Lips Unsealed Read Online Free Page A

through seventh grade when we packed up—not a great timeto change schools. But I tried to make the best of it when I entered Colina Junior High. I told myself it was an opportunity to get away from all the kids who called me Belimpa or fatso and reinvent myself.
    I stuck to a diet, traded my princess dresses for cutoff overalls and knee socks (think early Linda Ronstadt), and twisted my hair into braids. I lost about forty pounds by the end of the school year. My friend Christina couldn’t get over it. She saw me for the first time in months when I visited my grandparents, who had moved into our old house, and she just stared at me, amazed, impressed, and maybe a little jealous of my new look.
    “Oh my God, Belinda,” she said. “You’re hot!”
    At Colina, I joined the track team and ran the hundred-yard dash. I was interested in boys but never comfortable around them. When I did have a crush, I kept it to myself. I carried around too much shame and fear to ever share my feelings and risk rejection. Then there was another problem: What if the boy liked me? I couldn’t imagine bringing someone home to meet my parents. My dad’s drinking made life in the new house as unpredictable and chaotic as it had been in Burbank.
    I barely confided in my new best friend, Jean Olson, an outgoing, good-looking girl whose boobs had miraculously arrived a couple years before the rest of us were out of training bras. They gave her a personality and a presence. I was barely a year or two past believing that storks delivered babies. I’m serious. Even though my mom popped out a baby every couple years, I was ignorant of how it happened—that is, until Jean set me straight about that, and more.
    And some things I learned on my own. The following summer I went on my Girl Scout troop’s annual overnight camping trip to the beach. Every year we went someplace up or down the coast. This time we camped at Carpinteria, a surfing village just south of Santa Barbara. There was a boys’ camp down the beach from us, a pretty far way down, but not too far that we didn’t wander over to see one another. One boy took a liking to me.
    I enjoyed the attention. We chatted, flirted, and chased each other up and down the beach. It was extremely innocent fun. We didn’t even attempt a kiss, though secretly I wished we had.
    After we returned home, my mom got a call from the troop leader. She said I had not conducted myself in the manner appropriate to a Girl Scout and therefore was not welcome to return to the troop. Not welcome? That was a strange way of saying I was kicked out of Girl Scouts. Apparently she went into a little more detail with my mom, but none of it was true.
    I was furious. Jean told me not to worry, and she was right. I didn’t care about being kicked out of the troop or that the leader had told an outright lie about me. It simply paled next to the realization that a boy had found me attractive. I was confused by the whole thing—but in a great way.
    I wished that had translated into self-confidence, but it didn’t. However, I did feel a certain something, a difference in the way I approached the world and felt about myself. Now I see that I was at that point in a girl’s life when she realizes she possesses certain powers that make her different, powers that will beguile the boys and turn even the strongest of them into jelly if used properly.
    In other words, I was slowly but surely becoming a woman. It takes a lifetime to figure out what that means and how to put that wonderful gift of fate to good use. It doesn’t come with an instruction book; at least it didn’t when I was that age. Instead, I gathered information from girlfriends and books. I went from Jean telling me where babies really came from to stumbling upon books about witchcraft and trying to conjure up powers without making a fool of myself—or at least
too
much of a fool.
    Jean was amused by my interest in black magic. Why wouldn’t she have been? Her