Touch by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online

the girls’ bathroom.”
    Chris said, “Kissing isn’t sex.” And they laughed again. I wasn’t getting the joke.
    After a silence, I said, “So what is on TV?”
    “Let’s find out,” said Shakes.
    They took the sofa. I grabbed a chair, and Kevin hit the remote.
    “ Pimp My Ride . Cool,” I said.
    They all seemed a little surprised, but pleased, as if they’d been thinking that a person with breasts would insist on watching some girl show like My Super Sweet Sixteen . Slowly, the pressure leaked out of the room, like air from a punctured bike tire, as we watched the transformation of a wannabe Hollywood actor’s ten-year-old, beat-up Lincoln Town Car into a movie star limo with a screening room built in behind the backseat.
    “Pathetic!” said Kevin.
    “Loser!” I said. I could feel them relax a little more. Breasts or no breasts, I was still Maisie, who could still insult the people who got makeovers on TV. Next we watched a segment about a girl who worked for a veterinarian, picking up ill pets and returning them cured, getting her mom’s station wagon all cheesed up and made over into a vehicle with a comfy dog bed that folded down into a dog run. I wished the girl hadn’t squealed in such a high-pitched soprano. I felt as if my friends were blaming me for how girly and ridiculous she sounded.
    I said, “So what have you guys been doing besides kissing girls and watching TV?”
    Shakes said, “Making movies. I got a camera for my birthday.”
    “What kind of movies?”
    “Short films. Stupid stuff,” Shakes said. “But we put one up on YouTube and got more than a thousand hits.”
    “What was it about?” I asked.
    “I play Shakes the Detective,” he said. “These guys take turns being the murderer and the murder victim.”
    I said, “If there were four of us, you could have acrime-solving partner.”
    “Or the victim could be a girl,” Kevin said.
    “I guess it could,” I agreed. No one spoke for a while.
    I said, “I could pretend to fall off a roof. You could film me going out a window, and then cut to a shot of me lying facedown on the ground.”
    “That would be cool,” Shakes said. “But you wouldn’t always have to be the one who gets killed.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “That would be good.”
    All of a sudden, it was like I was back in the club, though no one could have said what I’d done, or what it had taken, to be readmitted. They were glad to have me back, and I was glad to be there.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    We got through the rest of the summer. We had fun. It was just like before. Though actually, it wasn’t, not exactly. It was sort of just like before.
    Now, when the guys went swimming, I pretended I had something else to do. If they saw me in my bathing suit, it might undo all the hard work I was doing to make them see me as the same person I was before I’d left. Or anyway, the same person in an older person’s body.
    We made two episodes in the Shakes the Detective series. They were smart and funny and amazingly good considering we made them for no money with Shakes’s handheld camera. The best part was thinking them up. All of us had ideas, and we’d shout them out; it didn’t seem to matter which person had the idea.
    Even though Shakes had said I didn’t always have to be the murder victim, that’s how it worked out. I told myself I didn’t care. I was the only girl. Since we seemed to have started thinking that way—who was a girl and who was a boy—I figured I might as well take advantage of everything that made me a girl. That is, besides having big boobs. It always seemed more criminal and tragic if the victim was a girl and more satisfying when Shakes found out whether Kevin or Chris was the perp. The films were sort of a cross between mystery and science fiction. As soon as Shakes figured out who’d done the deed, I—the victim—would immediately come back from the dead. And later, at home, Shakes would score the film to a woozy, outer-space sound