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But meanwhile I’d lost touch with Amanda. I felt very sad about that.
Jimmy and I still did our homework together. Sometimes we really did do it, when there were other people around. The rest of the time we didn’t. It would take us about a minute to get out of our clothes and into each other, and Jimmy would be ru
I loved him so much. But then I made a mistake. I asked him if he was still in love with Wakulla or did he love me instead? I shouldn’t have asked that. He waited too long to answer and then he said, Did it matter? I wanted to say yes, but instead I said no. Then Wakulla Price moved to the West Coast, and Jimmy got moody and went back to spending more time with Gle
Despite that we were still having sex, though not very often – the red hearts in my diary were getting farther and farther apart. Then I saw Jimmy by accident at the mall with this foul-mouthed older girl called LyndaLee, who was rumoured to be going through all the boys at school, one by one but fast, like eating soynuts. Jimmy had his hand right on her ass, and then she pulled down his head and kissed him. It was a long, wet kiss. I felt sick to my stomach at the thought of Jimmy with her, and I remembered something Amanda once said about diseases, and I thought, Whatever LyndaLee’s got, I’ve got too. And I went home and threw up, and cried, and then I got into my big white bathtub and had a warm bath. But it wasn’t much comfort.
Jimmy didn’t know I knew about him and LyndaLee. A few days later he asked if he could come over as usual, and I said yes. I wrote in my diary, Jimmy you nosy brat I know your reading this, I hate it just because I fucked you doesn’t mean I like you so STAY OUT! Two red lines under hate, three under stay out. Then I left the diary on the top of my dresser. Your enemies could use your writing against you, I thought, but also you could use it against them.
After the sex I took a shower by myself, and when I came out, Jimmy was reading my diary, and said why did I hate him all of a sudden? So I told him. I used words I’d never said out loud before, and Jimmy said he was wrong for me, he was incapable of commitment because of Wakulla Price, she’d turned him into an emotional dumpster, but maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched. And I asked exactly how many that would be? I couldn’t stand it that he would just include me in a big basket of girls, as if we were peaches or turnips. Then he said he really liked me as a person, which was why he was being honest with me, and I told him to get stuffed. So we broke up on bad terms.
The stretch of time after that was very dark. I wondered what I was doing on the Earth: no one would care much if I wasn’t on it any more. Maybe I should cast away what Adam One called my husk and transform into a vulture or a worm. But then I remembered how the Gardeners used to say, Ren, your life is a precious gift, and where there is a gift there is a Giver, and when you’ve been given a gift you should always say thank you. So that was some help.
Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy’s tired of you, so what, there’s guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they’re wilted. But you have to act like you’re having a spectacular time and every day’s a party.
What I did next wasn’t good, and I’m still ashamed of it. I walked up to Gle
Gle
“I saw you with the Gardeners, at the Tree of Life,” I said. “Remember? I was the one who walked you over to see Pilar. With that honey?” He looked alarmed, and said we should get a Happicappuchino and talk.
We did talk. We talked a lot. We hung out in the mall so much that kids started saying we were a thing, but we weren’t – it was never a romance. What was it then? I guess Gle
Gle
He’d talk about other things too. One day, he said that what you had to do in any adversarial situation was to kill the king, as in chess. I said people didn’t have kings any more. He said he meant the centre of power, but today it wouldn’t be a single person, it would be the technological co
Once he asked me if I thought God was a cluster of neurons, and if so, whether people having that cluster had been passed down by natural selection because it conferred a competitive edge, or whether maybe it was just a spandrel, such as having red hair, which didn’t matter one way or another to your survival chances. A lot of the time I felt way out of my depth with him, so I’d say, “What do you think?” He always had an answer to that.
Jimmy did see us together at the mall, and he did seem taken aback; though not for long, because I caught him giving Gle
Jimmy and Gle
I put in the next two years somehow. My marks were poor, and I didn’t think I’d get in anywhere for college – I’d end up as a minimumwage meat slave, working at SecretBurgers or somewhere like that. But Lucerne pulled some strings. I heard her talking about it to one of her golf-club friends: “She’s not stupid, but that cult experience ruined her motivation, so the Martha Graham Academy is the best we could do.” So I’d be in the same space with Jimmy: that made me so nervous I felt sick.