Big Girl Small by Rachel Dewoskin Read Free Book Online Page B

else. I don’t want her to get hurt.”
    “I think the possibilities for where she was and what she was doing are fairly limited and safe,” my dad said. I was annoyed in a whole new way.
    “Maybe we should ask Chad to talk to her.”
    Then there was a long pause, during which I got up and climbed back into bed, wondering whether Chad was on my parents’ side.
    I didn’t care that much at that moment, honestly, because I had so much thinking to do about Kyle. I could picture him with absolute precision: his face, somehow soft even with the jaw; his hair, not curly exactly, but not straight, especially where it was a bit too long; his dark green cargo pants and faded T-shirt; his white teeth and his eyes. What color were his eyes? I hadn’t been able to tell, felt urgent about finding out.
    People joke all the time about teenage love and how stupid and “not the real thing” it is. My parents even have a reel-to-reel of that horrible song “A Teenager in Love.” But if I ever feel again in my life the way I felt about Kyle, I’ll eat every word I’ve ever written or spoken. There’s no way I’ll ever feel this way again. And I’m glad. I think maybe the very not-realness of teenage love makes it the only real thing . Say what you will if you’re a grown-up, that it’s puppy love when you’re young, that we aren’t going to marry our teenage loves anyway, so they’re just crushes, or that you have to spend years together, peeing with the door open, before love counts as love. But none of that matters. Because what’s true about love isn’t a quantity thing—it’s a quality one. And the reason I know that is because I still feel like I’m actually going to die.
    The Monday after Chessie’s party, I spent the morning zoning out on a series of announcements at “meeting” from 8:00 to 9:00 and then precalculus from 9:10 to 10:46. Why do high schools always schedule classes in such a weird way? Is it just a way of punctuating further the obvious fact that this is not the real world? A refusal to run on the normal human time schedule, say from 9:00 to 11:00? Or even 9:00 to 10:45? In precalc, I sat, as I always do in every class, in the back row. From there, I could observe my gleeful actor and dancer classmates—the smart ones, I mean—talk about how, oh my god, this year AP bio was going to be so gross and we were going to have to dissect cats, and placements for voice classes were already under way and had you gone yet, and oh my god, mine went, like, so badly, and did you hear they’re not letting any non-seniors into senior voice this year, and blah blah blah. Oh, and have you memorized your monologue for Ms. Minogue because she’s such a bitch, last year she made Sonya Ross sob and run from the room. I stayed quiet, but I could see their logic about AP bio. I mean, last time I’d cut something up, in eighth-grade bio at Tappan Middle School, it hadn’t been anything fluffy, just rubbery pigs. And since human beings have a habit of cutting pigs into bacon-shaped pieces and eating them, there’s less love lost there than there is with domestic pet corpses.
    At the mere mention of fetal animal dissection, I remembered Tappan suddenly, with the first nostalgia I’d ever felt for it, that sprawling concrete slab of a building with its unforgivable choice of school mascots: the Trojan. I could feel the energy of its colorless classrooms, rows of gray lockers, pervasive chlorine smell.
    Once, in seventh grade, a guy named Joseph peed into a radiator vent in the basement and they had to send everyone home because the entire school smelled so terrible. It was that kind of place, everything connected and infectious. When we dissected those formaldehyde-reeking fetal pigs, my lab partner dropped our pig’s heart onto my lap accidentally and then squealed and screamed like it had been her lap. Or her heart. I’m not squeamish. I picked the thing up and put it back on our table, like it was a piece of