“Grow up,” I muttered as I passed him. Desiree shot me her best stink eye, which made her look constipated.
Jackson could get any girl he wanted, and he knew it. He was the only boy at that age with perfect skin, strong arms, and the beginnings of a six-pack. And he was tall. He had grown fast. He’d outgrown all the goofiness of his preteen years by the beginning of our ninth-grade year—or maybe I just didn’t see it anymore. I had developed early too. Not that I had nice breasts—they were barely there, but by the end of ninth grade, I was done growing in every direction. Unfortunately, the same could be said for Desiree, who had grown in certain ways that I never would.
I sat in the library at lunch and talked to Ms. Lilly, the librarian.
“Where’s Jax today?” she asked. Even the teachers knew we were inseparable.
“I don’t know. He has a girlfriend now.”
The small gray-haired woman in her sixties looked surprised. “A girlfriend? I thought you were his girlfriend.”
“When we were kids people used to say that. It was just dumb kid stuff.”
“Oh.”
I held up a copy of She’s Come Undone. “Thanks for getting this for me.”
“It’s not exactly on the reading list, Emerson. Keep it hush-hush.”
“Always, Ms. Lilly. Thank you.” I went to a table to read, but I was distracted. I wondered why, in all of the time that Jax and I had spent together, he hadn’t tried to kiss me. He never even brought it up. I wasn’t the prettiest girl in school—no butt, no boobs, just a beanpole with a mop of dark hair—but I had nice skin and he’d told me once that I had pretty eyes. Actually, he’d said they were weird and so big, he felt like he could dive in and swim around in them. So maybe “pretty” wasn’t the right word . . .
Maybe he really was writing about Desiree. Maybe I was just his buddy from childhood that he used to play in the mud with.
On the bus on the way home, he was sitting in the front seat. “Hey, Em!”
He looked far too chipper for Jackson. As I took the seat beside him, I peered closer at his neck. “What in god’s name . . . Is that a . . . oh, gross.” It was a big, purplish-brown hickey. “I didn’t take you for a boob guy, Jackson.”
“Whatever do you mean, Emerson?”
I held my hands up to mimic big boobs. “Desiree, you idiot.”
He smirked in that shit-eating kind of way. “Oh. Yeah, hmm. I hadn’t really noticed.”
I huffed and then scurried to the back of the bus, thinking two could play this game. I ran home and threw my backpack down in the entryway. Racing past the kitchen, I glanced in and saw my father sitting at the table, reading the paper and drinking coffee. I stopped abruptly and backed up to the doorway. He looked up and smiled. “How was your day, honey?”
Honey? His eyes looked clearer than I had ever seen them. My day was horrible. “Good. How was yours?”
“Good. I made a meat loaf for you to heat up after I leave for work.”
Who is this man? “Thank you, Dad.”
He stood from the table. “Well, I better go get ready for work.” When he left the room I walked to his coffee mug and sniffed it. There was a very detectable amount of whiskey in his coffee, but the fact that he wasn’t sitting on the couch in his underwear, drinking it straight from the bottle and cursing at the TV, was an improvement.
Before he left, he peeked into my room, where I was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Jackson’s stupid hickey. “If you want to take the meat loaf over to the Fishers’, that’s fine by me. You don’t have to eat alone.”
“That’s okay.” I was used to it. “Jax and I aren’t really hanging out much. He has a girlfriend.”
He looked moderately relieved. I would’ve loved to think it was because he didn’t want anyone hurting his daughter, but I had been told so many times before not to get knocked up that it had to be more for that reason. “Okay. I’ll be home in the morning,” he said, and he was gone.
AT SCHOOL THE next day, I found Hunter “The Hoover” Stevens, who was known far and wide as the make-out king of our school. I think I was the only girl he hadn’t defiled behind the bleachers of the football field. I knew he was an easy target because he had been dropping me sly hints over the last few months. Like, “Hey, Emerson. You want to go study for the math test under the bleachers?”
Up until that point, I had ignored his pathetic attempts, but Hunter, Jackson, and I all had math together, so I took the opportunity to exact my revenge. I sauntered past Jax and leaned against Hunter’s desk. “I don’t really get this algebra stuff. I heard you’re, like, a pro.”
His eyes shot open and then dropped to my boobs. “You heard right.”
“How ’bout at lunch?” I said.
“Okay, meet me behind the bleachers on the football field.”