Before Now by Norah Olson

Author:Norah Olson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

6/3, AFTERNOON

I’m sitting on the bus on my way to meet Cole and Rita. The sun is bright through the window, and the sky is dotted with small puffy clouds.

Lisette says I’m spending all my time with Cole and that he has stolen me away like he promised her he wouldn’t. I thought about it and asked her to come with us, because I was planning on meeting Cole and Rita downtown and then going back to her house. Rita wants me to sit for a painting she’s making. I told Lisette it would be cool if she came and Rita could paint both of us.

“Why would she want to?” Lisette asked.

“’Cause we’re like royalty. We’re like EDM queens,” I told her.

“In our own minds,” she said, doing that thing where she makes her eyes look crazy. She smiled her big, straight-toothed, I-just-got-my-braces-off smile. “Let me text my mom.”

Of course I don’t have to even write what happened next because it’s so predictable.

“Goddamn it,” Lisette said, throwing the phone into her backpack. “I swear to God, she tries to control every single thing that I do.”

“If you get a boyfriend or girlfriend, definitely don’t tell her.”

“What do you mean IF?”

“When,” I said. “I meant when.”

Lisette is touchy on the topic of romance, which is strange. She is not in the undatable nerd category (which I was until very recently). She is funny and smart and super cool looking. She’d like everyone to think that her tastes are so particular there’s no one at school she could ever be with. But we spend half our time talking about who’s hot. It’s almost like she has some kind of force field around her. Tall girls with a great sense of humor should attract everyone. But in Lisette’s case it seems to freak them out, that and her mother. Her mother would freak anyone out.

On the way to the bus stop she asked me if I had slept with Cole. I looked at her but didn’t answer, and then she said, “Oh my God! What was it like? Look at you, you can’t stop smiling. Stop covering your mouth! Tell me what it was like!”

I thought of how Cole smelled, musky and sharp—slightly sweet. How he held me as the sunlight spilled in through the windows at Rita’s house. I thought of how my mind went blank and the way I could feel him everywhere, moving up from my toes, spreading into my hips, up through my back, and then a feeling of soaring. At the edge of my mind, a creeping memory from the retreat tried to push in, but I kept it out with thoughts of Cole.

“Good,” I whispered to Lisette.

She waited with me until the bus arrived and then gave me a big hug.

“Nerd girl in love,” she said.

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