Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,60

a senior, right? Do you know what you’re going to do when you graduate?”

“I’ve kind of been thinking about colleges,” Joe said. He turned his head toward me, so I tilted mine toward his. His dark eyes caught some of the light from the lamps over the field. “I never used to, but it’s going to be 1980, you know? It feels like the future or something, and it seems like if I can keep learning stuff, it’s maybe better than getting some job that might just disappear in a year.”

He seemed shy then, like he was waiting for me to tell him he wasn’t nuts. “I’m not sure things will be any different in a year,” I said.

“Maybe not,” he said, and he was looking at my face carefully. I stared back at him. It was odd, how exciting it felt to give yourself a minute to really look at someone’s face and notice all the pieces of it separately and in ways you can’t when you look at the whole thing at once. Joe had a little scar on one eyebrow, a slice of white through the dark hairs. He had a small freckle just beneath his nose, and his lips curved up on one side like they were ready to grin.

“Do you think you’ll go to college?” he said softly, still looking at me.

“I never thought about it either,” I said. “I guess I can’t see myself there. Wherever ‘there’ is.”

“I can,” he said. “I can totally picture you standing up and giving some cool speech about ‘Gimme Shelter’ or something.”

I grinned. “I can’t believe I did a header today,” I said.

“I can,” he said. Then he touched my chin lightly and I drew in a sharp breath. His face neared mine, and just as his lips almost covered my own, I shoved aside the bolt of excitement that had rocketed through me and pulled back.

Maybe this was his making-out blanket.

“Whoa, I’m not one of your girls,” I said, a little sharper than I meant to. What was I supposed to say, though? Yesterday, he’d taken Lizzy to the movies. Just because he could go around making out with everyone like it was no big deal didn’t mean I wanted to. Well, not that I didn’t want to, exactly—there was no denying the surge that had shot through my body when he’d gotten close. But I could drum up that same surge thinking about the channel 5 morning weatherman and its sports reporter. My body wasn’t a well-tuned antenna picking up one strong signal so much as a powerful radar that pulsed any time it detected someone decent in range. The only difference was Joe was one of the first guys I knew in real life—besides Bobby—to bring it on, without me having to imagine he’d been spliced with Paul Newman or something.

Joe’s face was a study in mortification as he sat up. “That was stupid,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

He seemed to really mean it. I sat up next to him and touched his shoulder. “It’s . . . it’s no big deal,” I said. “It’s probably, like, habit for you or something.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his agreement confirmed what I’d already been debating about him. He wasn’t any more serious about whatever girl he was out with than he was about anything else. And that was fine—we’d both be glad later that we hadn’t kissed.

“Let’s not be weird about it, okay?” I said.

“Definitely not,” he said. “It was dumb. Seriously, I’m sorry. Won’t happen again.”

He stood and walked ahead of me to the car. Watching him retreat, I felt a current circuit inside me, like a Hot Wheels car making its way around a track, vibrating beneath my lips and traveling down my arms, coursing over my chest and down to my hips, then repeating. My breath caught looking at a small tear in Joe’s T-shirt collar, and at his neck. I could imagine grabbing his shoulder and turning him toward me. We’d kiss up against his Nova until we couldn’t breathe.

But crossing a line in my head was different from crossing it in real life. Making out with Joe when neither of us was serious about it wouldn’t bring anything good, and would put an uncomfortable wedge in our friendship, like when you had something stuck in your teeth and couldn’t stop running your tongue over it.

The only problem was, judging by the more or less silent car ride to my house, the uncomfortable wedge