Wild Swans - Jessica Spotswood Page 0,25
defend yourself,” she continues. “But I heard what he said about your mom and I saw the look on your face. That was not a cool thing for him to say. Today of all days. You know it’s not true, right?”
I bite my lip. “Right.”
Claire raises one eyebrow. I’ve always been jealous she can do that. “Did you have sex with this guy?” she asks.
“No! Jesus! We were just kissing!” Having sex would be skipping several steps for me.
“And he wasn’t pressuring you? You were into it?”
I think about Connor’s hand on my thigh and his mouth on mine, and a shiver runs down the back of my neck that has nothing to do with the breeze coming off the Bay. “Um. Yes. Very.”
Claire laughs her full, throaty laugh. “Oh my God, you’re blushing! Ivy! Okay, I want to hear more about this in a minute. But look, you actually had fun for once! That’s okay. Don’t let Alex make you feel bad about it.”
I frown, a little stung. “Are you saying I’m not usually fun?”
“No, I’m saying you’d usually rather be home reading a book than at one of these parties,” she says, and she is not wrong. She links an arm through mine. “Come on. I’ll walk you home.”
I look down at her gold platform wedges. “You’re going to walk a mile in those shoes?”
“I’d walk ten miles in these shoes for you. Besides,” she says, shimmying a little, “they make my ass look fabulous.”
• • •
It’s almost midnight. Most of the old colonial houses along Water Street are dark. My flip-flops thwack on the uneven brick sidewalks. We’re halfway through the park, crossing a wooden bridge over a marshy inlet, when Claire lets out a yelp and yanks me to a stop. She points into the marsh, where a big blue heron stands, its eyes glinting in the moonlight.
“Ivy!” Claire whimpers, gripping my forearm with pinching fingers as the bird turns its head to stare at us. She’s terrified of birds, even Abby’s sisters’ parakeet.
It takes several minutes for me to convince her that this four-foot-tall blue heron is not going to peck us with its long bill or chase us with its long legs, and then she literally runs across the bridge like there might be trolls beneath.
I laugh. It’s weirdly reassuring to know that Claire is scared of something, even if it is waterfowl. She’s so brave most of the time. Like last January when Logan McIntyre told everyone that she gave him head on New Year’s Eve. When she realized why everyone was whispering, she didn’t go home sick or cry in the girls’ bathroom. She went right up to him between chem and English and announced that at least she’d had the class to keep it to herself that the good Lord only gave him two inches.
Then this past spring, she revived the dormant Gay-Straight Alliance at school and came out as bisexual. That earned her a lot of shit about how she’s a slut who’s down for anything. She said their ignorance only made her more passionate about sex education, so this summer she’s volunteering at the women’s clinic outside town, even though it means getting insulted and having to walk past posters of fetuses coming and going.
It sucks that Claire had to deal with any of that. But sometimes I envy that she knows what she wants. Sometimes it feels like everybody knows but me. Claire wants to get the hell out of Cecil, to go to American University in DC and major in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Spend a year abroad in London or Paris or Rome. Abby wants to go to the University of Maryland and study elementary education while Ty gets his degree in business. Then they’ll get married and come back to Cecil, where he’ll help run his dad’s hardware store and she’ll teach first grade and they’ll have three kids. She even has the names picked out! Alex doesn’t have his future quite as mapped out, but he wants to stay in Cecil and play baseball.
And Connor—I remember how passionate Connor was as he recited the Millay poem.
The only thing that turns me on that much is him.
• • •
When I fit my key into the back door, it’s ten minutes after twelve. The only sounds are the cicadas in the trees and the soft lap of waves against the shore. The house is dark and quiet, and I’m relieved that no one’s waited up