“Ha.” His hand touched hers, making her startle, but then he tucked a piece of candy into her palm.
She relaxed her shoulders and popped the red Skittle into her mouth. “Your turn. How about something embarrassing about you instead of a story?”
Something to make you less sexy and adorable would be nice, please and thank you.
“All right, let’s see.” She could feel him shifting in his seat. “Oh, I’ve got one. I have a deep, secret love for boy-band music. Like an unironic love.”
Her thoughts skidded to a halt at that. “Hold up. Really?”
“Yep.”
She wanted to turn around to see his expression and determine if he was screwing with her, but she forced herself to stay facing forward. “Like a particular boy band?”
“Nah. I’m equal opportunity—old ones, new ones,” he said, tone casual as ever. “I met this girl in one of the group homes I lived in early on who told me that you can’t stay sad or angry listening to boy bands. She’d filched all these different CDs from the group home’s ancient collection, and we used to listen to them together. One Direction. NSYNC. Backstreet Boys. New Kids on the Block. I got kind of attached. The harmonies just do it for me. So soothing.” He shifted in his chair, making it squeak. “She was right, too. You really can’t stay in a bad mood listening to boy-band songs.”
Hollyn’s heart gave a little kick, imagining Jasper without a family, living in some group home, but her lips curved thinking of him belting out boy-band tunes. “That’s kind of an amazing one.”
“Thanks. I’ll eat a Skittle,” he said with a smile in his voice. “Now you. Tell me an embarrassing unironic love, Hollyn. Death metal? Reality TV? Gossip about British royals?”
“Hmm, let’s see.” She stared at the windows and pondered. “Not reality TV, but I do have an obsession with movies and television shows set in high school. Angsty ones. Funny ones. Cheesy ones. Over-the-top dramatic ones. It kind of doesn’t matter the type as long as they’re teens in high school.”
“Yeah?” He sounded delighted.
“Yep. My mom pulled me out of public school to homeschool me when I was in sixth grade, so high school still seems like this mythic, fictional place I needed to learn about in order to not be a complete alien. I studied those movies and TV shows like a detective.”
“Wow, so all you know about high school you learned in movies?”
“’Fraid so.”
He was quiet for a moment as if digesting that. “So do you think that all high school dances have synchronized dance numbers?”
“They don’t?” she asked with mock shock. “At least tell me everyone is involved in an angsty love triangle where one guy is the girl’s long-pining best friend.”
He laughed. “Sorry to disappoint. Most school dances involved a lot of standing around and…not dancing. And no love triangles that I know of.”
“Dream crusher.”
He passed her a Skittle. “So why’d your mom pull you out of school?”
She winced at the question, though she appreciated that he didn’t automatically assume it was because of her Tourette’s. “That is its own horrible, truly embarrassing story.”
He was silent for a beat. “Want to share or is that one too much?”
She worried the green Skittle between her fingertips. The story was too much. But maybe if she laid bare her worst childhood story, it’d be like ripping the Band-Aid off. Nothing else she shared going forward could be more humiliating. She wet her lips. “It’s not a funny one.”
“That’s okay.”
She looked down at her hands, holding the candy like a totem. “That year, sixth grade, I had a crush on this older boy—Maddox. My first real crush that wasn’t someone on TV or whatever. I had no intention of pursuing it. I mean, I was already on the outs of the social circles by then, so I didn’t think it could turn into anything. It was the write-his-name-in-your-notebook kind of crush—a fun secret,” she said. “But somehow he found out.”
“Maybe one of the girls I’d confided in told him or maybe he sensed it. I don’t know. But one day, he sent me a note to meet him under the big oak tree at recess for a kiss. I was a romantic kid—already into movies with happy endings—and it didn’t cross my mind to question it. It just seemed exciting.” The green of the Skittle was staining her fingertips, her hands starting to sweat. “But when I showed up, he’d brought a group of his friends and the pet mouse from science class. He called me ‘rodent’ and told me he had found my prince.”
Jasper made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. “What an asshole.”
She swallowed hard. “Yeah, his friends grabbed me to hold me in place and he forced me to kiss the mouse.” Her stomach tightened, nausea trying to well up. “My mom pulled me out of school for good the next day.” Right after I announced I wanted to die. She tucked the candy in her mouth, chewing harshly, and wiped her hands on her dark jeans. “So now you know my most embarrassing moment. You can feel better about your boy bands.”
She could feel the air shift as Jasper turned toward her, but she wasn’t ready to face him yet. Her facial muscles were ticcing, and her fingers were counting.
“That sucks, Hollyn. I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said quietly. “Kids can be absolute dicks.”
“They can,” she agreed. “I also should’ve known better. My tics were terrible by then. Way worse than they are now. The notion that Mr. Popularity said he liked me should’ve tipped me off as a red flag.”
“Fuck that noise,” he said, grabbing her chair and turning her toward him. “You were a kid. Not one bit of that was your fault.”
She couldn’t look at him, so she focused on the hand he had braced on his knee. He was flexing it as if he was angry. “I thought this was supposed to be improv, not a therapy session. I know it wasn’t my fault. But it was a lesson in seeing the reality and not painting some delusional fantasy picture on top of that.”
“Thinking a boy could want to kiss you is not delusional.”
She glanced up at that.
He smiled and then reached out and took her hand, flipping it palm up. He poured the entire bag of Skittles into her hand and then started picking out the purple ones.
She frowned. “What are these for?”
“Because if you can survive that kind of sadistic bullying, you can survive anything onstage or in front of a camera,” he said, expression serious. “And it took guts to share that with me. You win all the candy.”