Beautiful by Amy Reed

shaking. She inhales and the smoke seems to warm her.
    â€œThank you,” she says.
    Sarah doesn’t have a winter coat, just the jean jacket she wears every day. I brought my old one to her house last week, the one I don’t need anymore. I have a new one now, the big puffy kind that’s popular. Alex laughed when I brought Sarah the old one, said something about charity. Sarah said thank you and looked embarrassed, set it next to her on the floor. I’ve never seen her wear it.
    â€œIt is so fucking cold,” I say, hugging my arms to my chest.
    â€œDon’t talk about it,” Sarah says. “The more you talk about it, the more it’s true.”
    The boys are not cold because they are moving. They are sweating in their T-shirts. Their sweatshirts and coats are heaped in piles with their backpacks. Alex is not cold because she is inside Wes’s giant sleeping-bag coat. He’s got his arm around her and what they’re doing could be called kissing but it’s more like sword fighting with tongues. They are by the piles of discarded clothes, across the concrete from me and Sarah, on the other side of the world.
    I get up and walk over. I grab Ethan’s sweatshirt. He is my boyfriend now. Because I let him fuck me, I can do whatever I want with his sweatshirt.
    Alex sees me and stops. “What are you doing?” she says. Her face is covered with slime. She looks proud of herself, even though she’s the one who told me about Wes’s reputation for fucking anything, including a couple of retards from Special Ed.
    â€œGetting Sarah a sweatshirt,” I say.
    â€œOh, aren’t you sweet,” she says like it’s the worst thing in the world. Wes has his hand up her shirt. He is trying to find the little that is there. Alex turns around and opens her mouth wide and mashes her face against Wes’s like his pasty, rubbery, zit-covered skin is the most appetizing thing in the world. I get away as fast as I can.
    I hand Sarah the sweatshirt and she says, “What’s this?” and I say, “A sweatshirt, dummy. Wear it.” She puts it on and it makes her look even smaller because the sleeves are about a foot too long.
    â€œYour boyfriend smells bad,” says Sarah as she sniffs the armpit of the giant sweatshirt.
    â€œAll boys smell bad,” I say, and she nods her head like we have just figured out something very important.
    We are sitting still. We are watching the boys skate backand forth. They occasionally jump or slide on a curb or a rail, something concrete or metal. It is only interesting when someone falls down. Ethan sees us watching, turns and heads toward us fast. We scream like we’re supposed to and he stops just before he runs into us. He puts his arm around me and starts kissing. I can taste the stale cigarette smoke on his tongue. I can smell his sweat. I can feel his wet armpits resting on the shoulders of my brand-new coat.
    â€œHow do I look, baby?” he says. He’s breathing hard and steam is rising off his body. He’s posing for us, puffing his chest out.
    â€œGood,” I say. “You look really good.”
    â€œCool,” he says, and he skates off to join the other boys going back and forth.
    This is the routine, except Alex is usually sitting with us and not kissing the fat guy with scabies. Usually, we are faking how impressed we are. But today, I turn to Sarah and roll my eyes. I make her giggle. I can do it because Alex is busy getting her face sucked off. I can do it because she’s not watching.
    â€œThis is so stupid,” says Sarah. “Why are we sitting here freezing to death?”
    The guys are taking a break from skating now. They are tagging their names on the concrete pillars with spray paint.
    â€œThey’re like dogs pissing on poles to mark their territory,”I say. Ethan has already claimed most of the poles. Red and blue and green and black,
Aleph
all