Terry! How could I have forgotten Naked Terry?

“Right,” I said. “Yeah. Okay, see you then.”

Then I switched over to the other line. “Hello?”

“Sam?” Dauntra shouted my name. From the background noise, it sounded like she was calling from a nightclub. Where a murder was being committed.

Which, knowing Dauntra, was not out of the realm of the possible.

“Dauntra?” I wasn’t sure she could hear me. Where was she? Then I was hit by a horrible thought. “Oh my God, are you still in jail?”

“No,” Dauntra said with a laugh. “I’m at a friend’s house. Look, I just wanted to call and say thanks. For taking over my shift the other night. I totally owe you!”

“Oh,” I said. “No problem. I hope you, um, didn’t have too bad a time in jail.”

“Are you kidding?” Dauntra said. “It was GREAT. I told ’em to keep my bunk warm for me since I expect I’ll be back there real soon. But don’t worry, I’ll be out in time for my shift on Friday. Oh, right, you’re going to your grandma’s for Thanksgiving. Will you be back for your shift on Friday?”

“Uh,” I said. “I’m not really sure. I might not be going. To my grandma’s, I mean.” I thought, once again, about asking Dauntra what she would do in my shoes…about going to Camp David, I mean.

But the thing was, I already had a pretty good idea. What Dauntra would do, I mean.

Dauntra would Just Do It.

“I haven’t really decided yet,” was what I settled for saying.

“Well, it won’t be the same without you,” Dauntra said, just as someone in the background of wherever she was let out a shriek, and said, “Kevin! Don’t!”

“Um,” I said. “Is everything okay there?”

“Oh, sure,” Dauntra said with a giggle. “Kevin just stepped on the pizza. Again.”

I didn’t even bother to ask what the pizza was doing on the floor. I sound like a big enough dork when I talk to Dauntra.

“So listen,” Dauntra said. “I was thinking. We should do a die-in at work. To protest Stan searching our bags.”

“Um,” I said. “I don’t know about that.”

“Come on! It’ll be fun.”

“I’m not sure a die-in is the most effective way to get our point across,” I said. I hated to be the one to burst her bubble, especially because in so many ways, I wanted to be her. I mean, Dauntra just didn’t care what anybody said about her. I wished I could be like that. “The thing is, we might get. You know. Fired.”

“God,” she said. “You’re probably right. Damn. Oh, well. I’ll think of something.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well. See ya later.”

“Yeah, see you tomorrow night,” Dauntra said. And hung up, just as someone screamed, “Kev-IN!”

Which is kind of funny. I mean, that she said, See you tomorrow night. Because I’m not working tomorrow night. I have the town hall meeting on MTV.


 

Top ten reasons it rules to be a teen in the United States (as opposed to elsewhere):

10. It’s unlikely you’ll end up being one of the 250 million children worldwide between the ages of four and fourteen who work a full-time job (unless you have parents like mine. The only reason they’re not making me work forty hours a week instead of six is because it’s against the law. Thank God).

9. Three hundred thousand kids a year are forced to serve as soldiers in armed combat by their governments or rebel insurgents. With guns, and everything (although, seriously, what government would give my sister Lucy a gun? She’d probably use it as a hair straightening iron).

8. Corporal punishment was abolished here ages ago, but in many countries today, it is still considered perfectly acceptable for teachers to cane children for tardiness or giving a wrong answer (although this would so cut down on the level of goofing off at Adams Prep, we might actually learn something for a change).

7. One hundred thirty million children in developing countries are not in primary school. The vast majority of them are girls (and as much as I hate school, I do realize it’s necessary. I mean, so you can, like, get a better job than one at Potomac Video. Because $6.75 an hour does NOT go that far).

6. In some parts of the Middle East and India, if you’re a girl who gets caught flirting with some dude you met at the mall or whatever, your male relatives can murder you and pretty much get away with it, because of the perception that you’ve disgraced their family (which basically means Lucy? Yeah, she would never have lived long enough to flunk the SATs if she lived in Saudi Arabia or wherever).

5. Instances of girls as young as seven being forced to marry are common in sub-Saharan Africa, where 82 million girls will end up married before the age of eighteen, whether they like it or not—most of them not (in the United States, this only happens in Utah. And maybe parts of, like, the Appalachians).

4. Globally, an estimated 12 million children under the age of five die every year, mostly of easily preventable causes. About 160 million children are malnourished (and not because they’re just eating Pop-Tarts all day like I would if I could get away with it).

3. In Singapore, you have to get a special license to chew gum in public. If you don’t have the license, and they catch you chewing gum, you can be publicly caned (although if people here in the United States had to get a license to chew gum, there would be a lot less cleaning up to do on the Metro).

2. In order to combat many of these rights abuses, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that seeks to address the particular human rights of children and to set minimum standards for the protection of their rights. There are only two countries standing in the way of the treaty being signed. One is Somalia.

The other is the United States.

Why? Because there’s a clause in the treaty that suggests that girl victims of international war crimes be offered birth control counseling, and the religious right in the United States doesn’t like that.

And the number-one reason it rules to be a teen in the United States:

1. Because this is still one of the few places on earth where you can mention how much something like the above sucks and not get thrown in jail for it.

Unless you’re Dauntra, I mean, and you mention it by pretending to be dead in the middle of the street.


10

David got to the studio before I did. When I walked in, he was already straddling his drawing bench, arranging his pencils on the seat in front of him.

The minute I saw him, my heart did that flippy thing it does whenever David walks into the room. That thing Rebecca calls frisson. It got even worse when David looked up and saw me standing there, and our gazes met, and he smiled.

“Hey, Sharona,” he said. “Long time no see.”

And it was like there was this invisible bungee cord between us. Because I suddenly found myself being propelled toward him, until I was standing with my arms wrapped around his head, holding his face to my stomach, since I hadn’t even given him time to stand up and hug me back properly.

“Well,” David said in a strangled voice into the front of my shirt, “nice to see you too.”

“Sorry,” I said, letting go of his head—reluctantly—and lowering myself onto the bench beside his. “I just…I really missed you. I didn’t realize how much until just now, when I saw you.”

“Well, that’s flattering,” David said. “I guess.” Then he leaned over and said, “I missed you, too,” and kissed me.

For a long time.

So long that we didn’t even notice the room was filling up with other people until Susan Boone herself cleared her throat, kind of noisily. Then we pulled guiltily apart, and saw that Terry was making himself comfortable, this time in more of a lounging pose, on the satin comforter Susan had laid across the raised platform.

Terry winked at me—I guess because of the intimate conversation he and I had had the last time I’d seen him—as Susan was fussing around with the comforter beneath him.

And I winked back, because, well, what else are you supposed to do when a naked guy winks at you?

Besides, it wasn’t like I was freaked out anymore. About seeing a naked guy, I mean.

At least, I didn’t think I was. I mean, I didn’t feel freaked out.

But I guess I must have seemed freaked out, since about an hour and a half into our lesson, Susan Boone came over and asked me, quietly, if everything was all right.

I looked up at her, feeling kind of dazed, the way I always do when I’m concentrating on a drawing and someone interrupts me.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Why?”

Which was when it hit me. Oh my God! What if Susan wasn’t talking about what had happened during our last lesson, with me freaking out over Terry and all? What if she was talking about something else—like how I was thinking about having sex with David? I mean, she’s an artist and all, and way more perceptive than, say, my mom and dad, so she might actually have figured it out. Was that what she meant when she asked if everything was all right?

And if so, what was I going to say?

“Well, I’m just concerned,” Susan said, looking at my drawing pad. “You seem to be concentrating so hard on getting the figure in, that you’re completely neglecting everything else.”

Blinking, I looked where she was pointing. I’d rendered a highly realistic portrait, it was true, of Terry, in all his naked glory.

But it was also kind of true that he was just hanging there, basically in outer space.

“A drawing is like building a house, Sam. You can’t start by hanging curtains. You have to build a foundation first.”

Taking my pencil from me, Susan sketched in a background behind the figure I’d drawn.