Rich and Famous Read Online Free

politics or some philosophical question I can usually fall asleep without much trouble. But this was interesting and it kept me awake.
    Pop said, “We’ll go to Paris and have the honeymoon first and then get married later—some time in the fall when the weather is cooler.”
    â€œWhat does cool weather have to do with getting married?” Denise said, which I thought was a pretty good question.
    â€œOh,” Pop said, “you don’t want to get married in the heat of the summer.”
    â€œMay I point out that it was twenty-six degrees this morning. Is that cool enough for marriage?”
    â€œStop changing the subject,” Pop said. “The question is, what about going to Paris?”
    I could tell that Denise wanted to go to Europe all right. She hadn’t been there since her junior year in college, she said. Pop had lived in Paris for a year once, before he married my mother, but he hadn’t been back since. So Denise shut up about getting married and they talked about it some more and after a few days they came up with a plan which they didn’t want to tell me about right away, as I might be upset.
    The plan was that they’d go right after school ended. They wanted to go for four weeks. Being a freelancer, Pop could take a vacation whenever he saved up some money, which he usually didn’t. Denise would take a leave of absence. As for me, they were going to stuff me off upstate at my Uncle Ned’s house with my Cousin Sinclair. Man, did I hate Cousin Sinclair. Cousin Sinclair thought he was perfect, which maybe I could have stood except that his parents agreed with him. They were always saying, “See the marvelous story Sinclair wrote,” or “The music teacher says that Sinclair’s the most brilliant flute student he’s ever had,” or, “Have you seen Sinclair’s painting that won the school prize?” Well, the story would be some crap about a little lost child that got raised in the woods by elves, and the picture would be sea gulls swooping over the waves, and as far as the flute was concerned Cousin Sinclair was pretty good at lilting airs out of his Little Masterpieces book, but he wasn’t going to get very many plays on the A . M . stations. I hate to brag, but the truth is that I’m a better musician than Sinclair, although naturally nobody in his family was going to believe that. Anyway, you can imagine I wasn’t very thrilled with the idea of spending half the summer stuffed off upstate. I’d never spent four consecutive weeks with Cousin Sinclair and I was afraid I might murder him before the first week was over.
    But what could I do about it? I spent a lot of time thinking about it. It really bothered me. It wasn’t fair. Why should I have to suffer just so they could go to Paris? I mean I had nothing against them going to Paris, they were allowed to do that if they wanted. But why did I have to get stuffed off in upstate New York with Cousin Sinclair?
    But I couldn’t argue about it until they told me about it. I mean I wasn’t supposed to know yet, so there wasn’t anything I could do about it yet. It was hard not to talk about it. A couple of times I almost blurted out something about it. Once they were talking about who was King of England during the war and I almost asked them if they were going to visit London when they were in Europe. Another time, when Pop gave me my measly dollar-fifty allowance I started to ask him if Uncle Ned was going to pay me my allowance when he was gone. But both times I managed to stop in time; and finally one day Pop said, “Put on a clean shirt, we’re going out to dinner with Denise,” and I knew they were going to tell me about it. It was about time; it was hard keeping their secret from them.
    We went to the Open Hart, which is their usual restaurant. It’s just a place with booths and red-checked table cloths and candles stuck in