Dirty Little Secrets

chocolate and caramel stuck to the roof of your mouth? Kaylie stood on her tiptoes beside me, looking for people she knew. She nudged me with her elbow. “He’s totally staring at you.”

“Who?” I asked, looking around. Somebody staring was generally not a good sign. Even worse if they were pointing.

She glanced over my shoulder and then back to me. “Like you don’t know who. Josh Lee who. In the popcorn line.”

As if I didn’t already know where he was standing, or that he was wearing the blue jacket with the koi design he got at the beginning of the year. As if I didn’t secretly watch him at lunch on the quad or practically lose my powers of speech every time our hands touched passing papers in physics.

“Right. I’m sure he’s staring at you, not me.” I pushed my hair out of my face and tried to look casually around. Kaylie was the one guys always stared at—tiny and cute, she could have been a cheerleader if she wanted to. Why she picked me to be her friend was still a mystery, but hanging out with her made my life seem almost normal.

She also never let a little thing like subtlety bother her. “Ooh, he’s with Steve Romero! We should totally go over there and talk to them.” She was a foot shorter than me but freakishly strong, pulling me in that direction before I could think up a good excuse not to go.

“No, Kaylie. Wait…,” I tried, but we were already there.

“Hey, Steve, hey, Josh,” she said effortlessly. “What are you guys going to see?”

“That new Will Smith movie,” Steve said, peering over the heads in front of him. “If this line ever gets moving.”

“Oh, my God,” she said, sounding surprised. “We are too.” She bumped me with her hip and I managed a weak smile. I knew the smartest move I could make right then was to stand there and shut up.

“Hey,” Josh said to me. He didn’t look too annoyed and was even smiling a little.

“Hi,” I managed, glancing up at those deep brown eyes. He had a certain Johnny Depp-ness that made my heart race and my cheeks burn. Somebody somewhere in his family must have been Asian—he had the deepest almond-shaped brown eyes. I was afraid to look at them too long in case they swallowed me up.

Josh had been in my eighth-grade English class when I’d first transferred in from Catholic school three years ago. He’d sat right in front of me, and I spent the entire semester staring at the back of his head, fighting with myself not to reach out and run my hand over the short, bristly hairs where they faded into his neck. He always smelled like soap and laundry detergent, and I leaned forward on my desk as often as I could to get a whiff of the light, clean scent. No matter how hard I tried, I could never smell like that.

“Poetry,” Mr. Manillo had written on the board that first week. I groaned inside. I liked English well enough, but I absolutely hated poetry. Poets never said what they really meant, and your job was to spend hours trying to figure it out. In the end it usually wasn’t worth the effort.

Mr. Manillo turned to face us as he spoke about the mysteries of poetry. His eyes locked on mine and I quickly glanced down at my desk.

Too late. “Ms. Tompkins,” he said. “You must have a favorite poet. I’m sure they gave you a good poetry foundation over at St. Ignatius.”

Like most of the other teachers in this place, he either thought too highly of a Catholic school education, or he was making fun of me. I was never sure which it was.

“I don’t…,” I started to say, but then noticed every eye in the room was on me. I knew my face was bright red and could feel droplets of sweat trickling down my back. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, cleared my throat, and recited the only poem I had ever memorized.

Judging from the silence in the classroom, maybe a poem from third grade wasn’t the best choice. Mr. Manillo cleared his throat. “That was, ah, interesting,” he said. “And that piece was by…”

“Shel Silverstein,” I said quickly. “A Light in the Attic.”

The whole class started laughing. And I knew right away they weren’t laughing with me. I could hear other kids talking behind me. I glanced toward the open door, wishing the bell would ring so I could run out and be anonymous in the crowd. Instead, I stayed glued to my seat, staring straight ahead, my head pounding with embarrassment.

Mr. Manillo held up his hand. “People, please.” He looked right through me. “This semester, we are studying the great masters of the seventeenth century and comparing the different forms of poetry. I’m afraid Mr. Silverstein is not on the syllabus.”

The laughing started to subside as he called on Josh. “Mr. Lee, do you have a better example of a popular poetry form?”

I was glad Josh was sitting in front of me so that I couldn’t see the look of disgust that was probably on his face. At least he hadn’t turned around to laugh directly at me. He cleared his throat and began to recite his poem in a clear, deep voice.

My pulse was pounding in my ears so loudly that at first I didn’t listen, but then I began to hear people giggling all around the room and I started to pay attention. By the time he was done with “Jimmy Jet and His TV Set,” I had the smallest but deepest grin on my face.

Mr. Manillo just stood in the front of the class with his arms crossed over his chest. “Is that meant to be amusing?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Manillo, but Shel Silverstein rocks.”

I didn’t know why he’d done it, but he managed to get everyone to laugh with him and come off even cooler. He probably just felt bad for the new girl who didn’t have a clue. If it were a movie, we’d have gotten together after class and discussed how much we had in common besides Shel Silverstein, and been bonded together from that very moment. Since this was only my real life, I just murmured “thanks” as I raced out of the room to change classes at the end of the period.

Josh was not just smart and gorgeous and apparently a Shel Silverstein fan, but he played guitar in a band called The Missing Peace and even wrote some of their songs. He’d also been one-half of the Cara-and-Josh super- couple since freshman year. At least until she got drunk and made out with someone else at that Halloween party a few months ago.

So now Josh was single and smiling at me, and I was standing right in front of him like a complete idiot with absolutely nothing to say. We stood in an uncomfortable silence, staring at the snack bar menu board, as Kaylie inched imperceptibly closer to Steve so she could put her hand on his arm for emphasis as she spoke. She made it look so easy.

“Maybe we should leave them alone,” Josh joked, nodding at Steve and Kaylie, whose heads were now bent deep in conversation.

“Yeah,” I said, mentally beating myself up for such a lame answer. I turned phrases over in my head, trying to come up with something casual and clever. So what’s your favorite Shel Silverstein poem these days? Right. He’d never remember something that happened so long ago. Where’s the band playing next? Too groupie slut. Did you know our children would be gorgeous?

I felt a hard tap on my shoulder. “Excuse me?” a girl’s voice demanded.

I turned to see Justine Hildebrandt, Cara’s best friend, standing with her hands on her hips. “The end of the line is back there, in case you didn’t know.”

“Oh, we weren’t—,” I started to say, but Justine cut me off, indignation flashing in her eyes. She glanced at Josh with a lot more anger than the situation called for, but continued to talk to me. All of a sudden, I had a pretty good idea what her secret was.

“Right. We saw you two cut in front of us,” she said. “Don’t think we didn’t.” A group of JV cheerleaders stood with her, nodding their heads in unison. At least Cara Lassen and her perfect highlights were nowhere in sight.

“No, really,” I managed. “Kaylie just wanted to say hi.” I reached out to grab Kaylie’s arm, but she was so blissed out talking to Steve she didn’t even notice we were about to be ambushed by the entire Gompers High School cheerleading squad.

“Ease up, Justine,” Josh said to her. “I’ve been saving Lucy’s place.” He smiled at me. “What took you so long?”

“Um,” I squeaked, startled by the fact that he’d actually said my name out loud.