Confessions of an Angry Girl

by Louise Rozett

  “She’s upset because she thinks I somehow made you follow me at the Halloween party, and at homecoming,” I say in a rush.

  “How do you know that?” he asks, sounding slightly suspicious.

  “She cornered me in the locker room before Christmas. She told me that if I ever looked at you again, she’d beat me up. And get Tracy thrown off the team.” I take a deep breath. “She’s the one writing ‘911 Bitch’ everywhere.”

  Jamie’s brow furrows like I’ve just said something that is incomprehensible to him. “It’s her? She’s doing that?” I nod. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. I figured it was better if I didn’t. It’s not like you can do anything anyway. If you do, it’ll make her think that…it’ll make her more jealous.”

  He leans back against the headrest. “Fuckin’ crazy,” he says, shaking his head.

  The unasked question that has been lurking in my mind for months is now on the tip of my tongue, but it still takes a few seconds for me to work up to asking it. “I don’t get it, Jamie. Are you…with her?”

  He shrugs. “Sorta. We grew up together.”

  “What do you mean? Like, you were neighbors or something?”

  “Yeah. And I lived with her family for a while.”

  My brain scrambles to process this information. Jealousy takes over, trying to get me to say things that I shouldn’t. I clear my throat.

  “Why did you have to live with her?”

  Jamie turns on the wipers to get rid of the snow that has built up on the windshield. He adjusts the heat again and traces the grooves on his steering wheel before answering me.

  “My mom died and my dad went bat-shit crazy. The Deladdos said I could stay with them until he got it together. He kinda never did, but I moved back home anyway.” He looks directly at me. “That’s why I know your mom. I got booted off the hockey team after my mom died. The school sent me to see her.”

  How is it that I could hear every piece of gossip about Jamie Forta—everything about how stupid he is and how he’s been held back a million times and all of that—and not know that his mother is dead, and that she died not that long ago, probably right before Jamie’s sophomore year?

  “But I never heard—”

  “She didn’t live with us. Nobody around here knew about her. The funeral was in Boston.” He looks so uncomfortable talking about her that I almost tell him he doesn’t have to, but I can’t—I crave every scrap of information he’s willing to share. “I missed a lotta school last year. That’s why I gotta take that English class.”

  “Was it cancer?”

  “No.” He turns on the headlights and the golf course in front of us is suddenly illuminated in a bright wash of light. “She was in an institution.”

  He watches me as if trying to gauge my reaction. For a split second, there’s so much sorrow in his eyes that I want to reach out and touch his hair, his face—find a way to make him feel okay. Then it’s gone.

  Peter must have known about Jamie’s mom. That’s why he asked Jamie to look out for me this year. Because Jamie knows exactly what it feels like to lose someone. He knows how the entire world suddenly turns into an alien planet, and people—all people, even the people who know you better than anyone else—can seem like insensitive, clueless losers when they get tired of you being sad after a while. Jamie knows all about this.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “You have your own shit to deal with.”

  “Why was she… I mean, she was in the institution because she was sick?”

  “I’ll tell you about it someday,” he says, turning in his seat to look over his shoulder as he backs the car out. “Forget Regina. She don’t get to say who you can talk to. You and me are friends. You can talk to me whenever you want.”

  The combination of the quick change of subject and his declaration that we’re “friends” is like a punch to the stomach. I know he means “friends” in a positive way, but I’m sitting in a car with him on Valentine’s Day in the most romantic spot in our stupid town, and he just told me one of his deepest, darkest secrets and we’re just…friends.

  So many questions are competing to get out of my head that they all clog the exit and none of them make it. I’m disappointed. Confused. A tiny bit relieved. Then disappointed again.

  Jamie keeps his eyes on the road. The snow is falling hard, and I wonder if his car can make it down the hill without sliding, but he takes it slowly and we make it just fine. We listen to static on the radio till we get to my house. As we sit there on the street, I imagine that he reaches over and touches my face like he did that night in Robert’s car. In reality, he doesn’t move.

  “Thanks for the carnation. It’s pretty.”

  “You’re welcome,” he says with that slight smile that makes the back of my neck tingle with warmth.

  I don’t want to be just friends with Jamie Forta.

  What would happen if I leaned over and kissed him? Do I have it in me to do that? Would he stop me?

  “Are you going back to Cavallo’s?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “To pick up Regina?”

  He turns, studying me like he’s looking for information. I picture Regina sitting where I’m sitting right now, holding Jamie’s hand while they drive somewhere, or talking to him about something only the two of them know about from when he lived with her family. It occurs to me that Regina probably helped Jamie get through his mother’s death, and then, before I know what I’m doing, I lean over and kiss him on the mouth, too hard.

  It’s not the sexy, grand gesture I had in mind, and I start to pull away before I mess it up any further, but Jamie catches my arm and stops me. I look down as his hand begins to slide up my arm, over my shoulder, stopping at my collarbone to touch the necklace Robert gave me. For a second, I feel guilty. But the guilt vanishes as Jamie takes the “R” pendant in his hand and gently pulls me toward him, pressing his lips to mine. I feel his tongue on my bottom lip, sliding back and forth before finding its way inside my mouth. My tongue meets his, and his kiss becomes a little more forceful as he wraps his other arm around my waist and pulls me closer. His mouth shifts to my neck, planting kisses in a row up and down. And then the kisses turn into little bites, and I make a weird sound. The sound startles me, and I try to pull away again, embarrassed, but he tightens his hold on me and says in my ear, “It just means you like it.”

  And he’s right. I do like it. I could stay here all night with Jamie’s arms around me and his mouth on my neck. I want more. I want his hands on me, everywhere at once. I suddenly wish that he would touch me under my shirt, and I realize that I’m moving closer, pressing my body against him, willing him to slide his hand under there.

  And then he stops. “Shit. Sorry,” he says, his arms still around me.

  I suddenly hear myself breathing too hard and too loud. I start to feel stupid, dumb, needy. Fifteen minutes ago, Jamie Forta said we were just friends, and so what do I do? I kiss him. And I get so into it that, for the first time in my life, I’m wishing that a boy would take off my shirt. And then he swears and apologizes, and now here I am, so close that I can feel his heart beating, but it’s all wrong. The way he’s holding me now has nothing to do with the way he was kissing me five seconds ago.

  It’s crazy. This whole thing is crazy. I’m crazy.

  I force myself to pull back, disentangling from him. I’m hot all over—I know my face is flaming red. I still can’t ca
tch my breath, and I have a very strange ache between my legs that I’ve never felt before but that is pretty easily identified. He looks weird and closed-off.

  “Sorry,” he says again, leaning against the door, putting distance between us. “I shouldn’ta done that.”

  “Why?” I ask, my breathless voice giving too much away.

  He puts his hands on the steering wheel and tightens his grip for a second as he takes a deep breath. Finally, he says, “A lotta reasons.”

  Heat floods my face, as if I could be any redder. So there are multiple reasons that Jamie shouldn’t kiss me, not just the one big one named Regina. Great. What are the other reasons?

  One of them is probably that I’m the world’s worst kisser. Actually, maybe that has replaced Regina as the number-one reason.

  I’m horrified. I just want to get out of his car before I do something else that’s stupid. I grab the handle and shove the door open.

  As I flee, Jamie’s voice follows me out the open door and up the front walk.

  “You okay?” he asks, surprise and confusion in his voice. “Hey—Rose?”

  If I were a normal person, I would stop and tell him that I’m fine, and I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. Maybe even wish him a Happy Valentine’s Day.

  Instead, I pretend I can’t hear him and I run up my front walk like my life depends on getting away from him, cursing myself for ever thinking that I could possibly kiss a guy like Jamie Forta and get it right.

  SPRING

  mortifying (adjective): incredibly, painfully embarrassing

  (see also: stirrups)

  17

  TODAY IS DAD'S birthday. And what am I doing to remember him on this day? Sitting in a free clinic, waiting to talk to a gynecologist about birth control.

  Dad would be so proud.

  Not.

  It’s been a completely surreal day, partly because I’m sleep deprived. I was up half the night studying the websites of the people who died with dad, trying to figure out what I should say on the site about the explosion. Should I just post links to the articles? That would make the most sense, but all these people have basically written essays about that day, with details they learned from reading this report or talking to that person in the military. They did research in order to put together the whole story, digging for information like there was a mystery to be solved and posting the pieces as they found them, whereas I just read one article and figured there was nothing else to know.

  What a lame daughter I am.

  I was really hoping to have the whole thing finished by Dad’s birthday so I could show it to Mom and ask to use her credit card to register the domain name. But the site’s not ready yet. Though I’ve posted a bunch of family photos on the picture page—including some of Peter—I still haven’t chosen the main photo.

  Again. Lame daughter.

  The first surreal thing that happened this morning was I went down to breakfast and saw a picture of myself on the cover of the Union Chronicle, the local paper. My mom had left it for me, right next to my orange juice, before she started seeing her morning clients. In honor of Dad’s birthday, the paper ran a nice photo of him next to a terrible photo of me, crying at his funeral in June. The caption under this terrible photo?

  Daddy’s Little Girl.

  As if having a photo of myself with snot running out of my nose on the cover of a newspaper weren’t bad enough, I also have to be called Daddy’s Little Girl? Luckily, the readership of the Union Chronicle is probably, oh, around twenty or thirty people, all over the age of eighty, most of whom can never find their reading glasses. I think. I hope.

  The next surreal thing that happened was that I lied to my mom after having just finished months of “probation”…for lying. So much for punishment being a deterrent. I left Mom a note saying that Tracy and I were going to the mall, when really, we were planning to get on a bus and go see a gynecologist at the free clinic downtown. Why I agreed to do this with her, I have no idea. I don’t need birth control, so there’s no reason for me to see a doctor. But Tracy convinced me that a really good friend would go through the experience with her and not just sit in the waiting room.

  And the final surreal twist to the day? Tracy telling me on the bus ride how she and Matt are happier together than they’ve ever been, and that they finally said “I love you” to each other last night. I’m betting Matt said “I love you” in response to Tracy saying “I’m going on birth control.”

  Call me a cynic.

  Matt didn’t break up with Tracy on Valentine’s Day. I wonder if he ever intended to, or if that was just the lie he told Lena to explain why he couldn’t see her that night. Now I’m wondering if Matt is actually going out with Tracy and sleeping with Lena simultaneously. If Stupid Boy is smart enough to pull that off, I’ll have to upgrade his nickname. To Sleaze Boy.

  When I talked to Tracy the day after Valentine’s Day, she said everything was great—although once again, they hadn’t had sex. She said Matt was worried that his parents were going to come home and they’d get caught. I wonder if Matt would tell the same story.

  But now, Tracy has decided that after everything that has—and hasn’t—happened, it’s time to go on the pill. I practically have whiplash from all the times she’s changed her mind about this. She says that he has waited long enough and things are really good now. She also says that compromise is the heart of any relationship—I’d bet money she read that in her mother’s Cosmo—and since he compromised by agreeing to use condoms, she can compromise by agreeing to go on the pill.

  Logic isn’t really Tracy’s strong suit.

  Condoms, pill, pill, condoms—I’m sick of the whole thing. I never want to have another conversation about birth control again, as long as I live.

  I flip through the pages of Parent magazine, which seems to be the only option in this waiting room, aside from a copy of the Union Chronicle, which I’ve turned over so no one can see my snotty picture. Tracy is going on about the fact that there are all kinds of different pills now, and there are these plastic rings, too, that you put in once a month. I don’t bother reminding her about STDs. I’m too nervous to pay close attention to what she’s saying anyway. I’m about to have my first gynecologist’s appointment. And from everything I’ve heard, it’s awful and humiliating.

  Just what I need. More humiliation. Maybe Regina will show up and paint First Gynecologist’s Appointment in nail polish on my forehead while the doctor has her hand inside me. Although I shouldn’t complain—except for the occasional scowl, Regina has basically left me alone since I talked to Jamie on Valentine’s Day. I don’t know how Jamie did it. Maybe he just told her he doesn’t care about me one way or the other.

  I still can’t believe Jamie’s mom is dead and I didn’t know.

  I’ve been thinking about every moment of the Valentine’s Day kiss at least thirty times a day since then, and I can’t figure out exactly what went wrong. Did he stop kissing me back because a) he has a girlfriend, b) I’m a terrible kisser, or c) he finds me repulsive?

  B and C may sound similar, but there are differences. C is much worse than B.

  Occasionally I think, who am I, kissing someone else’s boyfriend, even if that someone else is Regina? Am I the kind of person who helps a guy cheat on his girlfriend? It’s so far from my idea of who I am that it almost seems like it didn’t happen. My first lesson in denial.

  I look back down at my magazine. The articles in Parent h
ave nothing to do with my life, and I’m finding some weird comfort in that. Tracy is flipping through her Lucky, oohing and aahing over things I wouldn’t know how to wear if I tried. Then she leans forward, picks up the Chronicle and looks at the headline, Remember Local Hero on His Birthday.

  “You know,” she says, “your birthday is right around the corner. So’s Matt’s.”

  I know what she’s about to suggest, in order to avoid recreating last year’s fiasco, when she blew off our long-standing tradition of pizza, ice cream and a movie on my birthday in order to spend it with her brand-new boyfriend, Matt. To her credit, she still feels bad that I stayed home that night with my mom. Mom made my favorite chocolate cake with espresso frosting, but it didn’t make up for the fact that my best friend was with her boyfriend while I was home watching TV with my mother on my birthday.

  Funny. What I wouldn’t give to be home watching TV with my dad on my birthday this year.

  “What do you think about having a double birthday party?”

  What I want to say is, I’d rather stick needles under my fingernails than have a party with that jerk.

  “Why?” I say instead.

  “It would be fun, don’t you think? We could, like, take over Cavallo’s. Ooh, or maybe even have it during the day at the park! We could get a band to play, and have a keg—”

  “Trace, you don’t have to include me in Matt’s birthday celebration. I’m over what happened last year.”

  She knows that isn’t really true because every once in a while I can’t help but make a “joke” about how my best friend spent my fourteenth birthday with her boyfriend.