Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,4
you talking about?” I asked them, even though the phrase “soul mate” fizzed in my chest. If Bobby and I were soul mates, that meant we could also have sex, right?
“Your shorts,” Candace said. “Aren’t those sort of what soccer players wear?”
I looked down at my bare legs. It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, but in Chicago, you clung to summer, which meant wearing as little as possible for as long as possible. My shorts were the same elastic-band nylon shorts that I’d worn every other day since the eighth grade. Not the same exact pair; I had three pairs from Sportmart—one red, one blue, one green—each with white piping around the legs. I didn’t wear them because I played sports. I first bought them because they were cheap and I could pull them on over my swimsuit to ride to the Powell Park pool.
Then, this summer, I realized maybe the shorts meant something bigger. Like that I was a feminist. Not one who didn’t shave her armpits, but a sexy one. In this other book my mom gave me, Fear of Flying, the main character talks about a “zipless fuck.” (I didn’t read the whole book, and I wondered if my mom had before she gave it to me.) It was supposed to be a sexual encounter with no strings attached. It sounded simple compared to how Candace was always upset about a guy who ditched her, or how Tina pined for her long-distance boyfriend. Simple, like the shorts. Not that I’d know what to do if some guy suggested we try some no-strings sex, but it was easier for me to imagine the sex part of being with a boy than the part where you felt some kind of deep soul connection, or whatever happened when people talked about falling in love.
(Also, not for nothing, but early this summer, I was wheeling my bike down our alley ’cause the chain had fallen off, and I heard Jeff Sipowitz, who has the best hair in the eleventh grade but terrible acne, say to my neighbor Dave Kazlov, “Boing!” I didn’t know what he meant, but later Dave told me that Jeff thought I had a nice ass and “boing!” was what I did to his dick. And I sort of liked hearing that, even if Jeff is gross. So, okay, feminism is more complicated than my elastic-band shorts.)
But after three years at a high school where every boy—even the ones who seemed worth a crush for a minute—proved to be a letdown, maybe I could allow myself a crush on Bobby McMann, teacher or not. I’d have to allow it, since my mind was already picturing us grabbing one another by our matching waistbands. More realistically, I wondered when and how I’d see Bobby again.
And that’s how this whole thing started.
Two
I’d read a horror story once in some weird magazine one of my older sister’s boyfriends had left at our house about this town where a mysterious orb showed up and all the women became bold and sex-crazed. I think about that story a lot because it seemed to be saying that all my fantasies were weird somehow, like they needed to be connected to some demonic orb. But I didn’t care—Bobby McMann was my orb.
But, within a few hours, I realized he was having the same effect on every girl at Powell Park. The last time there’d been this much commotion over a guy was freshman year, when someone brought in an issue of Cosmo from, like, five years before in which Burt Reynolds was lying completely naked on a bearskin rug, with his arm casually draped between his legs, over his fulcrum. But Bobby wasn’t a photo, available to anyone who got their hands on that issue of Cosmo. He was Powell Park’s own resident hunk, like a gift specially for the girls at our school, maybe to make up for all the things we didn’t have, like attractive guys, flattering restroom lighting, and gym uniforms that didn’t give you a rash. Even the maxi pad dispensers in the bathroom still sold the ancient “sanitary napkins” that you had to wear with a belt.
We were in last-period Kitchen Arts, which was like extra home ec for people who wanted to focus on eating cake batter. Our teacher was Miss Cuddleton, a sweet-faced round lady with a squeaky cartoonish voice. We called her Miss Cuddle and abused her very limited authority so we could gossip in class.