Free Confessions of a Not It Girl by Melissa Kantor

for a cab, aren't you?"
    "I guess I am," he said. In the light of the cab I could see his flawless skin, his beautiful green eyes. I love you I love you I love you.
    "But we did save gas," I pointed out. "And that's good for...fuel emissions and, you know, the greenhouse effect." I was starting to sound like National Public Radio.
    "True," he said.
    "Well. Good night."
    "Good night."
    As I got ready for bed, I replayed the cab ride in my mind. Okay, true, we'd sat in complete silence for almost twenty minutes, but maybe that was a good thing. I mean, at least nothing hugely embarrassing had been said. Maybe he'd even start thinking I was a deep, introspective person, the kind who actually thinks before she speaks. While other girls were satisfied to string together banal observations along the lines of What a great party! and This sure is some cold beer! I felt no need to utter a word unless it was a pithy, insightful observation about the human condition.
    When I went into the bathroom to wash my face,
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    things with Josh became clearer. Looking in the mirror I saw I had lipstick smeared across my chin. Running down the center of the smudge was a thin line where Tom's drool must have proved too strong for the staying power of Bobbi Brown.
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    CHAPTER EIGHT
    I don't know if it was the phone ringing or the yelling that actually woke me, but by the time I was fully conscious I could tell that (a) my mom was on the phone with my brother, (b) they were in the middle of a major fight, and (c) the only way I was going to get back to sleep was to go someplace quiet, like the runway at Kennedy airport. My mom's study is right above my room, so I could hear what she said whenever she raised her voice, which was most of the time. My dad was up there, too, on the extension in their room.
    The first words I actually deciphered were, "I can't believe you would want to go to her house for Thanksgiving when you something something something.'''' Then my dad said, "Something family something."
    "A girlfriend is not something something. You have a something something." There was another pause, and he said, "I don't see how you call that an adult something."
    Until he went to college, my brother and my parents always got along; by third grade I'd probably had more fights with them than he'd had all through high school. He was on the squash team at Lawrence, first JV and then varsity, so every day he pretty much just went to school,
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    played squash, came home, and did his homework. He had a match or a tournament most weekends, and he wasn't around a lot. So I guess you could say their relationship was only as good as it was because he was never home, but that wouldn't account for how when he was home he didn't do stuff like leave his dirty clothes all over the place or forget to write down phone messages the way I apparently did.
    Basically, he was the good child and I was the bad child, a duality confirmed by the fact that on the day he got accepted to Yale, my parents received a letter saying my French grade was "in danger of being compromised" by my "failure to attend class."
    But then Rogier started Yale and got a girlfriend, and everything changed between him and my parents. As far as I know, Rogier never even kissed anyone in high school, but he was hot and heavy with this girl Heather from, like, day one of freshman orientation. They stayed together for the rest of the semester, but then in January he broke up with her and started going out with this other girl, Jamie or Julie or something.
    None of us ever met the Julie person because before school ended he got a third girlfriend, Larissa. Over the summer, Larissa and Rogier came up to our house on Cape Cod, and one afternoon my mom walked in on them by accident. I don't know if she actually saw them, but either way, the entire thing is simply too gross for words. It turned into this gigantic fight, with my mom screaming at Rogier about how whenever he comes home he treats the