I Will Save You by Matt de la Pena Page B

stared at the rash for a while, confused, wondering what made me have one. Maybe a certain bush rubbed against me. Maybe it happened when I was sleepwalking.
    Then I just sat on my sleeping bag for the next two hours, watching the sun disappear outside my tent door and trying to talk myself into going to the beach.
    Finally I made myself a deal. If I got up and went down the stairs I could just look at it for a while, and see Olivia, and then come right back up to my tent and go to bed and hopefully not sleepwalk into another poisonous bush.
    The Bonfire
    A big crackling flame coming out of a homemade pit and two older guys sitting on stools playing acoustic guitars and singing and everybody else in little groups eating off paper plates and drinking from red cups and talking and laughing, their chairs all facing toward the bonfire or each other or the ocean.
    I sat leaning against the cliff, by the stairs, watching them, sometimes looking down at my clothes, my brand-new jeans and new collared shirt. It didn’t even feel like me anymore. Iwatched the bonfire again, thinking how it’d be if you could actually turn into the person your clothes made you seem like. Then you could go over to whatever party was happening like you totally belonged and have as much fun as everyone else.
    I remembered how when I was little my mom would sometimes do a barbecue in the alley behind our apartment complex and some of the neighbors would come down with plates of their own marinated meat and coolers of beer and lawn chairs. My mom would cook all their food on the grill, wearing her favorite checkered apron, and everybody’d be talking and laughing with each other, just like this, and I’d be right with them.
    I was staring at the bonfire, thinking of those alley barbecues, and my mom, and what it felt like to be inside a party, when I noticed two girls walking toward me.
    I looked over my shoulder.
    There was nobody.
    I watched them and whispered in my head: “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.” Over and over. ’Cause I knew it was the two girls that were on the stairs taking pictures with Olivia, but I didn’t know what they were gonna say. And when it came to girls I wasn’t like Devon. It always felt awkward.
    One of them was wearing a flowing brown dress and as she walked she sipped from her plastic cup. The other one was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and she had a red cup in each hand and she was saying something to the dress girl.
    Then they were in front of me.
    “See, told you it was him,” the sweatshirt girl said.
    “You were right.”
    I stood up and leaned against the cliff and crossed myarms, but it felt awkward like that so I uncrossed them and pushed off the cliff and stood regular.
    “Hi, again,” the sweatshirt girl said.
    “Where’s our money?” the dress one said.
    “What?” I said, and then I smiled ’cause I figured out she was just saying a joke about Devon.
    “We can still post those pictures, you know.”
    They both laughed and the sweatshirt girl held out a red cup and said: “Here, we brought you a present.”
    I took the cup and told them thanks and looked in it.
    “You work with Red, right?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    The girl in the sweatshirt flipped her long blond hair from one shoulder to the other and said: “We’ve seen you. I’m Jasmine, by the way, and this is Blue.”
    “Hi,” I told them.
    “And it sounds a little strange calling Jasmine ‘ma’am,’ don’t you think? Considering she’s not some old lady.”
    I nodded and leaned against the cliff again and then pushed off.
    “I bet I’m actually younger than he is,” Jasmine said. She looked at me. “How old are you?”
    “Seventeen.”
    “Okay. Same age.” She turned to Blue. “He looks older than seventeen.”
    “Right?”
    “We thought you were, like, nineteen or twenty or whatever.”
    Blue took a sip from her cup and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said: “Anyways.”
    I looked in my cup again.
    “It’s