Artifacts, 9: "Cmon, if it's not because I'm girl then why can't I beat out Quentin for the spot?" Kerry was leaning into him, smiling, and Aaron thought for a moment that she looked like she was going to kiss him. Which she clearly wasn't even thinking about, he told himself. It wasn't that Kerry couldn't like him. It was that their circles did not intersect at all. She was smart: a Dean's List perennial who'd gotten a writeup in the local paper for getting perfect scores on her SAT, even though she took it a year early. She was popular, but didn't hang around the "cool" kids, a group headed by Quentin Lauder, all that much. She did her own thing, as Aaron's mom would say, not entirely approvingly, with a group of girls who, like her, were good at school but not overly involved in it. Instead, they circulated petitions on their own, or went to film festivals, or backpacking weekends, all things Aaron had heard her talking about. She and Aaron (and Quentin) had known each other all their lives, because they'd lived on the same street all their lives, Quentin down at the entrance to their subdivision in the duplex his family owned but which never had the other unit rented out, Kerry's family on the other end of the road where it split into the two halves of the road that encircled their small subdivision, which, despite having been around for nearly 25 years now, still was half-undeveloped, numerous vacant lots and half-finished projects forming a demarcation between the settled half and the half filled with overgrown lots still vaguely marked by weathered posts. A lawsuit against the defunct developer had been making its way through the courts for nearly five years now. Aaron's parents were somehow a part of that Aaron's own house was in between the other two, almost exactly in the middle and bordering on the park built around the Trident. That proximity meant Kerry said hi to him when they saw each other, and was friendly, but did not elevate him to potential boyfriend material. "He uses an Aritfact," Aaron blurted, before he could overthink it even more. To hs dismay the statement caused Kerry to pull back from him.#ericajong#1980sbooks#1980s