Scarlett, Are you still asleep? I can hear you in there, snoring away. I need the following:

White plum tea (whole leaf, loose, organic)
Yerba mate lotion
Dance tights
Laptop computer (I’ll leave it to you to pick one out)
A book on how to write a book
A spicy tuna roll (brown rice)
A list of all plays currently on Broadway
Matches

$4000 should be enough. I’ve shoved the money under your door (see it?). I need these things by noon. I’m meditating now. I want my change, but feel free to take cabs if the purchases are too heavy.

Get the sushi last, obviously. And wake up! We have work to do!

-Mrs. A

A Party Best Avoided

On the morning of the tenth of June, Scarlett Martin woke up to the sound of loud impromptu rap penetrating her thin bedroom wall from the direction of the bathroom next door. Scarlett had been trying t ignore this noise for fifteen minutes by incorporating it into her dream, but it was a difficult thing to weave the constantly repeated phrase, “I got a butt-butt, I got mud hut” into a dream about trying to hide a bunch of rabbits in her T-shirt drawer.

She blinked, groaned the tiniest groan, and opened one eye.

It was hot. Very hot. The little window unit air conditioner in the Orchid Suite, the room she shared with her older sister Lola, hadn’t really functioned correctly in years. Sometimes it left her shivering, and sometimes, like this morning, it did nothing at all except move the hot sheets of air around give the humidity a nice fluffing up.

Hot weather made Scarlett’s blonde, curly hair into a big fright wig. What in winter were chin-length ringlets became insane, puffed-up worm creatures as soon as June arrived. One of these sprung into action and jabbed Scarlett’s eye as soon as she opened it. She pulled herself upright in bed and opened the sheer purple curtain next to her bed.

It was a well-known fact that you could almost see the Chrysler Building from the Hopewall Hotel, if the other buildings hadn’t been there. Still, she could see into the apartment buildings that backed up to the hotel and that was always interesting. In a city with so many different types of people and so much competition, mornings were an even playing field where no one looked good or knew where anything was. There was the woman who changed her outfit four times each morning and practiced different poses in the mirror. Two windows over, the obsessive-compulsive guy was cleaning all the burners on his stove. A flight down, there was Anything for Breakfast guy who would (as his name implied) eat anything for breakfast. Today he was pouring melted ice cream over cereal.

Another neighbor, a woman of about seventy, was completely nude on the rooftop patio of the adjacent apartment building. She was reading The New York Times and carefully balancing a cup of coffee by squeezing it between her thighs, which was a completely unacceptable sight at this time in the morning. Or really, any time. Scarlett reeled backward onto her bed. The rap got louder as the shower that had been running underneath it was turned off. The lyric had moved on to, “Got shoe and socko, get me a taco…”

Excerpted from SUITE SCARLETT © Copyright 2011 by Maureen Johnson. Reprinted with permission by Point, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.