JEM’S PHONE
Draft Folder
From: Jemma Dutton
To: Olivia Freeman
Subject: snakebite
If you get a snakebite, keep wound above the heart. Raise arm or leg, etc. Cut into wound with knife and suck out blood and venom. Then spit it out and rinse with Gatorade.
We totally made that one up because we really, really wanted to suck out venom.
Here’s what happened last week:
He asked for a “real date.” He said when he has the house to himself. He kissed me.
Ollie, I know something now. You can actually fall for somebody you’re really not sure you even like. You wait for his lame texts. You wonder if you like his smell. Something about him kind of turns you off, but you still like him touching you. It’s sick.
Meret knows he goes for a coffee at eleven at Aldos, so she waits there or happens to be walking by. Yeah. How do I know this, because I was with him yesterday and that is why. She is flirting w him, she knows about my crush. She’s a witch, she just knows things. Annie tells me that on groupchat she’s calling me a slut and they’re betting on my losing it to him. Yeah. I’m a ho. Ha. Ho Ha. So yesterday Meret says to me, with Lucas right there—*puts on concerned face* “Aren’t you dreading the first day of school, Jem? I mean, especially you.” When I ask her why she just laughs and says Lucas doesn’t want to hear about high school stuff.
Annie fills me in. Meret made up T-shirts with #MAYFLOWER on them and everybody is going to wear them first day of school. Even the stupid boys.
Lucas told me he might be hanging out into September. Hale invited him, he has a house on Shelter Island. Lucas quit his job, so he says he needs “recovery time.” And he said why should he leave, when there’s a girl like me to hang with?
So I have a stupid plan. It only requires losing my virginity, ha ha.
Okay not ha ha, I’m totally serious. Kind of.
The thing is, I have to pull a Crazy Ivan. Remember when Wash does it in Firefly? I’ve got to spin really hard and fast and go straight at it. It’s the only way to beat the bad guys.
If Lucas and I hook up, I could ask him to drive me to school the first day in his white Jeep. Because you can ask something that little and they have to do it, right? I could kiss him with the top down. I could just sit there in the parking lot, kissing Lucas.
Even if they do the mayflower thing, it won’t matter. I’ll just seem all older and above it. Meret will completely cave and find another victim.
Do you think it’s creepy that my dad might marry Lucas’s stepmom? Because it’s not like we grew up together. And it’s not like Adeline is his mother. His mother died when he was I think sixteen? Which explains maybe why deep down he’s sad.
He hates his stepmother, you can tell. I don’t know why. Adeline found a house she wants to buy in Orient and she’s going to renovate it for next summer. There’s a wing for me, she said. A wing.
That just makes me feel all confused, honestly. And I can’t talk about it with Mom because Mom gets crazy eyes when Adeline comes up.
It’s like Mom is mad all the time, or sometimes she’s just sitting there at the kitchen table, staring. This summer we broke this huge rule and I’m allowed to wear earbuds and watch something on my phone while we eat dinner. She started painting again, I guess that’s good even if the paintings aren’t? Dad is super preoccupied with Adeline. I get how Dad is happy, because love, obv, but being with Adeline is like a vacation from real life all the time. Nothing is hard. You just pay for things and get them. You can read the paper about some new play and just go, “We should see this in previews.” We used to go to the theater in New York like maybe once a year, and that was a huge deal.
Turns out she has a plane, Ol. Like, when she goes to California or something? She goes in her own plane.
Maybe you’d hate that. Maybe you’d say, she should be arrested for that Spinosaurus-sized carbon footprint.
I just can’t stop myself. I check my phone like fifty times a minute. He hasn’t texted me in three days. And it’s Labor Day weekend and it feels like my very last chance. He might stand me up, he did it once before, when we were supposed to go to Roberta’s in Sagaponack and he said he was going to a party instead because she was boring. Turned out he was right because the dinner party got canceled because of this big storm and because Roberta wasn’t feeling well, so all I did was sit in another rich person’s guesthouse and watch TV on my phone.
Is he ghosting me?
Should I text him?
What if he doesn’t answer?
It’s like stepping off the edge of the world and never landing.
From: Jemma Dutton
To: Lucas Clay
I’m off work at 1 we could maybe get ice cream or something LOL
Ignore that LOL so lame
…
you didn’t tell me what time Saturday