Fast & Loose by Elizabeth Bevarly (the giving tree read aloud .txt) 📕

“Lu?” her friend said in a voice Lulu remembered well from their childhood. It was the one Bree had always used in Brownies or art class when they were doing a craft and Lulu glued something to her forehead without realizing it. She hadn’t heard her friend use it since the pufferfish girl incident. “What’s wrong?” Bree asked. “Why do I get the feeling you’re about to tell me something that’s going to make me say, ‘Oh, Lulu, what have you done?’ Again.”

Pointing at the television again, Lulu told her friend, “I met him the other day.”

“Scott Reynolds?” Bree asked, brightening. “Did his hair look as fabulous in person as it does on TV?”

Lulu shook her head. “No, not him. Cole Early. The guy they just interviewed.”

Bree’s dark eyebrows arched so high, they disappeared under her bangs. “You met Cole Early? Are you serious? Why didn’t you tell me? You know the entire goal of my life is to be the kept woman of a guy like that. If you’ve met him, it puts me within one degree of separation.”

It wasn’t hyperbole on Bree’s part. Her life’s goal really was to be the kept woman of some rich guy. Ever since kindergarten, where she and Lulu first met, she’d said she was going to grow up to marry one of the richest men in the world. By sixth grade, she had begun doing research and making graphs. By high school, she’d narrowed it down to where her ambition in the senior yearbook said: “To become Mrs. Bill Gates. Or Sra. Carlos Salinas. Or Sig.ra Silvio Berlusconi. Or Fr. Ingvar Kamprad. Or Princess Sabrina bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud.” Bree had always been an equal opportunity gold digger.

With the harsh reality that set in with college, however—the realization that there were very few billionaires walking down the streets of Louisville on any given day—Bree had become less adamant about the Forbes and People magazine lists, not to mention necessarily wanting to marry the guys. These days, all Bree wanted—and Lulu did mean all she wanted—was to find a guy who raked in at least a high seven figures a year and drove (choose as many as applied) a Ferrari, Maserati, Porsche, Lamborghini, Mercedes, Jaguar, or at least a really nice Lexus. During Derby time in Louisville when most people were trying to decide which horses had the most potential to win the race, Bree was trying to decide which out-of-towners had the most potential to array her in Prada.

It wasn’t because she was shallow that she’d developed such an ambition at such an early age, however. It was because she never knew her father and grew up watching her mother struggle for meager amounts of money, security, and self-confidence. Although Lulu didn’t necessarily agree with her friend’s certainty that money could not only buy happiness, but also security and some righteous self-esteem, she didn’t begrudge Bree her quest. Lulu’s own home life growing up hadn’t been the most stable in the world, and Bree had expenses these days that Lulu sure wouldn’t want to shoulder.

But neither did she have any desire to put her happiness and her future in someone else’s hands. Bree, however, couldn’t wait to unburden her burden onto someone else. Preferably someone with open table reservations at Spago and an account at Tiffany’s.

Lulu met her friend’s accusatory gaze sheepishly. “I didn’t tell you I met Cole Early because I didn’t know the guy I met was Cole Early. I thought he was just some jerk guy.”

Now Bree looked at Lulu as if she wanted to smack her forehead. Hard. And not Bree’s forehead, either. No, Bree looked like she wanted to smack Lulu’s forehead. Hard. “Okay, number one,” she began, “how could you not know Cole Early when he’s been in the paper like every day for the past two weeks?”

“Oh, the sports section,” Lulu said. “Who reads the sports section?”

Bree gaped at her. “In April? In Louisville? Oh, I don’t know, Lulu. Maybe everybody? ’Cause how else are you going to know which horse to pick for the Derby?”

Lulu shrugged. “I usually just pick the jockey silks I like best.”

Bree closed her eyes, and judging by the almost imperceptible movement of her lips, Lulu was pretty sure she was counting slowly to ten.

“Or sometimes,” she added, “if the horse has a name I like, I go for that.”

Make that twenty Bree was counting to.

Finally, she opened her eyes. But she continued as if the break in conversation had never happened, “And number two, even if you didn’t know Cole Early, how could you possibly mistake that…that paragon of perfection, that ideal of impressiveness, that gem of juiciness, that nonpareil of numminess, that—”

“Bree?”

“What?”

“You’re starting to drool.”

Without missing a beat, Bree swiped the back of her hand across her lips, lifted her beer to enjoy a healthy swig, then concluded, “How could you mistake that…that hard copy of hunka hunka burnin’ love…”

“Oh, now, you’re reaching for that one.”

“…that masterpiece of manhood and monument for moolah…How could you mistake that for some jerk guy?”

Lulu fidgeted on her seat a little. Bree did sort of have a point. “Well, he acted like kind of a jerk guy when I talked to him.”

“You talked to him?” Bree squealed.

“And he did knock me down,” Lulu told her. “And he barely apologized when he helped me back up.”

“You touched him?”

“He knocked me down!”

“You touched him?”

“Bree!”

Bree expelled a sound that was a mix of impatience and intrigue. And then she said, “Oh, Lulu. What have you done?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Lulu protested. “Except maybe, you know, talk to him like I thought he was, um, an idiot.”

The sound Bree expelled then wasn’t a mix of anything. It was totally, crystal clear in its meaning. That meaning being, Oh, dammit. But all she said was, “Tell me what happened.”

Lulu replayed the incident at Eddie’s office for her friend as quickly as possible, leaving out the panties-shimmying part and focusing