The Kiss Off by Sarah Billington Page B

hardly notice the pimples anymore,” Vanya said helpfully. Mads gasped and slapped her hand to her chin. I pulled it away and clasped both her hands in mine, squeezing them reassuringly.
    “And you’ve got us there to help you.”
    For a moment she seemed to be settling down, but then she pulled her hands away, strode to the other side of the room and declared: “I’m not pretty, I’m horrible, I’m hideous, I’m disfigured!”
    “What are you talking about?”
    And that was when she whipped her top off. Just like that. She pointed to her boobs. Her naked boobs. This was new.
    “Um, Mads,” I started.
    “I like this one!” Vanya threw whatever top she was holding at the time at Mads’s chest. It happened to be her gym uniform. Mads threw it to the ‘hell no’ pile.
    “Look at them,” she said. “Look at the left one, it’s growing as big as a porn star’s but then look at the right. It looks like my dad’s boobs!” I didn’t exactly want to, but since she was being so demanding about it, I checked out her boobs. I looked from the left to the right and back again.
    “They look fine to me.”
    “They’re not fine!”
    “What do you think, Van?” Vanya rolled her eyes, bent at the waist and squinted at Mads’s boobs.
    “You say the left one’s bigger?” she asked.
    “It is!”
    “I don’t think you have to worry. The other one’ll catch up.” Van stood up and crossed her arms with a nod.
    “And besides, Mrs. McCleary said it’s perfectly normal to have one boob bigger than the other.” I reassured her.
    “You see it too, then?” Mads looked panic stricken. “That the left is bigger?”
    “No!” Vanya and I yelled together.
    “You don’t?”
    “Your boobs are fine, Mads,” I told her, picking up a baby pink tank top from the ‘maybe’ pile. I handed it to her slowly. Thankfully, she clutched it to her chest.
    Vanya held up Mads’s vintage electric blue Motocross jacket, and we had a winner.
    “I think that’d look good with some long necklaces, don’t you?”
    ***
    Mads was still a bit crazy with nerves when we got to the mall and headed toward the cinema, so much so that we had to detour to the rest rooms and get her to jump around a bit and shake her arms in the air to exhaust some of that nervous energy. When we walked into the cinema foyer, however, we discovered that it wasn’t actually Mads who needed to be nervous. Dev and his boys were there, and Dev’s face lit up when he saw her. And Drew gave us a wave, but his other friend didn’t smile. He sort of grimaced. Turns out, Dev’s other friend was Cam. I was completely blind-sided. I didn’t even know they hung out. I realized I’d stopped walking when Vanya yanked on my sleeve a couple of times. Dev’s only new this year so we didn’t really know who he considered his friends yet and who were just random people he knew. He was still sorting through the crap from the doubly crap.
    Van and I made sure that of the three of us, Mads was most definitely the hottest one, so as not to distract him from his date. So Mads was the one looking hot, while Van was wearing sweat pants and I had my hair in a messy knot on the top of my head. I hadn’t even brushed it.
    And it turns out the boys in our class who Dev had decided were his actual friends were Drew – a good guy, everyone knows that – and…Cam. This didn’t say much for his taste in people. But Drew told me when Cam wasn’t listening that apparently Dev made sure not to invite Nikki because he really doesn’t like her. And he does like Mads, so maybe he had some taste after all. Either way, it looked like I was taking one for the team.
    Mads owed me big.
    Anyway, you’d think my girls would nip this potentially disastrous situation in the bud, it had been weeks since I’d last had a proper conversation with Cam, not since before the whole… well, not since before her . So I would have thought they’d run some interference for me, but no. The losers