Waking Beauty by Elyse Friedman Page B

heaving slowed and eventually subsided. He hadn’t made a sound. Carp surreptitiously dried his eyes before lifting his head and looking at me sharply.
    “I didn’t cry,” he said accusingly.
    “I know.” I looked him in the eye. “I never said you did.”
    He held my gaze for a few seconds, realized that I was going to be kind about it, and then sighed deeply. He sniffed a couple times and wiped his nose. He stared at the ground and said, “Don’t tell, okay? Don’t tell those guys.”
    “It’s no big deal, you just slipped.”
    “Please,” he said. “I beg of you.”
    Again I wanted to laugh. Never had Servan seemed more uncool or more likable. “I won’t tell,” I said solemnly. “Don’t worry about it.”
    “Swear that you won’t tell any person?”
    “I swear that I won’t tell.” And I didn’t. Until now.
    “My parents are going to kill me,” he said, tugging on his wrecked jersey.
    “Just tell them you got in a fight. Tell them you were defending someone who was getting picked on.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll tell them I was defending a Romanian that was going under attack by a Hungarian gang.”
    “Um, I don’t think there are a lot of marauding Hungarians around here. Maybe you should just tell them—”
    “Yo, Steve, Carp! Where are ya?!”
    In response to Leon’s call from the top of the embankment, Carp clamped one hand on my forearm and motioned with the other for me to be quiet.
    “His jacket’s here,” I heard Rachel say boozily.
    “So is the hooch,” said Leon. “They’re around. They’re probably just dicking with us.
Hey, Rachel, you wanna smoke a joint? I got a nice big joint here in Carp’s jacket. And we can have it all to ourselves. Unless, of course, there’s anyone out here who would like to join us…
?”
    Carp squeezed my forearm and then, perhaps to silence me more than anything else (did he think that I couldn’t refuse a toke?), leaned in and attached his mouth to mine. He stuck his tongue in there and moved it around. Palinka fumes, stale marijuana, and a touch of fresh autumn mud. It didn’t taste bad.
    “They probably went in, but they’re coming back out,” said Rachel. “Let’s just go find them. I have to go to the bathroom anyway.”
    “Jerk-offs,” said Leon.
    I heard them move off through the woods toward the schoolyard. I expected Servan to stop necking with me as soon as the voices trailed away and they were clearly out of earshot, but astonishingly, he persisted. I concluded that while it wasmy first real kiss and I didn’t really know what I was doing, I must have been doing it right, or right enough anyway, because after a few minutes of mad mouth action, he reached into my jean jacket and started kneading my breasts. It felt okay, but I was dead nervous, afraid that Servan’s hand would move a couple inches lower and discover my belly flab, the existence of which I took great pains to hide under loose layers of clothing. In a preemptive move, I lay back so that my bunched stomach would flatten out (Carp went with me, his mouth fixed on mine). The rock was cold and jagged and dug into the back of my head, but I didn’t dare sit up, as Carp had taken my recline as an invitation to inch his hungry hand down into my pants. He wrestled with the button on my Levi’s for an excruciating amount of time before successfully popping it. He got the zipper down, thrust his icy fingers into my undies, and wriggled around in there. I felt the scratch of a fingernail as he located my hole and plugged a digit inside. More wriggling. It didn’t feel so great, to tell you the truth. And while I was relieved that he hadn’t drawn his hand back in disgust, I pretty much just wanted him and his nails out of there. I endured another thirty seconds of frantic poking, because I wanted to be polite and also seem as if I was experienced and accustomed to that sort of thing, but then I suddenly had this memory flash of Servan, earlier on,