Wicked Sweet Read Free Page A

she repeats. “But … next year we’ll be graduating … and, we’re going to need a date for prom, right?”
    “Prom?” I thought we’d decided to stand against the consumerism of prom. And no guy would see me as a potential date, not today. I didn’t shower, my hair is in a frizzy ponytail, I’m in my practical one-piece, and I have never waxed. Anything. I can’t be the best at fashion and looking hot and still be the best at grades. I don’t have the time. And neither does Jillian. I grab my backpack, search for my shorts.
    “I wasn’t trying to surprise you. I wasn’t. I didn’t even know, for sure, that Parker and Annelise broke up. They’re just coming to talk to us.”
    “Will picked his nose and wiped his snot on my arm.”
    “In the third grade.”
    “He tripped me in gym, almost every day …”
    “In fifth.”
    “He put the fetal pig heart from seventh grade dissection in a box and gave it to me. Pretended it was a Valentine’s gift. I hate him.”
    “He does stuff like that to lots of girls.”
    “No, Jillian.” I want to tell her that girls who want guys to like them are like moths flickering toward a light, that third-degree burns and scars are inevitable. I want to remind her that Parker was the one who sent Annelise to the bathroom. I want to tell her that earlier this year, Will grabbed my left one while I was standing at my locker. When he’s near me I fall apart inside and not in a good way. But I haven’t told anyone, because it’s weird. It doesn’t make sense.
    The guys are now five rectangles of towels and two circles of umbrellas away from us. And I don’t have a plan.

Jillian
    Beginning .
    O ur friendship was immediate, that’s how I remember it.
    We moved to town when I was eight, moved away from the log cabin near a stream in the Slocan Valley, where my only friend had been our dog, Mangy. My parents were into sustainable living before it became fashionable. After a while my dad didn’t feel like an alternative lifestyle was for him. When he left to find work in Vancouver, my mother couldn’t sustain much of anything anymore.
    She packed up our chipped dishes and we followed the trail of RVs on the winding mountain roads into town. We stayed in a motel at first and I used a remote control for the first time in my life. Over the noise of cartoons and National Geographic specials I listened to my mom talk to her parents on the phone. She told them what had happened since she last saw them ten years earlier: she could find water with a divining stick, she’d learned to play the fiddle, and she had a daughter: me, Jillian.
    “I’m ready to reenter the world,” she told them. I don’t think they expected that she meant the world of dating. She rushed her hellos and hugs when they reunited in our motel room, and left us behind to get to know each other while she met a guy for drinks. My granddad told me stories about his old war friends and my grandmother Nona combed and braided my hair. They said I was the most precious thing
they’d seen, more beautiful than an emerald lake or a sunrise on the prairies. They let me drink hot chocolate with my dinner and eat ice cream for dessert. My mom and her new friend opened the motel room door as the sun was coming up the next morning, and Nona begged for me to stay with her and Granddad a little longer. The new boyfriend took me for a walk while my mom argued that she wouldn’t let them take me away from her. My grandparents left after breakfast.
    The guy stayed with us in the motel long enough that my mom said I should call him Dad. “He can be Dad Two,” I told her, sure that she’d get mad and walk away. Instead she called the guy in and told him the story of me saying the cutest thing. Dad 2 looked at me sideways when he hugged my mother.
    “She’s a real charmer,” he said. “She could tame a grizzly bear, couldn’t she?”
    We moved into our house on Columbia when it was 85 degrees outside and Mom complained