grabbed a notebook from my desk and cleared one of the piles of dusty Sunday New York Times from my formerly white couch, carving out a seat for herself. “I might have to repo them. You don’t get it. I need this one bad, Thee. Like really bad.”
    “Who’s it for?” I asked. I knew, but I wanted to hear it from her.
    Her lips twisted in a secret smile. “I can’t tell you. It’s too embarrassing.”
    “See, that’s a red flag right there. You can’t write a love letter to