Free My First Love by Callie West Page A

mean,” I said, referring to myself.
    Though I never would have picked the red dress before Friday, the longer I wore it, the more I liked the way it looked. The dress was bold and risky, the kind that would encourage a good girl to behave like a wild thing. I whirled before the mirror, remembering how it felt to have Chris’s lips on mine.
    Then I snapped back to reality. “But it’s way too expensive,” I said regretfully, smoothing the silky fabric. “I don’t spend this much on clothing all year.”
    “The dance isn’t for another month,” Blythe reminded me. “We could stake out that dress between now and then, watch to see when it goes on sale.”
    “Maybe,” I said doubtfully, since Blythe and I had vastly different ideas of what was affordable. “In the meantime,” I told her, “I’ve got to get this off before I lose all my willpower and put it on layaway.”
    Just then, the salesperson walked over to us. “How are you young ladies doing?” she asked in that fake-sweet tone salespeople always use to show you that they care.
    “I’m going to have to pass on Fire Engine,” I told her. “How about you, Blythe? Are you going to go for Finnegan?”
    The clerk stood there smiling stiffly, trying hard to be amused. She relaxed a bit when Blythe said, “Charge it,” and flashed her parents’ Visa card. Smiling her approval, the clerk hurried away with the credit card before Blythe could change her mind.
    “So,” I said to Blythe, trying to sound casual, “I guess this means you’ll ask Rick. You look too good in that dress to waste it.”
    Blythe gazed at me in the mirror, a rare flash of uncertainty in her eyes. “But Rick is … our buddy. It’s always been the three of us, friends forever. Now it’s like everything is changing. What if he doesn’t feel the same way I do, what if …” She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t want to blow our friendship, Amy. Once you’ve started something like that, you can never go back.”
    I stared at myself in the sexy red dress, remembering Rick’s hurried kiss and all that had happened since: the awkwardness that had replaced my easy friendship with Rick, the thrilling and confusing feelings I had for Chris.
    You couldn’t go back. That was true. You couldn’t stop the planet from spinning, day from turning into night. You couldn’t take back a kiss.
    “Things are going to change. There’s no way of stopping it,” I said, more to myself than to Blythe.

chapter nine
    “You’re, sure in a good mood,” Mom said suspiciously when I offered to wash the Honda before she left for work.
    “It’s just that it’s so gorgeous outside,” I said, while his name—
Chris, Chris, Chris
—surged through my brain. After spending the last hour staring at my physics book and daydreaming about Chris, I’d thought of a great way to do something productive
and
daydream about Chris at the same time—wash the car. Besides, I wanted to be alone where Icould think about him without worrying that my smile or my mood would betray me. “I can’t stand staying inside.”
    Mom squirted some detergent into a bucket and handed me a sponge. “Can you finish in half an hour? I’m going to take a shower now and get ready for El Rancho.”
    “No problem,” I said, tossing the sponge aside and running to my room to change.
    Outside, it was what people call Indian summer. In Phoenix it lasts almost the whole autumn, a stretch of amazing bright-skied, eighty-five-degree days. On such a day, anything seemed possible—breaking a state swimming record, getting a college scholarship, even living happily ever after with a guy like Chris.
    I used the garden hose to fill the bucket with sun-warmed water and started sudsing down the car. As I slopped the sponge around on the hood, I wondered where Chris was at that moment and whether or not he was thinking of me.
    Our yard was haunted with reminders of the previous night: the rooftop we’d used as a diving board, the