Tru Love by Rian Kelley Page A

Hunter to his class, walking abreast of him, talking at him because he wasn’t answering her and refused to even look at her, when she decides that in this case, her mother isn’t right—following a man shouldn’t happen fifty percent of the time. It shouldn’t happen at all.
                  She’s fuming. There’s got to be steam rising from my head, she thinks. She will not waste any more time on the bone head. In fact, she won’t even think his name again, ever.
    And, she decides, she’ll work at taking Hunter’s bone head’s infantile behavior in stride. It must be a male thing, she tells herself, like testicles. They’re ugly to look at,
    hairy to hold (or so she’s told) but it’s something you’ve got to do if you want to be everything to your guy.
                  “Crap,” she mutters. What a bunch of crap. She feels absolutely no need to hold a hairy sac of marbles in her hand and certainly no need to follow a guy around like she’s president of his fan club. So what if their friendship is lost? Completely obliterated? Hit by an asteroid and disappearing fast from the universe?
                  She has other friends. She could even have another boyfriend, though she’s convinced now that there has to be something wrong with Truman. He acts like he’s known her forever and everything about him seems perfect, but it’s an illusion. Perfection doesn’t exist. Not even in Snow White’s magic mirror.
                  She’s at least two minutes late when she strides through the door and straight into Marilyn’s breathy request for an excuse.
                  “No excuse, Ma’am,” Genny admits. “Throw the book at me.”
                  She can tell Mrs. Lombardi is startled by her careless attitude, but doesn’t care. She finds her seat, two aisles over from Truman, who’s watching her with a bemused look on his face. Genny gives him her profile and resolves that she will not turn
    to look at him. She won’t stare obsessively at his hands, or dwell on his lips. She refuses to look at that crazy red-brown hair or even to curl her hands when the memory of its luxurious feel strikes her brain and makes her fingers tremble. She will not be drawn into his magnetic field of attraction at all during the next fifty minutes even if it kills her.
    It almost does. By the time the bell rings, she has a stiff neck from denying what has become an involuntary action and she feels sunburned by Truman’s determined gaze.
    She stays after the bell rings to accept Mrs. Lombardi’s reprimand. But she doesn’t get detention. Her teacher sits in the desk in front of Genny’s and offers her advice.
    “This is about the break-up,” she guesses. “Kids here talk. Faculty, too,” she admits with a grimace. “I guess it was very public—of course, all it needs is an audience of one and then the news spreads, people get their hands all over it and suddenly what’s left is lot more exciting than the truth.”  She folds her manicured hands over the back of the chair and leans into Genny’s space. “Maybe you can’t see this right now, but there will be other guys. More than you’ll want to bother with.”
    “It’s not about the break-up,” Genny says. She knows Mrs.
    Lombardi is trying to be nice, and she doesn’t doubt the woman’s sincerity, but it really boggles Genny’s mind that no one seems to count the loss of friendship as the real tragedy. “We were friends,” Genny says. “ Friends. For three years.”
    Genny watches the light dawn on Mrs. Lombardi’s face. It seems to raise a halo around the woman’s head.
    “Ah. And now he doesn’t know you’re alive. Yep. Classic male ignorance. Hear no evil, see no evil.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Men don’t like to deal with messy emotions. Most of them haven’t had the training and have no clue what’s even going on inside us. So they assume. They think we’re