“Jeremiah Brown.”
“And who is Jeremiah Brown?”
I take a deep breath. Kelsey and Vanessa are all over me. “Why do you want to know?”
Vanessa gives me a look. “Who doesn’t love girl talk?”
“Let’s talk about you and Rory then,” I say.
“Bo-ring,” Kelsey sings. “They’ve been doing it for ages.”
Soon we’re back in our suite, piled on Vanessa’s bed. Kelsey is so excited, she seems to have temporarily forgotten our falling-out.
“How’d you meet Jeremiah?” Vanessa says. “I love his crazy hair.”
“And he has a great body,” Kelsey adds.
“And those tattoos on his arm! Oh my God, that’s hot—”
“He has The Flash on his shoulder blade,” I say. “The comic superhero guy.”
Kelsey and Vanessa giggle. “You’ve seen it?” Vanessa asks.
My lips begin to tremble.
“Spill already,” Vanessa says.
“I met him running on the trails.”
“He seemed interested in you today.”
I know he’s interested, I want to say. But I can’t. If I wasn’t so nervous to talk about this—about my feelings for Jeremiah, about how I’m not over Kyle, about how I’m worried to death Jeremiah’s going to hurt himself—it might feel good to have a girl talk.
When I was little, when Kelsey’s mom took care of me at night while my mother worked, Kelsey and I had slumber parties all the time. We draped sheets over the dining room table and pretended to camp out and talked about everything. But our conversations grew different as we got older. We went from talking about Barbie, to learning cursive, to who had gotten their periods, to who we wanted our first kiss to be. That’s what today feels like, and the excitement makes my heart pound faster. But back then, even though I freaked out over every little last thing, nothing was truly at stake.
Everything is at stake with Jeremiah. I don’t want to lose him to some crazy sports accident. I don’t want to lose him as a friend, either. And like Liza said, sometimes it’s okay to be single. That’s what I need.
“Do you have a cute bikini for the party tonight?” Vanessa asks me. “If not, I bet one of Kelsey’s will fit you. Maybe the orange one with white polka dots?”
Kelsey nods quickly. “I’ve got a cute white sarong to go with it—”
“I’m not going,” I interrupt.
Vanessa slaps the mattress. “You have to go! I couldn’t believe the tension between y’all today.”
“That’s precisely why I don’t want to go.”
“What aren’t you telling us?” Kelsey asks slowly.
I fall over onto a pillow. “I hooked up with him.”
“What? When?” Vanessa squeals.
“Right after graduation. Um, when we were running.”
“You hooked up while running?” Kelsey asks, furrowing her eyebrows. “How does one hook up while running?”
“I thought only, like, Cirque du Soleil performers could do stuff like that!” Vanessa says.
I roll my eyes. “We were running on the trails by the Little Duck River and then we went down by the water.”
Vanessa and Kelsey glance at each other.
“So why haven’t you mentioned him?” Kelsey asks.
I pull myself into Indian style. “He didn’t call afterward…” And then I found this ring in Kyle’s bedroom. “And I just felt…”
The girls stare, waiting for me to finish.
“It felt wrong.” Saying that is sort of a lie, but the emotions are too complex to figure out.
“But do you like him?” Vanessa asks. “I could tell something was up between you guys.”
“We’re friends.”
My heart beats faster and faster when I think back to that moment on the banks of the river. Yeah, I’d never felt so turned on, so out of control, but lust and love are two different things. Love is far more dangerous.
“He’s not for me,” I say.
The girls let out sighs.
“We’re still going to this party, right?” Vanessa holds up the DTK flier.
“Yeah, maybe we’ll meet other guys there,” Kelsey says. “And we can both get rid of these droughts.”
“I don’t think Annie has a drought,” Vanessa says. “She hooked up like a circus performer while running, remember?”
I swat her with a pillow.