Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love (20 page)
Tomorrow!
“Hey,” I say. “I’ve got a date with Randall tomorrow.”
“Cool,” says Matthew. “Don’t take any guff from the Randinator! Feesha deserves the best!”
“Thanks,” I giggle. “I’ll remember that.”
I wonder if I should ask him about whether he likes anyone new, now that his crush on Jess is
histoire
. But he seems to be thinking about something else.
The little kids are starting to arrive at the playground. Matthew and I watch them take over the benches, race to the swings, scramble up the slide. I bet some of them have newly folded cootie catchers in the pockets of their windbreakers, predicting with absolute certainty which ones of them will marry which other ones.
Pick a color! O-R-A-N-G-E, Matthew! You picked Matthew! Ewwwwwwww!
“Paste breath!” a little boy yells, throwing a fistful of grass into a girl’s hair. “You have paste breath!” He runs, and with an expression of ferocious clarity, the girl chases him round and round the playground, getting closer with each lap.
“I think he likes her,” Matthew and I say, at exactly the same time, like we planned it but of course we didn’t.
And we crack up laughing.
Yet another reason why I’m friends with Matthew Dwyer.
Maryrose wood
grew up on Long Island and moved to New York City at age seventeen. She currently lives in Manhattan with her two children, who are both remarkable even by New York standards.
This is her first novel, but Maryrose also writes for the theater and film. Her work as a lyricist and librettist has won prestigious awards. These are nice but are often presented at award ceremonies, for which it is very, very difficult to choose an outfit.
Maryrose has a cat but secretly prefers dogs, and does not ride her bike as often as she would like. She strives to live with the appropriate mixture of coolness and whimsy and suspects this may in fact be the golden road to happiness. She will let you know how it turns out.
Published by Delacorte Press
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Maryrose Wood
All rights reserved.
DELACORTE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wood, Maryrose.
Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs fall in love / Maryrose Wood. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: A group of girls calling themselves the Sex Kittens and their male
counterparts, the Horn Dawgs, face love, karate, and science experiments in an
unstructured private school setting in New York City.
[1. High schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—
Fiction. 4. Love—Fiction. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W8524Sex 2006
[Fic]—dc22 2005013659
eISBN: 978-0-307-43373-2
v3.0