How They Met Read Online Free PDF Page A

that her license had been suspended. I chose to think she did it on purpose, just so I’d have to drive her around and hear her advice on boys, school, and how bad my hair looked. Hysterical. And, best of all for a quick laugh, there was Lily White—that was her name, swear to God—who certainly enjoyed kissing me in secret. But then when I brought up the idea of, hey, maybe doing it outside of her house, she shut down the whole thing and said to me, “None of this happened.”
    Well, I knew a punch line when I saw one. So the next day at lunch, when no one was looking, I spilled her Diet Coke all over her fancy shirt and said, “None of this happened.” And the next day, my bumper just happened to ram into the side of her daddygirl Cadillac. I left her a note:
None of this happened.
And it didn’t happen the next day, either.
    I, for one, was amused.
    It was hard for me not to feel a little stupid about Lily White. Not because it ended or that it had gone on for three months, but because I’d started it in the first place. Lily was the popularity equivalent of a B-minus student—never the brightest bulb in the room, but still lit. She never laughed at a joke until she saw other people laughing at it, too. Even when we were kissing, she never seemed to admit that we were kissing—it was like I was saying something she couldn’t hear, and she was just nodding along to be polite. The first time we got together, it had less to do with romance and more to do with Miller Lite. It took just two cans for her to turn playful. We kissed; it was nice. And for three months we pretty much stuck to that. The kissing was hot, but Lily was pretty insistent about not letting the fire spread. Every time I tried to take her clothes off, she suddenly had somewhere else to be. Every time I felt her up, she acted like my hands were cold. And every time I tried to go near her pussy, it jumped away.
    I could lie and say I swore I was through with girls, but really I figured I needed to find someone better than Lily White. When Ashley Cooper came to town, I was primed.
             
    She made one hell of an entrance.
    She was ten minutes late to homeroom, because in her old school homeroom was at 8 and in our school it was at 7:50. Nobody’d told us there was going to be a new girl; they never do.
    What I’m saying is: I wasn’t expecting her. Then suddenly there was this girl in front of our class, trying to explain to Mr. Partridge who she was, only Mr. Partridge hadn’t heard a complete sentence since he was eighty, which was a long time ago. He was telling her she was late, and that he was going to mark her down for being late. She made the mistake of asking him if he even knew who she was, and he shot her a look like she’d just told him that World War II was over. Then he shook his head and said, “Sit down, Antonia.”
    Man, she looked awesome. Short red hair, full full lips, shirt so tight you could check for tattoos underneath. Most of us put up with Mr. Partridge when we had him for history because at the end of each marking period we could steal his marking book, change the grades, and know we’d be getting A’s. But Ashley wasn’t the type to let it go. “Who’s Antonia?” she asked. “I’m not Antonia.”
    “Hell you’re not,” Mr. Partridge chided. “Sit down!”
    I thought she’d storm back out; she had that pose. But instead she turned to the class—we were all treating this like gossip unfolding before our eyes—and said, “Who
the fuck
is Antonia?”
    I was so snagged. There was no way I could say something to her. But there was no way I could ignore her, either.
    “Antonia’s my sister,” I said.
    Ashley walked over to me.
    “Do I look like her?” she asked.
    “No,” I told her—it was really the truth. “But I don’t look like her, either, and that’s what he calls me all the time.”
    “So he thinks I’m you?” She didn’t sound offended by this, which was a start.
    “He’s