Free Sass & Serendipity by Jennifer Ziegler Page A

hanging with Luke, right? There was no reason she couldn’t do both.
    “No. No plans. Let’s go.”

 
    “Sam Milburn has the most amazing tongue!” Lynette Harkrider exclaimed, gazing upward as if she could see a little thought bubble with his image in it.
    Eight other girls, including Daphne, leaned toward her as if she were magnetized.
    “He’s so cute!” Sheri Purnell said, emphasizing every word in her sentence.
    Daphne thought Sam resembled a lizard too much to ever be considered good-looking. His eyes were so far apart, they were practically on the sides of his head, and he seemed almost hairless with his crew cut and sparse brows. Plus, like his reptilian brethren, he apparently had mad tongue skills. But she kept quiet. As a junior varsity cheerleader, Daphne had to defer to the varsity cheerleaders’ superiority. And Lynette was the most alpha one of them all.
    She wasn’t even head cheerleader—that was Tricia Albright. But Lynette was the mouthiest and, according to public opinion, the prettiest. She had expertly styled honey-colored hair and skin that was a matching honey hue, and herdaily makeup job was as elaborate as a Monet painting. Daphne didn’t think Lynette was anywhere near as beautiful as Gabby; in fact, underneath all those dabs of color, Lynette was rather freckled and ordinary. But she did have the best legs of all the cheerleaders, and her painstaking morning routine probably should count for something. Thus, Lynette reigned as Queen Supreme at Barton High. And, of course, Gabby was too much of a sourpuss to seriously compete for the title.
    “And he’s got these killer abs,” Lynette went on. “I mean, like,
underwear model
abs.”
    “Is he taking you to prom?” Tricia asked.
    Lynette made a face as if it was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard. “No way. It’s not serious or anything. We’re just having sex.”
    Daphne stared at Lynette, with all her sultry confidence, and then studied the rest of the girls in her pre- and post-school hangout crowd. Being a cheerleader with a perky personality, she was part of the group by default, yet she often didn’t feel like one of them. She tried to emulate their style, painting her nails the color of the month, wearing slinky tops from the accepted stores (which she often had to hide under sweaters around her mom and dad), flirting with the jocks, and subscribing to similar views on boys, fashion, and which celebrities were considered awesome and should be copied. She didn’t have the years of gossip experience or the income bracket to be pitch-perfect, but she had managed to fake it so far. However, the one thing she never succeeded in adopting, or even credibly imitating, was their laid-back attitude toward sex.
    Just sex
, Lynette had said.
Not serious
.
    But how could sex not be serious? How could taking off your clothes in front of a guy and letting him touch you all over
not
be serious? Lynette and the others made it sound like a game of checkers.
    It wasn’t as though Daphne were antisex. She loved it—or at least, she was pretty sure she would when she tried it. But to her it was something epic. Something that should be done on a deserted tropical beach or in a bedroom strewn with rose petals and lit by candles. Not in the dirt-strewn bed of a Dodge Ram or the auditorium’s fusty-smelling costume loft, in full view of any cockroaches or theater tech geeks. She didn’t want a cheap-sex kind of relationship. She wanted a guy who would look at her as if she was the most beautiful and amazing creature on the planet, who would pick her wildflowers and call her by a cute nickname and write her sweet little notes that he would tuck in secret places for her to find later. She wanted love—without all the smirks and cynicism. Real, unapologetic, romantic love.
    Daphne’s anxiety must have shown in her expression, because suddenly Lynette was looking straight at her, her eyebrows raised into two perfectly plucked