3.7 We're getting out
Rose clung and played the coquette all week, and by Friday I was tired of her conversation, in which she alternated between telling me how much she liked smart guys and trying to interest me in pieces of celebrity gossip. Diplomatic, I refrained from pointing out the contradiction in her strategy: smart guys aren’t interested in the Spice Girls’ love lives.
Rose had become the eager puppy I once was. That Friday afternoon, when I walked up the aisle to the back of the bus, she had plans for me. “Hi, Josh!” she fawned, “come sit next to me.”
“Shuffle up, Mariko,” I said. “I want to talk to Lily.” Lily, whose pleasure was inversely proportional to the intensity of Rose’s arm-crossing, frowning sulk in the opposite corner.
“What are you doing on the weekend?” I asked Lily.
“I’ve got to go to your school tomorrow,” she said, “to do stuff for Little Shop. Then I’m going shopping in Frankston on Sunday. Hey, I just read in Cosmo that wearing horizontal stripes makes your boobs look bigger. What do you think?”
“You don’t have a lot to work with.”
“You want me to slap you?” she said, but with an open-mouthed, toothy smile. Just so long as I was looking, she told me later, it was good enough for her, and she liked that I wasn’t so overawed I’d never say anything critical.
“Hey, let’s try the theory out,” she said. She grabbed my wrist and wrapped my arm over her chest. The red, yellow, and blue candy-stripes of my blazer ran roughly parallel to the line I imagined you could draw between her nipples. A thrill ran through my body from the touch of hers.
“What do you think?” she said.
“It’s hard to say. I don’t think there’s meant to be an arm between boobs and stripes.”
“I guess if you’ve got the arm of a guy you like around you, you don’t need to worry whether your boobs are big enough, hey?”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. You never know what he might be thinking.”
“I’m thinking I like you touching my breasts.”
“I kind of like that myself.”
“Just what kind of girl do you think I am?”
“The same as everyone does.”
“And you still want Rose?”
“Maybe that’s why I want her.”
“I know you don’t know what you’re missing, so I’ll let that slide. Speaking of which, why haven’t you called her yet?”
“I don’t have her number.”
“Remarkable restraint on her part.” Next she whispered. “Rose gets desperate when she’s alone. She’ll go with anybody.”
“Is that an incitement or an insult?”
“Neither.”
“How can you hate Rose, and still call her up and tell her your stories? How can you still be friends?”
“We’ve known each other all our lives. Her dad’s shop is next door to my house. We’re stuck together. But she’s a creature of this town: she’s got its flat, suburban mentality. I don’t.”
“I live here, too. You don’t seem to hate me.”
“Oh, now you’re just fishing for compliments. Here you go: you don’t really live here.” She reached into her bag and got out my copy of The Dispossessed, which she was about halfway through, judging by the sticky note peeking out between the pages. She pointed her index finger at the cover. “I know you. You live here. You’ll find better places, though. You and I are getting out of Rosebud.”
Our time was up: there, outside, was the Jade Gate. Lily grabbed her bag and left. Rose waited. How the tables had turned.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk,” Rose said. She’d stood now, and leaned down to talk to me. I could see down the neck of her dress, and smell her White Musk. The girl thrust a torn-off corner of lined exercise-book paper at me.
“Call me,” she said.
YOU ARE READING
Kiss Me, Genius Boy (No More Dreams #1)
Teen Fiction"In that moment, there arose all the resolve I hoped would be with me when I finally met her, and my vertigo turned to exultation. So what if she was married? I had contemplated that long ago, and decided I'd have her anyway." Joshua Rivers was born...
