Nutmeg.
“What did he taste like?”
I don’t know. Person.
“Did he lick your ear?”
No. Gross! (Laughter.)
“Did you grab his butt?”
“Cricket!”
“I would have grabbed his butt.”
(More laughter.) “I’m not up to butts,” I said. “That’s way too advanced.”
“Not
“Even so. Butt-grabbing on a first kiss is a bit much.”
“Oh, I think you can get a nice handful even before the first kiss,” said Cricket. (Raucous laughter.)
“You’re just going to reach over and squeeze?” I asked.
“Sure, why not?”
“Please. You’re all talk.”
“No. I would completely do it. On top of the pants, mind you.”
And so on.
The next day, I got to school wearing like four times as much lip gloss as usual and Shiv was in the hall, standing next to his mail cubby. “Hey, Shiv,” I said to him.
He turned around and walked away.
In Poetry, he didn’t look at me.
At lunch in the refectory, he didn’t talk to me or sit anywhere near me, but Cricket, Kim and Nora had told all the girls about what happened, so I was pretty busy fielding gossipy questions from Heidi, Ariel, Katarina and the like, so I didn’t really have time to think about it much.
In Drama, Shiv and I had to perform our scene.
“What did you think?” I said, after.
“It was okay,” said Shiv, his eyes on the ground. Then he grabbed his backpack and left.
After school, I saw him heading for the bus. “Shiv, wait up!” I called.
He kept walking.
By this point, it was obvious he had changed his mind. I felt like an idiot. Had I been a rotten kisser during our session against the door? (This was certainly possible, as I had so little experience.)
Maybe I smelled bad?
Or had there been a booger hanging out of my nose when we stopped kissing?
What could I have done to make him stop liking me?
I thought about it all the time, but I never found out. I felt like a complete loser. I liked him so much, and now he seemed to hate me, and there was no way to turn it around. I was completely helpless.
I never really talked with him again, except to say hi in the halls.
When I told her about Shiv, Doctor Z thought I should ask him what happened. Well, she never says anything quite that directly. What she really said was “Is there a way you could find out?”
“No.”
Silence. She was wearing that poncho again.
“Well,” I said, after a minute, “I guess I could ask him. But I’d rather die than do that.”
More silence. It really is a horrible poncho.
“I don’t care, anyway.”
Even more silence. Who buys this woman’s clothes?
“Well, I guess maybe I kind of do,” I went on. “I mean, I do. I liked him, I wanted to kiss him again, we had a good time together. And the whole thing was humiliating. Everyone knowing we were going out, and then with us breaking up so fast after—I felt like people were talking about me.”
“Can you ask him?”
I ignored her question. “And this is my life, getting dumped with no warning. Or liking people who don’t like me back, or who don’t like me
