Page 63 of Sad Girl Hours
“Right, well. Come on then.” She touches me on the arm and jogs upstairs, me close behind.
She shuts her bedroom door after us, points at her bed and tells me to sit. Then she throws herself down next to me and says, “Talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I’m not completely sure,” I say. “Which I think has been the issue this whole time. But I think I’m growing surer that there might be … something.”
“What aren’t you sure about?”
I snort lightly. “Everything. Sometimes I think there’s something a bit wrong with me.”
Jenna’s listening so intently, and suddenly I feel a bit silly. She’s my best friend, has been for years now. Why haven’t I just been talking to her about this the whole time?
“I don’t think I feel the same things as other people.Sexwise,” I add awkwardly.
Somethingflickers over Jenna’s face, and I could be wrong, but it’s almost like she has to stop herself from smiling.
“I’ve just been really confused this whole time. Because I know I like Saffron, but I wasn’t feeling the things that I’ve always heard people talk about feeling. This big pull towards a person like your bodies are opposite magnetic poles and it would physically pain you not to give in and touch them. I’d heard about it so many times but I’d never felt it.”
“Question.”
“Of course.”
“You’re talking in the past tense. Are you feeling those things now, with Saffron?”
I’m quiet for a moment while I think. “Kind of. But not really. But also a little. Ugh, I don’tknow.”
I’m expecting Jenna to laugh at this, at my indecisiveness. Instead, though, she just smiles, eyes dancing with secrets. “That’s OK.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that it’s OK you don’t know. You don’t have to know.”
This is new. “But you’ve always been the one teasing me about Saffron, joking about us being in love or whatever.”
“Like you’ve done with me and Casper, yes,” Jenna says. Now she does laugh. “But I think we might both have been idiots and should probably have had this conversation awhileago.”
“What conversation?”
She lets a breath ripple out into the air between us. “Ah! OK, I can do this. So, Casper and I, we’re not…”
“What?”
“We’re not … having sex.”
I feel my forehead crumple into a frown. “But you guys are always disappearing together into each other’s rooms. Casper’s definitely in love with you, whatever you might say.”
“I think he is too,” Jenna says, her smile fading into something with a dull, pained edge. “But we’re not together. Not like that. Or at all really.”
“OK, I’m confused. Those excuses – you simplyhaveto leave, you’ve got to go rehearse your lines or do apuzzlefor Christ’s sake.”
“They weren’t excuses. Well, they were excuses to leave, but they weren’t lies.”
“So, you’re not together and you’re not even, I don’t know … friends with benefits?”
“No. Well, yes, but those benefits aren’t sexy times; they’re talking about our feelings and doing jigsaws. Look.”
She points up at a giant, framed floral poster above her bed. It’s pretty, brightly coloured and demanding that you look at it, a bit like Jenna, but now, when Idolook at it, I also notice that it’s not a poster at all. It’s a framed jigsaw.
“That was the first one we did together last year.” Her big brown eyes grow a little hazy with nostalgia.
