Billie Jo

Billie Jo was wearing jeans when Mike saw her. He had to blink a few times. She had turned away from her locker and he quickly opened his. Billie hid a smirk and placed a hand on her hip. "Admiring the view?"

Mike had the decency to blush. "You never wear jeans," he mumbled to his gun metal gray locker, chancing another glance at Billie's legs.

"I like skirts better," she said, shrugging. Her hand snuck up to ruffle Mike's hair. "Maybe I'll wear jeans more. I'm a natural tease, you know."

Mike turned and grinned at her. "No, really?" he said sarcastically. For a moment, his hand reached out as if to touch the girl's cheek. But it fell to his side when a passing boy whistled at Billie Jo. Her eyebrows furrowed and she turned toward the whistle to cover her confusion.

Colby, the boy from her computer class.

A smile flitted across her painted lips. Mike's expression tightened and he shut his locker loudly. Billie Jo glared at him. "And what's your problem exactly?"

"I don't like him," Mike said, repeating what he had told her during lunch the day before.

"I'll keep that in mind," she snapped. "But you aren't my boyfriend. Or my brother. Or my dad. You're just being stupid."

"And when you find out he wants nothing more than T & A, you let me know." He practically spat the words out at her, not sure why he was saying them in the first place.

"You're an asshole," Billie said coldly, taking off down the hallway. She was almost immediately intercepted by an auburn-haired girl who introduced herself as Aubrey.

"You're new, aren't you?" Billie had barely nodded when the girl started talking again. "You're in eighth grade, right? God, you're pretty. Is that your natural hair colour? I'd kill for curls like yours. Where'd you get your shoes? Ooh, your nails are pretty. Did you do them yourself?"

"I, uh—"

"Jesus, Aubrey, give her some room to breathe," a blonde girl said, looking up from a magazine she and another girl were looking at. "I'm Jess," she told Billie. "And this is Kate." She poked the girl next to her.

"Billie Jo," the girl said shyly. Her green eyes followed Mike as he walked past, deliberately ignoring her. "Your boyfriend?" Aubrey asked.

"N—"

"He's not bad-looking. Never seen him before. Is he in our grade? Swear I know everyone. What's his name? Do—"

Jess's hand covered the rambling girl's mouth. "She's just talking to make sure the memory chip in her brain isn't fried."

Billie's head was still spinning from a million questions about a boy she'd known for less than a month. "Not my boyfriend," was all she could manage. "I-I have class." She was regretting wearing jeans. Her hands didn't have a skirt to smooth down and were instead fidgeting with the zipper on her purse and the belt loops of her jeans.

"Sit with us at lunch," Jess said. "We eat in the Art Room. Mr. Klosik is so cool. He lets us curse and play music."

"I eat with Mike," Billie Jo said, voice distant and shaking as she turned away and started walking toward the computer lab. Now she just had to make up with Mike during third period English.

* * *

Billie edged as far to the left as her desk would permit, trying to ignore the come-ons from the guy next to her. He had more piercings than any one person should and smelled like a mixture of gasoline and Jack Daniels.

"I could do things to you so good, babe, you wouldn't be able to sleep for a week."

Billie stared at her history book, half amused. What the hell does that mean anyway?

Ollie Armstrong always said she had no idea where Billie got her mouth, but her daughter always said that thirty minutes in school would teach you more curses than prime numbers. Fortunately, her mouth typically only got carried away when they were fighting, otherwise the threat of home schooling might not have been a threat much longer.

Billie Jo spent the remaining twenty minutes of class ignoring increasingly vulgar comments, half of which she didn't understand, and pretending she knew what the hell her teacher was talking about. When the bell rang she leapt up and immediately headed for her locker, trying to lose her 'admirer' in the sea of junior high students.

She was about five feet from her locker and Mike when the boy grabbed her arm. "Come on, baby. You, me, back of my car. You'd look really pretty in the moonlight, you know."

Mike saw it. Mike didn't like it.

"Hey, you!" he snapped as he walked toward Billie. "Just what the fuck do you think you're doing?" Billie lowered her eyes and blushed as Mike walked toward them and placed his hand on her shoulder.

"You her boyfriend or somethin'?" the offending boy asked.

"Something," Mike said. Billie Jo tugged her wrist away from the other boy, losing her balance and falling back against Mike, who slipped an arm around her waist. It was partly instinct, partly something else. What that something else was, however, Mike didn't know.

"Something?" the boy questioned Mike, not even trying to disguise the fact that his eyes were staring directly at Billie's chest.

Mike released his hold on Billie Jo and gently pushed the girl toward their lockers. It didn't take very long for Mike to throw the other boy against a wall. "She doesn't want you to have anything to do with her. And what she wants I'll get her, so don't try anything, you stupid fuck."

Billie Jo's cheeks were still tinged with pink as she and Mike walked toward the English classroom. "Why do you do that?" she asked him quietly, or as quietly as the hallway would allow.

"Were you going to?" Mike asked without looking at her.

Billie bit her lip and shook her head, before realizing he couldn't see the action. "No. I-I can't, I'm not—" She touched Mike's arm, inwardly smiling when he stopped and turned toward her. "Thank you."

"You could," Mike said softly. "If push came to shove, you could, Billie Jo."

The girl gave a soft laugh, but both of them could sense the disbelief in it.

* * *

That first year Mike and Billie were friends not much happened, an extremely unusual thing in the girl's life. She didn't transfer schools and no one groped her in the hallways, mainly because Mike was her standing bodyguard.

She went to Maine with her mother for the summer, for reasons she wouldn't tell Mike, and when she came back with hair even longer than before and a darker shade of lipstick she was hoping her first year of high school would be just as mundane in the social aspect.

"What are you doing after school?" Mike asked Billie Jo during lunch. She was eating an apple and he was smoking a cigarette.

"Well, what are you doing?" Billie asked, tossing the half-eaten piece of fruit on the ground in front of her. The apple had traces of lip gloss on the skin from where her lips had touched it. Seizing opportunity, she dug in her purse and pulled out a camera. Ever since she had started her photography class she never went anywhere without the Nikon.

Mike didn't say anything as Billie Jo snapped pictures of the discarded apple. She liked it that way and he liked to watch her take the photographs. Her face would flush slightly and her teeth bit at her dark gloss-coated lips.

After the camera was safely tucked away in Billie's purse, Mike answered her question. "I've got a date."

"Oh," Billie adverted her eyes from her best friend and looked toward the school. Mike was dating a lot lately. Usually girls from the clubs he would never take her to. He would go out on a date and come to school the next day, hardly able to get through it, too exhausted from the excursions of the night before.

And for reasons she couldn't explain, Billie was growing insanely more jealous by the minute. Her mother had said Mike was trying to make her jealous, but Billie Jo had put her foot down.

* * *

"Why would Mike try to make me jealous?" Billie Jo asked. "I'm not his girlfriend, Mom. He doesn't like me like that. I'm not . . . his type." They were the words Mike had used.

There was no arguing with Billie on that fact. Ollie knew, mothers always do, but she didn't say it. "When Mike sees you with those other boys and when you're just talking with girls at school he's probably worried you might want to hang out with them more." she had said instead.

"Are all boys that stupid?" Billie asked, exasperation rising in her voice.

Ollie gave a soft laugh. "Why do you think God created us, Billie?"

* * *

"Just 'oh'?" Mike asked, putting out his cigarette. "No sassy response this time?"

"If you want to fuck some whore you met in a club, it's no business of mine." Billie Jo said coolly, digging a tube of lip gloss and a mirror out of her purse.

"Just what the fuck is your problem?" Mike snapped. "You went away for the summer and came back a real bitch, you know that?"

"Well, I came back to you being a hypocrite." was Billie's quick reply. "Bitching about me flirting with guys, claiming they only want T & A, but that's all you're after with these girls at the clubs, isn't it? Fuck 'em and dump 'em."

"Jealous?" he snapped.

"Hardly, Pritchard. What's there to be jealous of? A clumsy one-night stand? Please."

* * *

"I still think he's trying to make you jealous," Ollie said in the car as she and her daughter went to pick up Chinese take out.

"Well, there's not a lot I can do about it even if he is," Billie said, playing with her hair. "I don't date."

"Lie," Ollie said, pulling into the parking lot. "Or make up something about flirting with a boy. Mike won't know it's not true."

Billie didn't say much after her mother said that. She went into the bathroom at the restaurant after she told her mother what she wanted and reapplied lip gloss that didn't need reapplied. She stared at herself in the mirror for awhile, scrutinizing her reflection. Not to see if she looked the way she should so people didn't guess, but to see if she looked the way a girl should if she wanted a boy to flirt with her.

She definitely didn't look like the girls Mike went on dates with.