“Elise!”
“I kinda think it’s hot,” Elise says. “I want to be honest. I’ll probably tell her I liked it.”
“But it’s weird. I mean it’s . . . everyone in the whole school knows who her boyfriend is. And everyone in the whole school knows that she lives near the lake. And now everyone knows what she and Joe do in the lake,” I say. I drop my voice to a whisper so that the crowds of people picking up books and making jokes and texting and holding hands don’t overhear us.
“But isn’t that hot? That she just doesn’t care? Like—that she’s so into sex or Joe or whatever that she has to publicize it? That she can’t keep it in, and doesn’t care, and all the societal proscriptions fall the fuck away?” Elise is getting all worked up and forgetting to look at my face, which I’m almost certain is turning shades of pink and gray from humiliation and disgust.
“I mean, you’re obviously in the majority. Sasha Cotton just became the hottest girl in school,” I say.
“It’s also kinda genius,” Elise goes on, this time actually looking me in the face while she talks to me. This time, she’s really considering the words.
“Genius?”
“She must have known. About you liking Joe. And Joe thinking you’re cute or whatever it is he thinks. Or maybe she could tell he was thinking about breaking up with her or something. She must have felt it coming, and what better way to stake her claim, right?”
“We’re talking about my life here, Lise,” I say. I’m still waiting for my best friend to pull me into a hug and tell me it’s going to be okay, or to help me hate on Sasha, but Elise is in a whole other realm with all this.
“Right,” Elise says, and grabs my hands in her own. “Sorry. I know you like him and stuff. And he’s a dick for leading you on. But she’s upping her game, and I think you need to step out of this one. That’s what I really wanted to say. Don’t get in some weird girl-fight over stupid Joe, right?”
“Yep,” I say. But now it hurts even more, the fact that Joe and Sasha are probably-definitely sleeping together, and that she is so confident in their love for each other that she would put it all out there like that. Turns out Sasha is some mystical nude-swimming sea nymph who needs both saving and screwing, and I’m just Tabitha: freckled and sad (but not depressed). No one is mistaking me for a damaged, alluring daughter of a philosopher like Sasha. The girl wears silk scarves like headbands. She knits her own sweaters. She laughs out of context and is probably right now sculpting a purposely lopsided vase with organic clay. You know, if clay can actually be organic. She has deep feelings that the rest of us cannot possibly understand. And though she has friends and a boyfriend and the basic respect of everyone in school, she’s somehow the special, depressed one, and I’m just mopey.
“I can’t have a crush on her, right?” Elise says, watching as Sasha walks by, too in the clouds and distracted by her own fragility to overhear the boys catcalling her. She just walks right by, long legs, wide hips, silvery silk scarf tied to her head and trailing a few inches behind her like fairy dust.
Basically: Sasha is a strange, sad mer-creature, and I’m just some virgin-girl who is not even as interesting as her own parents.
Secret:
I listen in on my mother’s phone conversations. Especially the ones that are all about me.
—Agnes
Six.
Everything is wrong. I can’t get the smudge off the glass counter at Tea Cozy, and most unfair of all, I’ve seen Alison and Jemma eating cheese sandwiches with Sasha Cotton at lunch, and as far as I can tell, no one’s telling her to be careful about giving the wrong impression, even though she just published a porn poem in the school journal. I guess it has something to do with her scrubbed-clean face and feathery hair and the fact that she has hips but no boobs. Since she doesn’t look like trouble, she can have all the sex she wants and still have friends.
She can even, apparently, publish erotic poetry about it and still be a teacher’s pet and Alison and Jemma’s new best friend.
I couldn’t be more of a virgin, but somehow I’m the one who’s changed.
These are the kinds of conundrums that slow down my shift at Tea Cozy the Sunday after Sasha’s poem hit the school. I’m trying to wipe down tables and refill cups of water, but I keep managing to do the same ones over and over. Plus, Cate is playing kids’ music on the café’s iPod, and the way it jingles out from the speakers is completely distracting.