Read Drop Dead Beautiful for Free Online

sleep over it, because if there was one thing she excelled at, it was solving problems. And with the help of her two best friends—Cookie, a pretty black girl, and Harry, an in-the-closet gay teenager—she’d somehow work it out.
    Cookie and Harry were the best, always up to support an adventure, and meeting some hot guy in Big Bear was a major adventure. Not that they were going to get to meet him, but they’d back her up all the way. That’s what true friends were for.
    Later that afternoon, Cookie and Harry came over to lie out by the pool and mull over the situation.
    “ I wanna meet your Internet perv,” Cookie insisted, swigging from a can of Red Bull. She was a curvaceous girl in a young Janet Jackson kind of way. Chocolate-brown dreadlocks framed her heart-shaped face, and her lips were full and pink. Her father was Gerald M., the forty-nine-year-old smooth-soul-singing icon. Cookie had chosen to live with him in Beverly Hills because her mom was a prescription-drug whore who’d moved over the hill to the Valley with a twenty-five-year-old sometime musician, and Cookie couldn’t stand either of them. Her mom and boyfriend cohabited in stoned bliss, while Cookie enjoyed the good life with her famous father.
    “Yeah, an’ I wouldn’t mind giving him a blow job,” Harry leered, huddling under a huge sun umbrella, hiding from the sun. Harry was skinny and alarmingly pale, with dyed black hair worn spiked, as if he’d recently stuck his finger in a power socket. His mogul-type dad worked late hours at the TV network he ran, while his mom, a born-again, spent most evenings at her church or meeting with her pastor, a man Harry was convinced she was sleeping with.
    “Bet you both wish you were coming with me,” Max said, tossing back her long mane of dark curls. “But hey, I’m the one that’s gonna be screwing him, that privilege is all mine, so try not to turn into jealous wrecks.”
    “ If your mom lets you go,” Cookie pointed out, adjusting the top of her bikini.
    “I’m workin’ on it,” Max said confidently, knowing that she was taking off to Big Bear whether Lucky agreed or not.
    “I so hope this dude’s like not a perv,” Cookie offered, wriggling around on her sun lounger, her brief pink bikini showing off every curve.
    “And I hope he is,” Harry said excitably, his skinny body fully covered in a faded black T-shirt and baggy black pants worn half-mast. “ ’Cause then you can give us all the sicko details when you get back.”
    “ If she gets back,” Cookie interrupted, rolling her eyes for emphasis. “ ’Cause he could cut her up into itty-bitty pieces an’ bury her under the mountain.”
    “Thanks for the thought,” Max said, biting down on her lower lip. “But hey, I know how to kick ass, so any cutting goin’ on will be coming from me. Get it?”
    “Bad shit happens,” Cookie said, nodding wisely. “I read where this woman met this dude on the Internet and he like strangled her, ’cause that’s what she told him she was into. How psycho is that?”
    “Grant’s cool,” Max said airily. “I can tell.”
    “How?” Cookie demanded.
    “I got good instincts.”
    “You’d better answer your cell at all times ’cause we’ll be on red alert,” Harry said sternly.
    “Should I pick up my cell even when we’re doin’ it?” Max teased.
    “What?” Harry said, his face reddening.
    “Don’t go getting all prudish on me,” Max said, giggling as she reached for a tube of suntan cream. “I gotta do it sometime , and Grant’s the perfect victim.”
    “He is?” Cookie asked. “How’s that?”
    “Well,” Max said, “he’s like an out-of-towner who can’t go around blabbing about me. Oh yeah, an’ he’s older, so he’ll be like an expert at it.”
    “You go for it, girl,” Cookie said, making a victory sign. “Only try not to get slashed along the way.”
    “Oh, so now he’s a slasher ,” Max drawled, reaching for a bobby pin and piling her hair on