LITMIR.BIZ

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head snaps up. “Of course not!”

      “Dad does.”

      “Stop that,” she says. “Your dad loves you.”

      “He still wants to kill me.”

      “This is hard for him. For any dad. He doesn’t want anyone to take advantage of you.” She takes a deep breath. “Sex is a beautiful thing. If it’s with the right person. Was this…have there…been others?”

      I don’t say anything. I get up, take the container of yo-glue and go to toss it in the trash. I see that the picture my dad printed at the store has been torn into little pieces and thrown inside, right on top of the cranberry-orange-oatmeal muffins.

      “Audrey, I just want you to be careful,” my mom says.

      I don’t say, Like you were? There’s a honk from outside. “That’s Ash,” I say. “I have to go.”

      At school, anyone who hadn’t seen the picture has now seen it over and over again. I find a copy of it pasted on my locker. I grab it, crumple it to a ball, and throw it on the floor. I haven’t said a word to Ash all the way to school, and she hasn’t asked me to, but now I tell her about my parents.

      She sucks her breath through her teeth so quickly that she whistles. “Scheisse,” she says. “How did they find out?”

      “Someone sent the picture to the store. My dad brought a copy home. They thought that it was someone playing a prank.”

      “How did they take it?”

      “My dad’s mad. At first he thought someone, um…” I lower my voice. “Someone, you know, forced me or whatever, but I told them that no one forced me to do anything.”

      “You should have said someone forced you.”

      “Yeah, right. And have them call the police? I don’t think so.” I stuff my jacket into my locker. “My dad can’t even look at me.”

      “What about your mom?”

      “She’s trying, but she doesn’t know what to say. It took her till this morning just to say the word ‘sex’.”

      “Jeez,” says Ash.

      Cindy Terlizzi and Pam Markovitz walk by. Pam grins at me and gives me the thumbs-up sign.

      Ash scowls, then sighs. “It’s bad now, I know. Really bad. But people will forget.”

      “Yeah?” I say. “When?”

      “Soon. They always do.”

      I know they will, someday, but that doesn’t help the frozen spot where my guts should be. That doesn’t stop the stares and snickers and giggles in the hallway. That doesn’t stop Chilly from whispering poison in my ear. That doesn’t keep the more girl-impaired of the male honour students from eyeing me with this strange curiosity, like they want to pin me down to a dissecting tray and prod me with sharp instruments. Even Ron “Valedictorian” Moran, who’s had a girlfriend for the last year, stares. I stare right back. What was Ron doing with his girlfriend when they thought no one was paying attention, when they thought their parents were out for the afternoon? Ron looks away.

      All day, I bury myself in work, in words. I sink into them like a bath. My friends give me my space, but the teachers yammer all around me. Limits, amendments, oxygen cycles, Shakespeare. This is important and that is important and all of it will be on the test. I write, underline, highlight, repeat. I get text messages and delete them. A few people pass me stupid notes that I know say horrible things, and I shove them into my books or backpack without looking at them. At lunch I will go outside and set them all on fire. Ash will throw the ashes out of her car window.

      “What I really want to know is, who took that picture?” Ash says. She’s taken me to the diner to eat. “Do you really think that Luke had nothing to do with it?”

      “I don’t know,” I say.

      Ash scoops up a spoonful of mashed potatoes and gravy, what she orders every time we come to the diner, day or night. Her eyes narrow. “What about Chilly? He’s still dogging you like he owns you.”

      “I don’t know,” I say.

      Ash puts down her spoon. “Don’t you want to know who did this? Doesn’t this make you mad?”

      “Well, yeah,” I tell her.

      “Well, yeah?” she says. “I’d be furious! I’d want to kill someone! You got more upset that time Madame Kellogg gave you a B plus on your French report.”

      “I just wish it never happened,” I say. “I wish I’d never done it.”

      She tucks a stray curl behind her ear and sighs. “You love him, right?”

      That seems funny to me. I love my parents. I love Ash and Joelle. I love my cat. Luke is—was—a different story. Luke is like a creature from another planet. Can you ever really love a creature from another planet? Someone who could jump on his spaceship and rocket off to Pluto at any minute? “I don’t know.”

      Ash is getting annoyed with all that I don’t know. “Yes, you did. Isn’t that why you were all weirded out with the friends-with-benefits thing? Weren’t you jealous of all those other girls? Didn’t you want to go out with him?” She eats another spoonful of mashed potatoes.

      I want to tell her the whole story. I should tell her. She’s my best friend and I need her to understand. But I’m not sure if she will. After Jimmy, I’m not sure if she can. So I agree with her. Yes, I was weirded out. Yes, I was jealous. I don’t know what else I was—insane? obsessed?—but I think if I say “I don’t know” one more time, she’ll kill me.

      Luckily, or unluckily, she decides to let me live. Sixth period, and I’ve gotten through most of my classes and even managed to eat two bites of Ash’s potatoes at lunch. Even though I’ve got my eyes pinned to the floor, I see Luke walking down the hallway as I’m trying to get to history. It’s not the blond hair that catches me, it’s the movement—the rolling, easy walk, the walk that says he could run very very fast if there were ever any need to. He’s alone this time, no gaggle of rockheads shoving phones at him. Then he sees me. He never said much more than “hey” to me in public before, but this is a new low. His face stiffens and his eyes narrow, and his lip curls up as if he’s disgusted, as if he can’t even bear to look. He speeds up, passes me and keeps on rolling, like a wave that jumps the beach and takes you out at the knees.

       Once More, with Feeling

      The first time was Ash’s party, a back-to-school barbecue without any of the actual barbecuing. There must have been a shortage of parties that weekend, because the entire senior class showed up to mourn the end of the summer. Ash’s parents had taken her little brother out of town, stupidly trusting Ash not to do anything stupid (like, say, throw a party for the entire senior class). But there we were, in Ash’s house, with everyone packed inside and spilling outside, a blur of shorts and halter tops and precancerous brown skin, all of us hugging our friends and hugging total strangers and loving the world. Even Chilly seemed less Chilly somehow—less obnoxious, less angry—maybe because there were chicks there who’d never met him before and were willing to give him a shot. I remember looking out the open window to the back yard and seeing a girl run by wearing only her underwear, but moving too fast for me to see her face. I could hear her, though. She was giggling like a maniac.

      Once in a while, Ash would announce that the drunk and otherwise hammered would have their keys and maybe even their cars confiscated to guard against possible injuries and subsequent lawsuits (her dad is a lawyer), but as these things go, the party was tame. Something was in the air, some late-August-evening magic-fairy nice dust that made us all mostly friendly and sort of giddy and not too destructive. It seemed that we all understood

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