“Come on,” I said, taking a swig of Coke. “Leave it, okay? You’re already gorgeous.”
“Dikker doesn’t think so,” said Joc. Arcing her neck, she studied the long gleaming slide of her hair.
“He told you that?” I demanded. With a sigh, I propped Joc’s pillow behind my head and settled in for yet another extended discourse on Barry Alan Preddy, more commonly known as “Dikker”—a guy who’d told Joc on their first date that he wanted to be dead before he turned thirty. Talk about being paranoid of commitment.
“He didn’t have to,” said Joc. Licking a fingertip, she tapped the curling iron to test it for heat. “It’s all in a guy’s eyes,” she said. “Where they are when you’re with him.”
“So where are his?” I asked in a decided monotone. I mean, we’d been through every possible angle and permutation of this subject countless times. Too many of my conversations with Joc were beginning to feel like a repeat of a repeat of something that had been interesting three years ago.
“Everywhere but on me,” she muttered, leaning toward the mirror and poking at a zit on her chin.
“Why doesn’t he break up with you then?” I yawned.
“Because I’d kill him,” Joc said casually, catching the edge of her bangs expertly with the curling iron. “And then I’d kill myself.”
“Oh yeah,” I muttered. I’d heard this comment before. Many times. “Romeo and Juliet,” I added without thinking. “Front page news.”
“Look, Dyl,” snapped Joc. Releasing half her bangs into a perfect curl, she turned to glare at me. “It is, of course, obvious to you and everyone else that you’re superior to the rest of the human race,” she said acidly. “For some reason known only to His very divine self, God dumped us normal people with a shit-load of hormones and you just got a sprinkling, which you take care of with the occasional mastie.”
Turning back to the mirror, she started up another stare fight with her reflection while I lay rigid on the bed, observing the ceiling. Here it was again, that conversational scorpion that leapt out of nowhere, poisoned the most innocently intentioned words and vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The last time Joc snapped at me like this, we’d ended up heaving large objects at each other. Tim had actually turned down his bedroom stereo and sauntered across the hall to find out what all the high-pitched squealing was about.
“Cat fight,” he’d said, unimpressed, and left again.
It had taken a week to work our way back to speaking terms, and that had been only last month. Tension like this never used to happen between us. Sweet sixteen could really suck. Pressing my cheek against my can of Coke, I waited for the fire in my face to burn down.
“Okay,” I said thickly. “Dumb thing to say, agreed. It’s just...
I never liked Dikker, you know that. He’s always making you feel like crap. When’s the last time he made you really happy?”
“Last Friday,” said Joc, forgiving me with a smug grin. “Around 1:00
AM
.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “You were probably stoned.”
“As a matter of fact, I was,” she said complacently and set down the curling iron. Then, without the slightest warning she crossed the room, climbed onto the bed and straddled my hips. Leaning over me, she poked her intense narrow face into mine.
“C’mon Dyl,” she said, her large purplish blue eyes trapping mine. “When are you going to let Cam get what he wants? You’ve been seeing him for eight months now. You’re practically married. You should hear the poor guy moan when you’re not around. Says he’s almost forgotten how to use it.”
The perfect curl of her bangs dangled from her forehead, and the rest of her hair dropped in a smooth, coconut-scented fall around my face. “Don’t you like him?” she whispered, her lips inches from mine. I could smell tobacco on her breath. “He’s decent enough,” she added thoughtfully. “Doesn’t two-time, has a great car.”
At that moment she shifted, and the unexpected movement on my hips set off a wave of sweet singing heat that shot everywhere through me, suspending me in an edgy horrified bliss. Then the sensation passed and I came back to myself, eyes closed, fighting panic.
Shit
, how had that happened? It sure as hell hadn’t been my fault—I wasn’t the one who’d crossed the room and jumped all over someone else’s body. Joc must have hit some goddamn hyper-alert nerve when she shifted, but I hadn’t asked for it. I
hadn’t
.
Well, the first thing to figure out now was whether or not Joc had noticed. Had I moaned, had my expression changed or given anything away?
“I dunno,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes closed. “Sometimes I feel like it, but never when he wants to, y’know?”
Joc hesitated. I could hear the soft come-and-go of her breathing as she thought. “Is he rough?” she asked. “Pushy?”
“No,” I said.
“What would it hurt to try it with him then?” she asked. “C’mon, you’ve got to give the guy some hope.”
“Maybe,” I whispered.
“Open your eyes, would you?” she said and tugged gently at my left eyelid. “I feel like I’m talking to a corpse here.”
“Can’t,” I said, keeping them shut. “I’d go cross-eyed staring at you this close.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll wallpaper myself to the other side of the room.”
I waited, my eyes squeezed shut and counting heartbeats, but the only thing that moved was the tip of her hair teasing my neck. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked finally. “You’re all tense. If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you didn’t get it on for guys, you—”
Joc paused, her silence speaking for her, and then the tip of her coconut-scented hair buckled and she was right onto me. “But I know you better than that, don’t I?” she whispered, her words puffing gently against my face. “No one knows you as well as I do, right Dyl?”
“No one,” I said softly, and longing flared, slow and searing, in my gut. Turning my head to escape Joc’s nearness, I felt her breathing angle up my neck.
“So, if I think it’d be good for you to get it on with Cam, it probably would be, right?” she said.
“Maybe,” I hedged.
Definitely,” said Joc, and the coconut-scented hair wisped away from my neck. Returning to the dresser, she once again
took up her battle stance in front of the mirror while I lay dishrag-limp on the bed, breathing in the empty air bit by bit, its hard lonely truth. Slowly I turned my head and watched Joc through slitted eyes.
“My hair sucks,” she said bleakly, staring into the mirror. “My face looks like it’s been pickled. I give it two weeks before Dikker dumps me.”
Closing my eyes again, I shut her out.
Chapter Two
The problem wasn’t that I was a virgin. I mean, I’d had sex—with a guy. As far as I could tell, my sexual experiences to date had been pretty much the usual—some lunch-hour kissing in junior high and the odd after-school groping session. Then, midway through grade nine, I started dating Paul Loye, and over the summer we had sex four times. It was always with a condom—the first time I was so nervous, I almost made him wear two! But even with protection, and even though I liked Paul, I could never relax and get off on it. I guess the whole thing just felt sweaty and grunty and bump-bump-bump. Plus I would always be in a funk, wondering if the condom was doing its job or if I was in the middle of getting pregnant. And then, to top it all off, afterward neither of us could look the other in the eye.
To be honest, sex with Paul was one big flat-out disappointment. Which was definitely confusing, because I’d always figured sex would be the most fantastic experience of my life. At least that was the way it looked on TV. I can’t tell you how lonely I felt. And what made it even worse was that when Joc and I consulted, we seemed to be doing the same things, and she was, as she put it, “enjoying her karma.” Or so she said, so of course that was what
I said too. But lying about it just made the situation worse, and the whole time I kept wondering when someone would finally see through the act I was trying to pull.
I think that was why I kept doing it with Paul. I was trying to
make
myself like it, prove to myself that I
could
like it. But all it seemed to prove was the opposite, and in the end I couldn’t fight it off anymore—the certainty, the
knowing.
Because I did know what was going on, had begun to sense it way back in grade six when Joc and I had started growing breasts and pubic hair, and she’d wanted to compare. No big deal—lots of kids pull that kind of stuff when their bodies are changing and they can’t get a straight answer from their parents. And our school sex ed class hadn’t explained
everything
we wondered about, even with its extremely straight answers to questions we hadn’t even known existed. Basically it was the little things we wanted to know about then, not the big ones. Like most eleven-year-old girls, Joc and I weren’t interested in attaching our eggs to anyone’s sperm yet. We just wanted to know if our boobs were growing too fast, or if there really was supposed to be that much hair you-know-where. And those weren’t the kind of questions you could ask your health teacher.
So we did a few spot checks on each other, took off our shirts and checked to see whose breasts were bigger, that kind of thing. Once Joc reached out and touched one of my breasts, but I jerked back at the sudden soft explosion of sensation, and she never did it again. Still, she kept wanting to compare, so I kept telling myself that my reactions were normal—I was just feeling the way I was feeling because our shirts were off, and if she was a guy, then things would
really
get hot.
Then came a fateful grade seven sleepover at Joc’s house, when she decided that we were going to strip head-to-toe and do a “scientific evaluation.” Actually, it was a very helpful experience as
far as science went—it’s not all that easy to see between your own legs and I learned a lot about exact locations, especially with Joc’s finger right on them. I kept a pillow over my face while she was examining me and refused to touch her, though when it came my turn to play doctor, I looked—I have to admit I looked for a very long time.
After that I knew. Even though I kept telling myself that Joc was just a substitute for a guy, I knew better. And the weird thing was that she was always hanging all over me. She’s a naturally physical person, but guys took to calling the two of us lezzies. Just joking, of course—by grade eight Joc already had her rep, having officially done the deed with Larry Boissonneault, then dumped him for his best friend Terence Harty.
I think she knew too—about me, the way I was. Sometimes I would look up and catch her watching me, her eyes kind of glazed and her mouth pouty, the way it goes when you’re dead center in your hottest sex fantasy. And every time I caught her watching me like that, she would look away. But first, just for a second, there would be this electric flash that leapt between us— something you couldn’t see or hear but damn well felt—and then she would blink and turn her head. And it would be completely and utterly gone. Until the next time it happened.
The thing was, Joc hardly ever looked away. Sometimes we had stare fights that lasted five, ten minutes, and she never backed down. Never. After that sleepover in the seventh grade, we didn’t compare again. At least, not that obviously. But the summer before grade ten, when she started dating Dikker and I was going with Paul, we double-dated a couple of times. Dikker was a year older than Joc and already had a car, so after the movie, they would take the front seat and we would take the back. And the whole time, even though she seemed to be
really
busy with Dikker, I could have sworn Joc was listening to me and Paul—so
close, it ended up feeling like a competition, each of us trying to prove who was having the hottest time. Thinking about it afterward made me feel kind of sick, so I told Paul that I would rather do things with just the two of us. When I told Joc that I didn’t want to double with her and Dikker anymore, we stopped talking for a while. No apparent reason—she didn’t get mad or anything, it just happened. Then, at the end of the summer, I broke up with Paul, and Joc and I were best friends again.
Now I was going out with Cam Zeleny. And like Joc said, I couldn’t expect him to hang around,
unfulfilled
, as she called it, forever. After all, Cam was prime dating material—smart, decent, good-looking and a member of the senior jock crowd. Dief girls lined up every day just to say hi to him. I mean, I was definitely not his only option for a Saturday night. And to add to the pressure, he’d put in his time with me. I was way overdue to start putting out, at least by most dating standards. What was I going to do when he finally lost patience and dumped me?
I could already feel it—that big lonely crater opening in my gut. Cam might not have been the one who secretly turned me on, but he was a worthwhile conversation and a damn good kisser. If I kept my eyes closed, he could get me pretty sweaty. The problem was that I couldn’t take it any farther. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I would have given almost anything to have been able to respond to what Cam wanted to give me. But every time we tried, I turned off. I didn’t think
no
, didn’t protest or push him away. Some inner switch simply clicked off, and I turned into cold putty in his hands. He always stopped then—Cam wasn’t the kind of guy who just wanted to get off. A few times he’d tried to get me to talk about it, but what was I supposed to say? I couldn’t even
think
the truth inside my own head. How was I supposed to tell him?
And if I was going to be absolutely honest, I would have to admit that behind the fear of losing Cam was the complete and utter terror of what other kids would think if we split up. Ultimately there were only two reasons for a girl to reject Cam—she was religious, or deep inside herself she was skewed, she was wrong. Okay, maybe I’m being a little paranoid here. Couples break up for lots of reasons, but if Cam and I split, that would be why—I was skewed. And with all the talk about gays and lesbians these days, someone would eventually figure it out. Once they did, it would get around. Then everyone would know. Everyone would know that deep inside, in the deepest core place, Dylan Kowolski was
wrong
.