“I think you let that stop you,” she says, and we’re a little closer than I meant for us to be, at 6p.m. in the mostly-darkened gym. There’s a deejay with one light machine set up at the far end, and a crowd of nervous, sweaty thirteen-year-olds dotting the gym and waiting for someone else to make the first move.
“Let it stop me?”
“Look at Brandon,” she says, nodding toward one of the students we share. “He’s gone up and macked on, like three different girls tonight and he’s got braces.”
The kid is brave, I’ll give him that. When I was his age I didn’t find girls terrifying, exactly, but I didn’tnotfind them terrifying.
“Did you just saymacked on?” I ask Sadie. “Is it two thousand three?”
“Fuck off,” she mutters.
“Wow, okay, second offense,” I say, and she smacks me lightly on the arm.
My skin tingles where she touched it, and I look away because the new long-term substitute math teacher is really fucking hot in a nerdy-girl-next-door-who-probably-reads-tentacle-smut kind of way, and thatdoesit for me.
She’s got longish dark hair that she usually wears up, green-gray eyes the color of moss, and lips that are always smiling or laughing. There’s something mischievous and pixie-like about her, like she’s always about to say she’s tricked me and now I owe her my firstborn or something.
But in, like, a hot way.
Sadie wears a lot of dresses that should not, objectively, be as hot as they are. There is no way her tits should look that good in boxy jackets, and perfectly normal gray pants should not highlight her thighs and ass that well. I know, logically, that she looks perfectly normal for a middle school teacher. It’s just… a hot normal?
And today, the day of the eighth-grade fall semiformal, she’s wearing a green dress that matches her eyes and shows half an inch of cleavage if she moves the right way, and it’s tight at the waist and then flares out. It’s a good dress. I like it.
But also, a couple nights ago Lola said she wanted to hear my voice while she was naked and touching herself, so I might have a girlfriend. Or something. Whose face I’ve never seen but who I’ve watched fuck herself while wearing a plug in her ass, so, a very normal relationship. I haven’t dated anyone since Lola and I started …whatever this is… and even though Sadie is cute and hot and funny and maybe flirting with me, I feel like I should probably focus on figuring this thing out first.
Or at least hear Lola’s voice. Maybe find out her real name, someday.
But in the meantime, I kind of can’t help flirting with Sadie.
“Is that too close?” Sadie says, crossing her arms over her chest and tilting her head as she looks at some kids on the dance floor. “Should we be intervening?”
“What’s the official guideline, again?” I ask her, because I don’t want to be the guy going over to a couple and lecturing them about leaving several inches between their clothed genitals. There’s no part of that I want to think about.
“You gotta leave room for the Holy Spirit,” she says, laughing. “Or Jesus. I’ve heard it both ways.”
“Well, definitely not enough room in there for Jesus,” I say, considering these two kids who look like they’re having a good-but-also-stressful time together. “But I bet the Holy Spirit can get pretty small.”
“A benefit of being incorporeal,” she says, and sighs. “Come on, guys, don’t make the adults intervene, it’s weird for all of us.”
The kids just get closer to each other, and when they start making out, Sadie and I play rock-paper-scissors over who has to go talk to them.
She loses.
* * *
Two nights later,I’m driving home when my phone rings.
When I see it’s Lola, I accidentally throw it across the car and nearly drive off the road.
“Hey,” I say when I finally manage to answer.
There’s a long pause.
“Max?” she says, her voice tinny and staticky.
“Lola,” I say, palms suddenly sweaty against the steering wheel. “Hi.”
“Where are you? You’re hard to hear,” she says, hard to hear herself.
