my phone as it buzzes with a text message. I’ve been texting back and forth with Candy all night. Candy is my best friend and she also just turned eighteen today. She was born only fifty-six minutes ahead of me, according to our gossipy parents.
We met when we were both seven after my mom and her dad enrolled us in the same elementary school, on the same day.
We’ve been giggling and talking about boys ever since.
“ So r u gonna invite him over?” Her text says.
“Fuck no...are u crazy?” I text back.
“Him” in this case is Jake K. Williams. The handsome-as-fuck boy who lives just two doors down from me.
He also just turned eighteen and I know this because two nights ago, a friday night, there had been extremely, almost obnoxious, loud music coming from his house. Looking out through my room window I’d seen Jake’s driveway packed with cars and a lot of boys who I recognized from my high school days hanging from those car windows.
Every now and then, somebody would get on what sounded like a megaphone and bellow out the words, “Happy eighteenth birthday, you bastard!”
It got so that I could almost time the stupid megaphone voice and found myself wishing “Jake the bastard” a happy birthday about fourteen, maybe fifteen times.
This had gone on throughout the night, till the cops finally showed up at about three in the morning and shut the whole thing down.
I don’t know for sure but I have a feeling, Mrs. Deuteronomy further on down the block, was the one who called the police. I could almost put money on it. Whatever little I have, that is.
Now the thing is, I’ve had a crush on Jake ever since he and his family moved in two years ago and he swaggered over to my porch where I was standing looking at them move in, held my hand up in the air, spun me around and said, “Don’t drool over me. I’m hard to get.”
Cocky bastard.
My cell phone dings again.
It’s a text from Candy: “No, ur the crazy one...u like this guy and he likes you back...he didn’t give you his number for nothing...just invite him over, gal.”
Unlike myself, Candy is very experienced when it comes to dealing with boys. Mainly because she’s always had a boyfriend and several admirers on the side who she keeps on a very short leash in case she needs to pick up a new boyfriend in a hurry.
“Reserve emergency boyfriends,” she once winked at me when I’d asked her what the hell she was doing stringing all those boys along.
But that’s Candy for you, though. She’s been playing men ever since she was a senior in high school and she loves it.
The most astounding thing to me, however, is that none of the boys have ever caught on to her act.
I don’t know how she gets away with it but she’s good. Really good at dealing with boys.
And even though she swears up and down that none of her boyfriends have ever seen the inside of her vagina, she herself has seen several penises.
Black penises (God, the entire basketball team back in high school, I’m sure, although she only confessed to seeing two of them naked), white penises, big penises, small penises, stiff penises, limp penises, and everything else in between.
Or to put it bluntly, she’s “blown” and “hand-jobbed” almost every boyfriend she’s ever had. And there have been many of those over the years.
Now that high school is over for us and we’re both over eighteen, we’ve made a pact to remain virgins till we both get married.
I’m pretty sure I’ll stay true to my stated goal.
I’m also pretty sure Candy will definitely not stay true to hers.
I send her a text back: “ur crazy gal...who knows what will happen if I invite him over. Hell nooooo!”
If I’m going to stay a virgin till the day I get married, the first step in that direction is to avoid the small temptations that come my way every now and then and Jake isn’t just a small temptation...he is the biggest, damn temptation a girl could ever have.
***
I lie down
Marina Dyachenko, Sergey Dyachenko