The Charmer

5

It was funny, how it went, the last three weeks. It was like a switch that suddenly gave her something to look forward to, made her days feel fuller. Some people told her that her teen years would be so exciting, the best days of her life, and that she'd enjoy them and look back at them fondly as she grew older. Nothing in her life seemed to support that advice—until the afternoon that Jim first walked her home.

They talked on the phone almost every night. He walked her home almost every day as well. He hung around her locker in the mornings, sometimes to continue the conversation they were having the night before; sometimes just to smile cheekily at her before heading to his class. (Those were like drive-by shootings. She was convinced he did it on the off chance that the sight of him leaning against her locker like a YM spread would one day stop her heart. But if there was any good way to go...)

People noticed. Leo would bug her incessantly if they were, like, together. Officially. Char liked to make pointed comments, but she was passive aggressive and never bit when Trini would ask her directly what she meant. Being Rulebook 'National Bookstore' Trini had its positives, in that the goodwill she sowed by giving away pad paper and spare ballpens to her classmates meant they reacted to seeing her with Jim with curiosity, rather than spite. She had one afternoon of fear when she found herself in the girls' bathroom with Jean, Lisa and the cheer team. But instead of reenacting a John Hughes bullying montage, they just asked her a few curious questions: was she tutoring Jim? (Kind of.) Were they friends? (Yes.) What did they like to talk about? (Music, movies.) Maybe she should watch his next game with them. (Sure, but unlikely).

Sometimes, though, Trini wondered if the tide would turn, if her run of good fortune would drop—she knew very well that all it took was a rumor to make things go crashing down. She had the unnerving feeling that she didn't deserve happiness, that her blank, rule-following, under-the-radar existence had been the highest she should have aspired to, and what she was doing now, letting herself be happy with Jim—would tempt fate.

Still, things had a habit of developing whether she wanted them to or not. She introduced him to her mother one afternoon. It couldn't be avoided. Mom had come home early from work; said she took a half-day leave because of a migraine and had been sweeping the front sidewalk (something that she almost never did) when Trini and Jim came ambling along after school. Jim had been charm itself: he made mano, said 'good afternoon po, tita,' blushed a little when Mom asked if he was the boy who called Trini every night. She asked him to have a glass of Coke before leaving, and then gave tacit permission for Trini to invite him over whenever she liked.

"It's nice for you to have people your age you can talk to. Just be good," Mom had said.

They were. It wasn't like that; what they had, which was why Leo's non-stop questions were hard for her to take. They were friends, they talked about almost everything, they stared at each other, sometimes they put their arms around each other's shoulders (and just as quickly pulled them away). They were happy. Why did they have to force and define something, and not just enjoy it for what it was?

Not that she didn't sometimes think of those things, the things that were, by Mom's definition, Not Good. There was his mouth, soft and red and smiling and pouting, and it was hard not to think of how it would feel against her own lips. There was that queer feeling that bloomed all over her body, when he was close, like a mini forest fire that ignited the tiny hairs on her skin. It was the thought of his pretty hands, and how their touch might soothe the fire.

But she put a stop to those thoughts before they could go any further. To allow them to progress would definitely be tempting fate.