Less Than Three

Chapter 3: Miss Buttered Popcorn

The second morning of summer found me emptying the dishwasher and wiping down lawn chairs. My mom and her lists. Still, I would've scrubbed a hundred chairs with a belly button brush if it meant I could go back and un-see what I'd witnessed the night before. I needed to talk to Madison about it but I wondered if I should. There was that whole bearer of bad news thing to consider. I tried consulting Craig. He was unavailable due to lawn mower duty.

We were floating in Mad's pool when I found the nerve to bring it up. "About Jacob," I started, but Madison interrupted.

"Why do you always pronounce his name like that?"

"Like what?" I asked.

"Ja-a-a-y-cob," she said. "Like it makes you want to hurl or something."

I bit back the urge to say 'because it does' and changed the subject.

When I got home, I opened up Mom's website, determined to make a little boring but necessary progress on it. I plugged in my headphones for some musical inspiration while I listed all the club members and their contact numbers. I was searching the laptop's files for photos of them when I accidentally switched to my own blog – and what I'd wanted to talk to Madison about accidentally slipped out:

Thursday, June 12 3:37 PM

Term of the day: Scrumdillyishus - Supremely good.

OK, so it's not a real word. It should be.

Gordon Toledo, the lead singer of PaperKut, is the most scrumdillyishus rock star on the planet. I spend more time planning how I'll meet him than I do figuring out how to get into a good college. You could say I'm a little obsessed.

On an anti-scrumdillyishus note:

I saw a boy at the movies last night. He was standing at the snack bar. Lily Peterson was smiling up at him. She was leaning over the counter, with a tank top on and most of herself hanging out of it. The boy had his nose an inch away from her nose. And he was smiling back.

Madison called a few minutes later. I held the phone away from my ear when I answered it. I was sure she would be either angry or weepy, but the conversation took a different turn. She was breathless with excitement at the prospect of good, juicy gossip. "Craig?" she squealed. "Was it Craig at the movies with Lily?"

"Uh, no," I told her. "Craig wouldn't do that."

Not that smiling at a member of the opposite sex is the most awful thing a person can do. But. Who knows what would have happened if Brady and I hadn't ordered the Big Deal at the start of the movie, if I hadn't drunk the mega-soda, then realized my bladder would not hold a mega-amount? What if the urge to pee had hit me ten seconds later? I might have caught Jacob and Lily with their tongues intertwined or something.

"Dave then," Madison almost shouted into the phone. "It was Dave Brown, wasn't it?"

"No." I couldn't believe she was so clueless.

Dave Brown is a jerk. He's just not that sort of jerk. In fact, he only managed to do one stupid thing the whole night. A PaperKut song came on when the movie ended. Dave stood up and played air guitar to it. Craig joined in. Then they both tried to get me to sing along. Despite my mood since the snack bar incident, I giggled. Dave must have taken it as a sign that I wanted more. He jumped over the seats to give me an up close and personal encore.