Total pages in book: 185
Estimated words: 180510 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 903(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 602(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 180510 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 903(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 602(@300wpm)
“But she broke up with me.”
“Yes. But that doesn’t mean she’s ready to see you with another girlfriend.”
“But she had a boyfriend for a month.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
That made no sense to me. It did matter.
“You never said what made her mad to begin with. Why did she run off to her tree? Did you say something? Did someone at school say something?”
I hadn’t told my mom about the kiss behind the garage. Even if I didn’t think she’d be mad, I also didn’t think she’d exactly be happy either.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled as I escaped to my room before she asked anymore questions.
Taking my usual spot on my beanbag chair by the window, I pretended to read the book we were supposed to be reading for English while keeping surveillance of the Watts’s house in hopes of catching a glimpse of the stupid girl I had a chronic crush on.
The next day, I broke up with Annie.
Josie still ignored me on the bus ride home, even though I sat right next to her. When the bus dropped us off at our stop, I waited for Josie to get her bag, and we exited the bus together. Instead of walking toward home, she just stood there, watching the bus close its door and pull away from the curb as the rest of the kids scattered in different directions toward their respective houses.
When it was just the two of us, I broke the silence. “Aren’t you coming?”
Josie turned ninety degrees from the curb toward me. After a few slow blinks, she clenched the straps of her backpack, lifted onto her toes, and leaned forward, our lips pressing together. But this wasn’t like the Annie kiss. This was different. It was a real kiss.
My lips moved, latching onto her top lip for a few seconds, and then her lips moved and did the same thing to my bottom lip. There was suction and movement.
It was definitely a real kiss.
When she dropped flat onto her feet again, she smiled. “Let’s go home.”
That wasn’t the day she became my girlfriend, again. Not in any official capacity. That was just the day I started kissing Josie Watts.
We kissed a lot.
We held hands.
We hung out at the batting cages, in the woods behind her house, and in her dad’s garage where he exercised or worked on his old Chevelle. That was the year I learned to change a tire and change the oil in a car. My dad thought I was a bit young when I told him, but I think he was just jealous that Josie’s dad taught me instead of him.
Josie and I were friends, but of a different kind. At school, I had my friends, and she had her friends. I played sports and the piano. Josie stayed after school to help the librarian put the returned books back on the shelves. And sometimes, she lay in her front yard under the maple tree and read. Josie read so many books.
Then there was our time. It felt like everything else was just an obstacle to navigate to make it to our time. That place where our hands searched for each other. That place where she’d nudge my arm with hers, and I’d bend down to give her a quick kiss. We’d smile and I knew she thought the same thing I did: we weren’t each other’s world—the world was simply ours when it was just the two of us.
Josie Watts was unlike any other human I had ever met. She’d call me stupid one minute and bring me cookies she made with her mom the next minute with a handwritten apology.
Passionate.
I’d say she was passionate, even if at the time I didn’t know what the word really meant. There were a lot of words that fit Josie that didn’t come to mind until after I’d already lost her.
Inquisitive.
Generous.
Authentic.
“I heard something,” Josie said one night as we were stargazing from her mom’s hammock on their deck. Her parents were inside, tending to her baby brother.
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“No.” She gently rolled toward me as I did the same, so we didn’t fall out of the hammock. With her face a few inches from mine, her lips pulled into a sad smile. “I heard my dad telling my mom something about your dad.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you.”
“You have to tell me. We tell each other everything.”
“Yeah.” Her gaze shifted to my chin. “But this is something that’s sad.”
“What? Just tell me.”
She forced her eyes, the color of night, to look into mine again. “My dad said he saw your dad kissing a woman that wasn’t your mom.”
“That’s a lie.” I sat up, and Josie had to quickly put her feet on the ground, so she didn’t fall off the other side.