Tease(23)

Maybe it’s stupid, but I hadn’t really thought past the part where I slept with him the first time. Having sex almost seems scarier now, like I’m definitely going to get pregnant, or he’s definitely going to stop liking me if we only do it, like, once a month. There hasn’t been a good time or place to hook up since Brielle’s party, but it has to happen eventually, right?

I have to pick up the boys from school, but as soon as Mom gets home I go over to Brielle’s. Her parents are out at some fund-raiser thing, as usual. She always calls herself Poor Little Rich Girl—she has a tank top with that bedazzled on it—and everyone knows she’s bragging. Once my mom said she felt sorry for Brie, that she seemed lonely. But she never seems lonely to me. Besides, I’m almost always here. Tonight we sit at the counter in her kitchen, putting maraschino cherries in our Diet Cokes.

“How often are you actually supposed to . . . do it?” I ask, stuffing three cherries in my mouth as soon as the words are out.

Brielle pushes a cherry off its stem, into the fizz of her soda. “Don’t you want to all the time?” she asks. There’s a teasing ring to her voice, like she’s suddenly my much older, much wiser sister. “I mean, it’s D-Licious! How can you keep your hands off him?”

I roll my eyes at the new nickname, but otherwise I’m not sure how to respond to this. I use a trick I’ve seen my mom use on my little brothers and turn it around, saying, “Did you want to all the time with Diver?”

That’s the guy she slept with last summer. We never use his real name, for some reason. It’s a cool one, too—Kiefer, like the actor—but Brielle came home from swim camp just calling him Diver. He was the diving coach at camp, going to the university on a diving scholarship, apparently. So it stuck as a nickname at camp and beyond, between us.

“Oh, totally,” she says, but she’s kind of just staring at her soda, not really looking at me. She never really talks much about Diver. Back when it happened, while she was still at camp, she’d used some of her online minutes to email me that she’d lost her V-card to this cool older guy. And since she’s been home she’s mentioned it casually, sounding very nonchalant and mature about it. I wasn’t even sure if they’d done it more than once. Something about the way she’s concentrating on pulling another cherry out of the jar, though, keeps me from asking her to go into more detail now.

I know she hooked up with Rob a lot last fall, but I’m pretty sure they never did it, did it. Now she’s not really dating anyone. For a second I wonder why I don’t know more about my BFF’s love life. I used to know everything—when a boy would so much as brush his hand across hers in class, or like when Chris Simmons kissed her at that party in ninth grade, right before he asked Tiffany Martin to go out with him. When Rob first started flirting with her I was there—last semester we all took the Visual Art elective together—but now—

“Dude, don’t stress about it,” she says. She pushes off her stool, twisting the cap onto the maraschino jar and putting it back in the fridge. I wasn’t done with them, but Brielle’s mom has weird rules about food, so I guess we ate all the ones we were allowed to already. “Dylan’s a nice guy, he’s into you. You’re not gonna get pregnant.”

“I’m not gonna have an AIDS baby?” I ask. It’s this dumb joke we have, that the worst possible thing will happen to us if we’re not careful. Usually the worst thing we can imagine is having a baby with some terrible disease.

“Oh, no, you totally will,” she says, turning around and leaning on the fridge door. “But it’ll be cured, and Dylan will play for the NFL, and he’ll have to marry you forever because you had his magically cured AIDS baby.”

“That sounds nice,” I say, even though of course it sounds ridiculous.

“As long as you take me with you to all those NFL parties so I can marry Tom Brady, I promise to help with your sick baby,” she says.

“Okay. I think he’s married, though.”

“Whatever. I’ll be the hot young second wife.” She comes back to the counter and points at my Coke. “Are you done? Let’s go find Valentine’s dresses in my closet. Or better yet, my mom’s closet.”

Upstairs, we spend at least an hour inside her parent’s crazy room-sized closet, but in the end everything looks too old or is way too fancy for a school dance. Brielle already has a dress, anyway, and technically I do too. By ten thirty I’ve gotten, like, four Where are you texts from my mom, so I finally go home.

I text with Dylan a little. He doesn’t have much to say—he never does, especially on days he has practice. It’s always about his coach, like Briggs killed us, or just Dead, but then he adds Ur cute or Sweet dreams. Tonight he writes Take that sexy ass to bed followed by xo, and I’m smiling as I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

But once I’ve gotten cleaned up, I don’t go to bed. Instead I open up my laptop and check Facebook one last time, scanning the new posts on my wall. I go over to Dylan’s page and can’t help smiling at his photos. I’m sure I’ve looked at them all, but he’s so cute, and soon I find myself in his older albums, the ones from last year. There are a lot of shots of him with this girl Caysie he was dating then, and I swallow back a lump of jealousy as I flip through. I wish he’d take these down, but I know I can’t ask him to; that would be pathetic. Caysie goes to a different school, the Catholic all-girls’ academy, so I don’t see her in real life. In photos she seems really happy, one of those girls with shiny hair and an easy smile—like she’s really smiling at you, even if she’s looking at a camera. Like she means it.