Rabbit & Juliet by Rebecca Stafford

Author:Rebecca Stafford [Stafford, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780063351363
Amazon: B0CRL827NT
Goodreads: 199635113
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-09-23T22:00:00+00:00

the good times

“Just hit it. It doesn’t matter how good of a job you do yet, just hit it,” said Juliet. It was a few days after the boat incident, and we were in the Galaxy House gym, where we’d be spending most of our free time together in the coming month.

“Yet?” I said.

“First, we start small. We learn to defend ourselves. Then we overthrow the patriarchy,” she said cheerfully. Just like that.

According to Juliet, the first thing we needed to work on was our endurance. We’d started with jumping jacks, pretended to skip an invisible rope, and punched at the air repeatedly. In addition, we’d established that I could barely do a push-up, I really couldn’t do pull-ups, and I was not secretly a great boxer. It was hilarious. Sarah and I giggled at the silliness of it all, and Juliet had even joined in.

None of it seemed very serious, and it was important that it didn’t. We knew Juliet wanted to teach us how to fight, and we knew we wanted to punish Richard and his friends. But if Sarah and I had really considered the intersection of those two ideas, we might have realized it was insane. We might have stopped. And we didn’t want to stop, not really.

Besides, since the forced night of swimming, both Sarah and I had moved like old women. Juliet’s exercises, although awful to start with, eased the pain. The more we moved under her instructions, the looser our limbs were.

Juliet was holding a red padded mitt straight out with one arm, the other tucked behind her back, her legs planted like tree roots. Sarah was facing her, knees slightly bent, her left foot forward and her right behind. It was supposed to be a stable way to stand, according to Juliet, but Sarah still wobbled. She managed to keep her fists in front of her face, but no matter how Juliet coaxed her, Sarah wouldn’t move them any farther.

Behind her fists, Sarah’s lip trembled. She’d been weepy all day. She’d broken up with Richard, finally, unable to stand his touch after seeing the pictures. She was better off without him, but she still cried. He didn’t call her incessantly like he did after he and I broke up, which I perversely took a strange pride in, as if his obsession had been a testament to my irresistible beauty.

I’m aware how screwed up that is.

“Oh, come on, cupcake. It’s just a little punch,” Juliet cajoled. Her patience, never abundant, was fading. “It’s not going to bite you.”

“Shouldn’t we be wearing big pillowy gloves?” I asked. I wanted to break the tension, just a little, to remind us we were doing something fun.

“You’re hitting mitts,” said Juliet. “They give. Besides, you won’t be wearing gloves when it’s for real.”

At this, Sarah’s eyes widened.

“Look,” said Juliet, in a tone both stern and understanding, “I just want you to throw a punch so we can make sure you won’t break your hand, okay? Just try so we can move on.

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