Charm and Consequence (Novella) - By Stephanie Wardrop Page 0,5

out some toothpaste froth like it’s poison.

“You didn’t have to jump on Ali like that,” she says.

“Come on, Leigh, you don’t really believe this stuff, do you?”

“What 'stuff’?” she snaps, one hand on her hip. She looks like a very angry little sparrow. “That people should only have sex in a loving, married relationship? Yes, I believe that ‘stuff.’ That I have more value as a female than what I can offer a male sexually? You believe that, too, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, but this whole born-again purity thing, putting such a premium on your virginity—it’s medieval.”

She turns back to the sink and rinses off her toothbrush, then shakes it out with surprising vigor.

“I should have known you wouldn’t understand,” she says, and this makes me feel really bad.

“I want to. But I don’t think virginity is something to be guarded or bartered.” I sigh because this is so hard to talk about. “I mean, come on, Leigh, the Taliban thinks like that, and they stone women to death!” She whirls around to face me and I notice the welt on her neck under the ruffled collar of her nightgown. “Leigh!”

Her hand flashes up to cover the mark and when she pushes past me her face is as red as the hickey. I just stand there for a few moments, blinking at my reflection in the mirror, but I can’t see myself through the mental fog.

When I stumble back to our room, Tori’s there in a pink nightgown, brushing her hair over her head until she looks up and sees my face. “What?”

I just shudder.

“What? What happened?”

“Either Leigh had to pull a sea lamprey off her neck earlier or Alistair the minister’s son gave her an enormous hickey tonight.”

“No!” Tori gasps, clamping her hand over her mouth to stop the fit of giggles, especially when I tell her what a champion of women’s virtue Alistair claims to be.

“Oh my,” she laughs and falls on her bed.

“He’s a hypocritical little hobbit,” I fume. “Honestly! The whole time he’s lecturing us on girls’ needing to keep their legs crossed and their heads bowed, he’s planning an all-out assault on our sister’s neck!”

Tori shakes her head at me and crawls into bed.

“Well, I say good for Leigh, if he makes her happy.”

“Whatever,” I sigh, falling onto my own bed. “If she wants to start some weird new Puritan sect that allows skin-marking foreplay but no technical sex, I guess that’s her business.” I roll over on my stomach and look at Tori. “And what about you and Trey? Do you need a cold shower and a lecture on the value of abstinence?”

Tori allows, “Trey is a good kisser. And that is all I’m going to say.”

“So smug.”

She throws a pillow at me and then has to get out of bed to pick it up again.

“Good night, Georgia,” she says, and, judging by the soft snores coming out of her a minute later, she’s quickly off to dreamland—which probably features another date with Trey.

I turn on the little lamp on my headboard and make myself read more Hamlet because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to fall asleep anytime soon. I keep thinking of the way the word “No” cut through the air when Michael said it in the parking lot the other day, and of Alistair and how phony he is to preach bodily virtue and then suck a big old bruise onto my sister’s neck. I guess that kind of activity is morally acceptable to him and Leigh because it isn’t sex, exactly.

And Leigh must have liked it. You wouldn’t let someone work on your neck like that if you don't want them to do it. A hickey must take some time to produce in all its garish glory. I am only guessing, of course, because no one has ever done that to me. (Or “with” me. I’m not sure which is correct.) I’ve been kissed twice, once by a boy in third grade who pretty much ran around the playground kissing every girl he could catch, and whose lips tasted like grape jelly, and the second time by a guy in Colorado. I went to a spring dance with him in our last year there because everyone else had turned him down. I felt sorry for him and sort of obligated to, like it was a test of whether or not I was a good person. When he kissed me it made me want to wipe my lips right off