The Last Best Kiss (3 page)

“He’s really smart,” I said. “And nice.”

“If he were really nice, he wouldn’t have put you in this position.”

“Yeah.” I stared up at the ceiling, which I couldn’t actually see in the dark but was reasonably certain was still there. “I guess you’re right.”

Maybe
that
was the moment when I went so far down one path, I couldn’t find my way back.

Because I could have said,
Finn and I have secretly been going out for the last three months.

I could have said,
I actually
want
to go to semiformal with him.

I could have said,
You don’t understand. He’s wonderful, and I’m kind of in love with him.

But it was only later that it felt like I could have said any of those things. At that time, in that moment, it felt like I couldn’t say anything but “I guess you’re right.”

The Saturday morning of the dance, Finn and I met at one of our favorite semideserted bluffs, and as we stood there looking at the ocean, he took my hand and said, “So are we going together to the dance tonight?”

A simple question. Too bad my answer was a babbled mess.

I told him that of course I wanted to go with him—it would be a lot of fun—but all of my friends had agreed to stick together and go in one big group, and it would be mean to the girls who couldn’t get dates for the girls who could to just
abandon
them, and I had to go along with what everyone else wanted, since these were my closest friends, and, anyway, semiformal was pretty lame, everyone knew that, and no one went in couples, no one except people who were, like, really going out seriously and . . .

That’s when I stopped, suddenly deeply uncomfortable. All the talking I’d done made my abrupt silence all the more obvious. It also made me aware that Finn had let go of my hand at some point during my speech.

“So,” he said lightly, “it’s a no.” He turned toward the ocean. “Waves are big today.”

I glanced at the side of his face, saw how suddenly rigid all the muscles in it were, and part of me wanted to say,
Screw my friends—let’s go together
, but the other part of me was relieved to have ended the conversation. So I joked about how I should learn to surf, because with my gracefulness and agility, I’d just totally rule at it, and then I laughed too loudly while he didn’t laugh at all, and eventually he walked me back to my house.

We said good-bye at the front door, and he hesitated, then abruptly leaned toward me. He had been so quiet since our conversation that, when I tilted my face up to his, I expected a quick, dismissive peck. Instead his arms went around me and tightened hard as his lips crushed mine in a way that was hungrier and more demanding—and more wonderful—than any kiss we’d had before. I was glad his arms were pinning me against him, because it felt like my legs were dissolving underneath me.

Then, just as suddenly, he released me and stepped back. I wasn’t ready for that: I swayed and caught at the door handle to steady myself.

“I’ll see you,” he said, and walked away.

Maybe I should have realized there was a hint of something desperate in that good-bye kiss, but I didn’t. I felt slightly dizzy as I watched him go, and I pressed my fingers against my mouth to try to hold the exciting warmth in for a while longer.

I was convinced all that passion was proof that Finn wasn’t angry at me. I walked into the house smiling and humming.

Was he deliberately testing me that night at the dance? I don’t know.

I was definitely tested, and I definitely failed, but whether it was deliberate on Finn’s part—that’s the part I can’t decide.

Not that it matters.

We went to the dance separately, me with my group, Finn by himself.

He showed up late and alone, in a suit that was too big for him. It looked like his father’s. It probably
was
his father’s, and probably was from the nineties.

The guys in my group were all in slim black tuxes, rented for the occasion, which made Finn’s boxy orange-brown suit look even weirder.

When Finn spotted me and headed toward us, Camille started giggling and couldn’t stop. I wasn’t all that close to Camille, but Phoebe had invited her to join our limo since she lived in our neighborhood, and she’d stuck with us once we arrived at the dance. Camille had smuggled a water bottle filled with vodka into the limo we’d all shared and drunk a lot of it on the way. “My god,” she said as Finn came near us, “he looks like an Oompa Loompa.” And Jordan, who was her best friend and had just wandered over to our group, called out to Finn, “Where’s Willy Wonka?”

Finn said, “What?” and the two of them snorted with laughter.

He flushed. He may not have heard what they said, but he knew he was being made fun of. He turned away from them, toward me. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said. I was wearing five-inch platform heels and a super-tight bandage dress. We were all wearing bandage dresses that year, not because we had made a pact or anything, but because they were in. Mine wove together diagonal stripes of purple and pink spandex. Lucy and I had gotten our hair done together at a blow-dry bar, and mine was pinned up with a couple of tiny braids woven in. I felt very sophisticated.

Finn said, “Do you want to dance?”

In those heels I towered over him, and I knew we’d look ridiculous dancing together. People would laugh at the sight of us. I didn’t want to hurt him by saying no without a reason, but I couldn’t think of one that would sound genuine. I opened and closed my mouth without saying a word and glanced desperately at Lucy, who instantly knew I needed help. She took me by the elbow and said, “Hey, Anna, remember that thing we were going to do over on the other side of the room?”

“What?” I said stupidly.

“That
thing
,” she said, and dragged me away.

And I let her.

I even thanked her for it.

The rest doesn’t really matter, does it? That Finn left the dance, or that I felt sick to my stomach for the rest of it, or that he dropped out of the carpool and stopped going out for frozen yogurt and coffee with me—stopped kissing me—stopped talking to me other than a grave nod and an occasional distracted “hi” in the hallway . . .

You rip a seam, the thread pulls out.

If I had apologized, would it have changed anything?

That’s the kind of question that can keep you up at night.

Anyway, I didn’t. I’m not even sure I could have. What are the right words to say after you’ve made someone feel like his attention is an embarrassment to you?

I hung out with my friends at school and at parties, and I worked hard at home on my schoolwork and my art, and I sat alone in the backseat during carpool while Lizzie and Cameron gossiped and complained to each other up front, and I felt lonelier that spring than I ever had before.

And then it was summer vacation. I’d gone to the same sleepaway art camp in northern California for eight weeks every year since I was eleven. Lucy always said, “How can you stand to be away from home for so long?” but her parents totally adored her, so of course she didn’t get it.

Anyway, off I went, and by the time I came back, there were only two weeks left until school started again. Lizzie was packing for her freshman year at UC Santa Cruz, which meant she wouldn’t be driving me that fall, and I didn’t have my license yet, but Phoebe knew a senior named Natalie who was putting together a carpool in our neighborhood. “We just need one more person to get in the good lot,” Phoebe told me on the phone.

“Finn Westbrook lives nearby,” I said, and wondered if he’d agree to share a backseat with me again. I hoped so. I’d been thinking about him a lot that summer and was pretty sure that if I just had some time with him, I could convince him to forgive me.

“Who?”

“The guy who was in my old carpool.”

“Oh, him,” Phoebe said. “I’ll tell Natalie.”

Later she called me back and said, “That kid Finn is gone. His family moved. To Portland. Or was it Seattle? Whatever. Somewhere in Oregon.”

“Seattle’s not in Oregon,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“About Oregon? Clearly not.”

“No, I mean about Finn’s family moving away.”

“That’s what Natalie said. She got his number out of the directory and called him. You didn’t know?”

“It’s not like we’ve kept in touch,” I said.

Natalie’s information turned out to be accurate: Finn’s house had a new For Lease sign out front, and when I went back to school, there was no Finn Westbrook in the hallways; no small, thin guy with glasses and big brown eyes to look up and smile at the sight of me; no one to show me pictures of the latest photos from outer space or Outer Mongolia; no one to meet me for frozen yogurt and sweet, stolen kisses.

I shared the backseat of Natalie’s small Mazda with a freshman named Helena whose one great dream was to be on the cheerleading squad and who first told us all every detail of the tryouts and then, after she didn’t make the cut, devoted herself to shredding the reputation of every girl on the team.

I sent Finn a text a week or so after school started. It was late one night and I was sick of doing homework and I suddenly really wanted to talk to him. I missed him so much it hurt.

I spent a long time figuring out what to write and decided—hoped—that simple and casual was the way to go.

Hey! You’re really not coming back?

He didn’t respond that night, but when I woke up, I found he had sent a text at two in the morning.

Nope.

The fact that he had responded at all made me decide to try one last time.

Carpool’s not the same without you.

Again, no response for hours. But that evening one came in:

LOL.

We used to joke about how much we hated when people wrote
LOL
—that no one ever means it literally, and it’s really just a lazy way to get yourself out of an exchange you want to end as quickly as possible.

So. That. Was. That.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

one

I
’m walking past Molly’s room when she calls out to me, so I go in. She’s home for a couple of weeks between her summer internship at a San Francisco legal aid office and her final year of college, and she’s made it pretty clear this will be the last time she’ll ever live at home. It makes me sad: I like having her around. Lizzie’s been home this summer, but she and Dad mostly talk about the restaurants they want to go to and how badly most of the world dresses and stuff like that. I just can’t get into their conversations, and when I try to switch it to something more interesting, like movies or current politics or . . . you know . . . the relative merits of small versus big dogs, they don’t have much to say and just murmur some empty response before returning to something that interests them. Which is usually food, exercise, and how much classier they are than anyone else in the world.

In a year I’ll leave for college myself. I can’t wait. Neither can Dad, who’s already talking to Realtors about putting our house on the market. He wants to move into a Century City high-rise. He says he’ll have a guest room for whenever we girls visit, and he told Lizzie she could decorate it, since she has such a “good eye for these things.”

Whatever.

I go into Molly’s room, and she’s lying on her bed with a book and she looks up at me and says, “I heard you walking by. Come talk to me.”

I’m happy to comply. I sit down on her desk chair and swivel it around so I can face her. There’s something effortlessly cool about the way Molly looks, with her honey-colored hair that she wears chin-length and usually tucked behind her ears. She always wears jeans and T-shirts, but they look good on her because she’s tall and thin. I wish I looked more like her, but I’m shorter and curvier, and my hair is thick and dark and wavy, which isn’t completely awful, but I’ve always wanted straight, fine hair like hers. We have the same hazel eyes and arched eyebrows, though.

“You started packing,” I say, because her suitcase is open in the corner, pants and bras spilling out of it.

“I never unpacked.”

“I don’t blame you. A quick getaway from here should always be an option.”

She smiles briefly, and then she’s silent for a moment. “Anna,” she says, suddenly pushing herself up to a higher sitting position on the bed.

“Yeah?”

“You know I’m gay, right?”

I stare at her. “What?”

“Then again,” she says, her lips twitching like something’s funny, “maybe you didn’t.”

“Why would I know? You’ve never said anything.”

She raises the book in her hand. “Well, there’s this, for one thing.”

“
Rubyfruit Jungle
? I just assumed you were reading it for school.”

“Not everything is assigned reading, Anna.”

“I guess not. Wow. I mean . . . You know. Wow. So . . . you’re really gay? Definitely?” She just tilts her head at me with a
Come on
kind of look. “Okay. Fine. Good. That’s cool, Mol. Do you have a girlfriend? Like a steady one?”

She nods. “Her name’s Wally.”

“Seriously?”

“I know. It’s ridiculous, but it’s not her fault. Her parents named her Wallis, after the Duchess of Windsor, but that Wallis was a Nazi sympathizer douche bag, and she hates the name. So . . . Wally. And, yes, that makes us ‘Molly and Wally,’ which is pretty awful, but there’s not a lot we can do about that.”

“But, I mean, do you . . . um, are you guys like a real couple? Or just dating?” That’s not really what I want to ask. What I want to ask is far more complicated—something about whether they have sex and how they have sex and whether she thinks about girls the way I think about guys and a million other things. But this is what comes out.

“We’re a real couple,” Molly says. “Whatever that means.”

“How long have you known?”

“That I like Wally?”

“That you were gay.”

“For a while.” She puts the book down and pulls her knees into her chest, hugging them with her arms. “I mean, I didn’t wake up one day and think, Oh, look, I like girls. It was more that I just knew I reacted to stuff differently than my friends—they were all excited about dating and the guys in our class, and I just didn’t care. It took a while for me to realize why, but by junior year of high school, I was pretty sure.”