Free Bad Apple by Laura Ruby Page A

“about Tola.” My sister says that every fight is “about Tola.” Mr. Doctor asks if there’s any more apricot sauce for the chicken. Tola, who’s sick of being the subject of so many ongoing/online conversations that seem to have no relationship to what’s actually happened to her, to what’s actually happening, retires to her room with her crazy cat.
     
    Besides Seven, only three guys have kissed me, and a fourth did something that resembled kissing but shouldn’t even count. The first guy, Raul, I met in day camp when I was twelve. I was almost normal then, way before I pierced my nose and dyed my hair and generally made everyone crazy. Every morning for a week, I stole two cigarettes from my mom, who was trying to quit at the time, and shared them with Raul at the end of the day, after most of the other kids had been picked up. His tongue was weird and gluey, and he tasted like burned toast, so I told him that the cigarettes had made me sick and I had to go to the bathroom to throw up, which I did, twice.
    The second was a guy I met on the boardwalk one night when we were on vacation at the Jersey shore; he never told me his name. I went for a walk on the beach with him, and he picked me up and carried me around as if we were beingfilmed for a deodorant commercial and then ended up making out on the beach. He reached under my shirt and tried to get into my bra, but I stopped him; now, I’m not sure why. It’s not like I had anything in there, anyway. We made out some more and then went home. The next day, I went to talk to him at the boardwalk game where he worked, the one where you put the little rubber frogs on a stand and pound a lever with a hammer and try to get the frogs to land on lily pads. He looked up and, with not one iota of recognition in his voice, said, “Three frogs for a dollar.”
    The third guy, Billy, was this senior in my high school. I saw him playing football in the street with a couple of his friends and made sure that I intercepted one of the passes. What I mean is that I walked into the middle of the game because I was lost in a daydream and got hit in the head with the ball. We went out for two months, which was an eternity considering that the only reason we were attracted to each other was because he thought it was cool to go out with someone freaky, and I thought it was cool to go out with someone semipopular. It wasn’t long before he started complaining about my hair and my clothes, and I didn’t want to go to parties filled with the young and the witless. We got bored talking to each other on the phone, and he started telling me these involved, incredibly detailed stories about his favorite pastime, hunting. I mean, who hunts in New Jersey? I broke up with him after he gave me a forty-five-minute lecture on the proper way to gut a deer.
    Which was partially the reason I made out with a girl. June and I were sitting alone in Mr. Mymer’s art room eating lunch freshman year, lamenting the fact that since I’d broken up with Billy, neither of us had boyfriends. And since we didn’t see any reasonable prospects around, we were destined to be alone and lonely for the rest of our lives, and wasn’t that completely pathetic? Then June suggested that maybe there was another alternative: girls. We listed the advantages. Girls are generally cleaner, safer, smaller, and can’t get you pregnant. Most of them don’t do stupid things like play Guitar Hero for fourteen hours straight or attach a chain to one of those huge blue mailboxes and try to pull it behind his dad’s car the way Miles Rosentople did, which got him arrested.
    On paper, dating girls seemed to be a fantastic idea, much better and more practical than dating guys. June asked me if I’d ever kissed a girl before, which neither of us had, not for real. So, since there was no one around, and since we figured no one would care anyway, we tried it. Unfortunately, we picked the exact moment when the vice principal came