Fantastic Hearts and When to Trust Them (2)

Girl Talk, Girls Walk

That night Celia finished brushing her teeth and opened the door to the guest room to hastily hushed giggling. Celia rolled her eyes, raised her chin, and paid them no mind. Instead she dragged her quilt off her bed and curled up in the chair next to the window, where there was a small lamp she could read by. She had to lower herself into the chair, muscles fluttering around her bones.

She made it through less than an entire page.

"So how was it?" Tina asked.

Celia knocked her head back against the shoulders of the chair. "Lord, save me."

"She loved it," Queenie sang.

Tina tittered. "I knew it."

"She kissed him the second time!" Queenie added.

The both of them squealed.

"Oh my God," Celia muttered, and bundled up her quilt and book, and left to read in the sitting room instead. "You two are going to ruin me."

"Aw, Celia, come back!" Tina whispered as she opened the door, but Celia shut it briskly behind her and settled in on the couch.

This time she only made it half a page, but she was determined to ignore them when they came out with their quilts too and sat on top of Celia's feet and in the armchair.

"My first kiss was a boy named Burt Maylittle," Tina said from the armchair. "I was fifteen."

"Burt Maylittle!" Queenie crowed. "Oh, I will never get over that name."

"Neither one of us was brave enough to risk getting caught out of our Houses after hours," Tina admitted, "so we left the Halloween feast early and found a quiet spot outside. We were both good friends—great friends, actually—and honestly just wanted to know what a kiss felt like. I'm not sure either one of us did it justice."

"Mine was Jack Hornsby," Queenie reminisced. "Sixteen. Oh I was just smitten with that boy. We snuck out. There was a dusty old tower—I don't even remember what they used to use it for—and Jack's older sister was something of a trouble child, so she taught him all the ways up the invisible staircases and which doorknobs didn't bite." She sighed. "It wasn't perfect, but I thought I loved that boy, so at the time I thought it was."

Celia regarded them both imperiously, then pointedly closed her book and laid it on the windowsill. "I was eight, and I kissed our neighbors' son Edmund. His daddy runs a chicken farm. The hens they kept for eggs; the roosters they sold for meat. Edmund's who I got Francis from. He told me I wasn't brave enough to kiss him on the lips, afraid I'd get a lickin' from my momma. I told him I was. It wasn't till I was about seventeen I figured out he'd done turned that rug around so I walked into my own fire." She cackled.

"My best friend at the time, Daisy," said Tina, "I thought she was going to slap me when she found out I'd kissed Burt. She said I had no more business being loose with my lips than I was with my tongue and, well, at that point in my life I already had a reputation for speaking my mind where it wasn't wanted."

"You kidding me?" Queenie retorted. "Betsey Davison gave me a high-five!"

Celia snorted. "Edmund punched me in the arm, shouted 'gotcha!' and ran off."

"That's good that you had good boy friends," Tina decided. "I think if we'd had a few more, men wouldn't have been quite so intimidating."

"You found them intimidating," Queenie muttered.

"Yeah well I didn't have any extra talents that helped me see them for who they really were!"

Queenie looked curiously at Celia. "You didn't have any close girl friends?"