• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"I know. Which is why I’m like, never going to speak to them again."

She started waving her hands wildly in the air, as if to wipe out the previous conversation. "Enough about that and back to this," she said, holding up the note. "All I can say is, you are a very lucky girl."

"I am?"

"Now I know how Marcus gets so many girls to sleep with him," she said. "He knows how to like, woo."

Woo? I was freaking out at this point.

"Can I read it?!"

Bridget rolled up into a ball and giggled hysterically. "Oh, you can read it," she said. "But its gonna like, blow away your whole just-friends idea."

And it did. Because here’s what Marcus’s origami mouth had to say:

FALL

We

are Adam and Eve

born out of chaos called

creation

Ribbing me gave you life

yet you forget

there will always be

a part of me in you

yes

I taunted and tempted

you

with my forbidden fruit

does that make

me

the serpent too?

Believe what you will

but if I am exiled

alone

I know we will be

together again someday

naked

without shame

in paradise

My thanks to you

for being in on my

sin

the eleventh

I couldn’t stop thinking about "Fall" all weekend. Or the quasi-kiss. And what one had to do with the other.

I must have read the poem a bizillion times. And every time I finished, sweat was pouring from my armpits, down the inside of my T-shirt. Every time, it was too much. Sensory overload.

I know we will be/together again someday/naked/without shame/in paradise.

What else can that mean but what I know it means?

At first I tried being blasé about it. He wrote that poem when he still deserved to be called Krispy Kreme, before he even knew me. We were different people now. Friends. He even said himself when we had our first talk in the Caddie that it was probably better that I never got to read it.

But the more I read it, the more it disturbed me. Because it reminded me of the fling with Cal on the big day. Cal had convinced me—albeit briefly—that we had a connection, one that he concocted to get his rocks off. What if my phone friendship with Marcus was the same sort of thing? What if it was nothing more than the second phase of his plot to make me another donut?

If we were going to continue talking, there had to be zero doubt that our phone friendship was not going to lead to sex. That meant no more lip-nipping. Nothing. Of course, Marcus didn’t make this confrontation easy for me. I had to hover at my locker for a few minutes before homeroom, waiting for him to finish feeling up Mia.

Mia. Did she know about the lip nip? Did that count as cheating?

When the spittle settled, I walked up to him. He leaned against the locker Mia had been pressed up against only seconds before. I bet it was still warm from their body heat.

"I read your poem," I croaked. "’Fall.’"

Then something I never thought would happen, happened: Marcus Flutie was shocked by something I said.

"You did?" he said. "I thought you lost it!"

"Well, someone found it for me. Where do you get off saying," I lowered my voice, "we’ll be naked without shame in paradise?"

He didn’t open his mouth.

"I know what that means, you know. Who do you think I am?"

He didn’t open his mouth.

"We are never going to be naked without shame in paradise."

He didn’t open his mouth.

"We’re NEVER going to have sex," I whispered, clearly overstating my case.

He didn’t open his mouth. The mouth that he used to bite mine.

"And I’m just going to forget about that biting thing from the other night," I said.

He looked me right in the eyes. If he’d focused hard enough on my pupils, he could’ve seen his own reflection, his own face smirking at me.

"You couldn’t forget it if you tried," he said, before walking away.

He’s right. And I don’t know if I hate him or love him for that.

the twelfth

I can’t stop thinking about sex.

Specifically, that everyone at PHS has had sex except me. I mean, even Pepe Le Puberty used to grope his pixie chick like un homme qui a beaucoup de sexe.

Am I a dysfunctional freak for not doing it?

I’m not a prude. I’ve just never imagined myself