Read Online A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson - Free Book Online Page A

her mother, her electric blue eyeliner drawn so thick that Liza sees it flash as Melissa tips her a wink. She glances down to see if the red bra Melissa loaned her is showing through the white, and yes, it looks like she has a pair of Claymation Rudolphs pressing their noses through the wet cotton. The bra belongs to Melissa’s mother, because Liza couldn’t fit in Melissa’s A+ cups, even if Melissa owned a red bra. Liza wonders if Mrs. Richardson wil recognize by color or cup shape the crimson glow of Liza’s boobies, shining through the white.
    Liza presses her lips together, trying to look solemn. If she meets Melissa’s eyes now, they wil both bust out laughing and the whole thing wil be ruined.
    Pastor John hasn’t noticed the bra. He stands sideways to her, talking to the youth about the angels rejoicing at a single lost lamb coming home.
    He has no idea that as he turned her profile to the audience and began to lower her, she snaked one hand beneath his armpit and held it up behind his back. As her head went under, Liza made sure to keep her fingertips above the surface of the water. Melissa said it doesn’t real y count if you don’t go al the way under, and Liza doesn’t want it to count.
    She doesn’t want to be fresh and sinless this afternoon, when she meets Melissa and Danny Deerfield and Carter Mac up in the tree house.
    Danny wil bring warm beers and some applejack, and she wil make out with him. Carter wil bring nothing and make out with Melissa, but he’l peek at Liza even as he tries to worm his hand up under Melissa’s shirt. If she had let it al be washed away, if she’d let herself be scrubbed clean, returned to the girl she was in middle school—that girl would not do any of the things Liza wil do this afternoon. Back in eighth grade, guys like Danny and Carter wouldn’t have noticed she was breathing, and she wouldn’t have cared. Last year she was a baby who had never been in love.
    Now? She’s so in love it eats away her oxygen. It’s the one thing she doesn’t share with Melissa; loving him is something that’s only hers. He kissed her once, pul ing her into the AV closet after fourth period, but he isn’t taking her seriously. He’s too cool and beautiful to screw around with fumbling virgins, so she’s learning off of throwaways like Danny and Carter Mac. She needs to know everything, so she keeps two fingers in the air behind the pastor’s back, curled in a hook to hold her hard-won sins.
    Pastor John is stil droning on about redemption, and Liza knows what wil happen next. She has lived this before, and though she can’t make her own body obey or find words or stay grounded in the present, her memories are stil her own. She is alive when she can get herself inside them.
    Next she wil change and go downstairs to take her First Communion, lined up with al the other youth. When her turn comes, Pastor John wil let her break off a piece of a wide, flat cracker. Melissa’s mom wil hand her a plastic shot glass, and she’l toss back a dribble of sour grape juice.
    But she can’t move. She’s stuck in this moment, and now the concrete of the baptismal font under her feet is softening. She is sinking, fal ing below her memories, down into the black depths of dreaming.
    Liza turns to wade up out of the pool, to go to the next part of the memory. Communion, the bread, the cup, but the preacher’s arm on her shoulder has become an iron bar.
    The disapproving face of Mrs. Richardson wavers, and as she sinks, the smiling, wide mouths of the youth-group kids yawp impossibly wider, their faces hinging almost in half to show rows and rows of teeth. They look carnivorous, as though they want to climb up the wal s of the font like sticky-fingered tree frogs, join her in the water, maybe get a piece. She’s sinking, losing her place, going back under.
    Liza strains up, trying to stay in this moment. Trying to keep herself in this smal piece of her past. She should be dressed by now,