“Yes, Taylor,” Josey says, folding out the spout on her milk carton. “You may ask us a question.”
“What do your parents say about you guys?”
“About us three, you mean?”
“They know about me?”
“Mine do, of course,” Josey says. “I've been talking about you for like months.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They're happy it's working out. They're poly, but you know that.”
“Right, yeah.” I'd forgotten, at least a little. Maybe it just sounded so impossible that it couldn't stick in my brain.
“They want to meet you,” she says.
“Ew, why would anyone want to meet me.”
She smacks my hand and rips off a bit of her pizza crust and gives it to me.
“What about you?” I ask Theo.
“My parents?”
“Yeah.”
“They know...sort of.” He does his shoulder-clench thing. “We don't talk about it.”
“They don't like me,” Josey says.
“Yeah, they really don't. I don't know how much of their disapproval is not liking the poly thing and how much is not liking Josey.”
“Why don't they like you?” I ask her.
“Because they project the poly thing onto me,” she says. “But they're not willing to think about it hard enough to address their issues with it, so it's easier for them just to dislike me.”
“That's her theory,” Theo says. “I think they just don't like how she dresses.”
She looks at herself. “What's wrong with the way I dress?”
“Did that shirt belong to an obese man in the 90s?” he says.
“Yes. My dad.”
“Sorry.”
She spears a pea. “Mmhmm.” He leans over and kisses her cheek, and I look away and try to make it not look like I'm looking away. Because the bottom line is that it's still so weird. My boyfriend's over there kissing another girl on the cheek.
And okay, what if it does mean something that he's sitting next to her? What if he didn't want to sit next to me as much as he wanted to sit next to her?
I don't know if Josey and I would be friends without him. I don't know if we'd even talk to each other.
She'd been telling her parents about me for months, while I'd been wishing she would disappear.
Right now I just want Theo to look at me and not her.
Look at me.
Look at me.
He does. “So why's this all on your mind?” he says.
“My mom's all asking questions.”
“Tell her that's against the rules,” Josey says. “Gimme a carrot.”
I do.
11
Mid-November, Theo scrounges up enough money to take me somewhere that's too nice for a sweatshirt and leggings. The only issue is how to get out of the house in my nice clothes, but fate serves me well and my mother and Dominic head out for cake-tasting followed by florist visit followed by dinner and a movie, and Alexis is at her mom's house. The universe is pushing pretty hard for us to have this date, and I am not going to argue.
Theo shows up when I'm halfway through sticking jewelry in all my piercings. “Look at you!” he says, because I look quite nice, mostly because I've managed to tame my hair into actual curls that might stay in for a few hours.
“And you own a shirt with sleeves!” I say.
“I do. I really do.”
“Come in, I'm almost ready.”
He follows me into the kitchen and looks around while I hunt for my keys. “I don't want to alarm you,” he says, “But there are a lot of Spanish embroidered uh, things on your walls.”
“Aphorisms. Yeah, my grandmother made them. Lots of stuff about living life to the fullest and not letting the Devil into your heart.”
“Do you speak Spanish?” he says.
“Eh, some. Not as much as I used to. I need to start speaking it again with my mom, get back in the feel of it. Then we can talk secrets in front of my new stepdad.”
“This house is nice,” he says.
“Thanks. It's not really mine. Do you speak Portuguese?”
“Sim.”
“That's...really hot.”
“Come make out with me on not-your couch.”
So I do. It's not like we need much excuse to, nowadays. Pretending to be platonic in school is both frustrating and frustrating, and we're always sneaking away during lunch to drive to some shopping center parking lot and kiss for an hour, or hiding behind curtains before his rehearsals, or completely inappropriately on each other's laps in the diner. I've never been the best at keeping my hands to myself, and I don't think he is either .
“We're gonna be late,” I gather enough air to say, eventually.
We manage to make it through a whole dinner and dessert while maintaining some amount of dignity, but as soon as we're back in the car all bets are off, and he has to pull over a few blocks from the restaurant so we can smother each other in chocolate-flavored kisses. God, I am falling and I am falling hard, and there is nothing innocuous about a single thing in my life right now.
I hit the stereo button with my foot just to turn on whatever and straddle his lap while I kiss him. He squeezes me, messes up my hair.
We've been doing under-the-shirt stuff since a few days post-Halloween, but today for the first time he puts his hand on my thigh in that way I can tell is going to try to sneak up higher, because when it comes to trying to get under your clothes, all boys have the same nervous moves. Aanya and I used to laugh about it, about how after she and Jake have been sleeping together for almost two years he still tries to eek his hands down her pants like his goal is for her not to notice right away, the same way
