Read Online Ready or Not by Meg Cabot - Free Book Online Page B

Dauntra refused to believe this, but it’s cool she even cares. Some people I know—well, okay, Kris Parks, to be exact—only pretend to care about issues because doing so looks good on their college applications.
    â€œI was thinking about pouring Aunt Jemima all over the inside of my JanSport,” Dauntra went on, “so when Stan reaches inside it tonight, he gets a big handful of syrup. But I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good backpack.”
    â€œYeah,” I said. “I can see how that might hurt more than help. Besides, it isn’t Stan’s fault, necessarily. He’s just doing his job.”
    Dauntra narrowed her eyes at me. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what all the Nazis said in their own defense after World War Two.”
    I didn’t think searching someone’s backpack for stolen DVDs was quite the same as killing seven million people, but I didn’t figure Dauntra would appreciate me mentioning that out loud.
    â€œAnyway,” she said, changing the subject, “how was that new art class? The life drawing one?”
    â€œOh,” I said. “Kind of, um, startling.” I still didn’t feel comfortable bringing up the David thing, so I just said, “Did you know life drawing meant nudes?”
    Dauntra didn’t even look up from the manga she’d cracked open over the register’s keyboard.
    â€œYeah. Of course.”
    â€œOh,” I said, slightly let down. “Well, I didn’t. So I got to see my first—you know.”
    That got her attention.
    â€œThe nude model was a GUY?” She looked up from the comic book—well, it was really a comic novel, or graphic novel. I should start trying to get the terminology correct, since someday I hope to write and illustrate mangas of my own. “I thought nude models were always women.”
    â€œNot always, I guess,” I said.
    â€œYou know, some guy dropped his pants in front of me on the Metro the other day,” Dauntra said incredulously, “for free. I had to call the cops. And, like, this Susan Boone lady, she pays some guy money to do it?”
    â€œYeah,” I said.
    Dauntra shook her head in disbelief. “Did you feel violated? Because whenever a guy shows me his goods when I’m not interested in seeing them, I feel violated.”
    â€œIt wasn’t really like that,” I said. “I mean, you know. It was art.”
    â€œArt.” Dauntra nodded. “Sure. I can’t believe a guy gets paid to show off his goods, and people call it art.”
    â€œWell, not the showing-off-his-goods part,” I said. “But the drawings we make of it.”
    Dauntra sighed. “Maybe I should take up being a nude model. I mean, you get paid just to sit there.”
    â€œNaked,” I pointed out.
    â€œSo what?” Dauntra shrugged. “The human form is a thing of beauty.”
    â€œExcuse me.” A tall guy in a beret—no, really, a French beret, although he didn’t happen to look French—approached the counter. “I believe you’re holding a film for me. The name is Wade, W-A-D—”
    â€œYeah, it’s right here,” I said quickly. Because the guy in the beret is a regular, and even though I’d only been working at Potomac Video for two months, I knew that if you didn’t head off Mr. Wade at the pass, he’d go on for as long as he could about his film collection, which is extensive, and mostly in black and white.
    â€œAh, yes,” he said, when I showed him the DVD we’d been holding for him. “ The Four Hundred Blows . You know it, of course?”
    â€œOf course,” I said, even though I had no idea what he was talking about. “That will be fourteen seventy-nine.”
    â€œOne of Truffaut’s finest,” Mr. Wade said. “I have it on video, of course, but it’s really the kind of film you can’t own enough copies