Read Online Going Off Script by Giuliana Rancic - Free Book Online Page A

and confused.
    “Uh, well, I, uh, have a new girlfriend, and I was hoping you could tell me whether I should give her flowers or lingerie for Valentine’s Day. What do you think?” He pulled a red teddy from the bag.
    “Omigod, definitely lingerie. That’s so sexy!” I felt grown up to be asked for such advice. “Okay, so, I have to go now! Good luck!” I turned and rejoined my friends.
    “What was that all about?” one of them wanted to know.
    “Oh, nothing, he just wanted my opinion about some lingerie for his girlfriend,” I said. There was a collective outcry of
“Eeew!! Gross!! That’s so creepy!!”
My friends convinced me that there was nothing innocent or remotely normal about a uniformed cop taking a sixteen-year-old girl out for after-school snacks in her short shorts and seeking her advice about underwear. The next time Pervy appeared out of the blue, I breezily waved at him and kept walking, and that was the end of that. I didn’t need or want his attention, anyway; I had a boyfriend.
    I was dating Lance, the 7-Eleven bad boy. Lance was one in a series of losers I gravitated toward. I was all shoot-for-the-moon when it came to pranks or outrageous behavior, but when it came to romance, I purposely aimed low. Little ventured, less lost. I boasted a perfect record of never being dumped only because I was accomplished in the art of preventive dumping. I never wanted anyone to see me hurt. My working assumption was that anyone who chose me would never want to keep me, except maybe the bottom-feeders who couldn’t get anyone else. If I sensed that a guy I liked was losing interest, I would bolt before he publicly confirmed how unworthy I was by leaving me first.
    When I pulled the plug on a relationship, everyone was going to know. I was not the type to beat a quiet retreat. Even the DMV knew that. Not everyone was that perceptive. There was Sam, for example. Sam was a cute Middle Eastern boy who hung out with the Euro crowd of kids whose parents were diplomats, World Bankers, and the like. Sam and I were briefly a couple in my senior year, until I left early one night when we went clubbing, only to hear later that he had made out with one of my friends, a hot Latina named Sophia. The next day, I went to school ready to kill them both. I waited for Sam after first period and slapped the crap out of him in the hallway in front of an appreciative audience. After second period, I found him again and did the same thing. Sam offered a very sincere apology and begged my forgiveness, which our hallway audience also appreciated. I started to melt, then changed my mind.
    “No! You know what? I’m going to slap you every period!” He had five more to go.
    I got a hall pass during third period, and spotted Sophia through the glass of a classroom door. I started gesticulating wildly until a few kids noticed me, and my mimed message was somehow relayed across the rows of desks to Sophia. Sophia looked up to see my angry face in the window.
“I am going to kill you,”
I mouthed, slashing a hand across my throat for emphasis. I then gestured for her to come out into the hall for her murder. Sophia shook her head. I gestured more vehemently. She pretended to pay attention to the English teacher droning on about Shakespeare. I decided that if Sophia wasn’t going to come out to get killed, I was going in. I opened the door, marched up to her desk, and dragged her out of her seat. She resisted by trying to hold on to anything in her path, like desks and heads. The teacher stood frozen in shock. Things like this did not happen at a school like Walt Whitman.
    Once in the hallway, we both fell to the floor, and a patheticgirl fight ensued with hair-pulling and screaming. We scuffled until the teacher broke it up and sent me to the vice principal. I got suspended and was told to go home. I left campus, but kept coming back after each period to slap Sam, who had run out at lunch to buy me roses in hopes I would stop