Totally and Completely Fine(18)

And I realized how stupid I’d been. Stupid in thinking that I could just go around doing whatever I pleased with my body.

By the time I realized that it was too late.

Jessica was really the canary in the coal mine.

She’d started making herself scarce. There were excuses—she had a test, and then some after-school thing, and then her mom wanted her to go to church. That should have been my first warning that something was different. Because Jessica’s mom had always wanted her to go to church.

Jessica and I both had daddy issues. We’d joke about it sometimes—that my issue was I didn’t have a dad anymore, and hers was that she had two and hated both of them.

Not that I could blame her—I’d met her bio dad once or twice and he more than lived up to the deadbeat dad stereotype, swanning in and out of her life whenever he needed something. Totally aimless. Pathetic.

Her stepdad was the opposite—a former military guy who’d never heard of the concept of leisure, let alone experienced it himself. He was regimented and strict, and both Jessica and I were pretty sure the main reason he’d married her mom was because it guaranteed he’d get three home-cooked meals a day and clean underwear.

At first, Jessica told me he was the reason she was going to church regularly again.

“It’s just easier than fighting with him all the time,” she said.

I started seeing her less and less. There was a youth group that held meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school. I knew about it because Spencer had been trying anew to get me and Gabe to go with him. He said things were different now—that they would only accuse us of going to hell after they got to know us a little better.

I wondered if Jessica and Spencer sat next to each other at church. If sometimes she offered to share her prayer book with him or if she “forgot” hers and had to share his.

Now whenever I saw her, it was like watching a photograph fade. All the detail, all the specificity, all the Jessica-ness, seemed to get duller and duller.

She was slipping away, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

When the rumors started circulating, I knew we were done. Because it was easy to tell where most of the stories were coming from—exaggerations peppered with just enough truth to sell it. Including details that I knew Jessica had taken from her own experiences.

I was the shield, and she wielded it well. It wasn’t hard to convince people.

The whole town already knew that I was trouble. First the poker game and now sleeping around. Those poor horny boys—how were they supposed to say no?

No one cared that I was just as horny as them. That it sometimes felt like my entire body was vibrating from the inside out and I just needed to feel something—someone—or I was going to start running around town screaming. That I was so lonely and sad and lost and the only things that made that disappear were boys and weed, and even then, it was only a temporary relief.

It didn’t matter.

No one judged the guys, of course. No one questioned why Jessica knew all these details. No one remembered how wild we’d been together.

She walked away—born again.

I bore the brunt of it, having to listen to Mikey “slut”-cough under his breath every time I walked by. He cornered me once in the hallway and called me the town bicycle in front of the rest of the baseball team. You would have thought he was Chris Farley from the way they laughed.

“Looking for the next rider?” he asked, thrusting his hips toward his hand.

I knew he expected me to run. To cry. To cower.

I stood my ground. Leaned into one hip, arms crossed as I gave him a slow, unflattering once-over.

“Maybe,” I said. “Can you recommend anyone that lasts longer than five seconds?”

There was some choking laughter from the group.

“Fuck you,” Mikey said.

“Not if you begged me,” I said. “Oh, wait, you did.”

His ears turned red at that because he had. But he pretended that I hadn’t said anything, turning back to his group of lackeys instead.

“You’ll want to double-bag it with this one,” he said. “Who knows where she’s been.”

It shouldn’t have hurt. I didn’t care what Mikey Garrison and his big, useless penis thought. I didn’t care what his friends thought.

But past all of them, I saw Gabe. And Spencer.

They’d heard everything.

I never forgot the look on Spencer’s face.

He pitied me.

And that was what hurt the most.

Chapter 12

Now

I was staring at Ben, and I wasn’t being very subtle. Gabe and Lena had left for crafty a few minutes ago—the actress playing Tracy had paid for a fancy local fro-yo truck—so I had a few moments to indulge myself.

I told myself that if I couldn’t touch, then I might as well look.

Not that it would be possible to ignore him. For whatever reason, the scene they were shooting required Ben to get in and out of a white-tiled swimming pool multiple times, water sluicing off his movie-ready muscles.

He’d taken off his ring and his necklaces. There were some patches on his skin that looked slightly off-color—his chest, shoulder, side, and arm—and it took me a while to realize that it was makeup, probably to cover up tattoos.

“See something you like?”