Twice Kissed - Lisa Jackson [49]
Maggie nearly choked as Mary Theresa opened the refrigerator door with the nonchalance of an accomplished actress. She pulled out a can of Diet Coke. “Want one?” she asked Maggie, who, her cheeks burning with embarrassment, couldn’t believe her sister was ratting out Mitch—the guy she’d been making out with, her partner in…in…
“Sure.” M.T. tossed her a can, grabbed one for herself, and popped the top, wincing a little as if her sunburn was flaring again. “I think you should talk to him.”
“I will,” Bernice said as she replaced the pitcher and wiped a drip of water from her fingers onto the shorts of her yellow jumpsuit. Her lips were compressed into a that-kid’s-gonna-get-a-piece-of-my-mind grimace. “Right now.”
Chapter Seven
“I can’t believe you did that!” Maggie whispered once she and Mary Theresa were in her bedroom and the door was firmly shut.
“Did what?”
“Throw Mitch to the wolves like that! Mom is gonna kill him.”
“Better him than me.” Mary Theresa dropped onto a corner of Maggie’s unmade bed and sipped her soda as if she didn’t have a care in the world other than a case of sunburn, as if she wasn’t on the brink of excruciating trouble, as if she hadn’t done anything remotely wrong.
“But—”
“Don’t worry about Mitch. He can handle himself.”
“I don’t believe you!” Maggie set down her drink, picked up some darts, and hurled them one after the other at the back of her door, where a dartboard was covered with a picture of her latest boyfriend, Sean, a wingback on the football team. When he hadn’t been able to convince Maggie to go “all the way” even when he’d told her that he loved her, he’d dropped her for a freshman girl with braces, long blond hair, and legs that seemed to go on forever. He’d bragged about scoring with the girl two weeks later, then promptly discarded her for a sophomore on the girls’ soccer team. Maggie yanked the darts from the board, stood a few feet away, drew back, and took better aim. She let the first dart fly. It pierced Sean square in the middle of his chest, where his heart was supposedly hidden. She’d have to aim a little lower next time.
“It was all Mitch’s idea anyway,” Mary said, pouting a little. “Let him take the heat.”
“What was all his idea?” Maggie was sick of the vague innuendoes and secretive glances. “So what’s going on, M.T.?” She threw another dart. Bingo. Right in the crotch.
“Oh, just drinking and getting into the hot tub.”
“So he’s gonna take the fall.”
“What else can I say?”
Maggie threw the darts. One, two, three. All landed close enough to Sean’s head, heart, and other areas to convince her that she hadn’t lost her touch. “Well, just keep me posted, would ya? I’d like to know what the latest secret is. You know, so that I don’t blow it.”
“I will,” Mary Theresa said. “You don’t have to get nasty about it.”
“I’m not,” Maggie argued as Mary Theresa drained her can of soda and, standing, dropped it into Maggie’s already overflowing wastebasket.
“Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
Maggie didn’t believe it for a minute. Lately, Mary Theresa seemed to be on a collision course with any and all things sensible.
That night Maggie flipped through the channels of her small black-and-white television, listened to Johnny Carson’s monologue on the Tonight Show, then clicked off the set and flung herself onto the bed. Her restless thoughts had slipped to Thane Walker again, and she couldn’t figure out why he seemed lodged in her brain. He was kinda good-looking, if you liked the rough-and-tumble cowboy type. He had a sense of humor, irreverent though it was, and there was a touch of mystery to him that appealed to her. But she knew he was way too old for her, way too hard-edged, way too worldly. Still, she couldn’t quit thinking of him.
“Give it up,” she muttered as she picked up her large black magic ball, the one Mary Theresa had given her on their eleventh birthday. Mad at herself and the world in general,