Read Online Geek Abroad by Piper Banks - Free Book Online

date—I didn’t see them kissing or anything—but they were laughing a lot. I’m so sorry. I hate being the one to tell you about it, but I also don’t want you to waste your time in London worrying that you’re cheating on Dex.
    I stopped reading Charlie’s e-mail, and then started again from the beginning. But the content didn’t change. Dex had been out on a date. With some other girl.
    I began blinking very fast, trying to keep back the tears that were welling up in my eyes and clinging wetly to my lashes. My stomach felt pinched and sour, and my throat was oddly dry and prickly at the same time, as though I’d swallowed a fistful of feathers.
    So that was why Dex hadn’t written to me . . . he’d found someone else. A girl who made him laugh. Charlie hadn’t said whether the girl was pretty, but I had to assume she was. Dex’s last girlfriend was a model. In fact, maybe that was why he’d lost interest in me; maybe I wasn’t pretty enough for him.
    I could actually feel a throbbing pain in my heart. I had liked Dex. Really, really liked him. And I’d thought he liked me, when clearly . . .he hadn’t. Or, at least, he hadn’t liked me enough. Which was almost worse.
    I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t come to London. What if I’d canceled my trip at the last minute and stayed home? Would Dex and I be together then? Would he be at the movies with me, laughing at my jokes?
    “Miranda.”It was Sadie, calling from the bottom of the stairs. The house was so tall and narrow that her voice echoed in the stair-well. “Dinner’s ready! And I put the Mame DVD on!”
    I inhaled a deep, ragged breath, and tried not to sniffle.
    “Okay, I’m coming,”I said, shutting down my e-mail, without responding to Charlie’s note.
    Merry Christmas to me, I thought, and sadly wiped the tears off my cheeks with the back of my hand before heading downstairs.
    Chapter 7

    Sadie and I had plans to spend a quiet Christmas lounging around in our pajamas, drinking cocoa and watching a movie marathon of all our old favorites: Jerry Maguire, Moonstruck, Gone with the Wind . We ate leftover quiche for breakfast, and Sadie planned to roast a duck for dinner. I felt too depressed over Dex to really get into the Christmas spirit, but I tried to fake it for my mom’s sake. And I was—temporarily, at least—cheered when I opened Sadie’s gift to me: the new laptop I’d been pining away for.
    “Mom!”I cried, pulling the laptop out of its box and cradling it against my chest. “It’s perfect, perfect, perfect!”
    Sadie beamed at me. “I thought you’d like it,”she said. “And I adore my new bookends.”
    Sadie loves all things Art Deco, and I’d been lucky enough to score a pair of vintage bronze greyhound bookends on eBay. She’d already set them out on her desk, where they stood guard over a row of her best-selling novels, which she wrote under her pen name, Della De La Courte.
    My dad had sent me a pretty gold bracelet, Peyton gave me a gift certificate for a pedicure (which I knew was her way of criticizing the state of my feet), and Hannah gave me a cute T-shirt with a picture of the Union Jack on it, which just goes to show she can be oddly thoughtful at times. Finn gave me a computer game he’d designed, and Charlie had painted a tiny portrait of my dog, Willow.
    All in all, it was a great Christmas. . . . Except for the part where I was completely heartbroken over Dex.
    “Forget about him,”Sadie declared once she’d finally dragged out of me the truth about why I was so mopey. “Have I taught you nothing? You don’t need a man, Miranda.”
    “I know,”I said sadly. “I just really thought he liked me.”
    “Well, if he doesn’t, there must be something wrong with him,”Sadie said.
    “Of course you’d say that. You’re my mother.”
    At this, Sadie looked surprised. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to your faults.”To prove her point, she began to tick them off on her