THE ONE WITH BRIDGET
—–
Beth, Carla, and I left my room and walked down to the Tuck, which was pretty full, though it was still early. I wondered if later we would see more activity that looked like dates on a night with no movie, or less. Not my problem. I had plenty of other problems, but that wasn’t one. I was personally riding a double blow job high, and walking with the two girls who had delivered them, if not as interactively with each other as I still hoped might happen someday.
Maybe I did not actually have ‘plenty’ of other problems…
We were met with a surprise. Fortunately, or so I thought at the time, the Sarniokis had gotten back from their Date Night early, and Bridget was there in a booth, sucking on a thick milkshake in a momentarily distracting manner.
“Wow! You are done early, Bridget,” Carla observed easily, reaching the booth first and sliding into it opposite Bridget. Beth followed immediately and sat beside Carla. I was slower, waving at people as I followed, even pausing briefly to say hello to Jenn Potter who was on her way out with a friend. That delay earned me at least a glance or two as I settled into the booth next to its original occupant.
“Date night for the Sarniokis tonight was dinner at Wendy’s, an ice cream cone, and an attempt to buy every last thing in the store at Target,” Bridget reported, explaining her early release. “But an early evening still pays the same! And I even got the creatures in bed and asleep for the Sarniokis before they got home. They were pretty stoked about that, actually.” She sniggered after a moment, “I’ll bet they realized that they were going to get to have sex on date night, after all!”
We all shared a laugh, and Carla and Beth volunteered to go fight the modest line to get food for everyone. Bridget didn’t want anything besides the shake and fries the she was already idly devouring. I just wanted a double-sized chocolate malt.
As they walked off through the crowd, Bridget turned a little toward me in the booth and asked, “So what were you guys up to while I was doing toddler rodeo?”
It was just an idle attempt at conversation. In retrospect, I am sure of that. But with all the talk about secrets that afternoon and evening, especially secrets from Bridget, I jumped like she was hitting me with the Third Degree. “Oh… um, nothing. We were hanging out in my room… torturing Ben,” I added, wanting to focus on not the three of us.
Bridget briefly cocked an eyebrow. I saw it. It scared me. She genuinely let it go, however.
“Torturing Ben is always good,” she observed, sucking once more on her shake. “How did he deserve it this time, and how’d you do it?”
Dumbass. Explaining that would require revealing the Maddie secret, which I still wanted to keep close, though at least it was not the nuclear level one involving Carla and Beth.
“Oh. Uh. Nothing, really,” I temporized. “The three of us were just hanging out, taking about… nothing really, when Ben came in. Then Beth decided, kind of out of the blue really, to tease Ben. It was, um, effective. A real sight to be seen,” I added, momentarily brightening in an attempt make the story at least interesting enough to not sound incomplete.
Bridget just looked at me skeptically, and not at Beth’s sudden decision to sexually torment Ben. That seemed to be the only part that met with casual belief. My mind, which was frantically and inefficiently scrambling for cover stories, was immediately distracted by that. Had Beth been pondering Ben for a while now? How long? Before me, even?
Now was not the time to ponder Ben’s chances. I had somehow wandered into a field of running chainsaws without warning, all because I had flinched just once.
“And Carla?” Bridget asked drily. “Did she torture Ben, too?”
“What? Oh… No!” I brightened. “No, she just enjoyed watching it with me.”
I’m not sure what I was hoping to accomplish there, but I sure didn’t accomplish it.
Bridget just sat there, staring at me with an unreadable, but probably angry, look in her eyes, searching my nervous face, until Beth and Carla returned with munchies. It was about the longest I think I’ve even been in the same place with Bridget without saying anything.
See, the problem is, Bridget knew me too god-damned well. As I’ve said over and over, we have been friends almost from the start of Freshman year. She had watched me grow taller than her. She had listened to me tell dumb joke after dumb joke after I had been shut out or ignored by other kids and didn’t want to stop talking in case I started crying. She had helped me learn to tell better jokes, possibly in self-defense.
We had played terrible practical jokes on each other, one time even getting in trouble for it. I had once helped her get a date (meaning hang out in the Tuck Shop for an hour before Study Hall) with Felix de Pont back in the tenth grade.
And I had held her while she cried after Gianni Torrine dumped her, back in the fall. It is interesting that every time I say I had basically never touched a girl before Carrie, I kept forgetting that night, when I must have hugged Bridget for twenty minutes. I’m pretty sure that is because that traumatic episode was not about the holding, and I sure as hell didn’t have it in my mind that I was holding a girl. I had just been there for a buddy who was hurting, bad.
But.
But that, and so much more, meant that Bridget could read me like a damned open book. I could read her just as well, to be honest, but she wasn’t the one hauling around a book full of secrets at the moment.
The girls slid back into the booth and shoved my malt toward me.
Then they both caught sight of Bridget’s face, which had gone from stony when we were alone, to full-on stormy.
“What?” Carla asked, perhaps unwisely.
Bridget just stared at us all, somehow she managed to lock eyes with us all simultaneously, despite how spread out we were around her.
“Who?” she asked flatly.
“Who what?” Beth tried to ask flippantly. She and Carla still didn’t know what was up, only that Bridget was pissed. I had an awful insight that somehow, we were on the verge of being busted.