The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) by Maureen Johnson Page B

and tucked it into the corner by her closet. Jazza had time for everyone except Charlotte. There was an old feud there, one that predated my arrival. Charlotte was the full moon that brought out the werejazza.
    I looked at the card. Clearly, this woman had talent if she had fixed Charlotte, but in the end, she was just another therapist I couldn’t talk to. I dropped the card into my top desk drawer.
    “I have a date tonight,” I said. “An actual date.”
    “This seems to surprise you.”
    “No.” I reclined back on the bed. “I just…a date. It’s so formal-sounding.”
    “Is it formal?”
    “I think we’re getting dinner,” I said.
    Dinner and…perhaps we could have a redo on the making-out fiasco. I spent a pleasant few minutes visualizing what that might entail. I got to the part where the imaginary hand was just sliding under my imaginary shirt…
    Where it encountered my scar. My terrible, nasty, jagged, ugly scar. The imaginary hand withdrew in horror. My actual hand reached up under the bottom of my shirt to see if the scar felt as bad as it looked. It could definitely be felt. What was my boyfriend going to do when he saw my scar? My newly labeled boyfriend, who had only tentatively ventured into that territory anyway. My shirt had never come off. I had no idea when we would get to the shirt-off phase. Maybe now we never would, because we’d both know what was under there, aside from the customary attractions.
    “I need to show you something,” I said to Jazza. “And I need you to be honest with me. Can you be honest with me?”
    “Of course.”
    “No, I mean actually honest.”
    I stood up and lifted my shirt, pulling it up to just under my chest, revealing my abdomen. I had grown used to the scar. Ithad to be a shock to see it for the first time, all Frankensteiny with the hash marks across the cut line where the sutures were made.
    “It looks bad,” I said, poking at it to show her. “But it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
    “It doesn’t look…that bad. It’s not that bad.”
    It was totally that bad. Her pained expression and wide eyes and massive lie told me that. It was time to stop talking about it.
    “Actually,” I said, lowering my shirt, “I’ve seen worse scars. I told you about the time my grandma got a questionable boob job in Baton Rouge a few years ago?”
    “No?”
    “She got the boob job because she had a coupon for it. Twenty percent off. She had a surgery coupon. She got her boobs on sale. Those scars were worse.”
    This was a partial lie. My grandma really did get her boob job with a 20 percent off coupon from the local paper. We were pretty horrified when we found out, but we found out pretty late, after the surgery was over and she’d been recovering for two weeks. I don’t think there was any bad scarring, though. That was the part I was lying about.
    “They definitely don’t seem real,” I went on. “They don’t move. But they’re real-ish. They’re bigger, and they stick straight out. She calls them ‘my new front porch’ whenever she talks about them, which is a lot. She wears these low-cut tops and says, ‘Just getting some sun on my new front porch.’”
    That part was entirely true.
    “What I think,” she said, as she repositioned herself and straightened up, “is that you are very brave. And it looks fine. It’s not bad. It’s not. It’s just—a line.”
    “But my bikini modeling career is over,” I said. “Unless it’s for pirate bikinis. They don’t mind it if you have a bitchin’ scar when you wear a pirate bikini. That would be amazing. A little skull and crossbones on each boob—”
    Jazza held up a hand, possibly because I was saying “boob” too often.
    “You don’t have to make jokes,” she said. “Have you been downstairs? To where it happened?”
    “I skipped that,” I said.
    “Do you want to go now? You and me,” Jazza said, offering her hand. “Together.”
    There was something about Jazza Benton that just