Free Cameo by Tanille Edwards Page A

confused. Jason didn’t really seem to be secretive like this—he seemed like he would sign his name. Maybe I was just reading too much into this.
    One month without a boyfriend, and I didn’t know how to flirt. Yet, then again, when did flirting become borderline menacing? And there was still the question of who pulled the bathroom stunt. Who would work with Carolina and what would they get out of it? She was kind of pretty, but there was something about her that reminded me of a rat. I did once hear that her stepdad was loaded and that she had bribed her first boyfriend into staying with her an extra month by buying him a new pair of sneakers. Obviously she was about as deep as a puddle, so I could only imagine the type of guy that would fathom dating her.
    I looked around the hallway inconspicuously. The farther down the hallway I went, this place felt more and more like one of those eerie fun houses. Did they have me on camera or something? My face was probably glaring with oil. Years ago, during a bout with acne I had used this infomercial stuff that was like steroids in a bottle, and since halting all use of that skin kit thing, my skin was like an oil slick two or three hours after washing my face. Better on the surface than in my pores, is what I told myself. But on camera, with a few editing tricks, I could quickly go from fresh-faced and dewy to greasy and gooey.
    A frantic panic came over me. I asked some random girl in the hallway where the bathroom was. She pointed all the way to the end of the hall. Suddenly it seemed like I had been walking forever. That was when I stumbled upon Cindy and Peter.
    Oh, gosh! I couldn’t stop staring. It was so rude. They didn’t seem to notice me between Peter taking off Cindy’s cardigan, and Cindy wrapping her legs around him like he was the dreaded rope climb in gym class. She told me that she always wore layers to parties for this exact purpose—as she put it, guys liked to rip your clothes off, so a girl had to build up the anticipation by having more to take off. He clumsily opened the door and the two stumbled into his bedroom. I took a step forward, allowing my eyes to follow them in. They dropped to the floor about three feet shy of his huge king-size bed. His room was decorated like one of those sleek, modern hotel rooms with a brown suede headboard and dark blue curtains and sheets, and there was even a sofa and a fifty- or sixty-inch flat-screen. Yet there were no pictures on the walls or anything. A few soccer trophies, some staged lacrosse racquets … I guess that’s what you called them. I didn’t know what the game entailed, but I did know that lacrosse had been invented by Native Americans. Why was I thinking of this at a party? Probably because I’d rather be at home reading a book. In short, the room was nice but stale.
    I felt relieved that I didn’t live in one of these humongous farm houses with so much space one wouldn’t know what to do with it. But the decorating was lovely. That was my mother’s word: lovely. I continued down the hallway in search of a bathroom.
    I knew Cindy was promiscuous. But she was my best friend. I looked at her as being in control of her dating life rather than submitting to pressure or doing it to be liked. She had a lot of strengths that made her really cool. Seeing her in action had me in shock, though. I just kept thinking that she barely knew him. It was, like, yesterday when he gave her his number. I wasn’t one to sleep with every guy I fancied. In fact, I had only slept with one guy in my entire life.
    â€œEntire life” is such a weighted phrase. Here’s my disclaimer—I’d only reached puberty at age fourteen, and I believed a girl shouldn’t have sex before seventeen. That was the magic number of maturity in my book. Although my friends said most girls lost it at sixteen.
    This was not the time for a soliloquy. There wasn’t a line at