End of the Innocence Read Free Page A

Another small smile. “I mean, I had a ton of reasons, but they didn’t, and that ticked me off.” She stopped making circles. “So I decided ‘what’s done is done’. Besides, you guys are too cute for words, so why stay mad?”
    I had thought I felt bad about what I’d done to her before, but seeing her sitting here, burying the hatchet like this, I was stunned by the fact that I really didn’t know much about Jennifer at all. “I am so sorry about hurting you,” I blurted out, the emotion beginning to rise inside me. “You deserved better than that.”
    Her mouth was a crooked grin that could make lesser men buckle. “I know.” We sat, both of us doodling and turning text pages while we figured out what to say next.
    “So, Christmas break’s coming up,” she said casually.
    “Yeah, can’t wait,” I answered, not sure where this was going.
    “Kelly’s having The Party…,” she trailed off.
    Oh shit, The Party.
    While my brain scrambles to find the ability to make words again, let me explain that Kelly’s parents are some of the worst people I have ever met. People have to get a license to fire a gun, drive a car, even to sell hot dogs on the corner, but any idiot can have a kid. If there were two people less suited to be parents than mine, they were Kelly’s.
    His mother was one of those ladies who had no idea how to act her age. She still wore clothes that would have looked tacky on girls with half her mileage. She had a Snookie-like tan that made her skin look more like tanned hide, and I am not even going to go into her hair. Worse, she took every opportunity to try and flirt with any of Kelly’s friends who were stupid enough to come over to their house over the summer. To have a woman who is as old as, if not older than, my mother tell me I was “growing up nicely” and then give me a long look up and down was just about the creepiest thing I could imagine.
    His father was even worse.
    There is a certain type of man who can only judge his value based on how many women find him attractive. He keeps count of how many girls he thinks he can have. That number translates exactly to how much of a man he is. I was used to seeing this behavior in guys my own age, but to see it in a man as old as my father was just gross. And that was Kelly’s father: gross.
    I don’t know if he was oblivious to the fact he was balding and overweight and at least three times the age of the girls Kelly knew, but his dad would leer at any girl no matter how old she might be. That kind of thing was just sick. Kelly wasn’t a girl magnet to begin with, and after it got out how pervy his dad was, it was near impossible to get a girl to come over to his house at all. The only exception was The Party.
    Every year, his parents went out of town right after Thanksgiving and left Kelly alone at their place. Now you’d think a teenage boy throwing a house party when his parents left for a few days might be a stereotype. In Kelly’s case, it wasn’t like that. You see, his parents knew about the party and let Kelly throw it every year. They would leave him some money and then drive off for a week, knowing their teenage son was alone and having a party for half of Foster. They wanted to be known as the cool parents, the ones the kids liked and trusted. As with my parents, appearances were all that mattered, and not in a good way.
    Like I said, these people shouldn’t have been allowed to buy a dog, much less raise a child.
    All moral objections aside, The Party had become legendary in the town over the last four years. It had grown year after year, and now that it was Kelly’s senior year, it was rumored to be the best one yet. I had known all this, of course, but since everything with Kyle and me had gone down, going to The Party had been the last thing on my mind.
    Until, you know, like now.
    “Did I lose you?”
    I looked up and saw Jennifer staring back at me. I wondered how long I had spaced out and shook my head.