Kissing Kate by Lauren Myracle Read Free Book Online Page B

still best friends?” I liked Nikki. Nikki rescued daddy longlegs and wanted to be a firefighter when she grew up.
    Beth shrugged. “Nikki’s kind of babyish, don’t you think? She doesn’t even wear a bra.”
    “Beth, you don’t wear a bra.” I paused. “Do you?” I felt her shoulder for a strap and my eyebrows shot up. “Beth, you’re in fifth grade. You don’t need a bra. You don’t even—”
    I stopped. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the other girls in her class were all wearing bras, all except Nikki, and so of course Beth had to, too. I didn’t wear one until seventh grade, but I knew that was pretty late. And even then I’d had no idea how to buy one, or how to ask Jerry to buy one for me, which I was not going to do, and I still remembered how traumatic it was to go to Rich’s lingerie department and riffle through the rows and rows of light, silky undergarments. I bought my one white cotton bra and wore it day after day, until Kate’s mom somehow found out and bought me another. She left it on Kate’s bed one night when I was staying over, explaining that she’d found a buy-two-get-one-free sale at Neiman Marcus. “And Kate certainly doesn’t need three new bras. If it doesn’t fit, we can exchange it. All right, sweetie?”
    “Where’d you get it?” I asked Beth.
    She was mad at me for touching her, and she wrapped her arms around her ribs. “It’s one of yours. An old one.”
    There was no way a bra of mine would fit Beth’s skinny frame, even an old one. Maybe that’s why she was wearing a sweatshirt. God, what a nightmare, going through fifth grade wearing your big sister’s droopy bra.
    I switched off the TV with the remote. “Why don’t we go to Rich’s and get you some of your own. All right? Let me write a note to Jerry telling him we’ll be late for dinner.”
    Beth plucked at her jeans. “I want to go to Macy’s,” she said. “That’s where Vanessa got hers. And we don’t need to leave a note for Jerry, because he won’t be here anyway. He left a message on the machine.”
    “Working late?”
    “He said he was going to finish up some stuff, and then he and Sophie were going to grab a hamburger at Bennigan’s.”
    “He and Sophie ? Did he, like, ask her out? Like, on a date?”
    “Lissa, please. This is Jerry, remember?”
    Exactly, and Jerry was not a grab-a-hamburger kind of guy. Occasionally he took me and Beth to dinner, but he rarely went out on his own and never with his co-workers. He said situations like that made him uncomfortable, and he blamed it on how he was brought up. He was raised along with my dad on my grandparents’ farm in Tennessee, where, according to Jerry, bread-and-mayonnaise sandwiches were considered a delicacy, and catching greased hogs at the state fair was the closest thing to culture they experienced. My dad went to college and taught himself to act more sophisticated, but Jerry was still a work in progress.
    I thought about how idiotic I’d acted around Kate these last couple of weeks, and it occurred to me that when it came to social skills, Jerry and I were a lot alike. Maybe it was genetic. I winced as I remembered the way I stopped and studied a “Say No to Drugs” poster when Kate passed me in the hall this afternoon, just so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. I had to tell myself all over again that it was the weekend, that for two and a half days I didn’t have to deal with anything I didn’t want to.
    I stood up from the couch. “Come on, Beth. Let’s go.”
    At Macy’s lingerie department, we were approached by a pinched-lipped saleswoman wearing a lime green suit. “Can I help you?” she asked.
    Beth stepped a foot or two away. She fingered the strap of a black silk slip, then moved on to examine a cream colored camisole.
    “I think we’re okay,” I said. I headed for the junior-miss section, and Beth ducked her head and followed.
    “Oh, you’re shopping for your little sister,” the saleswoman exclaimed. She