Girl Crushed by Katie Heaney

Author:Katie Heaney [Heaney, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Homecoming was now less than two weeks away, which meant people at school were starting to act insane. In the bathroom between classes I saw a junior being comforted by her friends and assumed the person she’d hoped to go with had asked someone else, but from the stall I overheard that he had asked her, just not creatively enough. It seemed he’d set a precedent the year before, filling her car up with balloons while she was at work at the mall, and now, she said, he could barely be bothered to ask her directly. “He just assumed I’d go with him,” she whined. Her friends murmured sympathetically, rubbing her shoulders and petting her hair as I washed my hands and pretended I wasn’t there.

Equally distressed was Alexis, who’d been dropping hints with no fewer than four different boys for weeks. She seemed to regard them like colleges: there was the reach (Anthony Millard, a second-tier but still popular water polo player she’d been friends with as a child), the targets (Eddie Soto, her chemistry lab partner, and Aaron Gray, the boy she let copy her Spanish homework), the safety (Jacob Ramos, who was gay and went to private school, where Alexis had gone to be his dance date on two separate occasions). Church boy—once a promising Plan Z—was eventually deemed inferior even to going alone. While all her options had initially expressed at least tentative interest in taking Alexis to homecoming, she worried she was “starting to lose them.” The way she said it, it sounded like they were terminally ill.

“Jacob owes me, and he knows that,” she said, catching me up after lunch one day. “But the other night he said he might have to go to a funeral.”

“He might have to go? To a funeral?”

“I know,” she said. “But what can I say to that?”

As for me, I still wanted to ask Ruby, obviously. Our picnic was set for Sunday, which felt twenty years away. I’d hoped for Saturday, but she was busy, and I had soccer every other night, and I knew if I met her afterward she’d be all I thought about during practice. For my team’s sake, and especially for Ronni’s sake, I was trying to keep girls and soccer separate.

So I would see her Sunday, and if it went well, maybe I’d ask her to homecoming then. It wasn’t much notice, but Ruby didn’t seem like the type of girl who’d need weeks to prepare. Though she also didn’t seem like the type of girl who would go. So I’d feel it out when I saw her. I told myself I could always pretend I was asking as friends, but even the thought humiliated me. Everyone, but everyone, would see right through that. But then, what if she agreed as friends, and the dance itself changed things? As I considered and reconsidered every possible outcome, I began to sympathize with the crying girl in the bathroom. There really was so much that could go wrong.

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