The Kiss Off

The Kiss Off - Chapter Four

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Chapter Four

Mads was being thoroughly annoying on the way home from school the next day. There I was, hands stuck under my armpits, nose stinging from the winter-like chill and my bare knees clacking together because I couldn’t stop shivering in the horrendous freak freeze while she stood there, staring off into space with a big goofy grin as she put her fingers to her lips, took a drag and puffed out the white icy air pretending she was having a smoke. She was finding the cold funny. She also thought her two pimples were totally invisible under the mounds of concealer – both green (for the redness, she told me) and skin tone as well as a full face of makeup that made her nose kind of shiny. She was kidding herself.

‘Don’t you just love being in love?’ she asked with a contented sigh.

‘Please,’ I sneered. ‘You’re not in love.’

‘Well, like then,’ she said. ‘Don’t you just love being in like?’ Truth was, I hadn’t been in like very often. At least not with boys that there was even the remotest chance I was going to do anything about it with. Definitely wasn’t going to ask a guy out, like Mads. She’d been all dreamy eyed and giggly about Dev for weeks and all of a sudden she gets up the guts to ask him out? Where did that even come from?

Cam’s really the only boy I’d been in like with, like…seriously. Seriously in like with. One hundred and ten percent in like with. And then poof, it was over. Though there was this one boy early last year, we were both at Tahni Mossman’s birthday party and everyone was outside screaming and laughing and lighting sparklers and waving them around as it started to get dark. They were jumping fully clothed off the pier into the lake out the back of Tahni’s house, and this guy friend of hers, I don’t actually know where she knows him from, started smiling at me and I smiled back. He walked over to me and we talked a little bit and we sat down over on the stone fence in the shadows away from everyone and next thing I knew we were making out. And it was really nice. And I was kind of in like with him, but then his friend called him away and that was the last time I saw him. I don’t even remember his name.

‘Yeah,’ I said to Mads as the bus arrived and we piled on, squeezing through the Mounties and the business suits to a spare pocket of space near a pole to hold onto. ‘I like being in like.’

‘Are you in like with someone right now?’ Mads asked. She wriggled around on the spot, looking like she had to pee her pants. It was actually excitement, but the business suit behind her didn’t know that, so he eyed her warily and shuffled a little further away.

‘No,’ I said, averting my gaze as images of Cam kissing Nikki flashed into my mind. ‘There’s no one.’ I said.

‘Wow,’ Mads said. ‘You are the worst liar. Who is it, who is it? I know it isn’t Cam the way you’re all with the death stares and stuff,’ she said. ‘Clearly you’re over that drama.’ She paused and looked at me. ‘I mean, you’re not over it, but you’re over him. Oh you know what I mean. What an ass hat,’ she said. ‘The both of them.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. There was nothing else to say.

‘Sooo, tell me who you like,’ Mads said, bouncing up and down again.

‘I don’t like anyone.’

‘Come on, you like someone, I can tell.’

 ‘I don’t, Mads.’ I said. I glanced around at all of the teenage boys within hearing distance of this conversation. Public forum much?

The bus slowed and I gripped the hand rail as we all jerked forward when it stopped.

Through the front door, Cam and Nikki stepped onto the bus, take away coffee cups in hand. What was she doing on the bus, again? As they got on and Cam flashed his bus pass at the driver and inserted a dollar for Nikki, they seemed deep in conversation and neither of them even looked our way. Mads must have followed my gaze because she stopped pestering me about the whole liking thing.