She's quiet for a minute, and then she says, “You know what?”
“What.”
“It's kind of the opposite,” she says. “It makes me feel like...like what I am is perfect. If there's the option open for Theo and I to be with other people, it means that we're not trying to get the other one to fill a role in our lives all by themselves. He doesn't need me to try to shove myself into a girlfriend mold, and be that person who's always available but never clingy, who's sexy but great with your grandparents, who's sensitive but not too sensitive, funny but not funnier than he is, pretty but not into her looks, all those ridiculous things that guys, you know, guys I dated before, want every girl to be.”
“Right.”
“And with Theo now...I can just be me. I don't have to be girlfriend Josey. I'm just Josey. I can just...I can relax. Whatever I am, like, exactly how I am, is a person he wants to be with. It doesn't matter if I can't, you know, can't be perfect. If he wants something else that's not what I do—I'm not always available at all, I'm always blowing him off, and I'm not real sensitive either—then he can find someone else who's that and, you know, maybe not as funny as I am. I'm pretty damn funny.”
I laugh a little, appropriately.
“I don't have to be anything I'm not,” she says. “I fit into him because I'm not pressured to try to fill up every one of his cracks.”
“But what about you, though?”
“I just babbled about myself for like eighty hours!”
“I mean your, like, boyfriend space,” I say. “Because you've never been with someone else, right?”
“No, but it's on the table if I ever want to. But honestly? I don't have nearly as large of a boyfriend-space, I guess. I'm too damn busy. The two parties you've seen me at are the only times I've been out all year. Knowing that if he wants someone who goes out we can find him someone who goes out takes a lot of pressure of me. I can stay home and do homework like I want to.”
“You want to do homework?”
“Isn't that weird?”
“Extremely.”
She's watching me. “So what do you think?”
“I think I'll go home and get some homework done.”
“You're awful.”
I roll my eyes. “I think I should go talk to him, obviously.”
She smiles. “You go, kiddo.”
I find him standing alone like the outcast loser he is, playing with his phone. He looks up when I come over and he lights up some, God.
“Hey, Cipriano.”
“Whatcha doing?”
He shows me his blank phone screen. “Pretending to text so I don't look like such an outcast loser.”
Heh.
“I think we should talk,” I say.
“Oh, um, yeah. You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Do you want to go somewhere?”
I'm about to say yes, and then I realize I don't really know where, because Josey is out back and I want to talk to him alone, and I don't know Elisha's house well enough to go skulking around for rooms, and going out to his car seems really...suggestive when I still don't know what I want--
And I look up, and he's looking at me.
“Just out front is fine,” I say.
“Okay.”
We stand there on the tiny stoop in front of the door. We can hear Avril Lavigne blaring from inside. I hear laughter, hear way down at the end of the parking lot a clink of bottles, but the people are just shapes bent over someone's trunk. No one's looking at us.
“Are you okay?” he says again.
I reach up and kiss the hell out of him.
9
I haven't been this nervous to go to school since that time in fourth grade where I got that really horrible haircut over the weekend. That time didn't go well. Lee Hubert called me a dyke about ten seconds after I stepped into my classroom.
Today could be potentially worse, because I haven't seen Theo and Josey since the party.
I've texted him, of course, and I've tried to keep my completely embarrassing nervousness to a minimum. I get like this, always, with guys after we first hook up; I'm convinced they're going to change their minds, or that I imagined it all, or that he gave me a fake number and I'm actually talking to Lee Hubert.
You never know.
He assured me, over and over, that everything's okay, but since I'm holding back on my neuroticism as much as I can he hasn't assured me enough times for me to really feel it. And now i'm standing in front of my mirror and my hair is behaving even less than usual and for possibly the first time in my life I care about my weight, because nothing in the world looks good on me, and he's going to see me and realize i'm a junior neurotic whose only experience in relationships is with juniors who don't treat neurotics all that well.
There's a knock on my open door and I turn around. Nobody, until I look down.
“Hi, Alexis.”
“Dad said can I borrow your toothbrush.”
Ew. Ew.
Is this a thing sisters do? Should I be fine with this? Should I be enthusiastic with this?
Whatever. I'll buy a new one on my way home from school. Maybe I'll get some stickers and put them all over the old one so she'll know it's hers now. That sounds good. Kids like
