Fight Like a Tomboy - Stephanie Street Page 0,2

shoulders, blocking the onslaught with his back. I splashed him several more times, because I wanted to, and he’d let me win.

“Stop!” he finally yelled. He whirled around and got right up in my face. “Stop! What is your freaking problem?”

I did stop then. In all the confrontations I’d had with Jared, he’d never looked at me like that. Like I’d truly made him mad. He always played it off with humor. This time, for a split second, before his face calmed down, I was afraid of him.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he demanded, his brows furrowed and his jaw tight.

“Like what?”

“Like that. What you’re doing with your face. Like you’re scared of me or something. Stop it.” He still looked ready to kill someone. Maybe me.

“You did scare me.”

His wet cheeks turned red. “I didn’t do anything to you, Kelly. When have I ever done anything to you?”

“You just yelled in my face!” I yelled back because I’d lost all sense of rationality.

Jared pressed his lips in a tight line as he stared at me for a long moment before responding to that. “You pushed me. You yelled at me. You splashed water in my face. You made accusations.”

He was right. And I knew he was right. I knew he knew I knew he was right. Now faced with his obvious restraint, I experienced the awful beginnings of horrified humiliation. Again! Because he was right. I had done all of those things.

Jared shook his head and turned to swim away. At the edge of the pool, he boosted his long body out of the water and stood staring down at me. He stared at me for so long; I didn’t expect him to say anything else, and then he did.

“What did I do to you, Kell?” His jaw worked, and he glanced at the wet cement at his feet, obviously fighting his emotions. When he looked up again, his face was impassive. There wasn’t a hint of his earlier frustration, just a cold stare. Still, he asked, “What did I do to make you hate me like this?”

My first reaction was to deny it, tell him I didn’t hate him. But that would be a lie. I had hated him with an unholy passion for more than a year. It didn’t matter what I might have said, because Jared didn’t give me a chance.

“I get it. I get it now. I’ve tried and tried over the last year to be your friend. But I understand now that it’s impossible.”

“I—” I began, feeling desperate to say something, anything to get him to stop looking at me like that, to not talk to me like that, but what could I say? He was right. I’d done everything in my power to let him know how much I disliked him. I’d even screamed it in his face once at a dual swim meet. In front of everyone. And he’d—what had he said? Tried to be my friend? That’s what he’d done? I couldn’t wrap my mind around that.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Okay.” He sounded… Defeated. Sad. Why would Jared be sad? He didn’t like me any more than I liked him. Did he?

He smiled then, but not his usual easy smile. This one he forced. This smile on anyone else would have appeared grotesque, but on Jared just took him from an eleven down to a nine. Possibly a ten. Nothing could make him look bad.

I wished I had that problem. Because I had a feeling I looked pretty darn gross right then. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. The worst part was that I found I kind of did want to do something about it. Something to make Jared not look at me like that.

“Don’t worry, Harris.” He reached down to pick up a backpack at his feet. He threaded his arms through the straps and smiled. It was more genuine this time. I didn’t know how to feel about that. “We’ve graduated,” he continued. “We never have to see each other again. Good luck, Kelly. Have a great life.”

He turned and walked out of the pool, never once looking back.

2

Jared

It was summer between my junior and senior years of school. My dad got a new job and we moved. We were only thirty miles from our old house and my old school, but outside the district boundaries by a lot. The school said they’d give me a waiver and so I could still attend, but my