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Bright and early, he had knocked on my bedroom door, grinning, holding up both pairs of skates. “You ready to do this thing?”
I’d jumped out of bed and gotten dressed more quickly than ever before in my life. I’d skipped Mom’s pancakes for a granola bar and dashed out onto the driveway, where Danny was already waiting for me, skating in circles. I’d watched him enviously as I tied my own skates on—I wasnevergoing to be as good as my big brother.
Danny’s had a broom handle, and he gave it to me to hold on to. “We’ll work on coasting first,” he said. “You hang onto the handle, and I’m going to pull you around the driveway, okay? You can get used to what it feels like to be upright on rollerblades.”
He’d been towing me around the driveway when Jake had come strolling up the sidewalk.
“Come on,” he’d said to Danny. “I’m going down to the playground.”
We were nearly too old for the playground by then, but there was a single bar, and the guys had recently learned to do pull-ups and were obsessed with showing them off. Still, Danny paused and looked at me. “I said I’d help her learn to rollerblade.”
“She can practice by herself,” Jake said dismissively. “I bet you I can do a one-armed pull-up.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Can.”
And I was forgotten. Danny was taking off his skates and giving my ponytail a little tug, and with aWe’ll do this later, okay?he was gone.
I was devastated.
But thinking back on it now, the only thing I could feel was anger. They had done the same thing to me so many times, and it had always begun with Jake treating me as if I didn’t matter at all.
And now I’d slept with him. When I thought about it in those terms, I was furious with myself. No matter how good it had been, I shouldn’t have allowed it to happen.
Tanya was watching me. “You okay?” she asked.
“I’m okay. I can’t believe I gave in to him, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty surprised myself. I know you always hated him. But at the same time….” She shook her head.
“At the same time what?”
“Well, it’s hard to fault you for it,” she said. “I mean…Jake Wallace.”
“Okay, for real, though, why do you keep saying,Jake Wallace?“ I asked her. “He’s the only Jake we know.”
“Yeah, but you can’t pretend he’s not the hottest guy you’ve ever met.”
“Oh, please.”
“We both had crushes on him when we were teenagers.”
“We had crushes on everybody when we were teenagers. I had a crush on the host ofSurvivorwhen I was a teenager.”
“You and I both know you would hook up with Jeff Probst if he ever gave you a chance.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
Tanya laughed. “Okay, okay,” she said. “But for real… was it hot?”
I groaned. “It was the best sex of my life.”
“I figured!”
“That’s not good news!”
“That you had the best sex of your life? I’d be stoked if it was me.”
