The Cinderella Pact by Sarah Strohmeyer Read Free Book Online Page B

ones.”
    I grip my purse. Not my standards, Belinda’s higher British ones? Listen, I’m tired of being the nun from Romeo and Juliet, I want to tell him. Look at my chin. Do you see hairs? Is there a cowl around my head and a cross dangling from my neck?
    And then it hits me. OK, Princeton’s Gift to Women, let’s have some real fun.
    â€œI’ll tell you what.” I reach into my purse, pulling out the tiny black “food diary” I picked up at the bookstore along with Who Moved My Fat? I rip off a blank page. “I’ll give you Belinda’s e-mail, her personal e-mail, not the one her columns go to, and you can write her yourself.” I scribble it and hand it to him.
    Nigel takes the paper with gleaming eyes. “You won’t regret it.”
    â€œOh, I’m sure I won’t.”
    Boom! The conference door flings open and there stands Lori DiGrigio looking nothing short of insane.
    â€œI can hear you two all the way in there.” She waves to the conference room where I spy my friend Lisa from Books, her eyes wide. “Why weren’t you at the meeting? You’re so late, it’s over.”
    â€œThere was a meeting? Fancy that.” Nigel, calm as crystal ice, checks inside where everyone is standing, pushing in their chairs and mumbling somberly. Joel, Lisa, and Dawn, Lori’s former secretary who was replaced by a dimwitted Valley Girl from Swarthmore, file past us.
    â€œSorry, Lori,” I begin, feeling the familiar panic rise again, “I didn’t know if . . .”
    â€œYou.” She points a finger straight at me. “I need to see you now. Alone.”
    I flash Nigel a wave of my fingertips, wishing that I were as lucky as he to be spared a private conference with this rabid pit bull, and slide against the wall into the room. Lori slams the doors behind me. It is just the two of us, and her bloodred nails are digging into the flesh of her elbows.
    â€œI have a question for you,” she says. “Just who in the hell is the real Belinda Apple?”

Chapter Five
    Five Things You Couldn’t Pay Me to Wear (Even If I Were Thin):
    1. Cropped tops
    2. Flimsy T-shirts that say things in sparkly lettering
    3. Polyester bicycle shorts
    4. White pants
    5. Thongs
    Â 
Thong ! is the first word that pops into my mind when Lori DiGrigio demands to know who the real Belinda Apple is. No matter what she is saying, all my attention has turned to the very faint straps of her red thong peeking above the waist of her Tahari black pants. Accident? I’ll venture not.
    After all, David Stanton is out of his deathbed.
    It is common knowledge that Lori is plotting and planning to become the last Mrs. David Stanton so she can cash in à la Anna Nicole Smith. Seeing her thong, I realize she has taken a hint from Monica Lewinsky and decided that the first step in finding billion-dollar love is to reveal one’s underwear the way baboons flash their crimson bums to show they are in heat.
    Lisa heard a rumor from someone in Food that a few years back, when Lori was in Manhattan to meet with Corporate, she and Mr. Stanton stayed out past his bedtime of eight p.m. to take in a Big Band swingathon and that later she unzipped his pants in an alley and . . . Well, I’m sure it’s not true. I can’t imagine Lori doing that. Correction, I don’t want to imagine Lori doing that, especially in an alleyway with an octogenarian.
    â€œDon’t you know?” Lori is saying.
    â€œI . . .” I don’t know what to say.
    â€œThat Belinda Apple doesn’t exist?”
    I freeze. Simply freeze when Lori says this. She is staring at me, but I am unable to stare back because my entire life is flashing before my eyes.
    Somehow I find inner strength, possibly hidden in the criminal core of my id, to ask with an eerily calm voice, “What do you mean Belinda Apple doesn’t exist?”
    â€œI mean that everything about