Vegan Virgin Valentine Read Online Free PDF Page B

“You and Travis … in the locker room yesterday?”
    V split another Oreo in half and scraped out the filling. She wasn’t eating the brown cookie part, just licking them clean and lining them up in a row on the cutting board.
    “You knew I was with him last year,” I said, anger building in my throat. “How could you do that?”
    “You said he was nothing to you.”
    “That doesn’t make it okay,” I snapped.
    V didn’t say anything as she licked all of the cookies another time and then piled them in a stack.
    “I can’t believe you stole away
my
ex-boyfriend on your first day at
my
school.”
    “
Ex
is the operative word here,” V said, laughing sarcastically. “He didn’t exactly belong to you.”
    I raced toward her, seriously feeling like I was going to kick her. But, instead, I kicked over the other stool. As it crashed to the floor, I ran into my bedroom and slammed the door.
    I stayed in my room for almost thirty minutes. I arranged all my papers so they were in two neat piles. I put my pens and markers in the plastic student government cup that I got at a leadership conference two summers ago. I straightened my closet, hanging all my clothes in the same direction and making sure my shoes were paired up and relocating any sweaters that drifted into the shirt section.
    I kept thinking about all the things I wished I’d said to V. About how there’s a right and wrong in this world and what she did is definitely in the wrong category. About how you can’t let hormonal urges come before friends and even family. About how she betrayed me by fooling around with Travis and I’ll never forgive her for that.
    Once it was all clear in my head, I went into the living room to give her an earful, but she wasn’t there or in the kitchen. I opened the door to the stairwell leading to the guest room. As I headed upstairs, I smelled something sort of smoky and sweet and peppery.
    It was pot.
Oh my God.
V was getting high up there.
    I’ve only been around people smoking pot one time, but it’s such a distinctive smell, I could place it anywhere. It was at that Model UN conference at Georgetown. We all stayed in the dorms and, ironically, it was the kids representing the Netherlands who brought the joint. A few of my teammates smoked, but I didn’t try it. It wasn’t just that I was president of Chemical-Free Fun Nights, though that wouldn’t have looked very good if it got around. It’s more that I didn’t like the idea of losing control, of having a surge of unwelcome emotion, of giggling at stupid things and crying at nothing, like the girl representing Iceland was doing.
    I stood on the landing for a second, breathing in another whiff. So I was right about V and the new bad habit she’d acquired in San Diego. Her stoner backpack had definitely made me wonder.
    As I turned and stomped back down the stairs, V cracked open her door and shouted, “I’ll kill you if you tell G-ma and G-pa.”
    “I’m so scared,” I said.
    V slammed her door and I slammed the door to the stairwell, and suddenly I realized that in the past forty-eight hours, I’ve slammed more doors than I’ve probably slammed in the previous year.

Chapter Five
    V and I barely spoke over the weekend. She was out with my parents a lot. When she was home, I was either working at Common Grounds or studying at the college library or going for long walks in the frostbit January weather, just to be off her radar screen.
    Monday was Martin Luther King Day, so the high school and the college were closed, but my parents were going to work. When I woke around nine, they were already gone. V was still sleeping, so I wolfed down a banana and a bowl of cereal with soymilk. Then I bundled up in jeans, a long undershirt, a sweater, two pairs of socks, boots, a hat, a scarf, gloves, and my coat. I put my cell phone in the coat pocket and headed outside.
    The sky was clear blue and the air was freezing. I walked across town to the canal. I took a right