Free Infandous by Elana K. Arnold Page A

then there are date scenes. Supporting cast is supposed to fade into the background when the music gets all romantic and the lights begin to dim.
    “How’s your food, Seph?” asks my mother, and she turns to me in an obvious attempt to make me feel included. After all, this dinner is supposed to be about my newfound (potential) employment.
    Right then my phone vibrates in my pocket.
    I look down at the screen, and they pick up the conversation where they left off. I recognize the number, even though I haven’t saved it in my phone or assigned a name to it. I stare at the bright screen as it vibrates like a rattlesnake in my hand. After a moment or two, it stops. Then another moment passes and it vibrates once more, letting me know that he left a message.
    Now that desire that I’d felt earlier, back in the apartment—to have fun—is completely gone.
    “Hey,” I say. I have to say it again before either of them hears me. “Hey. I think I’d better go back and do my math homework.”
    Jordan looks—for a flash, before he rearranges his expression—like he’s won a prize. Then he does his best to look sorry that I’m leaving, but come on.
    My mom fakes it a little better. “You’re not even going to stay for fortune cookies?”
    “I’ll grab one on the way out,” I tell her, and I do, in case she’s watching me leave, but I throw it in a trash can just outside the restaurant door without cracking it open. Minor players don’t have destinies.
    My phone vibrates again, and I yank it out of my pocket. It’s a text, finally, from Marissa. Party at Sal’s. Bring beer , she’s written, ironically I’m sure, because she knows I don’t have money for beer. Or an ID.
    So I show up empty-handed twenty minutes later.
    The gathering of individuals hanging out on Sal’s mom’s shitty couch doesn’t really live up to the promise of the word party .
    There’s Sal, of course, and Marissa, who seems to have forgiven Sal for whatever his latest act of assholery has been, and Sal’s buddy Blake. I hear the toilet flush, and then Darrin comes out, not even pretending to have washed his hands.
    “He-y, Seph,” says Marissa, and she unwinds herself from Sal and weaves her way over to me, wrapping her arms around my neck and planting a big kiss on my mouth.
    So there were beers earlier.
    This is something Marissa likes to do: kiss me in front of an audience. We’ve kissed—I mean, a real kiss, on the lips, like this, with heat and tongue—maybe six times. I’ve enjoyed it exactly twice. Those were the two times we didn’t have an audience.
    Tonight is public, not private. Marissa wants this from me, for whatever reason, and she is my friend, my sister, so I give it to her. And maybe it’s not just for her. Maybe it’s the unanswered phone calls, the image of my mother in her red dress, and Jordan’s dogged attentiveness to her. All of it peaks like a wave and crashes. I feast on Marissa’s mouth, feeling her lips soften and spread as my teeth press against them, and I fill her with my tongue. I sense them, the others—the audience—but it’s not for them that I perform. It’s for her and for me maybe too. It feels good to overwhelm her, to give her more than what she’s asked for. I feel her surprise in my intensity as her shoulders tighten and her breath catches before she melts against me, for effect or for real I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter anyway.
    My hands go up and down the sides of her body. My leg finds its way in between her thighs. I press up against her, and in a motion that doesn’t feel intentional, she pushes back, grinding into my leg.
    I don’t pull away, so I guess it’s Marissa who does, with shocked wide eyes and parted lips, and it’s funny to see her looking like that—off-balance and surprised.
    Our audience seems to sense the show is over. They hoot their approval and someone, I think Sal, says something about live-action lesbo porn, and it takes Marissa a moment to