Roxy’s Story Read Free Page B

my father, never mon père .
    “So what do you want to do afterward?” he asked.
    “After what?”
    “High school,” he said.
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s too far away to plan.”
    He nodded. I had the feeling I was beginning to scare him now.
    “No, I don’t know. I might go into fashion modeling.”
    “You could.”
    “Thank you.”
    He glanced at his watch again and then surprised me. “How about some lunch?”
    “Lunch?”
    “That’s the least I could do for a girl who risked her reputation and her uncertain
     future for me.”
    I shrugged. “Why not? Only, I didn’t risk my future. I reinforced it.”
    He laughed. “You’re very funny.”
    “I’m better when I’m really trying to be. So where’s this lunch?”
    “I know this great sandwich shop on Fifty-Seventh.”
    “Lead the way,” I said, and we started out together.
    I suppose a relationship that began with a theft didn’t have a good prognosis, but
     I was never one to care about long relationships, anyway. Maybe my mother’s relationship
     with my father turned me off the idea. My guidance counselor, Miss Laura Gene, was
     an amateur therapist, and she often accused me of always looking for ways to blame
     my parents for anything and everything.
    “One of these days, you’ll have to take sole responsibility for things you do, Roxy,”
     she told me. “That’s when you’ll know you have become an adult.”
    “Oh, I thought that was when I had my first period,” I replied, and she turned a shade
     of purplish red.
    She would definitely categorize Steve as an adult. He was obviously a very responsible
     person and serious about his schoolwork. He was not my idea of anideal guy, anyway. I liked guys who weren’t uptight about their futures. When he told
     me he was very interested in international politics, I thought he was going to start
     talking about current events like my father and be boring, but he had a passion for
     what he liked, and I was attracted to that for a while. It didn’t take me long to
     figure out that he was not terribly experienced when it came to romance, despite his
     good looks. He was an only child, born to parents who had him late in their lives.
     Cursing, sex, drugs, and drinking were so alien to him that I thought at first he
     was from another planet. But he didn’t prove too difficult to corrupt.
    After lunch, we went for a walk in Central Park. He was going to go on to his apartment
     to work on a research paper. I asked him if he wanted company later.
    “Later? When later?”
    “I don’t care. You tell me,” I said.
    “It’s Sunday. Don’t you have school tomorrow?”
    “I never let something like that interfere with my happiness,” I said.
    He smiled, now far more relaxed. I could see he was intrigued with me, and for now,
     that was enough for me.
    “I’m not much of a cook, but I’m good at putting out a ready-to-eat chicken with some
     vegetables.”
    “I’m always ready to eat,” I said. “And other things.”
    “Other things?”
    “You’ll figure it out. You seem smart.”
    He smiled and gave me his address. “Six-thirty?”
    “Fine,” I said, and gave him a quick kiss on the lips, then hurried away. When I looked
     back, he was still standing there looking after me, glancing at the book I had swiped
     for him and then back at me as if he couldn’t believe that what had just happened
     was real.
    That was one of those nights when my father nearly took off my head, but I endured
     the pain and continued seeing Steve on and off during the next two weeks. As it turned
     out, he didn’t just have limited romantic experiences. He was a virgin. That ended
     fast. I was able to spend that night later at his place because one of the girls at
     my school covered for me in exchange for an iPod I had lifted. She really wasn’t much
     of a friend, not that any of them were. Mon père was on a short business trip, so I was able to pull it off.
    I did begin to really