Free Those Girls by Lauren Saft

sure where I’d been when everyone else was watching
The Wizard of Oz
and
Home Alone
and
The Breakfast Club
, but somehow I got to be sixteen and just had to pretend I knew what people were talking about when they said things like, “You can’t handle the truth!”
    “Famous.” I could hear him scratching his scalp through the receiver. “I don’t know what makes a movie famous. It’s just… it’s really good.”
    Another awkward pause.
    “I like good movies.”
    “Good,” he said through a muffled laugh. “It’s good to like good things. Better than liking bad things.”
    At this point, the old Veronica would have said something like,
but sometimes it’s good to be bad
, but I refrained. That was old jock-screwing, tit-flashing drunkie Veronica. New Veronica, who dated smart, sensitive, literate, good-movie-liking, good-SAT-scoring guys like Drew, didn’t revert to sexual banter for lack of witty, insightful things to say, right? So I went with the truth.
    “Well, honestly,” I said, “I don’t know much about movies, let alone good movies.”
    “Well, it would be my pleasure to introduce you to some good movies. And we’ll start with
True Romance
.”
    “Sounds like a plan,” I said, fighting a smile.
    He paused again, then said, “I’m going to go watch it. But do you want to hang out this weekend? Start your cinematic education with a Tarantino tutorial?”
    He was actually asking me out on a Wednesday for the weekend? He genuinely wasn’t going to ask me to come over right then to “watch”
True Romance
. This really was something different it seemed.
    “I’d like that. Call me.”
    “I will,” he said. Then he inhaled deeply. I could hear the faint buzz of his TV hissing through the phone. “Take it easy, Veronica,” he said. Then he hung up.
    My room, my house, was silent. I swiveled in my creaky green desk chair and looked at all the dolls and stuffed animals placed on the wicker bookshelf, where they’d been collectingdust, untouched, for, like, ten years. Pictures of me, Alex, and Mollie were tacked all over my lavender walls. Us dolled up in too much makeup and braces blaring at middle-school dances and jumping around on the beach in not-well-filled-out bikinis at my old shore house. Me, Mollie, and Sam with cigarettes in our hands some night outside of Rizzuto’s house. Me and Alex and Liz Masterson at my fourteenth birthday party. I’d always liked her; I strained to remember why we didn’t talk to her anymore. I looked up at the fading stick-on stars on my ceiling and thought of how they were there every night, but I thought to notice them only once in a while.

ALEXANDRA HOLBROOK
    S ix weeks after the make-out that shook the nation, nothing else earth-shattering had really happened on the Drew and Veronica front. They’d each reported that they’d talked on the phone a few times and I saw them wave to each other through the fence at tennis practice, but they hadn’t hung out one-on-one (thanks to a series of successful interferences run by yours truly) and hadn’t made out again since the party. Thank god. I relished the possibility that this whole thing was really possibly going to blow over after all.
    I found myself looking forward to band practice. Waking up excited on days that I knew we were going to play in the afternoon, skipping tennis so that we could start earlier and play for longer. And I really liked the guys. And I thought, it seemed, they really liked me, which for some reason made me feel more genuinely satisfied than anyone else ever liking me in the past had. Because they were different from anyone else who’d ever liked me in the past. They came from a different world, knew different things, had a different set of standards and values and ideas of what was cool and what was funny than anyone I’d grown up around. I had to shift my parameters around them,and at the same time, because it was understood that we were inherently different, could just