Free The Girl Who Kissed a Lie by Skylar Dorset Page B

somebody got it all wrong: my addle-minded father or my aunts who don’t keep track of dates. And some days I feel much younger than seventeen, like a small child, and I just want my mother.
    I feel that way now.
    I am thinking of my mother, of how I am told I resemble her. I have never seen her photograph, so all I can do is study myself in the mirror and draw conclusions from there. Tall, I suppose, the way I am tall. Slender the way I am slender. It must be from her that I get my pale skin that resists all of my efforts to get it to tan, since my aunts and father have naturally olive complexions. It must be from her that I get my blue eyes, my blond hair so light that it can be white in certain lights. I wear my hair long, and I wonder if my mother did—if she does still, wherever she is.
    “Hey,” says Ben, interrupting my thoughts. Ben works at one of the stands scattered through the Common. On hot summer days, Ben makes fresh-squeezed lemonade that he gives me for free. He brings it to me while I lie on the grass in the heat and read books and tell him what they’re about. Now, at the time of year when it can be summer or winter both in the same day, Ben makes lemonade or sells sweatshirts, as the mood strikes him. It must be sweatshirts today, because he’s brought me one, and he drops it playfully on top of my head, draped so that it momentarily obscures my vision.
    I feel like I have known Ben all my life, but that’s not true. I just can’t remember the first time I met him is the problem. I have always come to the Common to be alone, alone among the strangers, and Ben has always been in the background of life on the Common. I don’t know when we started speaking to each other, when he started bringing me lemonade, when we learned each other’s names. It all just happened, the way good things just happen without having to be forced. Ben is—I think—older than me in a way that always makes me feel very young, but I don’t think he does it on purpose, the way the college guys do when we cross paths on the T, Boston’s sprawling and ever-crowded subway system. Ben is effortlessly older than me. He is tall—taller than me—and thin—maybe thinner than me too, honestly—and has a lot of thick, dark, curly hair and very pale eyes whose color I can never quite pinpoint, and for a little while now, I have been ignoring the attention of Mike Summerton at school because there is Ben. But I don’t think Ben is thinking that way, and what’s really kind of annoying is that, in a relationship where I don’t ever remember even having to tell Ben my name, why should I have to tell him that we’re kind of dating, even if he doesn’t know it and has never kissed me? He should just know , the way he knew I’d like lemonade and that I was cold and needed a sweatshirt.
    “What are you up to?” he asks me, dropping to the leaf-strewn grass next to me. Ben moves with an absentminded elegance. When he drops to the ground, it almost feels like he floats his way down. It sounds weird, but it’s the only way I can think to describe it: a soft, fluttering quality to the way Ben moves. It is, trust me, very appealing. Ben never clumsily plops to the ground beside me. Ben always sort of sinks there. And you get the feeling, watching Ben move, that everything he does is very deliberate, no motion wasted. It makes it terribly flattering when he uses those deliberate, studied motions to come talk to you —terribly flattering and the slightest bit annoying. I am not known for my grace. Not that I’m the clumsiest person ever, but let’s just say I know I’m never going to be a ballerina. My aunts say that I move with “Stewart stubbornness,” trying to refuse to yield to hard objects or even gravity at times—that that is one thing, at least, that I did not inherit from my mother. I guess I have to take their word for it. In my head, whenever I imagine her, my “flighty” mother moves so fluidly she could be