by N. L. Greene
I tried to explain how difficult the classes were becoming, but they told me that if I spent more time at home studying and less with Mel goofing off, then maybe it wouldn’t be so hard. I begged and pleaded for weeks to no avail. My one big chance to convince them how hard my classes really were finally came though when we got assigned an end of year project. It was a hard one, and I legitimately needed help from my parents to figure it out, but neither one of them even remotely understood what I had to do. They finally conceded and called the school, informing my counselor to put me in normal, regular sophomore classes the next year.
With that hurdle behind me, I completely slacked off the last few weeks of school. I had already passed anyway, so what did it really matter?
There was one juicy piece of gossip that had recently occurred. As I had hoped, James and Ash had become more of an item. They weren’t officially calling themselves a couple, and no one but Mel and I even knew about it, because Ash’s parents would have killed first James, then Ashley if they ever found out they were dating. Not only because he was older than her, but also because he was a pot head and a high school dropout. They had been very vocal about this in the past, so any relationship they had would have to be very hush-hush. I was just happy that the two of them had become closer and that James had finally stopped hitting on me.
It wasn’t until the first week of summer that Mel dropped this juicy piece of gossip on me, though.
“I’ve got some gossip, girl!” she said to me as we were floating around my pool on inflatable lounge rafts. I was on my stomach and Mel was on her back, our feet holding on to each other’s rafts to keep us from floating too far apart.
I propped up on my elbows and squinted through my sunglasses at her. “Oh! What is it?” I asked; knowing it was going to be good by the saucy look on Mel’s face.
“Ash is fucking my brother,” Mel told me with a sly look on her face. I guess she was thinking I would be upset by this information, and actually looked disappointed when I let out a sigh of relief.
“You really don’t like my brother, do you?” she asked me for like the thousandth time.
I lay back down on my stomach; my face sticking to the sweaty plastic again. “God! No, Mel! I don’t! I’m happy for him and Ash. Now would you please stop asking me that?”
She huffed but thankfully dropped the subject, sort of. “So what do you think it was like?”
“What, sex with your brother?” I looked up at her again and smirked. “You really want to know that?”
Her face screwed up in disgust and she splashed me with water. “Ewwww! No! I do not want to know that!” She shivered. “I meant sex in general.”
I pushed myself up carefully again onto my elbows and pushed my sunglasses onto the top of my head to get a better look at her. “I thought you pretty much knew what it was like. You’ve gotten close, right?” Mel bragged all the time about how far she and Brad had gone during some of the make out sessions they’d had when they were alone at her house. From the way she talked, they’d pretty much done everything I could imagine besides sex itself.
She shrugged and looked away, and I started to wonder if maybe she had been exaggerating her range of experience. I wouldn’t be surprised. Mel was seriously all about the ‘image’. She wouldn’t want anyone to know just how much of a virgin she was, like everyone knew I was. I waited patiently for her to answer me.
“I’ve already told you that Brad and I did a lot, but there’s a huge difference between screwing around and actually screwing.”
I lowered my sunglasses and my head again, knowing that she wasn’t going to admit anything. “Well, I wouldn’t know about it either, so I couldn’t tell you what I think,” I said sarcastically. I knew she was about to give me a hard time over my lack of experience. Even though I had no idea where she expected me to get the experience from, when she was the one who had kissed my only two shots thus far. Obviously I was still struggling with that.
Mel interrupted my surly thoughts. “I don’t know why you don’t just go hook up with someone and get some of that shit out of the way. You wouldn’t be so uptight around guys anymore if you did.”
“Well excuse me for not wanting to be a total slut and just hook up with some random stranger!” I said with a roll of my eyes that I knew she couldn’t see.
“Don’t get all bitchy with me! I’m just trying to help.” She splashed me again.
I huffed an exasperated sight at her. “I know that Mel, but I can’t do that. It’s weird!” This time I was the one who shivered in exaggeration.
“So what? I’m weird?” she asked a little defensively.
“Umm, no. You hooked up with your boyfriend who you were dating. That’s perfectly normal and acceptable. It is not, however, perfectly normal or acceptable to hook up with random strangers.” I knew I sounded like a total goody-goody, but no matter how often she reassured me that everyone our age did it, I just couldn’t ever see myself doing that with someone I didn’t truly care about.
“Whatever. You’ll see. When you finally do get a boyfriend who doesn’t cheat on you,” she looked at me with raised eyebrows before continuing, “and you finally get further than a kiss, you’ll know what I’m talking about and try to hook up with whoever you can.” She snickered and then sighed, like she was remembering something specific.
I rolled my eyes before closing them again. I did not want to know what kind of racy encounters she was thinking about. “We’ll see I guess, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.”
Mel and I lazily floated around in the pool for the rest of the day, and for as many days as we could over the summer. We both tanned really well, so we didn’t waste any time in trying to soak up as much of the sun as we could. All that extra time in the sun also helped make my hair even lighter. I may not have thought I was very pretty, but even I knew that a dark tan and lighter blonde hair made almost anyone attractive, and I could get both easily during the summer. But my tan and hair weren’t the only changes I had over that summer.
I didn’t really notice it until Mel started pointing things out to me. Her shirts were getting a little snugger on me, and her shorts were tighter than they used to be whenever I tried to borrow them. It wasn’t that big of a deal; like I said, I didn’t even notice it until she started making jokes about my big hips, butt, and thighs, which started to make me feel really self-conscious. I thought that maybe I was getting fat, and I started to freak out. Ash tried to reassure me and tell me how lucky I was to be curvy and have boobs, and I wanted to believe her, but every time Mel called me fatty or big butt, and even though she tried to soften it with a playful smile, I felt fat. I was pretty sure that she was only teasing me, but she never told me she was just joking, so I still worried that maybe it was her way of telling me without overtly trying to hurt my feelings. Even though every time she teased me, my feelings were hurt. Either way, I stayed pretty covered up unless I was in my swim-suit by the pool or at the beach; unsure of my looks and what people thought of them.
This new uber-aware body-consciousness followed me through the rest of the summer. I started watching what I ate and paid more attention to what clothes I wore. Luckily there weren’t any parties to attend over the summer, unless you counted our own personal ones with James and his friends. His friends were all over at Mel’s house pretty much every weekend I spent at Mel’s, but there was never anything remotely special about it. We all sat around with the same old people, doing the same old thing, getting high and being lazy. Although at this point I didn’t feel the need to take part, Mel started drinking occasionally when we all hung out. It was never more than a beer, and it didn’t seem to have any more of an effect on her than getting stoned did, so I didn’t think much of it. I was just glad she didn’t hide it from me like she had when she’d started smoking pot with her brother and Ash. It made me feel strangely included.
Chapter 10
So I started my sophomore year off as best as I could, considering the n
ew uncomfortable feelings I had been having about myself. School clothes shopping sort of sucked, because I didn’t really like anything I tried on. Every time I looked at myself in the mirror I heard a tiny voice telling me my thighs were too thick, or my butt was too wide, or that my stomach was too lumpy. My mom finally got tired of me rejecting everything I tried on and threatened to pick out everything for me herself. I gave in and just grabbed some stuff, praying that I didn’t look horrible when I wore it to school. This was the first school year I could remember where I actually dreaded the beginning.
Mel and I shared a locker again, but this year we didn’t have any classes together. We’d hoped that since we both dropped our A.P. classes we would at least get one or two together, but no, not even one. Thankfully we still had lunch together, as well as with Ash. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d been left alone the entire day. I still had a few other friends that I regularly talked to at school and shared some classes with, and even Noah had a class with me, which was great. But I wasn’t as close with any of them as I was with Mel and Ash, not even Noah. We were still pretty tight, but only at school. He had a new girlfriend almost every other week, so he was pretty busy with that. But only being able to spend time with Mel and Ash at lunch really sucked. Who would I depend on to tell me if my make-up looked jacked before the day was over, and who would tell me the latest gossip so that I stayed in the loop? Mel always knew the juiciest information almost before anyone else did.
The only real positive thing about the new school year starting was that Ash had gotten her driver’s license and a car like, a week before school started. My parents weren’t entirely thrilled about the idea of a brand new driver taking me to and from school every day, but they liked Ashley, and my dad liked the idea of not having to take me when it rained even better.
On top of the fact that my new school year started out to be pretty shitty, I also had to worry about school interfering with my weekends. As much as I hated to admit it, school was really starting to lose its appeal. I had always been a really good student; applying myself and studying to make my parents proud. But now I found myself not wanting to spend all my free time studying and doing homework. I wanted to hang out with Mel and Ash, just getting high and being stupid. It was refreshing in a weird sort of way. I had gotten to the point where I had to smoke at least one cigarette every day, and was pretty dependent on getting high every weekend. That was the life I wanted to lead right now, carefree and fun. I didn’t want to worry about how much I seemed to suck at getting and/or keeping a boyfriend, or how strict my parents were, or how fat I was getting, or even about how my best friend seemed to put me down more than she pulled me up. Getting high was my relief from all of it, and now school was so getting in the way of that.
Sadly, my parents did not agree with my implied plan of irresponsibility. They felt that if I was no longer taking AP classes, I should at least be acing my regular classes. I didn’t agree, but I also didn’t want to stay grounded for the rest of my life so I managed to stay pretty close to what was acceptable for them; teetering on the edge of a high B or a low A average without too much effort on my part. Thankfully I was smart enough on my own to do that because I totally gave up on studying or any weekend homework altogether.
So this was pretty much how the days passed for the first half of the school year…getting high, hanging out with James’s friends, watching Mel and Ash get drunk, skipping my school work as much as possible, and trying to keep my parents from finding out about any of it. Other than that, nothing truly exciting really happened until a few months after school started and the weekend of my sixteenth birthday.
There was a major party going on the same weekend of my birthday, and my parents didn’t want to let me go. They wanted me to spend the weekend at home, having a birthday party or going to dinner with them. They finally relented after days of me telling them I was too old for birthday parties and that we could go to dinner any other night than the night of the party. And since I wasn’t getting a car even though I was getting my license, I used that to guilt them into it. I wanted to go to that party as my birthday present. Thankfully the guilt trip finally did it and they let me go. I was so excited! Mel, Ash, and I had gone out a few times and met up with people or hung out at her house with James and all of his friends in a ‘party type’ atmosphere, but this was my first high school party that I had been allowed to go to. Now, of course my parents thought we were going to be home by ten and that Mel’s parents were driving us and picking us up, and that all the kids who would be in attendance were our age, but that wasn’t entirely true.
The truth was that Mel’s parents didn’t remotely care where we were going, who we were going with, or even when or if we would be home. Ash’s parents cared a little, but she was older so it wasn’t as big of a deal for her, and her parents were cool with her driving us. On top of that, it was the whole high school at the party. It was an all ages, even some older siblings, college kids, and drop outs kind of party. There were no rules on who was allowed and who wasn’t. It was going to be EPIC and I was going!
I went home with Mel after school the day of the party, telling my parents we had a school project to work on. They didn’t know we weren’t even in any classes together that year, so they had no reason to argue. And I knew that when it came to school work, they never told me no. We all got ready together at Mel’s house. I brought my own clothes, but I ended up borrowing some of Mel’s clothes. She was allowed to wear whatever she wanted, so all of her stuff was way cooler and hotter than mine. My parents took me shopping and monitored everything I bought and wore, making it impossible to slip anything by them. They weren’t crazy-strict, but there was definitely a huge difference in what I was allowed to leave the house in at my house compared to Mel’s house.
Since the weather was still hot (which was almost always in Florida), and since Mel was like, two sizes smaller than I was, I wore a pair of my own shorts. They were what my mom called my ‘house shorts’, meaning I wasn’t allowed to leave the house in them, ever. They were way too short and a little too tight, but I knew they made my butt look amazing and rode low on my hips; making my waist look even smaller than it was. I tried to make sure all my clothes did that so I wouldn’t look fat. I did borrow one of Mel’s shirts, though. It dipped a little too low in the front and was a little too short at the bottom, so it showed lots of cleavage and a strip of belly. I didn’t have really big boobs, but they were definitely there, and with a flat stomach and a shirt that emphasized what little I did have, I looked pretty hot. I wore a little too much make-up and my long, blonde hair hanging loose around my shoulders with some cute strappy sandals to finish up the look.
I was finishing up with my lip gloss when Mel and Ash walked in the room. “Bitch!” Ash said playfully.
“Why am I a bitch?” I asked, still looking in the mirror.
“Because you look hot and I don’t.” She winked at me as she plopped down on the bed.
Mel grunted but remained silent, as she double checked her hair and make-up. I was surprised that she didn’t have some sort of comment for the way I looked. She always had something to say or some ‘tip’ to improve my look. She was hardly ever satisfied until she put her two cents in.
“Whatever! You always have every guy looking at you! I’m just hoping I can get at least one to talk to me with you around.” I rolled my eyes at her and finished putting on my make-up. Ash was so pretty with her perfect little petite figure, and she always had guys watching her and talking to her. Because of this I couldn’t help but be a little bit jealous of her whenever we went out together.
“Well, with the way you look tonight, I’m sure you’ll get way more than just one,” Ash said with a sly smile.
“They’ll definitely be looking,” Mel said with a narrowed look at my cleavage. I straightened my shoulders, but pointedly looked back to Ash. I wasn’t going to let her make me feel bad! I knew I looked good.
“God, I hope so! I
really want a boyfriend. Maybe one that won’t cheat on me this time,” I sighed with another eye roll. I saw Ash glance at Mel, who scowled back at her before turning her back and walking out of the room again.
“Come on you sluts, let’s go!” she yelled over her shoulder not even making sure we were ready and following her.
Weird exchange forgotten, Ash and I both giggled with excitement as we grabbed our stuff and followed Mel. James and his friends were in their usual spots, all sprawled out on the couches, stoned off their asses. They all let out wolf whistles when we walked into the room, and I couldn’t stop the smile that came to my lips. It was nice to get attention every now and then. I glanced at everyone, trying not to blush, but failed when James’ eyes took a slow trip from my toes to my face. His grin was a bit wicked and his eyes were heavy-lidded when they met mine. I knew it was from being high, but I couldn’t deny how the appreciative look in his eyes made me feel. Ugh, but it was still James, and I still didn’t feel that way about him. Thankfully I didn’t have to do or say anything, because Ash walked between us and into his arms.
“Nice, babe,” He said to her, but glanced over her shoulder at me again. She threw her arms around his neck and he kissed her. Since that day last year, when we’d all been in James’ room getting high, he and Ash have had a thing. They weren’t together, and they both even saw other people (although I couldn’t begin to fathom how they were okay with that), but they had sex on a pretty regular basis from what I understood, much to my objection. I didn’t want to hear about it, but Ash couldn’t seem to help telling us all the gory details ever since Mel let it slip that she’d told me. Ash was upset about it at first, but honestly, it started getting pretty obvious to even me that more was going on between the two of them by the way they were always all over each other.
