Free Rosemary's Double Delight by Heather Rainier Page B

easy familiarity, after a day that had been utterly foreign. Her chin quivered, and she pressed her lips together tightly.
    “Your day suck as bad as mine, Rosie Posie?” Evan asked, fingering one of her unruly locks. Rosemary nodded and ignoring the crowd around them, focused on Evan gratefully as he continued.
    “Coach popped everyone who ran late coming out of the showers with a wet towel. I’ve got a big, red welt on my butt. I can still feel it stinging.” The quiver in her chin stopped as he grinned sheepishly and rubbed the aforementioned butt cheek. She knew he was making light of his pain to help her feel better.
    “You have to take showers, too?” she asked, her heart beginning to lighten somewhat.
    Wes chuckled. “Yeah, nobody warned us about that, did they?”
    “No! I was in a room with a gazillion other nekkid girls,” she muttered, laughing when the boys gagged and made puking sounds.
    “At least we didn’t get popped with a wet towel.”
    Wes slung an arm around her and hugged her again.
    It was at that precise moment they drew the notice of three sixth-grade girls and a boy waiting in the line next to theirs. Rosemary recognized the boy from her science class, where he was seated next to her. She’d taken an instant dislike to him that morning when he’d flicked one of her tight, curly locks with his freshly sharpened pencil, poking her with it and marking her new white shirt. He’d asked her if she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket. Hardy-har-har, like she’d never heard that one before. She’d given him an evil look and ignored him.
    Now his jeering voice crowed over the rest of the chaotic noise on the schoolyard. “Hey, look! Curly Girlie has a boyfriend. No wait!
    She has two boyfriends! Are you gonna kiss ’em?” he asked in a singsong voice.

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    Rosemary looked on in shock as the three little girls standing with him began laughing, and pointed at her. They took up the boy’s chant,
    “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”
    Turning to Wes and Evan, Rosemary saw their features turn from shock to stone-cold anger. She looked back to the other group, and now the whole line was laughing and pointing at them.
    It was hard enough to survive this first day. Add to that her desperate need to fit in and find her place amongst these students, and poor Rosemary made a life-altering mistake.
    At the top of her lungs, Rosemary screamed loud enough for everyone to hear, “They aren’t my boyfriends! They aren’t my boyfriends! I don’t like them at all!” Her fellow classmates from Divine Elementary School turned, round-eyed, and gaped at her. They all knew Rosemary, Wes, and Evan were seldom apart.
    Bus number 11 pulled to a stop in front of their line of kids. Wes and Evan lifted their backpacks from the ground and turned from her.
    Evan glanced back at her as the kids in the other line continued to giggle and point at her. His eyes were filled with tears of betrayal.
    Wes’s shoulders were slumped, but he didn’t look back at her, just stumbled forward in the line. She opened her mouth to speak, even touched him, but he shrugged her hand away.
    Rosemary looked at the boy, and he stuck his tongue out at her triumphantly. She turned away in defeat. She already knew she wasn’t going to be friends with him or those bratty girls, but now she’d lost her two best friends, and for nothing. Once on the bus, Wes and Evan made their way to the back seat. Unused to riding a school bus, her instinct was to follow them, but she knew she couldn’t do that now.
    She was looking for an open spot when her friend Rachel Lopez beckoned her over. In tearful relief, Rosemary collapsed on the seat.
    “Wow! Rosemary, you’re just as dumb as a brick, aren’t you? Are you okay?” Rachel asked, as always balancing wit with compassion.
    Thankfully, the insult wrapped in sympathy kept her from crying.
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    “I dunno,” she whispered. Rachel patted her shoulder and left her in peace. Rachel made sure the