God is in the Pancakes by Robin Epstein

Author:Robin Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2010-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

I haven’t eaten all day, and I’m so hungry by the time I get home, the only thing I can think about is the can of Pringles I plan to dive into when I get inside. The salty tang should do a nice job of stopping the pain echoing in my stomach and head. But when I walk into the house, I find Lolly sprawled out on the couch, looking disheveled, like she hasn’t showered or bothered combing her hair. Jake must have done it. He must have told her about Natalie and broken her heart.

“Hey,” I say. I lean against the side of the couch and grab her foot. “I’m sorry about you and Jake.” I shake her foot back and forth a little in what I hope seems like a gesture of understanding; considering what went on with Eric, if there’s one thing I get right now, it’s the need to have people be there for each other when everything feels like it’s gone to hell.

“What are you talking about?” Lolly replies.

“Your breakup?”

“We didn’t break up,” she says emphatically.

“You didn’t?”

“Nooooo,” she says, her tone now implying that she’s speaking to a vegetable. “Why would you even ask that?”

Getting out of here as quickly as I can seems to be my only move now, so I head for the kitchen. “Oh, uh, I don’t know,” I say over my shoulder, wishing I could hit REWIND/DELETE.

“Who told you we broke up?” Lolly asks, bolting upright from the couch.

“I can’t exactly remember.”

“Well, we didn’t. We definitely didn’t break up,” Lolly says, punctuating each word in the sentence.

“Okay, I believe you. Sorry.”

But this doesn’t satisfy her. “I mean, if we’d broken up, would Jake have given me this this morning?” She walks over to me and points to an ugly reddish-purple hickey on her neck, which looks more like a wound than a sign of devotion.

“You’re right, Lolly,” I reply, feeling the heat rising to my cheeks. “If a hickey doesn’t say ‘I’ll love you forever,’ it’s hard to know what does.”

“Who told you we broke up?”

“It doesn’t matter. If you say you haven’t broken up, you should know, right?” I walk into the kitchen, but Lolly follows me.

“Tell me! Or are you just bullshitting again, Grace?”

This is not the time to be pushing me. “You want to know who it was? Do you really want to know who told me?” I ask, looking her directly in the eye. We’re both priming for a fight, as if hurting the other will somehow make each of us feel better.

“Yeah,” she says, “Grace, tell me. Where’d you get your juicy gossip?”

“Natalie Talbot.” I cross my arms in front of me and stare at my sister to see how she’ll react.

She laughs.

“Oh-kay!” replies Lolly. “Right, sure she did, because you and Natalie are such great friends.” Then she shakes her head. “Just because you have some sort of problem with Jake, that’s no reason to start making things up.”

“Think what you want,” I say. My cheeks are burning now.

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