Girl Next Door - Alyssa Brugman [32]
Will scrambles out of the car. The half-eaten burger goes flying all over the dashboard and some of it sticks to the windscreen. He runs across the car park and a van has to brake suddenly to avoid him.
'But this isn't about us,' I say.
14
HANSEN'S
DISEASE
All right, I'm ready. The most embarrassing thing ever – well, second only to the laundry thing. It's the reason why I don't exactly miss all those girls I went to school with at Finsbury, and why I wouldn't try to contact them even if there wasn't a lock on the phone. There was a party at Tanner Hamrick-Gough's house a while ago, when we were still normal, rich people living in a huge house full of stuff.
Tanner's sister's friends were at the party too, and a whole heap of Tanner's parents' friends, because they were back from Dubai. I'd never been to a party like that before, where all the adults and their kids socialised. There must have been a hundred people, maybe more. They'd hired a barman and a jazz band. I only knew a handful of girls, because I was pretty new to the school. Anyway, a group of the younger people went out into the pavilion to play spin the bottle.
Okay, in hindsight it's obvious that this was going to turn out badly, but I was trying to fit in, and several of the boys were pretty cute, so I agreed to play.
Jasmina was picked first. She went into the sauna with one of the boys for about a minute. Everyone outside was laughing and trying to listen to them, but the walls were really thick in there, because it's designed that way, and there was music playing. When they came out again the boy was blushing, but Jasmina seemed unruffled.
I was picked next. I went into the sauna with a boy. He wasn't one of the really cute ones. Anyway, nothing happened. We just sat there on the wooden bench. He asked me if I'd ever had a sauna. I shook my head, and then we went out again.
But when we got outside, they all grinned at us as though we had done something, and the boy gave a little thumbs-up to the other guys. I didn't say anything; I just smiled, because that was the game, right?
Soon enough the bottle came around to me again, this time with a different boy. So I went back into the sauna. The first boy must have encouraged this boy, because he didn't even wait until we sat down. He leaned forward and kissed me, but just a peck. Then he tried again and I said, 'Time's up!'
When I took my spin, the bottle pointed to one of the cute boys. We went into the sauna and sat down. He put his hand under my chin and kissed me. It was a really nice kiss, and so I let him kiss me more. He put his arm around my waist and drew me towards him so that our torsos were pressed together, and it was good, because that was the game, right?
And then the sauna door swung open and Tanner Hamrick-Gough's ancient parents were there. The first thing I noticed was that the lights were on and the music had stopped. I blinked in the brightness and I could see all the people standing around craning their necks to see what was happening.
Tanner said, 'Jenna-Belle has been kissing all the boys.'
Tanner's parents made me sit in the kitchen and wait for my dad to pick me up. There were about five other grown-ups frowning at me over their champagne saucers.
When Dad came they made out I was in the sauna all night and the boys came in one at a time to kiss me, and who knows what else? They told him that they'd never felt the need to supervise the young people so closely, because normally they played board games, swam in the pool, or sang songs on the karaoke machine.
Yeah, right, and they finished the night with a prayer meeting.
I can understand Tanner and the others trying to cover their butts with their parents, but for the next few weeks at school they carried on as though the night went the way their parents said, as though none of them had been involved. I know I did a lot of kissing, but technically I only kissed