If I Tell

trouble was that his voice sounded casual, almost brotherly, as if he was about to suggest setting me up on a blind date. Just what I needed. Love help from the juvenile delinquent I secretly crushed on. Man. I was seriously messed up.
    Jackson pointed to my guitar. “How about someone who digs Neil Diamond?” He smiled and my heart actually hurt.
    I leaped up, unable to sit still and listen to him trying to set me up. “We should get ready for work.” I picked up my guitar case and slung it over my shoulder.
    Jackson glanced at the clock on the wall. “Yup. I guess we should.”
    “It’s not really your business, you know. Who my friends are.”
    He lifted his shoulder. “Fair enough. Just that I thought I was one, you know? Seems to me you’re a girl who could use some laughs.” He got to his feet and held out his hand. “After you.”
    I scooted past him a little too closely, and his hand brushed against the exposed part of my skin. A shiver tingled up and down my back, but thankfully he didn’t seem to notice my reaction.
    “Maybe you could play your guitar just for me someday,” he said.
    “Maybe you could hand over your next paycheck.”
    He laughed, but his cell rang, and he turned his back to me and answered it.
    “Yeah. I got your stuff,” I heard him say into the phone.
    Great. Friends with a drug dealer. Grandpa had to be rolling in his grave. Again.
    ***
    Over the next few weeks, Jackson and I worked a lot of the same shifts at Grinds. I wondered if it had anything to do with Amber’s scheduling. She liked to nag me about needing more friends my own age and was probably stepping in. I liked talking to Jackson, but we had an unspoken agreement. Some things we didn’t discuss. Lacey. Nathan. His phone calls that I suspected had to do with drugs. I ignored them because his offer of friendship had become a pseudo-reality. My first friendship with a boy.
    I kept forgetting to bring his hoodie to work, and he eventually told me not to worry about it, and I kind of claimed it as my own. I didn’t wear it, but I wrapped it on my shoulders to keep warm when playing guitar in my room.
    I thought about inviting Ashley to hang at the coffee shop to show people I wasn’t as bad off as everyone thought, but she had swim practices after school. Besides, I didn’t want to subject her to Lacey’s wrath.
    Ashley invited me to swim with her, but that wasn’t going to happen. She also asked me to hang with her and Marnie, but I didn’t want to be a third wheel and said no.
    Lacey’s calls and pleas for forgiveness eventually tapered off. I never stayed for coffee with her or Nathan after work, and I didn’t go to parties or hang at their house anymore. The time I used to spend with Lacey I spent alone playing the guitar. I wrote some new songs, driven by feelings I couldn’t express any other way.
    I kept my distance from my expanding Mom too, because when I saw her stomach, all I could think about was Simon. The secret ate away at me, but I couldn’t do anything except keep it inside and hope that was the right thing to do. Sometimes I wished I’d never been at that party, that I’d never seen Simon and Lacey.
    I wondered what was worse, knowing or not knowing?

chapter nine
    My fingers strummed the strings of my guitar. I closed my eyes and bobbed my head, feeling the sound more than hearing it. I hummed, rolling new words to the melody over in my mind. I tried different versions of the chorus, playing the same chords over and over. I’d been composing and rewriting for weeks.
    Then, forgetting about chord progressions or melody, I improvised a new sentence to see if I could open my mind and get it right. I didn’t have it yet, but I trusted my process. It would come.
    I strummed, searching the music and letting sound wash over me.
    “I saw you there, exposing your lies.”
    The phone rang and I snarled at it, but Grandma had told me she was expecting a call, so I put down my guitar and leaned across my bed to pick it up.
    “Jaz?”
    “Hey, Mom.” Damn. I’d been too out of it to check the call display.
    “Hi, honey. I’m so glad I finally caught you. I haven’t seen you in ages. You should see me. I’m huge. Bloated. I look like someone injected my entire body with helium. I think the baby dropped though…”
    She went on and on about week thirty-four of her pregnancy, describing new symptoms and ailments. In vivid detail. After she mentioned hemorrhoids, I tuned out until she