Sometimes It Happens by Lauren Barnholdt

Author:Lauren Barnholdt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), General Fiction
ISBN: 9781442413153
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The First Day of Senior Year

Ava laughs. A big, loud laugh that echoes off the walls of Cooley’s. I’ve just told her that I’m the one who’s been seeing Noah, and she’s laughing. Of course, seeing isn’t really the right word, I guess. Neither is “sleeping with” since that implies it’s been going on for a while, and it wasn’t. But it was building all summer, and although I’m probably not the reason he broke up with her, I must have at least had something to do with it, even if I was just a symptom of some problem they were having.

“What did you say?” she asks finally, when she realizes I’m not laughing back.

“I said,” I tell her quietly, “that Noah and I were together this summer. Not, like, the whole summer. We just . . . it happened last night.” Last night, in the back, here, up against the counter, on the floor, Noah’s hands in my hair and on my back, and . . . I take a deep breath and hope Ava can’t hear how fast my heart is beating from just thinking about it.

“Tell me,” Ava says, gripping her fork, “that you’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

A look comes over her face then, one I haven’t seen since the sixth grade when Ava found out that Andrea Benson’s mom was trying to make a move on Ava’s dad. She found Andrea on the playground and started screaming at her, calling her mom a slut and a whore. She had to go to the school psychologist for the rest of the year, that’s how crazy it was.

“I see,” Ava says quietly. “Well. I guess that explains what happened when you two came to visit me this summer.”

“Nothing was going on then,” I say. Now that I’ve said it, that I’ve put it out there, I want to take it back. But now that I’ve told her, that I’ve done it, I can’t. It’s like, in the one moment I wanted to hurt her, I’ve ruined everything. I feel sick to my stomach, the French fries I just ate churning around and making me nauseous.

“Nothing was going on then?” She’s talking really quietly, which is unnerving for some reason. I want some kind of yelling or screaming. I want her to ask me why, to call me a bitch and a traitor, something, anything other than talking quietly.

“No,” I say. “Nothing is even really going on. It just . . . Last night something happened.”

“What?” she asks. I don’t answer, just look down at my napkin. “What happened?” she says again, this time her voice rising.

“We . . . we were here,” I say. “At the diner. We were closing down, it was late, and . . . one thing led to another.” I swallow and hope she doesn’t ask me what I know she’s probably going to ask me.

“Did you guys . . . Did you sleep with him?”

For a second, I think about lying. I wanted to tell

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