Girlfriend Material Read Online Free PDF

never stops talking, and the girl who I’m supposed to be best friends with has made it pretty clear she sees me as a pathetic leech who arrived to suck the fun out of her otherwise perfect summer.
    “Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it.”
    I really wanted to be happy for Laura, and I wasn’t exactly proud of myself for how I was feeling. But when you’re embarking on what’s clearly going to be the worst, loneliest time of your life, is it fair that your best friend in the world is setting sail for a summer of love?

THERE WAS NOTHING SUBTLE about how my mom and Tina pushed me and Sarah to drive to the club together while the two of them drove in Tina’s car; their whole We have to run some errands on the way was about as opaque as a plate-glass window. They hadn’t thought of everything, though, and Sarah and I managed to go the entire drive without exchanging so much as two words due to her blasting the radio too loudly for even the briefest of chats. Attempt to prevent conversation, or preference about volume at which to appreciate Moby?
    You be the judge.
    I didn’t really mind Sarah’s not talking since I was so totally freaked out by the conversation I’d just had with Laura. I kept remembering this thing my dad had said to me back when I was in junior high and I complained to him about how stupid all the boys were and how none of them liked me or Laura. My dad was nice enough not to point out that these two things should have canceled each other out (i.e., if the boys were so stupid, why did I care that they didn’t like us?). He told me not to worry, that things would get better when we got to college, which is when guys get more interested in interesting women. I asked him if he thought maybe high school would be an improvement, but he said probably not.
    Now, I have to tell you, when you’re twelve, hearing that your life will improve when you’re eighteen and that there’s nothing but a romantic wasteland between here and “Pomp and Circumstance,” is kind of depressing. But at least I’d thought Laura and I were in the same boat. I mean, she’d never had a boyfriend either.
    Actually, for one brief second last fall it had looked like I’d be the one to prove my dad wrong. This senior had a big party, and Laura and I went with these other freshman girls, and I kind of hooked up with this guy Tim, who was in my year. I mean, we didn’t, like do anything major, we just kissed. He was in my English class and I’d kind of thought he was cute when I met him—he went to a different junior high, so I’d only known him for a few weeks when we kissed at the party. And the thing was, and this is just so embarrassing I can’t even believe I’m saying it, I kind of thought … I don’t know, not that he was going to fall madly in love with me or anything, but that he’d want to … well, let’s just say I didn’t expect him to walk into English Monday morning and go Hey , and then completely ignore me for the rest of the year like he hadn’t spent the better part of a Saturday night giving me a tonsillectomy with his tongue. A couple of weeks later he started going out with this other girl, and he and I basically never spoke again.
    To cheer me up, Laura said we should make a list of all the things we didn’t do that girls at our school who had boyfriends did . We didn’t flip our hair around and giggle and squeal the second a guy came within a ten-foot radius of us. We didn’t pretend we couldn’t do our math homework without help from one of our male classmates. We didn’t spend every waking second wondering if what we were doing was attractive to the opposite sex.
    Then we made a list of all the things we liked to do. We liked to read books and talk about them. We liked watching old movies. We liked being really, really good tennis players. We even liked when we could beat the guys on the tennis team. After we’d finished the list, we high-fived. No wonder the guys at our