Goth Girl Rising (21 page)

Promethea387:
I just hate when you do that shit.

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
yeah

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
hey u shd come 2 the party fri

XianWalker76 is offline

simsimsimoaning:
thats perfect!!!

simsimsimoaning:
say u tried to sleep w/ him & he wuldnt but u saw his DICK anyway

simsimsimoaning:
& it was TINY

simsimsimoaning:
(shjoulnt be in ALL CAPS lol!!!!!)

Promethea387:
You're not helping.

simsimsimoaning:
ill call u

Promethea387:
What party?

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
ves

Promethea387:
I hate Pete Vesentine.

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
so?

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
no one likes him

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
they just go 2 the parties

Promethea387:
I don't know. Maybe.

simsimsimoaning is offline

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
pleeeeeeeeeeese!

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
please

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
lol

Promethea387:
I have to go.

xXxjeccatheGIRLxXx:
ok

M
Y CELL RINGS AS
I sign off with Jecca. It's Simone.

"Hey."

"Hey. So, who's the guy?"

I sigh. "Why does it matter? I just need you to fire up your bitchiest bitch parts and help me out."

"If I know who he is and what he did, I can, like, do a better job. Like, poetic justice and all that.
Irony.
"

"Right."

"Did you like that? How I busted out
irony
like that? Totally from English today."

I wasn't paying much attention in English today. Or most days. "Nice, Simone."

"Do you think Miss Powell has slept with any of the guys in our class?"

"What?"

"I'm just wondering. I heard a rumor that she gave a senior a blowjob her first year."

"Where did you hear that?"

"You know. Around."

I can't help it—I start thinking about it. Slutty Miss Powell. I wouldn't be surprised if she's slept with the half of the school Sim hasn't gotten to. "Maybe she effed Josh Mendel."

Simone laughs so hard, she starts coughing. "Oh my God! Crazy J, yeah. Maybe it's like something all the new teachers have to do, you know?"

We laugh a little bit and then she says, "I would
totally
do Crazy J. I don't care how insane he is. That boy is
hot.
" She sighs. "He could do, like, whatever he wanted to me."

"I bet he's a real perv. After what he went through? I bet he's only into really kinky, sick shit."

"Don't care. He's that hot."

"You're too young for him. He only screws adults."

"Yeah." She sounds depressed. I guess she really
was
thinking about having sex with him. God, Simone.

"Anyway," she says, "who are we trying to screw over?"

I give in. I tell her.

"Really?" she sounds surprised. "God, I
love
that
Schemata.
We won't mess that up, will we?"

Probably. "Nah," I lie.

"Aren't you friends with him? He's kinda cute. Geek cute."

"I told you before what's happening there. I want to destroy him, OK? And I have one way, but I need to be sure, so I want more ideas."

"What are you going to do to him?"

I look over at my desk, where the stack of
Literary Paws
and
Schemata
pages sit. Tomorrow ... tomorrow, I'll have the original pages, the Dina pages. But just in case, just in case it's not as obvious as I remember, I want to be ready.

"You'll see when it happens. Come on, Sim. Help me out here."

"Are you sure he's gay?"

"Yeah. He's gay for that black kid he hangs out with. The jock. I'm the only one who knows." By saying that, I've just guaranteed that by lunchtime tomorrow, everyone at school will know that Fanboy has the hots for Cal.

"OK, well, in
that
case, you should
totally
have sex with Cal," Simone says, like she's telling me to go buy a lottery ticket.

"What?"

"Yeah, if you want to piss him off, you should totally have sex with the guy he's crushing on."

"Forget it. I'm not doing that."

I hear her light a cigarette. My lungs cry out in lust. If I smoke in the house, Roger will smell it and bring down the Wrath of Roger. "Kyra, you just need to get laid. You need to get over all this virginity shit. Trust me. I'm your friend and I'm telling you—you're making this a much bigger deal than it really is."

Not
this
again. Simone's been harping on me about losing my virginity for
ever.

But maybe she's right. Maybe that's what I need. It can't be tough, right? Guys are easy. I could get one easy. I know I could. I saw the way Fanboy's eyes popped out of his skull when I showed him my boobs. He would have done anything I wanted. And there's this kid, this sophomore guy—Greg Titus—who's been staring at me in the cafeteria and during computer class. He's only a sophomore, but he's not bad-looking, and I bet if I went up to him, he'd be all over me in half a second.

Easy.

Guys are easy.

Some girls are, too.

But I don't want to be.

"I'm not losing my virginity just to mess with someone's head," I tell her.

"It's not a big deal," she says. "You're making this into something ... Like, I was gonna wait, once. I figured I would wait for some guy who loved me or something, or something special. But honestly, the thing is, you just jump in and
do
it and then it's over with and then you can really enjoy it, you know?"

"Simone. Enough." God, I want a cigarette!

"It really didn't hurt that much my first time. I was just sort of sore, is all."

"That's not it. It's not the pain."

"Then what? Are you afraid of getting pregnant? Or getting some disease?"

I think of all those times watching the pregnancy test with her. Of the bus rides to the clinic. Nah. It's not those things. I'm not a total moron—I know how to protect myself.

I think it's...

I don't know what it is.

No, wait. That's a lie. I do know. I know what it is.

"It's really good," Simone says, dragging on her cigarette. I want to tell her that I'd have sex with
her
if she would just magically teleport me to that cigarette right now. "Most of the time, it's good, I guess. And when it's good, it's like you totally lose control of yourself. You just can't stop yourself and you do and you say things without thinking. Like this one time—"

"Simone..."

No thank you. I don't want that. I don't want to lose control like that. To lose myself like that would...

Ugh.

No.

Just ... no.

"No, Simone."

She waits. "When it's happening, you know the guy likes you."

And now I'm
pissed
at her. "That's stupid. That's
stupid,
Simone. He only likes you because you're having
sex
with him. Once you stop, he doesn't like you anymore."

I hear her blow some smoke. "So? That's when you get another guy. Someone will
always
like you."

God. "Look, it's a moot point because I'm not sleeping with Cal, OK?"

"Fine. Fine." We sit in silence for a little while. I lie back on my bed and stare up at the ceiling. My pillow still feels weird against my shaved head. "Just blow him, then."

"No! Get off the sex shit!"

"OK..."

We wait forever, just silence on the phone, until..."Hey," Sim says, "do that thing that happened to Andi Donnelly last year."

"What are you talking about?"

"Oh, right. You were in the hospital when it happened. Someone put up these naked posters of Andi Donnelly all over the school and all over town with shit like 'I love to have sex'on them and her phone number."

"How did they get naked pictures?"

"I don't know."

"I don't have naked pictures of him." And this is weird, but it's a good idea because it would totally embarrass the hell out of him, but for some weird reason, the idea of showing other people what he looks like naked makes me feel bad.

"We could fake something," she says. "Something with a really tiny dick."

For God's sake! "Simone, stop it! You've got tiny dicks on the brain. And don't even
say
whatever it is you're thinking right now!" Because I know she would say something gross about dicks and brains or dicks being on something other than her brain. Eew.

The other end goes silent again, except for the occasional soft, wet pucker of Simone's lips giving up her cigarette. I lick my lips. I can practically taste the smoke.

"I've got it," Simone says after forever.

"Really?"

"Yeah, totally. I saw this once. In
Mean Girls.
I tried it, too. On a guy. It totally works."

And then she tells me, and God, it's perfect.

A
FTER
I
HANG UP WITH
S
IMONE
, I just lie in bed for a while, thinking about cigarettes, thinking about Fanboy, thinking about Jecca, thinking about the fat makeup lady. I think about all of it, sometimes all at once, sometimes one thing at a time.

Then I go to my computer and mess around. I have a message that says that Simone has updated her MySpace page, so I go check it out. (Yeah, Simone's still on MySpace. Please. It's all grownups now, trying to sell things to kids.)

So she has new pictures in her gallery. It's the cell phone pics of her and Jecca in the Victoria's Secret changing room, but there are more of them, including one where they're standing boob to boob. I feel like I
should
feel jealous, but I don't. Instead, I'm just pissed. Like, why are girls always showing slutty pictures of themselves on the Internet? You don't see guys showing their dicks online (unless they're child molesters), but you can always count on a picture of a girl showing her boobs or her butt.

There are comments under some of the pictures:

this is my fav pic of you not only do you look gorgeous but tose tits look AWSUM and u r the so fierce!!! i love! grls rulez!!!!!!!!
sigh I wish my boobies loked like that
i wuld totaly hit that i want 2 hit both of thm
hi will you make a ME sandwich? lol j/k (mabbe)
dam grl!
holy shit so hot
*pops wood* !!!!booiiinnggg!!!!

And some of those are from other girls! And a couple are from people I don't recognize—total strangers or adults.

I don't get it. Is it just me? It's like everyone else acts this way and I'm the oddball, so maybe I'm just wrong. Maybe Simone's right. Maybe I should just give up and dive in and lose it.

I shut down the computer and lie back on my bed again. Yeah, just go ahead and lose it and get it done and over with. Maybe that'll fix all of my problems.

But I don't know who to go to. I mean, do I go to Jecca and tell her, "Hey, I want to go all the way with you. I want to do it all"? Or do I go to someone else? Do I go to a boy?

I don't know what I am. I don't think I can be heterosexual because I like what I do with Jecca too much. And I'm not gay because I think about boys, too. So maybe I'm bisexual, but I don't know, because why does it have to be defined? Maybe I'm none of those things. Maybe I'm just
sexual,
period.