Kissing Kate Read Free Page A

thousand miles on it, and the first thing Vanessa said when she climbed in was, “Is this your uncle’s truck? Nikki said you live with your uncle and that he’s really old and weird. Is this what he drives?”
    “Nope, it’s mine,” I said. “I bought it myself.”
    “My uncle is not weird,” Beth said, kicking Nikki’s foot. “And he’s not that old. He’s forty-two.”
    “Is that how old this truck is?” asked Vanessa. She scanned the dashboard. “Where’s the CD player? Where’s the radio?”
    I backed out of Nikki’s driveway. “Nikki and Vanessa, you two need to share the side seat belt. And Beth, you need to put on the one in the middle. You know that.”
    Vanessa whispered something in Nikki’s ear about the truck smelling like pepperoni, and the two of them cracked up. Beth eyed me reproachfully as she buckled up.
    “My friend in Raleigh?” Vanessa said. “Her big sister drives a red Miata. It’s adorable. That’s what I’m going to get when I turn sixteen.”
    “Me, too,” Nikki chimed.
    “Not me,” Beth said. “I’m going to get a BMW convertible.”
    I lifted my eyebrows. In Buckhead, the part of Atlanta we lived in, practically everyone drove expensive cars: Mercedes, BMWs, Saabs. That was one reason I loved my beat-up old pickup, even if it did smell like pepperoni. And actually, it wasn’t pepperoni. It was sausage. On Saturday nights I worked for Entrées on Trays, a catering service that did deliveries for a handful of different restaurants, and last week I’d picked up five orders of cannelloni from The Mad Italian. The smell did kind of linger, but I didn’t care. I thought Beth didn’t either.
    “Hey, Vanessa,” I said, “Beth says you just moved here from North Carolina. What do you think of Atlanta so far?” I wouldn’t have asked, except I thought I should give her another chance. After all, she was just a kid.
    “Tacky,” she said. “It’s like the tackiest place ever—that’s what my mom says. When we were driving here from Raleigh, we passed a huge water tower shaped like a butt.”
    Nikki and Beth giggled.
    “It’s not a butt,” I said. “It’s a giant peach. Anyway, the water tower you’re talking about is in South Carolina, not Georgia.”
    “Whatever. It looked like a humongous butt.”
    I shut up for the rest of the ride. Vanessa entertained Nikki and Beth by describing, in detail, a book she’d gotten for her birthday called How to Upscale Your Image. “There’s an entire chapter just about lipstick,” she said at one point. “Like how it’s really important to keep your lips moisturized, so you can apply your lipstick in an even coat. Of course, I don’t have to wear lipstick if I don’t want to, because I already have natural lip color. Not many people do.”
    I must have groaned, because Beth glared at me before turning to Vanessa and asking, “What about me? Do I have natural lip color?”
    Vanessa squinted. “Maybe if you chewed on them a little.”
    “Beth, you do not need to chew on your lips,” I said. “They’re fine.” I wanted to tell them that none of them needed to wear makeup, period. They were in the fifth grade, for christsake. But they’d moved from lipstick to eye shadow, and Beth nodded as Vanessa explained how to make close-set eyes appear farther apart by applying dark shadow to the outer corner of each lid.
    Then I started thinking, hell, maybe I should be the one paying attention. With Kate, I never worried about how I looked. It wasn’t important, and besides, she was beautiful enough for both of us. People treated me differently when I was with her, as if some of her spark rubbed off on me. Cuteness by association.
    “And if your skin tone is uneven—see how Lissa’s face is all blotchy?—well, that’s when you’d use base. No offense, Lissa.”
    I dropped off Beth and her friends at the mall and told them to meet me at Chick-fil-A at two o’clock. I parked my truck and walked across the