Not My Ruckus by Chad Musick

Author:Chad Musick [Musick, Chad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cinnabar Moth Publishing LLC
Published: 2021-02-16T12:36:24+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“I’m not pregnant,” I told her. “So we just did the tests wrong.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yep. I’ve never even kissed a boy, much less done something that could get me pregnant.”

I tried to coax her out of the bathroom, but she wouldn’t come out until the next bell rang, signaling the end of school. When we left, she pulled her mask down over her face to hide how puffy it was from crying, and she made me pull mine down, too, so that we’d match even though I hadn’t been crying.

Usually, she walked home with Frank, so we had to search for him. When we found him, he said was going to go hang out with his friends, and later go to a party. He told Esther she should come, but for once she told him no. It hadn’t seemed like a real invitation anyway.

We walked home, but slowly. There were a hundred things she wanted to stop and look at along the way, it seemed like. We dawdled and delayed. Nothing good to hurry toward.

When we passed by the auto shop, she wanted to look inside the ice cream truck, to see whether it was truly destroyed. The fire had made the newspaper, but she hadn’t gone to look. I opened the back door, and the sun low on the horizon shone directly in to show the blackening on the outside had made its way inside, too.

We sat on the back fender. I told myself that if our black capes got a little sooty, it would just add to the authenticity and nobody would connect it to me.

Esther lifted her mask up, and I copied her.

“What if you are? Pregnant, I mean.”

“I’m not,” I told her.

“Maybe you just don’t remember? I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but you forget things sometimes, right?”

“I’m not that special,” I assured her. “There’s only been one virgin birth.”

“You’re a virgin?”

“Of course,” I told her.

“Oh.”

I regretted having said it. She was my friend, and I wasn’t trying to shame her. “It’s okay that you’re not.”

“What’s it like? To be a virgin?”

I laughed. “What? You don’t remember?”

I looked at her to share the joke, and she was crying so soft it wasn’t even moving her shoulders. She pulled her mask back on when she saw me look, but she didn’t stand up.

“We all have things we forget.” Her mask muffled her voice.

I shrugged. “It’s not much of anything. I don’t get how anyone ever stops being a virgin, except that they turn into some slobbery monster, like Frank. What’s the point?”

“You don’t think about sex at all?”

When she said the word, I felt myself go red, and I pulled my own mask down. It was hot inside, but some things are easier to say from hiding.

“No. I mean, momma has always said good girls don’t, but the way she says it, she seems to think good girls still want it, they just don’t do it. Do you think about it?”

It took her long enough to

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