Season of the Witch Read Free

girlfriend, and now, oh, my God, he’s a fag. But Ella just said, “Whoa, good for him. I’d totally swap spit with David, he is H.O.T.”
    She throws her arms around me. “Oh, my God, so great to see you! Catch me up, I know nothing! What insane naughtiness went on? I must know
everything
!”
    Everything, I think. That’s a lot.
    I nod sideways.
Let’s walk
. It’s twelve blocks to school. Twelve blocks of safety before the hell.
    I decide to start with the most important news. I say lightly, “Well, you know Chloe, right?”
    “Super-scary diva bitch Chloe who speaks fluent French and has the wardrobe of life,” says Ella promptly. She has everyone at school catalogued in her brain, everything they’ve ever done and said.
    I nod. “And of course Oliver …”
    “Chloe’s super-sweet, brainy boyfriend and you kind of don’t get it, but you think, Okay, he’s kinky for cruel.”
    I nod again. “Well, they had this fight over the summer.…”
    Ella stops dead. She’s been friends with me long enough to know where this is going. She mouths “Oh. My. God.”
    “Yeah,” I say unhappily. “A little bit. But it’s over, they’re back together.”
    “Is everything cool?”
    “Not exactly.”
    I can say a lot of things in my defense. Yes, Chloe and Oliver have been an official School Super Couple since last winter. But supposedly they were on some kind of sex break, because Chloe’d had this pregnancy scare and wanted to cool it. That was in June. Then in July, Oliver was like, Okay, this has gone on for a while, I’m starting to take it personally, and Chloe was like, Maybe it is personal, I don’t know.
    He asked, Do you want to break up?
    She said, I don’t know.
    And that’s how it was in August when Oliver walked me home from Erica Mittendorf’s party. When a guy walks three miles with you on a hot, humid night and you’re both making jokes about taking off your clothes and just walking naked and a certain amount of beer has been consumed—
    Things happen.
    Afterward, we had breakfast at dawn at a diner on Ninety-First Street. I said, “Look, I know you’re with Chloe, and my lips are sealed, I promise. I don’t want to screw you guys up.”
    Oliver was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Actually, I don’t know if I
am
with Chloe.”
    To which I said, “Oh.”
    “It seems like we’re kind of taking a break this summer.”
    I waited. “But you don’t know.”
    “No.”
    He looked sad; I felt sad for him. Chloe was Oliver’s first girlfriend; everyone knew she had him under her thumb.
    Still, I had to ask. “Do you know if the break includes other people?”
    He looked at me and we laughed and said at the same time, “No.” And I swear, I do not know if we meant no, he didn’t know, or no, it didn’t include other people.
    I said, “This is getting very confused.”
    “It is,” agreed Oliver, and pressed his knee between my legs.
    I let it stay confused for about two weeks. But then Lulu Zindel saw us being confused outside a movie theater. That’s when it got nasty.
    The next day, Oliver called me and said, “Chloe found out. She’s pretty upset.”
    Well, I thought, now we know how Chloe feels about the break-including-other-people question.
    “I can imagine,” I said. And waited.
    Oliver said, “I’m not really sure what to do.”
    “What do you want to do?” I asked.
    And of course he said, “I don’t know.”
    I said, “You should deal with Chloe before anything else happens with us. I think that’s fair.”
    “Probably,” said Oliver. “Sorry, this kind of sucks for you.”
    “Eh,” I said lightly, “I’ll deal.”
    And I would have—because I have been through this before. I have deeply weird boyfriend karma. Every guy I’ve gotten together with has either just broken up with someone or is obsessing about someone else. In eighth grade, Daniel Schrodinger French-kissed me at Carrie Nussbaum’s party—not, as it turned out, because he liked me