The Symptoms of My Insanity Read Online Free Page B

beers. That’s all she had … and boom! No kidneys.”
    This overdramatic, “I’m clueless” stuff has got to be some passive-aggressive mom technique. I refuse to believe my mother doesn’t know the difference between beer and roofies, and urban legends and actual news stories. But before I can explain this difference once and for all, Mom says how excited she is that we’re finally going to get rid of my split ends on Saturday. I guess her kidney story settled it: I’m not going anywhere with Blake.
    “Come on, sweetie. Don’t look so upset.” She turns to me at the red light and reaches over, pushing some strands of hair out of my face and tucking them behind my ear. “Can’t you wear a shower cap or something when you’re painting? This isn’t the best way to present yourself,” she adds, picking a piece of dried red paint out of my hair.
    I don’t respond. Instead I set more dried red strands free from behind my ear.
    “Well, good thing we’re going to get this cut soon anyway.” She looks at my face. “What?” she says. “You’re not excited to have a girls’ day with your mom and your sister?” She smiles and pushes the strand back behind my ear.
    “Just have a girls’ day without me!” I plead, pulling away. “Why can’t you have a girls’ day without me? And then I can go to the DIA and then after …” I trail off, seeing the hurt expression on her face.
    We drive in silence for what seems like a hundred miles before pulling into Jenna’s driveway.
    “I’d like to meet him first,” she finally says, taking out the festive pink gloss from her pocket and reapplying in therearview mirror. “I’ll meet him. And then [cough] maybe.”
    “Okay,” I say. And that look on her face, well, it’s a mental snapshot I wish I hadn’t taken.
    •   •   •
    The minute I walk into the Masons’ house, Jenna starts laughing. She shakes her head at me and pushes her chopped-out, wispy blond bob away from her eyes.
    “I keep telling you my A-minus girls don’t need new bras, Izzy. But so sweet of you to think of me.”
    Stupid Lola’s bag sticking out of my backpack.
    Jenna and I head up to her room and she immediately puts one of my new double Ds on over her T-shirt.
    “I’m totally wearing this baby during dinner.”
    “No! God, take that off. It’s so ugly.”
    She cups her hands over the bra.
    “I can’t believe you fill these things. I’m so jealous! I can’t even fill my own two hands.” She heads to the mirror to ogle her new air-boobs.
    The first time I saw Jenna, all I wanted to do was feed her a giant sandwich. She was so thin and pale, I thought she might be sick. But after watching her finish off an entire plate of nachos and win three events on our middle school track-and-field team, I quickly learned that her pale skin, blond hair, and rail-thin body really
are
due to what she likes to call “my cruel genetic fate.”
    “So … tell me again. You ran into Blake Hangry while buying lingerie?”
    I left Jenna a scattered voicemail while I was waiting for Mom outside Farmer Jack’s.
    “Yeah,” I say, smiling. “Wait, no, at Arbor’s Drugs. I told you, he spilled his Gatorade on me and—”
    “Oh right, so his sports juice is all over you, and then he compliments your art skills, and then?” Jenna grabs another bra out of the bag and slips it on over the first. “Wait, let me guess. You perform fellatio on him in the bathroom of the store like a good little Broomington girl?”
    “Ew,” I say. “You know I hate that word.”
    “Fellaaaaaaatio,” Jenna sings.
    There’s a big rumor going around school right now that Meredith Brightwell got caught giving Jacob Ullman a blow job in a girls’ bathroom stall last week during sixth period. I still don’t even know how Jenna’s mom found out, but Cathy Mason always finds out about everything. So of course my mom found out too and totally freaked out on me. She was acting like
I
was in the bathroom