Saltwater Secrets - Cindy Callaghan Page 0,26
Josie dawdled near Kevin’s Fun House.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked.
“I want to put this in the box.” She held up the shell.
“Now?”
She nodded.
On our way I asked her, “Do you like him?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. I never liked a guy before.”
“Well, if it helps, the fact that you want to save that shell in the box tells me you like him, too. At least a little.”
“You know so much about this stuff. I mean, you had Peter, and I feel like I’m behind schedule or something. It’s embarrassing.”
So I may have led Josie to believe that Pete and I were more than just friends. It didn’t feel like a lie, because I’d believed it myself. The problem, as I learned the hard way, was that he never thought that.
Josie added, “At home you have boyfriends, and, just like that, TJ likes you now. It’s like I can never catch up to you. And I don’t like it.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I’m sorry, Josie. I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. And, for the record, I don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Date and have boyfriends.”
“You don’t? But Pete— And I mean, look at you, acting all high school already.”
I knew she didn’t mean it as a compliment, but I liked that I acted high school. That was what I was going for. “Josie, don’t laugh—”
“About what?”
I stopped walking and went over to the boardwalk’s wooden railing. “When I tell you that I’ve never kissed a boy.”
“But I thought—Peter?”
“We were really good friends, maybe even best friends, for a long time, like years, hung out all the time and studied together. We had a streak over six hundred days.”
“That all sounds good,” Josie said. “Perfect boyfriend.”
“Correction: a boy who was my friend. Not boyfriend. I thought it was more than it was. It’s embarrassing.” I used my dirty shirt to wipe sweat off my top lip, then cracked open the bottle Timmy had given me, drank a big gulp, and rolled it on my forehead. “So don’t be hard on yourself.”
“What happened with Peter?”
“He told me he liked Kelsey Gelfman, the popular girl in school. To make it worse, he told me he’d liked her forever. And I’d thought we shared everything. He had this whole crush going on, and he’d never told me about it.”
“Did you ever tell him about your crush?” Josie asked. “On him.”
“I didn’t think I had to. I thought… he liked me back.” I paused for a beat before adding, “And the timing of all this was so bad, because it was right when Mom and Gregory told me they were getting married, and I assumed Pete was going to be my date for the wedding, but I went alone. And I had to deal with all this mushy love right in my face.”
“I’m sorry, Stella. What did you do?”
“For starters, I stopped talking to him!” I added, “And I cried a lot. I realized that he was pretty much my only friend. So I had to find friends.”
Josie made some comforting noises. “The girls you went shopping with when you cut track?”
I asked, “You know about that?”
“Strike one? Yeah. But I don’t know about strike two.”
“It was dumb. So dumb.” I sighed. I couldn’t believe I was about to say all this out loud for the first time. “Those new friends? I told them about Pete and Kelsey.…”
“What did they do?”
“They took pictures of them and then altered them with a photo program and made the pictures… well, made them really terrible, and then they posted them online. Everyone saw. Pete and Kelsey were totally humiliated. And, of course, they thought I was behind it.”
“But you weren’t?”
“No.” Then I added, “I was mad at Pete, totally mad. Kelsey, too, and she didn’t even have anything to do with it. But who does that? That’s just so mean.”
With that, Josie took my hand and led us to the fun house line, which we didn’t have to wait in. “Anyone who knows you knows you’re not mean. Anyone who knows you knows you’re awesome. And Pete missed out.”
I smiled. “You know, Josie, you’re so nice. You say the nicest things. Maybe if I’d been nicer and said nice things, it would’ve been easier to make friends.”
“Trust me, you’re nice,” she said. That was so Josie—my ally, always. I thought that maybe I should make sure I had her back as much as she had mine.
Josie took my hand again and pulled me into the hall of