Fangirl

Levi. Because I’m the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight—and Levi can’t even read.
    Cath immediately felt bad for thinking that. Levi could read. (Sort of.)
    She’d always thought that either people could read or they couldn’t. Not this in-between thing that Levi had, where his brain could catch the words but couldn’t hold on to them. Like reading was one of those rip-off claw games they had at the bowling alley.
    But Levi clearly wasn’t dumb. He remembered everything. He could quote extensively from the Simon Snow movies, and he knew everything there was to know about bison and piping plovers.… And why was she even arguing this point with herself?
    It’s not like she was going to send Abel Levi’s ACT scores.
    She should have texted him back. (Levi, not Abel.)
    But that would have been engaging in this situation. Like moving a chess piece. Or kicking off from the ground on a teeter-totter. Better to leave Levi up in the air for a day or two than to end up stuck there by herself.…
    The fact that she was thinking about whatever this was in terms of playground equipment showed that she wasn’t ready for it. For him. Levi was an adult. He had a truck. And facial hair. And he’d slept with Reagan; she’d practically admitted it.
    Cath didn’t want to look at a guy and picture the people he’d slept with.…
    Which had never been an issue with Abel. Nothing was ever an issue with Abel. Because, she could hear Wren screaming, you didn’t like him!
    Cath liked Levi. A lot. She liked looking at him. She liked listening to him—though sometimes she hated listening to him talk to other people. She hated the way he passed out smiles to everyone he met like it didn’t cost him anything, like he’d never run out. He made everything look so easy.…
    Even standing. You didn’t realize how much work everyone else put into holding themselves upright until you saw Levi leaning against a wall. He looked like he was leaning on something even when he wasn’t. He made standing look like vertical lying down.
    Thinking about Levi’s lazy hips and loose shoulders just dragged Cath’s memory back to her bed.
    She’d spent the night with a boy. Slept with him. And never mind that that’s all they’d done, because it was still a huge deal. She wished she could talk to Wren about this.…
    Fuck Wren.
    No … Damn her. Never mind her. All Wren did lately was complicate Cath’s world.
    Cath had slept with a boy.
    With a guy.
    And it was awesome. Warm. And tangly. What would have happened if they’d woken up any other way? Without Reagan barging in. Would Levi have kissed her again? Or would he still have rushed off with nothing more than a “later”?
    Later …
    Cath stared at her laptop. She’d been working on the same paragraph for two hours. It was a love scene (a pretty mild one), and she kept losing track of where Baz and Simon’s hands were supposed to be. It was confusing sometimes with all the he s and the him s, and she’d been staring at this paragraph for so long, she was starting to feel like she’d written every sentence before. Maybe she had.
    She shut the laptop and stood up. It was almost ten o’clock. What time did parties end? (What time did they start?) Not that it mattered, at this point. Cath didn’t have any way to get to Levi’s house.
    She walked over and stood in front of the full-length mirror that was mounted on their door.
    Cath looked like exactly who she was—an eighteen-year-old nerd who knew eff-all about boys or parties.
    Skinny jeans. Unskinny hips. A faded pink T-shirt that said, THE MAGIC WORD IS PLEASE . A pink-and-brown argyle cardigan. Her hair was pulled up into a floppy half bun on top of her head.
    Cath pulled the rubber band out of her hair and took off her glasses; she had to step closer to the mirror to see herself clearly.
    She lifted her chin up and forced her forehead to relax. “I’m the Cool One,” she told herself. “Somebody give me some tequila because I’ll totally drink it. And there’s no way you’re going to find me later having a panic attack in your parents’ bathroom. Who wants to French-kiss?”
    This is why she couldn’t be with Levi. She still called it “French-kissing,” and he just went around putting his tongue in people’s mouths.
    Cath still didn’t look like the Cool One. She didn’t look like Wren.
    She pushed her shoulders back, let her chest stick out. There was nothing wrong