Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend (19 page)

“Yeah, don’t worry about him. He can take care of himself,
ya know?” Angelo says. “He never cared about no high school
diploma, anyway.”
They don’t know. They don’t know what I did.
Tracy is in front of me suddenly. She’s digging around in her
bag, pulling out tissues. It’s only then, when Tracy brushes the
hair out of my eyes and starts working on the eyeliner and mascara that are running down my face, that I realize I’m crying.

“One, two, three, four!”
The band launches into “Cherry Bomb.”
I close my eyes. My hands are wrapped around the microphone stand so tightly that my fingers feel bloodless. The music
vibrates up my arms, into my neck and straight into my brain
where it takes over, obliterating everything else. There’s nothing but the guitar, the bass, the drums—and then, there’s me.

I am not thinking about Angelo and Stephanie half-carrying
me to the car where I fell into the backseat…
I am not thinking about Jamie….
Because this—what’s happening right here, right now—is
mine. And I got this.
I start out almost quiet, like Cherie does, because the notes
are low in my range, but by the fourth line of the verse, I’m up
an octave, right in my sweet spot, and heading straight for the
chorus with more power than I ever knew I had.
I grab the mic off the stand and start jumping—I can’t stand
still. I see Angelo out of the corner of my eye, watching me,
throwing his head around in time with the rhythm section. His
eyes practically roll back in his head during the solo. When I
come back in on another chorus, I start crashing into him.
The song goes up half a step, and now I’m not even singing
anymore—I’m yelling in key. I swing the mic in circles and snarl
just like Cherie did, which makes Angelo grin. By the end of the
song, I’m on my knees, pounding on the floor with my fist as
hard as I can. The song ends and I fall backward, my head hitting the floor, my legs folded under me, my arms thrown out
to the sides.
I can’t catch my breath. My hands are throbbing and bruised.
My throat feels raw. I’m completely wrecked.
It’s awesome.
Nobody says anything.
And then Stephanie screams. She jumps up from where she
was sitting on the floor and screams like she’s being murdered.
“Rosie! That was amazing! You’re totally incredible!”
She bounces over to me, pulls me up off the floor and wraps
me in a hug. We practically fall over, and then she shrieks again
and jumps on Angelo, grabbing his face and kissing him over
and over and over again.
“You’re a genius! She’s perfect!”
I reach out for the mic stand to steady myself. I’m doubled
over, still trying to catch my breath. Angelo takes his guitar off
and sets it on top of his amp. He comes over and holds his hand
up for a high five. I give him one.
“
That’s
what I’m talkin’ about, Rose.” Now it’s his turn to crush
me in a hug—I guess he doesn’t care that I’m dripping with
sweat.
For once in my life, I don’t, either.
“Wait here,” he says to me as he waves the rest of his band
into the other room. Stephanie is still hopping around with excitement.
“Oh, my god, you’re totally going to get it, Rosie! None of the
other girls who auditioned were anywhere near as cool as you.” I
must look unsteady on my feet because she suddenly says, “Oh,
here! Come here, sit down.”
She reaches for my hand. I put the microphone back on the
stand and let her pull me over to the ratty futon in the corner of
the rehearsal space. I collapse, half on the futon, half on the floor.
“Did that feel as incredible as it looked?” Steph asks.
“It was like…I don’t even know. It’s a rush.”
“You thirsty? Want some water or something?”
“Yeah, thanks, Steph.”
She dashes over to the crusty old refrigerator in the corner.
While she’s looking behind moldy pizza boxes to see what she
can find, I pull my phone out of my bag.
I have a whole bunch of missed calls. But none of them is the
one I’m hoping for.
I don’t have the strength to listen to the messages. I close my
eyes and curl up on the futon.
As I lie there, I can no longer push away the image of Jamie’s
battered face, and his words start ringing in my head.
I lost him for real this time. I did the wrong thing, and I lost
him for real.

But
did
you do the wrong thing? Jamie thinks it was the wrong
thing. But do you?
No. I don’t.
I didn’t do what Jamie would have wanted me to do, but that
doesn’t mean it was wrong.
My bag is next to me on the ground. I reach into it without
looking and feel around for the piece of cardboard that I’ve been
carrying with me since my birthday. I run my fingers over it,
and I can feel the indentations made by Jamie’s hand pressing
down hard with a pen as he wrote,
Love, Jamie.
His hands are
burned into my brain…the way they look, the way they feel, the
way they touch me.
If he gives me a chance to explain that I believed I was doing
the right thing, everything might be okay.
And if he doesn’t give you that chance?
If he doesn’t give me that chance…it’ll be his loss.
Something inside me falls away, something hard and restrictive and fearful. It crumbles, disintegrates and vanishes.
It’ll be his loss.
It takes me a second to realize Angelo is crouching in front of
me trying to get my attention. I take in his face, and notice he’s
got a black bruise on his cheek—he must have caught a punch in
the fight earlier. I sit up, with no clue how much time has gone by.
“Whaddya say, Rose, you wanna be a rock star?” he says, offering me his hand.
For once in my life, what I want is completely, entirely, totally clear.
I take Angelo’s hand and let him pull me to my feet.
“Yeah, I do.”
He smiles. “Awesome, Sweater, you’re in. Welcome to the band.
We start rehearsing tomorrow night.”
It’s not like all the bad stuff that happened earlier didn’t happen. But there’s something else, something that’s far away from
all of that. Something that is more than the desire, more than the
confusion and the fear, more than the random and the not-sorandom acts of violence, more than the love I feel for Jamie Forta.
It’s me. This is what I want. This is who I am.
And I am finally here.

THANKS TO MY AMAZING EDITOR, NATASHYA WILSON,
and the Harlequin TEEN editorial team, T. S. Ferguson and
Annie Stone. Thanks for the awesome karaoke, you guys! (Oh,
yeah, and all the support, too!)

Thanks also to my wonderful agent, Emmanuelle Morgen,
without whom I would not sleep at night.
And a very special thanks to my parents, my brother and Lester, who keeps me honest.

A. I was one of those kids who wrote lots of stories and plays.
As I got older and started studying acting, I focused more on
plays. I loved the collaborative nature of playwriting, but at a
certain point, I really wanted to create something entirely on
my own, that didn’t require a director and actors. And that’s
when I went back to fiction. For me, writing is the best way
to disappear into myself, to take a break from the real world.
It calms me and absorbs me in a way that nothing else does.

A. I have very vivid memories of being a teenager and trying
to understand and cope with desire and other big, new issues.
Desire is very tricky—people can really lose themselves in it
and make bad decisions as a result of it—and I was interested
in investigating what it’s like to be a smart girl navigating
that territory. Because it doesn’t matter how smart you are—
when you feel desire for the first time, it can really scramble
your brain.

A. Thanks for saying it’s a realistic portrayal! I think the thing
that’s tough about portraying grief is the time frame. It takes
a long, long time to process grief—it’s not the kind of thing
that can be dealt with quickly and cleanly. Based on my own
experience with grief and trauma, the healing process is messy,
and it’s not linear—it starts and stops, and it’s two steps forward, three steps back sometimes. Once I recognized that,
Rose’s journey became clear to me.

Q. In book 1,
Confessions of an Angry Girl,
Rose is bullied by Regina. In book 2, she sees Conrad being harassed by the swim team. What do you hope readers
learn from Rose’s experience, and what would you say
to someone who is being bullied or harassed?

A. I think it’s important for people experiencing bullying or
harassment to speak up, in whatever form that takes, whether
it’s talking to an adult, or addressing the bully directly, or getting the police involved. Everyone has to make their own decision about how to manage the situation, and choose what
feels right to them, as Rose does. But personally, I feel that
staying silent is not the answer.

A. There are a ton of different resources online, from websites
like StopBullying.gov to sections on bullying on the Gay, Lesbian
and Straight Education Network site, www.glsen.org. There’s
also a fantastic documentary called
Bully
that I think is a mustsee for everyone, with a website called TheBullyProject.com that
has great resources.

Q. Rose and Jamie have a rather complex relationship.
How do you view their romance, and is there hope for
them in the future?

A. I love Rose and Jamie together. I think they are very
different people who broaden each other’s minds and give
each other new experiences of all kinds. I honestly don’t
know what’s going to happen in their future—they haven’t
told me yet, if that makes any sense. But I will say this: the
hardest thing to do in a relationship is stay together through
change. And teenagers change quickly, and very often. It’ll
be interesting to see if Rose and Jamie can figure out how
to handle that.

Q. Rose and Tracy’s friendship has its ups and downs,
but in the end they seem to make it work. What do
you think is important in a friendship?

A. I think Rose and Tracy keep finding their way back to
each other because they understand that they are different
people, yet they respect their differences. They don’t try to
like the same things or the same people—they try to respect
each other’s opinions and decisions, even if they don’t understand them. If you can master that in your friendships, you’ll
have a lifetime of great friends.

A. I love Angelo. I really do. He’s a diamond in the rough.
Angelo sees potential in Rose from the moment he meets her,
and as he figures out who he is, he starts to help Rose reach
that potential. He’s also just fun, and funny, and kind, and
uncomplicated in a way. I think Rose appreciates that in the
middle of her very complicated life.

A. I have two pieces of advice for aspiring authors. The first
one is just sit down and do it. Make a schedule for yourself,
write it in your calendar like it’s a doctor’s appointment and
commit to it. If you don’t know what to say, then write about
that. But get some words on the page.

The second piece of advice is, be nice to yourself while
you’re writing. I think this is really important. A lot of people stop writing after a few tries because they read what they
wrote and decide it’s terrible. But they’re being completely unfair—they’re judging something that isn’t ready to be judged.
Writing is a process of creation and revision, and more creation and more revision—it takes time. You have to be critical eventually, but if you do it while your ideas are still young
and taking shape, you’ll give up before you’ve even started.