Thin Ice by Anthea Carson Read Free Book Online Page A

rings?”
                  “Aren’t you guys getting out?” some random guy stuck his head in the opened car door and asked.  Krishna blew a stream of smoke in his face in response.  Wait a second.  He was familiar.
                  “Come on, Krishna, everyone is skinny-dipping,” he explained.
                  The mall.  I knew him from the mall.  Krishna had pointed him out as a guy she had flirted with in her geography class.  She said she’d only flirted with him because he’d sat to her left or something like that, and had a policy of flirting with anyone who sat to her left in geography class.  If they moved and sat to her right, she completely ignored them, and began flirting with whoever had replaced them to her left.  “I only do this in geography class,” she’d said.  She’d giggled and giggled.  She’d said she was waiting for one of them to figure out what she was doing—but, of course, none of them ever did, although it was directly related to geography.  “What if a girl sat there?” I had asked her once.  She had shrugged and said that had never happened.
                  “You two gonna go?” said the boy from her geography class.
                  Krishna blew another stream of smoke in his face.  Then she turned to me and said, “Hey, that’s one way you could get out of Glinda seeing you in those pants: go skinny-dipping.”
                  I nodded thoughtfully.  “Glinda would kill me if she saw these.”
                  “Glinda Sinclair?” asked the boy.
                  “She’s not going to kill you,” Krishna said. “Look, if you couldn’t do it to yourself, kill yourself I mean, why would she be able to?”
                  “What do you mean?” the random boy asked.  We ignored him, of course.  What was he doing, standing there, talking to us?
                  “That’s true,” I said. “That’s a good point.”
                  “Glinda Sinclair is fucking hot!” the geography guy said.  He sat in the passenger seat where Gay had been.
                  “Just tell her to chill,” said Krishna.
                  “I love these pants,” I said. “I do feel bad about ruining them.”
                  “Those pants are cool,” the guy said.  “You look great in them.”
                  “Ugh, would you shut up?” said Krishna, turning to him, like a fly she was ready to swat.
                  “Why aren’t you talking to me?” said geography-class guy.
                  “Because,” she said, finally turning her black eyes on him, “I’m talking to Jane.”
                  He left, slamming the door behind him.
                  “That was that guy from your geography class,” I said.
                  “Yes!  How did you know?”
                  “Ha ha!  You decided only to flirt with the guy on your left.  He sat on your left.”
    “Oh my God,” she exclaimed . “Are you psychic?”
                  “No, you told me,” I said.
                  She burst out laughing. “I did?”
                  “Yes!”
                  “I thought I didn’t tell anybody that.  Freak!” Was she talking about herself or him?
                  “What I don’t get is”—and I lit a cigarette, getting ready to ask this question—“If you only flirt with him in class, how does that work?”
                  “I ignore him everywhere else,” she said, giggling.  Then she said, “You smoke like a chimney.  That’s why you burned those pants.  I can’t believe how big that hole is.  I’m surprised you didn’t light yourself on fire.  It would be cool to light yourself on fire.”
                  “Is everyone