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Denise Chapman found a seat at the rear of the bus, in the very back row. She was thankful that the bus wouldn’t be crowded. Only about thirty kids would be making the trip to the state fair, and this huge old bus had room for twice that many. Most of the kids were already crowded together in the seats in the front and the middle of the bus. With luck, she’d have the back of the bus all to herself and the trip down to the state fair would be pleasant instead of an ordeal. She’d brought along a half-dozen new teen-romance novels to read. She hoped to get lost in a good story and completely block out this trip she’d been forced to take by her parents.
“You need to socialize more,” her mother was always saying. “It’s not normal for a girl your age to spend all her time with her nose in a book or doing her chores. You need to meet some boys, to go out on dates, have some fun.”
It did no good to tell her mother that she enjoyed doing her chores, that more than anything she enjoyed reading her romance novels, that she much preferred the boys in her books to the flesh-and-blood boys she went to school with. The boys in her novels were all so chivalrous, so non-threatening. The boys at school, on the other hand, were crude and dirty-minded. The flesh-and-blood boys had only one thing on their minds — how to take advantage of a girl every chance they got. And real boys all carried that hard weapon between their legs, that masculine appendage that gave Denise the shivers even to think about. She didn’t dare mention to her mother that she was scared to death of boys, and her mother wouldn’t listen to her excuses.
Fictional reading for entertainment purposes only.