Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,111

entirely nude, with her leotard pulled down to her thighs. She covered her bare breasts with her hands.

“Susan,” Bobby said, fumbling to pull up his shorts. The shorts. The ones I thought of as my shorts.

Jacqueline said nothing, and when she recognized me, a faint smirk tugged her lip upward and she dropped her hands from her breasts, as if to show me what she had that I didn’t. She slowly pulled up her leotard as her expression grew more satisfied, like she’d pulled up in a car I’d never be able to afford.

Now the numb shock was mine. He was having sex with Jacqueline. Of all the women he could have, he’d picked someone like her.

It took me less than a second to feel years older. All the ways I’d previously known I was young and inexperienced and naive—all the ways I’d known better, deep down, than to imagine Bobby and I could ever be something—were compressed into a single moment. The years folded in on themselves. Seeing him then, I caught up to him, felt like I was knowing and wise enough for him, finally.

And I never wanted to see him again.

For the second time that night, I ran.

Sprinted, really, my shoes abandoned, down Mansfield, turned onto 107th. I saw Bobby’s car pull up at the corner and ducked into an alley. As I leaned my shoulders against cold brick, hiding, I wondered how he’d gotten rid of Jacqueline.

He got out of the car and called my name. I waited until he gave up and left, and after he did, I stood there as the air turned too cold for me to stay any longer.

I had to call Candace.

There was a convenience store, Pop In, Pop Out, a few blocks away. It was now almost eleven. Some of the store’s customers were just getting their evenings going, but mine was so obviously over that I drew stares from the people milling around the beer case or in line to buy cigarettes.

The clerk looked me over and said, “You okay, honey?”

I told her I was fine, thinking she’d have to be an idiot to believe me. “I just need to use the pay phone.”

She pointed me toward the back. I dialed the operator and asked to make a collect call to Candace. She was probably with George. She would tell him everything I told her the moment we hung up. Like she used to tell me.

Candace accepted the charges, and when I heard her voice, she sounded worried. “Susan, where are you?”

“Pop In, Pop Out.”

I waited for her to ask more, but she didn’t. She just said, “You sound awful. I’ll come get you.”

“What happened to you?” Candace said when she pulled up in Frank Jr.’s pickup truck. I was sitting on the bench outside the store with my arms around myself. “Why aren’t you at the wedding?”

“I got caught with my date in the coat closet,” I told her. “Remember that guy from Dan O’Keefe’s party?”

“The spiky-hair guy? How did he end up at your dad’s wedding?”

“We’ve been hanging out,” I said, understating the truth and skipping over all the good parts, since they didn’t matter now. “He was helping me with soccer. We were friends . . .”

“You never told me about him. Do you like him?”

Leave it to Candace to worry about my romantic entanglements when I looked like dusty peach roadkill. “I do. But I’ll definitely never see him again.” She didn’t ask more, to my surprise, and I said, “Why weren’t you doing something with George?”

“He was over, but I told him you needed me and he thought I should come get you by myself, so we could talk.”

“Oh, sensitive,” I said. And then, because I thought Candace seemed smug to announce how understanding her weird boyfriend was, I added, “Are you sure he’s not just pretending to be so caring to get in your pants?”

Candace slammed on the brakes. We were close to her house. “What the fuck, Susan? Is it so impossible to believe someone really likes me?”

“No, of course not,” I said, a perfunctory response. Giving thought to George Tomczak’s real feelings wasn’t my priority at the moment. “But do you even like him?”

“I do like him, and you’d know that if you hadn’t completely ditched me for soccer,” she said.

“Whatever,” I told her. “You’ve been ditching me for guys since we hit puberty. How am I supposed to know if you actually like him, when it’s always seemed you’d take