Free Last December by Matt Beam

but from the other direction, and she had a Walkman on and her hair was darker and wet, which looked pretty effin’ sexy, especially because it made me think that she must have just had a shower, and I was walking toward her, and I was trying not to stare at her, but I couldn’t help myself, and when she finally saw me, she smiled and said “Hi, Steven” really loudly because she had her Walkman on, and I said hi back, and my voice went high when I said it, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t hear that (thank god with a small g ) and then I just walked behind her, and my heart was beating again for a whole ’nother reason, and I couldn’t believe how completely absolutely seriously seriously sexy she was and I couldn’t imagine a single word I would ever be able to say to Jenny if she talked to me in the near future.
    Vocabulary
    In first period, Mrs. Reese told us that she used swear words in one of her novels, Sam, and lots of important people weren’t very happy about it, and that’s one of the reasons why she had to quit writing and become a teacher. So when I started this letter or whatever, I thought about what she said and I decided that maybe I shouldn’t use swear words because even though my story won’t be published, my audience is you, Sam, and you are too young to hear swear words. (Well, I guess the truth is that I don’t really know how old you’ll be when you read this.) But anyways, the thing is that I think I sort of suddenly get what balls-to-the-wall realness means, because sometimes when someone says the F-word they actually mean it and they don’t mean gosh or fudge or heck . So when I was writing about Byron and what he said when we were playing Ms. Pac-Man, I thought it would almost be a crime to make him say golly or sheesh , because Byron would never say golly or sheesh . Never. And he would never forgive me if I made him say it in my story, either. And I don’t know why that matters a lot to me, but it does. Even though Byron probably won’t ever read this. I figure “eff” is a pretty good compromise for the F-word, don’t you, Sam?
    Anyways, at the end of class, dorky Alan turned around in his seat and mouthed “The Leafs suck,” but he didn’t come over and talk to me, he just went over to Brendan’s side of the room, so I guess he understood that I was onto bigger and better causes and effects or something. Anyways, later in science class we weren’t in our lab groups anymore, we were doing individual readingand notes on multicellular organisms called sponges that look like holey moons made of Nerf balls, so I didn’t have to talk to Jenny, which was good, because my throat felt like it had a boa constrictor wrapped around it (that’s a very big snake, Sam), and I definitely didn’t feel like answering questions in class, because I wasn’t sure I would sound smart enough or dumb enough or cool enough or whatever-I-was-supposed-to-be enough.
    And I kind of had a headache by the end of the class because Jenny sat beside and a little behind me so I was looking out of the corner of my eye the whole time. And she got up at some point to go to the bathroom, and she was wearing jeans and a baggy red sweatshirt, so that you couldn’t really see her emgees, which are kind of big, but it made it worse because it sort of forced me to look for them even harder, which isn’t so easy, unless you have X-ray vision, which I don’t. (Only Superman does, Sam, but that’s stupid kids’ stuff.)
    At lunchtime, I went to the front doors again even if I didn’t have a cigarette to smoke, and Trevor was finally there with Alistair. Trevor said they were going to go to Brandy’s for lunch, and I just held up my lunch bag, and Alistair said, “They don’t mind if you have your own food just so long as someone orders something.”
    So we started walking toward Brandy’s, and I kind of felt weird because I didn’t really really actually know them, but then Alistair started singing this