Cherry (25 page)

Somehow she managed to glance over at her phone and see Dylan's name on the screen, and she was already missing him and their phonefalls and everything, and so without overthinking it any further than she already had, she picked up the phone.

“Hello,” she said with a giggle.

“Hey . . . ,” Dylan said. “You okay?”

“Oh yeah . . . I'm . . .” Zoe tried to control her laughter, but her blood was all still pumping faster than usual.

“What are you doing?” Dylan asked, sounding as if he had
almost
managed to put the pieces together.

“Um, you know, I'm just . . . ,” Zoe said, focusing on slowing down her breathing. Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

Dylan heard the breaths, and the tone in Zoe's voice and suddenly it clicked. “Zoe. Reed,” he said deliberately. “Sorry if I'm . . .
interrupting
.”

“What?
No.
There's nothing . . . you're not . . .”

“You sure about that?” Dylan laughed.

No.

Zoe wasn't sure about anything.

She wasn't sure what she was doing or if it really felt good or even why she'd picked up the phone exactly. “I just . . . I'd been wanting to talk to you, and I saw you were calling.”

“It's cool,” Dylan said without any judgment in his voice. “And . . . whatever you're doing right now, I think you should know that I, um, I like it, and I'm gonna let you get back to it.”

Zoe wanted to say that she didn't want to get back to it or need to get back to it, but that would've been a lie. She wanted to. And so she would. And a very small part of Zoe also wanted to ask Dylan to stay on the phone with her while she did, but she couldn't say that, either.

Extending that kind of invitation would mean crossing an uncrossable line.

She wasn't going to do that right now.

Not to Dylan. Not to Austin. And not to herself either.

EMMA
had expected things would go back to normal with Savannah . . .

. . . but they still hadn't.

She wasn't sure if it was the dance floor kiss itself or the conversation they'd had in front of Savannah's house the following afternoon that had thrown everything out of whack, but something between them just wasn't the same anymore.

It used to be all easy and effortless.

Now everything felt rather strained and calculated.

Savannah stayed after school on Wednesday to cover the varsity water polo match for the paper. Emma stayed too. To take pictures for the yearbook. The girls spent most of the match standing only about ten feet apart, watching the game and taking notes and snapping pictures, but the distance between them might as well have been a mile. Afterward, Savannah headed back to the yearbook room
to type up her notes. Emma followed after her. “My HD card is full,” she said out loud as an explanation.

“You don't have to make up excuses to keep hanging out with me.”

“What?” Emma asked, hoping Savannah would stop and talk to her for a minute.

She didn't.

Instead, she kept walking and talking, forcing Emma to pick up the pace. “You have an open invitation to hang out with me. If you want to stay for the water polo match, if you want to come to the yearbook room, if you want to sit and do nothing, then fine, let's do it, but you don't have to make things up,” Savannah said all at once. It wasn't her usual tone of voice or the usual kinds of words she used to talk to Emma, and Emma didn't like the way it sounded as it came out of her mouth. But when Emma opened
her
mouth to try and respond, all her thoughts just came out with the sound of a giant whistle. It was the whistle that finally made Savannah stop walking. She turned back to look at Emma. “What is happening?” she asked, clearly exasperated.

“What do you mean?” Emma asked just as sharply.

“I mean, what the hell are you doing right now?”

“I don't know! I don't ever know what I'm doing! Ever!” Emma shouted. “I don't even know why I was just shouting,” she added, lowering her voice again.

Then.

After what felt like the longest silence in the history of
silences, Savannah finally managed to say what they were both thinking:

“It wasn't weird.”

“The kiss,” Emma whispered back. The two little words came out of her mouth so softly she wasn't sure Savannah would even hear them.

“You don't have to pretend you didn't like it,” Savannah said, using her normal voice volume again.

“I'm not pretending. I'm here—”

“Yeah, you're here, but only because you're making excuses—”

“Okay, okay,” Emma said, stepping closer to Savannah. She reached out and touched her arm, as if to make sure she wasn't going to walk away again. “I'm . . . you know, I've been having a hard time with senior year and everything . . .” Savannah waited for Emma to find some more words, but after a few moments she could only manage two more. “It's not . . .”

“What? It's not you, it's me?” Savannah teased. “You're such a giant, boring cliché, Emma O'Malley.”

“So maybe I am. But high school is almost over, and I feel like I know even
less
now than I did when I started, even though it feels like everyone is expecting me to just, like, magically be this whole person all of a sudden . . .”

“Emma. Stop. Look . . . I hate to have to be the one to break this to you, but you're
already
a whole person. It's not ‘all of a sudden.' It's
already
happened. Like, right now, in this
actual
sudden—”

“Actual sudden?
That is not a real phrase—”

“Yeah, well, for actual and for real: You are already a fully formed human. You can still be in process or whatever. I think we all are . . . but you're still already you.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you hear me though?”

“I think so,” Emma said, even though she wasn't sure.

“You're already you—and you're already magical, so can we agree that whatever
this
is . . . is already good too?”

“Yes.” Emma nodded. Savannah's use of the word “magical” was still echoing inside her head. She didn't just
hear
that part, she felt it.

“Okay. So. Then. Are we . . . ?”

“Savannah. If you try to ‘
expectation
' me right now, I swear . . .”

“No, no,” Savannah said quickly, “I wouldn't dare do that to you.”

Good
, Emma thought.

Right now, for the first time in a long time, all of her thoughts were mostly clear and genuinely good.

Now
that
felt like some actual progress.

  *  *  *  

ZOE
was surprised to see Dylan standing in front of her house.

He had texted her about an hour ago, saying that he needed to see her. And now here he was, standing on the sidewalk at 9:00 p.m. on a Wednesday night.

“What's up?” she asked. “Another mix CD?”

“I can't
stop thinking about you.”

Zoe wasn't expecting that.

“And,” he added, nervously biting his lip, “I can't stop thinking about the other night . . . and how you picked up the phone while you were—”

“Ohmigod, Dylan. I swear to God if you say it out loud—”

“Okay, I won't . . . ,” Dylan said as his whole face turned into a smile. “But I do want to say that . . . I think there's a reason you picked up.”

“I picked up because you were calling me for the first time in
weeks
—”

“Yeah, but . . . I know you're attracted to me—”

“Oh, okay. Thank you—”

“—and I know I'm attracted to you, too! That's it. That's why I'm here. I can't stop thinking about you.”

Zoe let Dylan's words hang in the air for a moment.

She'd never heard him say anything like that before. Not even close. She waited for him to say something—
anything
—more . . . but he didn't. So she filled in the silence instead: “I have a boyfriend.” Zoe could feel her temperature rising. “I don't want to do this right now . . .”

“But . . . I just . . . feel like I'm gonna lose you, Zoe,” Dylan finally managed to say.

“That's a weird thing to say.”

“Why?”

“Because you never had me. You could've, maybe, at some point, but you didn't want me all these years, so—”

“That's not true—”

“But it
is
true. It's
painfully, absolutely true—and you're only saying this to me now because I have a nice boyfriend who isn't embarrassed to be with me in public—”

“No. Stop. Your nice, public boyfriend only started liking you once you got boobs!”

“Ohmigod.”

“What?”

“That's not fair.”

“Are we just supposed to pretend they don't exist?”

“I don't know! Why do you care about them so much?”

“That's kind of a stupid question.”

“
You're
kind of a stupid question,” Zoe said, wanting to laugh and scream at Dylan all at the same time. “I didn't really even know Austin
until
I had boobs, so your argument is also stupid.”

“Whatever. I'm saying I knew you before all that—”

“And what . . . ? Do you want, like, friendship
bonus points
for being nice to the awkward, frizzy-haired charity case?”

“Being
nice
? Zoe, is that what you think we've been doing all this time . . . ?”

“Stop,” Zoe said, surprised to hear the word come out of her mouth.

“Stop?”

“This isn't . . . I have a boyfriend.”

“I know, Zoe, but that doesn't mean . . . I'm just trying to tell you how
I
feel—about you—”

“I don't care how you feel! About anything!” Zoe said, even though they both knew that wasn't true. She did care.
She cared about Dylan so much. Probably too much. And there was a time when she would've killed for a moment like this. She'd wanted it to happen for years. But not now. Not like this . . . She didn't know what else to say. “I'm with Austin, and we're having sex now, so . . .”

Dylan's face sank.

Zoe knew he wasn't expecting that.

And this was certainly
not
how she had envisioned telling him, but the words had come out of her mouth, and she couldn't take them back now. “I'm sorry. For just saying it like that—”

“No, it's—”

“—but we hadn't really talked in a while, so . . .”

“Yeah. It's . . . I mean that's . . . cool. I just . . . I feel like an idiot.”

Zoe hated the look on Dylan's face right now, so disappointed and betrayed. Honestly, she felt like an idiot too. And she felt like there was so much more she wanted to say to him—but maybe there was also nothing at all. Dylan stood silently in front of her, avoiding her eye contact. All of their past conversations, all of the phonefalls, began to replay in Zoe's brain all at once, giving her a front row seat to relive them and over-analyze them at the same time. It looked like Dylan might've been doing the same thing. Or maybe he was just trying as hard as he could not to get emotional and therefore maybe he wasn't thinking about anything at all. Zoe couldn't quite tell. “I feel like you've been lying to me this whole time,” she finally managed.

“Zoe. I never lied to you,” Dylan insisted.

“I think it's
time for you to go home.”

“Zoe, please . . . ,” Dylan said as sincerely and sweetly as he could. “The only lie I ever told you was that I only liked you when I already knew I was completely in love with you.”

“Completely?”

“Maybe not the whole time, but—”

“Of course it wasn't the whole time! It couldn't've been! You were too busy dating a parade of skinny blond girls!” Zoe said sharply and loudly.

“Yeah. And falling asleep on the phone with you every night,” Dylan said softly.

Zoe had wanted to hear Dylan say this sort of thing for so long, but now that he had, now that she was listening to the words actually come out of his mouth, it just felt forced. “I feel like you only want to be with me now because I want to be with someone else,” Zoe said. She wasn't entirely sure she believed that, but was sure that she had to say it. And then there really was nothing left to say. Zoe turned around and left Dylan standing alone behind her.

LAYLA
couldn't remember the last time she'd had a new first kiss.

The only person she'd kissed for the past two years was Logan, and the painful truth was that he was still the person she wanted to be kissing, but he was no longer an option.

Instead she made a kiss list.

She took out a pen and a piece of paper and wrote down a list of people she wanted to kiss. It wasn't another to-do list, more like a wish list, and it made her feel silly and small, but she had to do
something
. She wished she had a better, more brilliant idea, but this kiss list was the best she could come up with considering the circumstances, mostly the fact that Logan was now (indefinitely) kissing Vanessa and there was absolutely nothing she could do about that.

So far Layla had written down five names: Wyatt (the cute boy from Savannah's party whose last name she didn't know)
followed by Jackson Clark, Miles Roth, Tyson Marks, and Channing Tatum.

Obviously, that last name was more of a dream than a plan, but Layla always mushed those two things up in her mind anyway.