“I know what it means. I just never heard it used like that,” she said.
“When you’re in love, everything is spontaneous,” Suzette said, and then giggled and turned her shoulders inward, which made her breasts bulge in the deep V-neck of her light blue sweater. I knew she often did that deliberately just to see where the gaze of the boy she was talking to went. “Whether it’s a kiss or something more,” she added.
“Then every day is spontaneous for you,” Kyra said. “Every month, you fall into a desperate love that lasts as long as your period.”
Everyone laughed. I smiled. It wasn’t all that much of an exaggeration when it came to Suzette. Recently, she had gotten blond highlights in her dark brown hair because Tommy Clark liked blond highlights, and soon after that, she let us all know she had pierced her navel. In fact, she let everyone know, especially Greg Storm, who had his nose pierced. It did seem like she remade herself weekly to attract some new boy she fancied.
“I’d rather go to Kane’s house. You’d have more privacy,” Missy Meyer said, getting serious again. “I mean, you have a nice house. It’s just that . . .”
“The way the house is laid out, her father might hear what goes on in her bedroom?” Suzette suggested, her silver-blue eyes brightening like two diamonds of promiscuous excitement. “Didn’t your younger brother hear what went on in yours when you brought Dylan Marks home one afternoon?” she asked Kyra. She embraced herself and mimicked groans and moans.
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“Shut up.”
“Well, no matter where you go after school, Kristin, he can’t help you with your homework. If anything, he’ll distract you,” Theresa Flowman said in her nasal voice. She was hoping for that result, hoping Kane would distract me enough to lower my grades. After the last marking period, Theresa and I were neck and neck for valedictorian.
“Please, Theresa, distract her?” Kyra said. “What you need is a lot more distraction. Any distraction, come to think of it,” she added, flashing a sly smile at me. Suzette and Missy laughed. Theresa turned crimson, glared at her, and walked off.
“All that girl knows about sex is that it’s a three-letter word,” Suzette said.
“And what do you know?” Kyra teased.
“I know Steve Cooper would like to practice the missionary position with you in his basement,” she retorted, and the three of them laughed again. Steve’s parents had let him move into their basement, which felt like a private apartment because it had a separate entrance. Lately, it had acquired a nickname: Steve’s Sex Pit.
They looked at me, noticing I wasn’t laughing this time. The chitchat had reminded me of Christopher and Cathy talking about sex, and for a moment, I was back in the attic, thinking about an older brother being a young girl’s only source for information about her maturing body. Even though Christopher was coldly scientific, he was still her brother and not her mother or older sister. Any young girl would still be sensitive about asking him questions about sex, but especially a sister. I recalled how hard it had been for my father to talk to me about any of it. He finally had to ask his sister, my aunt Barbara, to speak with me about my own emerging hormones clamoring to be recognized. She had made a special trip from New York to do it.
Who would make a special trip for Cathy? It didn’t look like her mother would take the time to do it. She certainly wouldn’t take her out of the room to have a private conversation, one of those mother-daughter talks that my girlfriends satirized. They didn’t realize how envious of them I was. There were so many little things that had become big things for all of us, but especially for children locked away like that, I thought, children locked in a room and an attic and left to their own imagination to amuse and educate themselves. Christopher would do fine, but Cathy . . . how would it end up for her? Did I really want to know? Would both Kane and I regret turning those pages in the diary?
“Anything wrong?” Kyra said. “Hello, earth to Kristin?”
“What?”
She looked at Suzette.
“We were both talking to you, and you didn’t hear us. You’ve been acting weird all day. You didn’t miss a period, did you?” Suzette asked. She would.
The three of them looked at me with one face, mouths slightly open, eyes anticipating.
“She hasn’t been going with him long enough, has she?” Kyra asked.
“We really don’t know how long she’s been seeing him,” Suzette said, enjoying the implication as she kept her eyes on me. “And guess what? It doesn’t take that long to get pregnant. Some sperm are faster than a speeding bullet, right, Kristin?”
“Get outta here,” I said, playfully nudging her. “You have a one-track mind,” I added, and then spotted Kane coming around the hallway corner. “Later,” I muttered, and hurried to join him.
“Hey,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “You all right?”
He looked back at my girlfriends, who were staring at us and giggling.
“Someone say something about us?”
“No. They don’t bother me. I think I screwed up on a math quiz.”
“Does the CIA know yet?”
“I’m serious. I should have aced it, Kane.”
“All right. Sorry. What happened?” he asked as we walked to our next classes.