Junior Year Box Set полностью

I’d accepted that I might not see him ever again when my brother needed to go into rehab. Trip arranged to get out of LA so there wouldn’t be the usual distractions, or so he explained to my mom. He suggested it would also be good for me to get out of LA. I didn’t figure out until we were packing to move that we were going to be in the same town as David.

I’d been working on my mom from a different angle. She’d found a project she wanted to work on with me called The Secret Circle, so I’d suggested David have a role in the movie. I think she found it amusing that I had a crush on the guy. I believed I was rather sly about it, but she told me later that she’d known when word got back that I was with him while filming Star Academy.

Mom was smart enough to recognize that both her children had plotted to get David and me together, so she didn’t object when Trip suggested the move.

When we first moved, it left me a little off-balance. You must realize we’d come from the hills overlooking LA to a small five-acre farm in the middle of nowhere. They didn’t even have a Starbucks!

My mom suggested I try out for cheerleading to help me fit in. That’s where I met several of David’s girl friends. What they told me was eye-opening. First, they said he was a loveable slut. David somehow managed to date almost every girl on the cheerleading squad, and to my amazement, they all were okay with it. I also heard that his best friend had just died in a swimming accident and the girl he thought was ‘the one’ had dumped him.

When I first saw David after we moved, his eyes showed it: the poor guy was a mess. Talk about terrible timing. Here I became the ultimate stalker and moved halfway across the country, only to find that the object of my obsession was emotionally unavailable.

To be honest, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. I’d had this whole fantasy that when David saw me, he’d realize that I was what was missing in his life. We’d get together and go off into the sunset, happily ever after. Seeing his eyes brought me up short; it made me slow down and look around to see where this might go. It allowed me to get to know him better, and we became friends, and eventually, lovers.

David has this little look he gives you that makes you just melt. I don’t think he realizes what a devastating effect he has on the females of our species. Combine that with his looks and his exploits on the football field, and you could understand why every girl around him would drop their panties if he asked. Thank God David wasn’t the type to take advantage. He seemed to need to like the girls he spent time with.

All I can say is that when David was with me, and those lips touched mine, I found it hard to even think. But how could I care about anything when I had David in my arms? His touch was enough to get my heart racing and my pulse pounding, threatening to cause me to faint. He is all male, and when he would push me against a wall and press up against me, it was all I could do to contain myself. He just had that effect on all of us.

I began to understand why a girl would go out with David and put up with him going out with others. He just made it seem like we were all friends, and it was okay.

I’m not just saying that, either. It was okay. I expect it was because David never led me on or tried to make what we had more than it was. I knew he cared for me; he might even love me. But I came to realize we were too young to be in the kind of relationship I wanted with him. That realization freed me to just enjoy our friendship.

Something else I learned was David is a true leader. I’d seen guys who were good at sports try to impose their will upon others. I think that’s part of what creates the stereotype of the bully jock. While David could be a jerk at times—what boy isn’t?—it never seemed mean-spirited. I’d watched him evict a group of freshmen from their lunch table—although, to be honest, he had a good reason. He did it so he could have a private conversation with someone who apparently needed it. Instead of being pissed, they’d been happy to accommodate him. It didn’t hurt that David’s friends had covered for him and let the freshmen hang out with them. You could tell it was a big deal that they got to hang out with us.

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I need to spend a moment on a personal problem he’d had. His friend Pam found herself pregnant. Tracy and Brook were nominated to push them together as a couple. Pam was scared to tell David because she knew he would ask her to marry him. The last thing Pam wanted was to be married and have a baby as a high school junior. I can’t say I blamed her.

What I did blame her for was letting her dad act like an ass. Since then, I found out she had some personal issues standing up to authority figures. But at the time, I wasn’t happy that she allowed the fiction of a rape to go on for as long as it did.