Invincible Summer(21)

She’s still kissing me. No, it’s too big, too dramatic, Noah could see, Noah could be upset—I pull away.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

My first thought is You’re old.

I say, “You’re doing something with Noah. I can’t . . . and I have some weird innocent not-thing going on with Bella—”

“Bella’s not here.” “She still exists.”

“So you’re going to wait your whole life for her?”

I’m going to wait my whole summers for her. I say, “I can’t be sitting here, kissing you, and my baby sister’s right here, and . . . ”

She’s still so close to me. How is she so close to me?

She says, “‘Nothing is true that forces one to exclude.’”

I can’t breathe too well.

“So don’t exclude yourself, Chase.” She lays her head on my shoulder. “God, I just want something—anything—that’s real.”

From that point on, all I can think about is kissing. And it’s like it’s everywhere. Noah and Melinda in the rain. Mom and Dad after they fight. Even in Gideon and Lucy’s stupid cartoons, kissing! The only person who isn’t kissing is Claudia; I would have expected she’d be on Shannon by now, but he’s apparently devoted to his girlfriend back home, and Claude’s making this big deal out of being heartbroken.

Bella never made me feel this way. Bella was just lips. We’re talking about whole bodies, now. We’re talking about lungs.

I’m just confused. Suddenly everything has this subtext.

I’m beginning to understand what Noah meant about foreplay. I think my whole life is foreplay. The girls lying on their stomachs on the beach every day? It doesn’t matter if they’re six or sixteen or sixty. It’s sex. Girls are sex! I feel like I’ve opened up a Pandora’s box of adolescence full of sunlight and lip gloss and Camus.

Noah says, “Seriously, Chase, what’s gotten into you?”

“The idea that the female race extends beyond Bella and my sisters.”

Noah laughs. “The things you discover when you live your life on beaches.”

I know I’m only fifteen, but I’m going to bed every night terrified that I’m going to die a virgin if I don’t have sex right now. I don’t think I’ve ever needed anything this badly. It’s almost terrifying. I’m addicted to something I’ve never tried.

“Do you want to borrow a magazine?” Noah asks. “Or, like, an internet connection?”

But seriously, I’m afraid there’s something wrong with me. There’s this girl I work with, and before I would have thought she was cute and that would have been okay—but now? I feel like doing things with her. To her!

Her name is Joanna, and she always wears pink shirts underneath her white apron. She must have at least twenty pink shirts, I swear. She piles all her hair on top of her head, like every girl in the world, but it looks better on her. She doesn’t wear makeup. Once, when she was reaching for the gummi worms, and I

was going for the wax bottles, the inside of her wrist touched the top of my hand. I got an erection immediately. It was horrible. I had to serve the next set of customers with my crotch pressed against the cash register.

And that’s just one of the things that’s hard about working.

Because my lack of sex isn’t even my only problem. I wish. What’s worse, honestly, is just the fact that I’m working when every instinct in me tells me I’m supposed to be out on the beach. All the people come in midday, sandy and sunburned, and I just want to say, Why are you here? Why are you downtown when you should be on the ocean? but my boss says all I’m allowed to say is, “Hi, can I help you?”

Claudia starts calling me Chase face, which I think has something to do with me not smiling as much as I usually do. Mom keeps wanting to talk, but whenever I take her up on it, all she does is act bored and tell me how wrong I am, which Dad says is a defense mechanism, but really, it’s just very irritating.

“I feel like I’m throwing the summer away,” I tell her.

She’s painting her nails with exaggerated precision. “No one made you get a job, Chase.”

“I hate being grown-up,” I say, trying not to picture Melinda’s mouth around Chase Everboy McGill. Actually, I spend a lot of time trying not to picture Melinda’s mouth. Why is it so different from everybody else’s mouth? How does she get the left side higher than the right side when she smiles? One time, I actually catch myself trying to imitate it in the mirror. And getting turned on by it.

Seriously, something is very wrong with me.

“Oh, hey, I got an e-mail from Bella,” Shannon tells me at work one day. We’re on break, and Melinda stopped by to sample all the fudge with us. Except they’re doing most of the sampling, and I’m organizing the stuffed animals, again, so I don’t have to watch Melinda lick her fingers.

“Just thought you’d be interested,” he says.

“Oh. Cool.”

“She got the lead in some performance they’re doing. She gets to be in pointe shoes, I guess, so she’s excited.”

I should be picturing Bella’s feet in pointe shoes, long and lean and perfect.

“Isn’t that lovely, Chase?” Melinda says, her voice slow and syrupy. I will not look at her. I will not check if her mouth is full.