Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 107949 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 540(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107949 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 540(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
My stupid brain started trying to quantify it: how many millions of steps in every single direction could I go and not encounter a single person who cared about me? How many miles, how many kilometers, acres, leagues, furlongs, fathoms, hectares, picas.
Then it started making up new units of measurement to quantify my isolation. How many skateboard-lengths away from love was I? How many pineapple-and-bacon pizzas? How many medium lattes, mass-market paperbacks, USB to HDMI cables, park benches? How many Jell-O shots?
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger,” Skinny Jeans said, leaning back against the chest-high wall I was looking over. “You know.” He rolled his eyes and gestured expansively, like we both knew he was repeating something common. “Anonymous confession and all that.”
“I don’t think you’re really dressed for the confessional,” I told him.
He grinned and turned toward me, his eyes doing that warm smiley thing. “Are you flirting with me?”
“What? No!”
He just smiled and went on.
“Seriously, what the hell is wrong? I get the whole ooh-college-new-city-angst thing, but you don’t seem the type to cry alone in a stairwell.”
“You don’t even know me,” I muttered, looking out into the expanse of night.
“Well, shit, I’m trying to! Just give me something.”
He was right. How the hell did I think I was going to end up with anyone who knew me if I didn’t start somewhere. So I did. I told him about how Daniel showing up in Holiday was about the best thing that had ever happened because for the first time I had someone to talk to who seemed to understand me a little.
I told him about Rex and how I’d watched them fall for each other. How sometimes it was physically painful to be around them because their love was an almost palpable thing in the room, showing me exactly what I wanted and didn’t have.
And I told him about Will. By the time I got to the part where Will had kissed me and then left for New York the next day, Skinny Jeans was shaking his head.
“What?”
“Tell me you didn’t. Tell me you didn’t pull a full-on Felicity and come to school in New York to follow this Will guy.”
“Dude, Felicity?”
“Felicity’s my jam! Whatever, don’t judge me. I have an older sister. What the hell’s your name, anyway?”
“Leo.”
“Ooh, are you one?”
“Um. No. I’m a Pisces, I think? I always forget the dates of it. Wait, what’s your name? In my head I’ve just been calling you Skinny Jeans.”
“Oh, weird, that is my name.”
He bumped me with his shoulder, and I felt this wave of warmth just from some dude palling around with me.
“No, seriously,” he went on. “Everyone said to my parents, ‘You can’t name him that; those aren’t even in style yet!’ but my folks were all, ‘Well, we can’t call him Boot Cut, it’s not black enough!’”
I started giggling a little, and we both jumped up to sit on the side of the wall.
“It’s Milton,” he said.
“Whoa. Heavy name.”
He grinned at me, then pulled out a flask. It was silver, and not the cheap, plain kind you can get at a gas station. Ornate, with filigreed cuts that shone in the moonlight like it was bejeweled.
“So, you were sad-drinking over whatshisname before. Now you’ve gotta happy drink with me over being here instead of in whereverthefuck Michigan, and making friends with magnificent me, and all the hot guys who’re gonna be psyched to jump the bones of a cute little white-boy skater with serious face.”
Whatever was in the flask burned going down but tasted of nothing.
“Just vodka, same as in the Jell-O shots, so you’ll be fine,” Milton said.
After a few mouthfuls, he pulled me down from the wall. “Just to be safe,” he said, and after a few more I was sure that he was going to be the best friend I’d ever had. I was warm in a good way, and the tension seemed to have seeped out of my shoulders.
When I looked out into the night, the lit-up windows twinkled like imperfect stars, waiting for the hand that would extinguish them. Then I was on my back looking up at the real stars, trying to pick out constellations like I had at home, but there was too much light pollution and probably regular pollution, so I couldn’t see anything.
Milton was talking about the boyfriend he’d had last year—he’d gone to some school here in the city that he kept calling by name, but I didn’t know what it was. Sounded fancy, though. And he talked about all the cute guys he’d already seen.
I guess it was the spirit of confessional that Milton mentioned—or maybe it was the vodka—but I found myself telling him that I’d never really had sex. That Will’s kiss hadn’t just been the best kiss of my life but also my first. That since then I’d briefly messed around with a guy in my statistics class at Grayling, but it had been… well, awkward would have been an understatement.