WEEK THREE
“Where are you going?”
“I was going to do a little Christmas shopping. Maybe get something nice for my mom,” I tell Kia as I apply some mauve lip gloss that’s actually pigmented enough to show up on my lips.
“With what money?”
Kia’s returned from visiting Cleveland for a few days, and things between us are in an awkward place. We’ve been friends since we were assigned as roommates freshman year. In fact, I thought she was my closest friend, but now I’m not so sure.
I’m starting to think that our friendship only works for her if I stay the same person I’ve been since I stepped on campus, the anti-social girl from Long Island who kept her head in her books.
Who knew her place.
Who didn’t dare become someone else.
Because while the two of us have essentially been outsiders of the jocks and the sorority girls, she probably always thought she was the cooler one of the two of us and certainly the prettiest.
Now that I’ve told her that I’m seeing Freak romantically, things are rapidly changing between us, or at least things have changed in her eyes. It’s almost as if she feels threatened.
“I have a little saved.”
“Is that a hickey on your chest?” she asks, sounding horrified at the thought.
I cover the red bruise above my breast with my hand but remember fondly how I got it.
* * *
“You’re a beast,” I scolded Freak as the bruise formed.
“You make me do crazy shit, babe.”
“Don’t blame me for your savagery.”
“What’d you call me?”
“Don’t do it!”
“Come sit on this savage’s lap.”
“Don’t you do it!”
“Here I come, Teach.”
* * *
“Who are you going with?” Kia asks, snapping me out of my flashback.
“What?”
“Who are you going shopping with?”
She already knows the answer to this, but she’s going to make me say it.
“I’m going with Freak, but then we’re going to work on one of his essays afterwards,” I say, as if I need to explain myself.
“You’re still going to be his tutor?”
“Of course I am. Nothing’s changed.”
