“Hmm. What do you know? Maybe there is a little bit of teenage rebel in there after all,” she said. She nipped my bottom lip one more time and slid off my lap. “Thanks for the beer, Boy Scout.”
Vicky: Please tell me you guys made out after I left.
Me: How did you know??? Were you lurking in the shadows with night vision goggles??
Vicky: I saw him pull in as I was leaving. Figured his lips had a homing beacon on you. Was it just as good as the first time?
Vicky: Don’t even try to go radio silent on me. The last time Rich and I had sex, he kept his socks on.
Vicky: I need to live vicariously through your swinging singlehood.
Me: Fine. There was a kiss. It was nice.
Vicky: *Hulk smash meme*
Vicky: NICE?? JAKE WESTON LAYS ONE ON YOU AND IT WAS JUST NICE???
Me: Go tell Rich to take his socks off.
22
Marley
A millennium ago. The Kiss.
“I don’t know, V. I’m just not happy. I mean, Travis is great.”
“So great,” Vicky agreed, digging into the Styrofoam cup of chicken corn soup, a staple at cold weather soccer games. “But?”
“But I don’t know. I feel, like, ungrateful saying it out loud.”
“Ungrateful like you owe him a debt of gratitude for dating you?” Vicky looked at me like I’d just declared that Russia had invaded Pennsylvania.
“Well. Yeah. Kinda. I mean, look how much nicer everyone has been to me since we started dating.”
“And by nicer, you mean Amie Jo stopped calling you Zit-Faced Loser to your face. I told you the fastest way to shut her up is to punch her in her goddamn mouth and call it a day. She comes after you because there’s no consequences. You don’t freak out on her. You don’t defend yourself. You just wilt like a pretty little flower.”
Vicky was annoyingly right. I just didn’t have the weaponry to defend myself from mean girls. As far as I could tell, Amie Jo wasn’t human. She’d named me an enemy on the playground in kindergarten and had dedicated her life to being an awful person to me. Dating Travis had been the only respite from her bitchy nastiness.
“Can we get back to the Travis thing?” I asked. The action on the field stopped with the whistle, and we watched twenty-two long-legged guys jog off the field for half-time.
“Fine. Tell me why you’re having doubts about breaking up with Prince Travis, the mostly okay boyfriend.”
Vicky had been involved in a relationship with Rich Rothermel since the end of 10th grade. She said she just didn’t want to commit the time to a decade or two of dating, so she was going to marry her high school sweetheart. But not until they were thirty and done with their two-year backpacking trip around Europe.
With her future already planned out, she was more than willing to help me shape mine.
“He’s nice,” I said. “And sweet and thoughtful.”
“Uh-huh. How’s the sex?” Vicky was skilled at cutting to the heart of an issue and then poking it in the eye.
“It’s…okay.”
I’d held on to my virginity until senior year, not liking any of my short-term boyfriends enough to hand it over to their clumsy, sweaty hands. But when Travis Hostetter swept his blond hair out of his blue eyes and flashed me that All-American dimpled grin on the first day of school—miracle of miracles—I’d all but stuffed my v-card in an envelope and addressed it to him.
I liked him. I really did. He was a great guy. But…
“I don’t have anything to compare it to,” I reminded her.
“Trust me,” Vicky said, jabbing the plastic spoon at me. “You’d know if it was good.”
“Ugh, I feel like an ungrateful ass. So the chemistry isn’t really there for me. Is that a good enough reason to break up with him? And is being moderately more popular a good enough reason to not break up with him?”
“You got yourself a real conundrum there,” she told me. “Bottom line, are you happy?”
“No, but—”
“No buts. There’s your answer.”
I knew she was right, but it didn’t alleviate the guilt I felt for not being more grateful that the guy picked me from obscurity and had done all the right boyfriend-y things. Travis Hostetter was a great guy. He just wasn’t my great guy. He’d make some lucky girl an amazing boyfriend if I could lady up and release him back into the wild.
I felt eyes on me and looked up to see Travis waving to