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laughed hard, rolling up into a sitting position. “Of course I have! Have you seen him? But we haven’t done it since he turned eighteen. He keeps telling me to slow down because he’s eighteen and I’m only sixteen and it’s all illegal and shit, but I want him so bad! Jenna, sex with him is soooo good. You have no idea.”
    No, I absolutely did not.
    “But you haven’t in a while?” I asked even though I really didn’t want to know. So why did I have to ask?
    “No. We do plenty of other stuff when I wear him down, though. The things that guy can do with his fingers. And his tongue! Fuck!”
    I wanted her skank ass off my bed that very second.
    I didn’t respond to her, mostly because it was too much information. I wasn’t shocked but I was mad for some reason. Not even really jealous, just mad.
    Initially, I had been closer with Kellen than Laney was. She liked that he was at the house and we knew him because he was a big deal at her school, blah blah blah, but it was me that he spent time tutoring every day. Me that he sat next to on the floor and joked with, talked with. He looked at my drawings and offered encouragement. I went to his boxing matches and shouted his name. I felt free with him. Like he saw me and knew me and he liked it all. I wasn’t used to that. I was used to being shoehorned into a mold, a dye my sister had cast and my mom was so excited about. One she demanded for both of us.
    When Kellen and Laney started dating I got a little territorial about him, feeling like he was my friend and she was going to steal him, but Kellen never bailed on me. He never treated me like I was nothing but a student or Laney’s little sister. I was always Jenna to him. I was his Nonpareil.
    I was worried with him going away to college that we’d lose that closeness. I worried that friendship with a fourteen year old Freshman in high school wouldn’t fit into his new college life. I was scared to lose him. Knowing he was so intimate with Laney was terrifying to me. They were working on a level I couldn’t operate at and I didn’t know what that meant for him and I. For me and my best friend. He was in love with her now and she was going to take him from me completely and the thought left me cold.
    And angry.
    “Are you done bragging now?” I asked sharply. “Can I go back to sleep?”
    Laney frowned. “What’s your problem?”
    “You woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me dirty stories, that’s my problem.”
    “I thought you’d be excited for me!”
    “I am but I’m also tired! Tell me all about it in the morning but let me go back to sleep now!”
    “Whatever,” Laney snarled, angrily jumping off my bed and heading for the door. “I’ll remember what a bitch you were just now when you come running to me to talk about the first time you’re in love. Oh wait, that will never happen because you’re a weird loner freak with no friends!”
    She slammed my door when she left.
     

     
     
     

Chapter Five
     
     
     
    A few days later I was awakened in the night again. This time it was the sound of a car coming into the driveway. A door opened and closed. Soft shouts. A hesitant knock on the front door.
    I glanced at the clock. It was 3am.
    I recognized my dad’s footsteps hurrying down the hall, heading toward the stairs. I slipped out of bed silently and crept toward my door. After he’d passed by, I slowly opened it and snuck out onto the dark balcony as he headed down the stairs. I knew he couldn’t see me there, not without the chandelier in the foyer turned on and he wouldn’t risk it. Not with mom and Laney still soundly asleep.
    He looked through the glass on the side of the door to see who it was then quickly opened it.
    “Kellen,” he said, sounding startled, “are you alright? What’s happened?”
    I couldn’t understand Kellen’s words but I could read his tone. It was low and dark. Dead.
    “No, of course. Come inside,” dad told him. He stepped aside to let