Confessions Of An Angry Girl. Louise Rozett
and turning, and then landing on his back on the ground and cracking into sections like a piece of glass that had been dropped from just a few inches up, shattering but still keeping its shape.
The dreams stopped after a while, and I was relieved—until I started to miss them. Now that I don’t see my dad at all anymore, I worry that I’m forgetting everything about him.
Jamie takes a right and then a quick left, and ten seconds later we’re at my house.
“This is it, right?”
“Yes.” Silence. “So, when did Bobby Passeo skate over Peter’s fingers?”
“I don’t know. Two years ago, I guess.”
I can’t believe he still remembers where we live.
“Wait, you had your license two years ago?”
He shakes his head and leans back against his door, looking at me with those perfectly hazel eyes that make me nervous.
“You okay?” he asks, a cloud passing across his face. His question and dark expression catch me off guard, as I’m still thinking about him driving without a license. A thousand people have pissed me off by asking that question in the past few months. But I don’t seem to mind it when it comes from Jamie. “I’m sorry. About your dad,” he says.
I nod, but that’s all I can do. I’m not going to risk crying in front of Jamie. I can’t really predict when I’m going to cry, but when I do, it involves a lot of snot. “Well, thanks for the ride,” I say, reaching for the door handle.
“Rose,” he says. “You know my name, don’t you?”
His name? He thinks I don’t know his name? The idea that I’m so in my own universe that I haven’t heard Angelo call him “Jamie” and “Jame” every two minutes in study hall—that I wouldn’t know his name, that I wouldn’t know who he was after watching him play hockey all those times—is crazy. But should I admit that I know his name? If I know his name, will he think I…like him?
“Um…” I say.
His expression quickly goes blank. He turns back toward the steering wheel and puts the car from Park into Drive as if he were planning to gun it the second my feet hit the pavement.
“Jamie,” he tells me as he stares straight ahead, waiting for me to leave.
I’m an idiot. But if I now say, Of course I know your name, I’ve always known your name, he won’t believe me. “Thanks again for the ride,” is all I can manage.
I get out as fast as I can, and he takes off, leaving me standing in the street, feeling like a complete loser for pretending not to know the name of someone who just went out of his way to be nice to me, who seemed genuinely sorry about what happened.
Nice going, Rose. Way to make friends. Keep up the good work.
belligerent (adjective): inclined to hostility or war
(once again, see also: me)
3
A FEW HOURS later, I’m in my usual Friday-night spot, sprawled on Tracy’s bright orange shag carpet that we got at Target, waiting for Robert and Matt to show up so we can go to Cavallo’s for pizza. I am very carefully not talking about Jamie, although I feel like I’m going to explode if I don’t. He was being so nice, and I messed everything up. I want to ask Tracy if she thinks he actually likes me or just feels sorry for me, but I can tell she doesn’t like him by the way she looked at him in study hall today. It’s easier just to say nothing.
Tonight, predictably, Tracy and I are covering three topics during our session in her room: her virginity, Robert and her cheerleading tryout. To be honest, I can’t believe Tracy is going out for cheerleading at Union High. First of all, our cheerleading team is not one of those amazing, superathletic competitive teams—there are no backflips off crazy-high human pyramids at halftime. The most acrobatic thing that goes on here is a synchronized hair flip. And being on the cheerleading team at our school isn’t like being a cheerleader at the private school in Union— Here, it doesn’t mean you’re at the top of the food chain. Yes, some of the cheerleaders are beautiful and go out with hot jocks, but some are average-looking girls who just happen to know how to dance. Some are smart, some not. Some have money, some don’t. In other words, not all of them are popular. And to top it all off, Union High cheerleaders have kind of a slutty reputation on the whole. At least, that’s what I heard Peter say once.
So even if Tracy does make the team—and I kind of don’t think she will—she’s not automatically granted access to the top tier of Union High popularity. But I’m not about to tell her that. She’ll just accuse me of being a snob. And in some ways she’s right—after all, I think Union High’s brand of cheerleading is a waste of time and teenage girls.
But I’d still rather talk about cheerleading than virginity.
“I don’t think fifteen is too young to lose it, do you?”
I hate this part of the conversation. “I don’t know,” I mumble.
“You always say that.”
Well, what do I know? I can’t really imagine letting a guy see me naked, never mind letting him do that to me while I’m naked. So I don’t really know what to think. I don’t want to think about it at all, most of the time. Which makes me think that fourteen is probably too young. And is fifteen really that different from fourteen?
“Maybe I should go on the pill,” she says.
I nearly fall through the floor. I suddenly feel like she’s thirty and I’m still in nursery school.
“Tracy, you can’t go on the pill.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not. You have to use condoms. It’s too dangerous not to,” I say.
“You’re so paranoid about sex, Rosie. You always have been. You better relax.”
She’s right about this, too. I am paranoid about sex. Maybe it’s because I have an older brother who decided to tell me all about the dangers of sex the night before he left for college. I’m not sure why Peter was so worked up about the whole thing, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was because he felt he had to fill the parental void. Since Dad died, Mom hasn’t exactly been “available” or “present” or whatever you say, which is kind of ironic, since she’s a shrink. Who specializes in adolescent psychology. When she does talk to me these days, she uses her therapy voice, which makes me go deaf almost instantly.
Thanks to her job, we have enough books on teenagers in the house that I could find the answer to pretty much any question I might have, if I felt like looking. Which I don’t. Maybe that’s why Peter called me into his room to talk about sex while he was packing.
He was listening to Coldplay and I assumed he just wanted to dissect the album and explain why he thought Chris Martin was such a hack. But, no. “Never, ever let some guy talk you into sex without a condom,” Peter had said without any sort of warning. I froze in the middle of his room. “He’ll try to tell you that he can’t feel anything, and that it will be better for both of you if you don’t use one, but he’s just being a selfish asshole. You can get all sorts of diseases from sex. Girls can even get cervical cancer from sex. So don’t listen to some loser who claims he can’t get it up with a condom on. That doesn’t happen to guys until they’re, like, old. And don’t go on the pill for anyone. But you’ll learn all about this stuff in Ms. Maso’s class—she’s the bomb.”
Peter scared the crap out of me, even though I didn’t understand half of what he said. Or maybe that’s why he scared me so much. I barely know what a cervix is. For someone with the aforementioned abnormally large vocabulary, I can be intentionally dumb sometimes.
Tracy hops off the bed and goes to her full-length mirror to check out how her butt looks in her new Rock & Republic jeans—again.