The Girl Who Invented Romance Read Online Free PDF

continued talking. I calculated my intimacy quotient when I had struggled through all twenty questions. My score was forty-seven. I flipped to the back of the magazine and looked up the meaning of the result.
    Under 50
, it said.
You have real problems relating to boys. Perhaps you should consider counseling
.
    Counseling! I didn’t need a mental health expert. I needed a boy to love me.
    But even though I knew the quiz was stupid and the questions were stupid and the score was stupid and even though I was in public, I started crying.
    Inside myself I froze, turning the tears solid, getting very still. I won’t cry, I won’t cry, I won’t cry. I stopped, but not before a few tears trickled down my cheeks.
    A large hand with freakishly long fingers landed on my magazine. Surely Mrs. Weston didn’t have hands that big. Surely—
    But it was Will, curling the magazine into a cylinder and removing it to his desk. Without unwrapping the magazine, he read the quiz, turning the roll like an axle to read the columns.
    “What’s your score?” he breathed.
    I considered lying. I considered not answering. But Will was not worth it. “Forty-seven,” I admitted.
    Will grinned ear to ear. He didn’t bother to face me. I only saw the grin in profile.
    That’s right, you bum, I thought. Laugh at me. I bet you got a thirty-three. The only thing you’ve ever been intimate with is a basketball.
    A low intimacy quotient. What a thing to have in common.
    The need to cry vanished. I felt thick and dull. The smile faded from Will’s face. He returned the magazine. He didn’t tell me his score and I didn’t ask. I swiveled in my chair to see what Faith was making of my exchanges with Will.
    Faith had not noticed. She had written
Faith Bennett Angelotti
six times in different scripts.
    Feminist commentators may think that we girls are beyond this kind of thing, but they’re wrong. We’re still here shading our writing with our hands so nobody can see that we’re trying out a boy’s last name in case we get married.
    Bells rang. Our final announcements come complete withchords. Mrs. Weston finished her history lecture while the principal cleared his throat and school came to an end.
    Our principal reads off a paper his secretary has printed out for him. Unfortunately his voice stops at the end of each line whether the sentence stops there or not. Drives me crazy.
    “Drives me crazy,” said Will.
    Probably the highest intimacy quotient I’ll have all week, I thought.
    “Someday I’m going to put my fist through the sound system,” said Will. But he wasn’t talking to me or really to anybody. He was just thinking out loud. You didn’t get a thirty-three, I thought. You got a zero.
    “Put your fist through Dr. Scheider instead,” advised somebody. “He deserves it more.”
    “Key Club will meet after school in order to discuss,” said Dr. Scheider. He cleared his throat. An entire school twitched. “The fund-raiser for next year the Ecology Club has a field.”
    Pause, filled by Will breaking a pencil in half.
    “Trip to the state capitol to meet our. Representative and the cost is twenty-seven dollars. Fifty cents the following students report to guidance office immediately after the final.”
    Several people were sticking four fingers at their mouths to indicate that on the gag scale, this was worse than usual. A four-finger gag is pretty serious.
    “Bell the school sweatshirts in the new designs are in the school store.”
    Everybody shuddered but not even Will breathed a syllable of correction. We were all awaiting Wendy’s broadcast. We are addicted to Wendy’s soap. It usually runs two minutes. This week we were worrying about whether Greg would change his socks and whether Allegra was going to shave the right hemisphere of her skull and put safety pins through her eyebrows and quit school for the British rock star she was seeing. There was also the problem Brandon and Octavia were having. Brandon seemed to be