i m n hell. i h8 it here.
Isadora Perrault punched each character with vigor into her BlackBerry. A few seconds later came the reply from her mother: Stay put. Look for the old hag with the purple coat. She’s the one.
With her mother’s oft-repeated dictum reverberating in her head to maintain the God-given social barrier between those of their rank and the unwashed masses, Isadora viciously tamped down her initial pang of sympathy and cringed away from the filthy street creature with foul-smelling breath and bad teeth that loomed much too close to her. “No,” she told him, then scooted further down the two-foot-high marble wall she’d been sitting on for the past hour across from the Houston Public Library and turned her attention back to her BlackBerry and her texting. Fine, she replied and hit the send button.
She lifted her gaze and scanned the perimeter for about the thousandth time. Would the old lady never show up? The so-called ‘beggar woman’ that her sister had given assistance to last week—the one that had then mysteriously, but most assuredly, blessed her with the ability to make loads of money in diamond stocks—was now of keen interest to both Isadora and her mother. “If anyone deserves to be a millionairess,” her mother said afterward, “it is you, Isadora—not that oh-so-sweet, goody-two-shoes half-sister of yours, Delilah.” Now Isadora was here with the express purpose of having the old thing toss a little magic her way as well.
A woman, professionally dressed in a red suit and matching pumps, walked across the paved promenade toward Isadora, her cell phone tucked against one ear while she dug inside her purse. Isadora turned a jealous eye on the shoes. Manolo Blahnik. Her feet are too fat for those.
The woman tripped on something and lost her balance. In the next second, she was flat out on the pavement, face-first.
Isadora shrugged. See? Too fat. The woman’s cell phone hit the ground and slid across the pavement, stopping an inch from Isadora’s foot.
Isadora glanced at the slim pink device, scooted down another few spaces and continued to scroll through the newest tweets on her Twitter page. “Jaded,” her favorite Aerosmith song, blasted from the BlackBerry in her hand at the same time her mother’s name popped up on the screen. She punched the answer button and lifted the phone to her ear. As she did so, she looked up. The lady in red, on her feet again, waved her hand in the air and fluttered her fingers in Isadora’s direction.
Isadora swiveled to her right, giving the strange woman her shoulder. “Hello, Mother,” she said. “No. Still no sign of her.”
A loud pop! and a sudden scent of patchouli wafted over to her from the direction she’d just turned from. With a jolt, Isadora swung her head around. Sparks flew and a cloud of glitter dust floated in the space where the woman had just been, but there was no trace of the lady in red. She’d vanished.
“Uh oh,” Isadora said. I think I just blew it, Mother. “Go blow yourself, Mother.” Huh?
* * *