The Last Best Kiss (4 page)

“That was so long ago.”

“Four years.”

She’s known for four years. I feel left out. And hurt. “Did you tell anyone?”

“Not until I got to college.”

“Were you afraid people would be mean to you? Because there’s a gay guy in my class and he’s totally popular. People can be cooler than you think.”
I would have been cool about it. If you’d just told me. Why didn’t you tell me?

She shakes her head. “I wasn’t worried about being bullied or anything like that. More that my friends wouldn’t be as comfortable with me anymore—that they would start to act weird and think I was staring at them and not want to have sleepovers and stupid stuff like that. It didn’t seem worth it.”

“Yeah,” I say, trying to be understanding, even though it still stings me that my own sister waited four years—
four years
—before telling me something this important about herself. I know I’m the member of the family she trusts the most. But not enough, apparently. “I get that.”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” she says, almost irritably, and my head snaps up with surprise. “I was a wimp. I should have come out.”

“But you just said—”

“I wasn’t that comfortable around them, anyway. I might as well have been honest. I’d have been more comfortable with
myself
, at least.”

“Do Mom and Dad know? Or Lizzie?”

“Not yet. I thought maybe they’d notice the lack of boyfriends or something.”

I feel better: at least she told me first. “You could wait a long time around here for anyone to notice anything,” I say.

“I know. I was hoping . . .” Her voice trails off. She looks sad. Then she shifts with a shrug. “But I invited Wally to come visit before we go back to school, and she’s going to take the train down next week. I thought I should probably tell you guys before then.”

“Don’t tell Dad and Lizzie ahead of time,” I say.

She tilts her head at me. “Yeah? You think?”

“Definitely. I want to see if they figure it out.”

She bobs her head. “All right, then. Why shouldn’t we have some fun with this?”

I’m starting to feel kind of excited. This is big news. I want to tell all my friends, only I’ll be super casual about it.
So my sister’s home . . . my oldest sister . . . the gay one.
“You know I think it’s great, right?”

“Do you?” Molly says, picking up her book. “Thanks, Anna.”

All right. She’s done with this conversation. I stand up. “I can’t wait to meet Wally.”

“She’s pretty wonderful,” Molly says with a smile as she opens the book. She glances up. “You have anyone in your life, Anna?”

“Not in the boyfriend sense.” I’d had a few brief hookups at parties . . . but nothing that mattered. Not since Finn. If that even counted.

“Wait until college,” she says. “The people are more interesting in college. “

All Molly tells Dad and Lizzie is that a friend is coming to visit and she’s picking her up at the train stop, so when she and Wally walk in holding hands, I swear Dad’s eyes almost come out of his skull. But he’s polite and doesn’t say anything embarrassing. He’s very civilized that way. I’ve never seen him treat a guest rudely or say the wrong thing in public. He and I might not have much in common, but at least I can introduce him to people without any embarrassment or fear.

After Molly and Wally head out for dinner together, Dad closes the door behind them and says, “I’m a little confused. . . .”

“She’s obviously a lesbian,” Lizzie says. I’m surprised she says it so calmly, but then I realize she’s talking about Wally, not Molly. “And she clearly has a crush on Molly. I can’t tell if Molly realizes it.”

“They’re both gay,” I say.

Two pairs of light blue eyes swivel to stare at me. Dad and Lizzie look the most alike out of all of us: big, steel-blue eyes; straight noses; and thin lips. “Are you joking?” Lizzie says.

“Molly told me.”

There’s a pause. Then: “Molly
is
a terrible dresser,” Lizzie says to Dad. “She always has been. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in a dress. Except for prom. And she’s never had a boyfriend.”

“I suppose it makes sense,” he says thoughtfully. “But even so—” He shakes his head. “She could do so much better. I’ve seen the girls at her school, and some of them are very attractive. Even some of the lesbians. And I’ve always said that Molly could be beautiful if she just put some effort into her looks. But this girl—”

Lizzie’s already nodding in agreement. “That nose! And the short hair . . . Could she be any more of a cliché?”

“I think she’s pretty,” I say. “And she seemed really nice.”

They both shrug.

“I should probably tell your mother.” Dad smooths the front of his shirt, a tailored pinstripe made out of crisp cotton. He has beautiful clothing, all of which he gets professionally laundered and ironed. He prides himself on always looking good, and he does. With his thick, dark hair (which I now know is carefully and regularly dyed) and his well-maintained, slender figure, he looks a decade younger than his fifty-three years, and women at restaurants often turn to stare at him. Sometimes I see my friends’ dads with their ballooning stomachs and balding heads—and overprotecting devotion to their daughters—and wonder what it would be like to have a father like that.

Lizzie says, “Maybe wait to be sure. It’s really hip right now for college girls to pretend to be gay.”

“Really?” Dad says. “Times certainly have changed.”

“I don’t think that’s what’s going on here,” I say. “Molly told me she’s known since high school.”

“Well, of course that’s what she’d
say
,” says Lizzie with a toss of her impeccably blow-dried mane of hair. She’s highlighted it so many times, it looks blond now, lighter even than Molly’s natural honey color, but she started with dark brown hair like mine. “But maybe she just couldn’t get a boyfriend, and this seemed like an easy out.”

I stare at her. “Seriously?” I say.

“Oh, grow up, Anna,” she says. “People do stuff like that all the time. You’ll see when you’re older.” Lizzie always likes to act like she knows a lot more than me, but most of her “wisdom” makes me stare at her in disbelief.

Wally stays with us for three days, but she and Molly are almost never home. I go with them for one trip, to see Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. We have fun, but I get the sense Wally and Molly would rather be alone. They share Molly’s room at night, and no one says anything about that.

The last day of vacation, they load up Molly’s car so they can drive to school together. Wally gives me a quick hug good-bye and then thanks Dad and Lizzie for letting her stay there. They tell her she should come back and visit again—a little too politely. Molly whispers to me to call her whenever I need someone to talk to, and then the two of them are gone.

Mom calls that same night to say she’ll be in town tomorrow and wants to have dinner with us all. She does this periodically: swoops in and reminds us all why she stays away most of the time. I think she actually comes to LA on business much more often than we know, so I guess I should be grateful these reunions are as rare as they are. She claims to be disappointed that she missed Molly by a day, probably because it’s easier to see us all at once and just get the family obligation over with.

Anyway, it’s bad enough we have to go meet her at Katsuya—restaurant of the rich and spoiled, where a few scraps of raw fish will run you a hundred bucks a person—but that afternoon Lucy calls to say that Jackson Levy (who’s moved up her list from “has potential” to “we could have a future together”) is taking advantage of his parents’ trip to take his sister to college to throw an end-of-summer party.

“I don’t know if I can make it,” I say glumly. “My mom wants to have dinner, and she has this whole
I’m so cosmopolitan, I can’t think about eating before nine at night
thing.”

“Can’t you just tell her you have something more important to do?”

“I haven’t seen her in almost a year.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

“Hers—but I still have to go to dinner.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess because she’s my
mother
.”

“Fine. Just come to Jackson’s as soon as you’re done.”

Dinner is excruciating. Now that Lucy’s questioned it, I wonder why I feel like I have to make time for Mom whenever she asks. I guess it’s because I don’t know when or even
if
she’ll ever ask again. And there’s part of me that thinks maybe we’ll connect more as I get older—maybe she’ll see something in the adult me that she didn’t see in the kid me and will actually show some interest in being part of my life. It hasn’t happened yet, but it could, right?

In the car I ask Lizzie if she knows why we always meet up with Mom when she wants us to, and she says, “Because Mom makes a lot of money, and we might need some of it one day.”

Dad isn’t with us, of course. He and Mom don’t have much of a relationship. I can’t remember them ever talking much, even when they were still married—usually they were just playing parent tag, each trying to pass the kids on to the other as quickly as possible so they could get work done. They communicated mostly by email, even back then. Neither of them is the type to get all nostalgic about the past, so I don’t really know why they got married in the first place, but Molly once said she figured it was because they were both ambitious, high-earning attorneys who liked the idea of being married and having kids and respected each other’s genetic makeup. The difference between them, she added, is that Dad felt a real sense of responsibility to the kids he’d brought into the world, and Mom didn’t. The reality of having a family wasn’t what she thought it would be—more work and less glory—and so she moved on. But he stuck it out. Which is definitely to his credit, and I should remember that when I get impatient with him.

At dinner tonight both Lizzie and I have trouble knowing what to say to Mom, who looks healthy and self-satisfied and much younger than her age, which is somewhere around fifty-five—I’m not sure exactly. After the divorce, she gained some weight, and I think the extra roundness in her face is part of why she looks so good. She once said to me, “Your father was obsessed with my being thin. I realized it was his issue, not mine. I eat what I want now and enjoy every bite.” She added, with a cackle, “And I’m still ahead—after all, I lost a hundred and sixty-five pounds of ugly fat just by divorcing him.”

She asks me whether I think I’ll get into a good college, and I tell her I’m mostly considering art schools. She makes a face and says, “I had higher hopes for you than that.”

Lizzie distracts her by saying, “Molly brought her girlfriend home for a visit,” and Mom says, “Girlfriend?” and Lizzie says, “Yes, didn’t you know? Molly’s a lesbian.” “Good for her,” Mom says, and Lizzie says casually, “I wonder if it has something to do with the absence of a maternal influence.”

Mom just shrugs and says, “Sexual orientation is hardwired, Lizzie.”

We’re stuck there for a while longer while Mom asks us questions about our lives and then seems uninterested—or at least unimpressed—with our answers.

Dinner is endless—since we’re all three fidgety, I can’t figure out why Mom orders an after-dinner drink, which forces us to sit for another ten minutes—and it’s almost eleven by the time we say good-bye to her in the restaurant parking lot. I text Lucy from the car to say
I’m coming
, but she texts me back:
Don’t bother. Cops already shut it down. Come to my house and I’ll give you the deets.

When I get to Lucy’s house, the twins’ Audi is parked in front. Hilary and Lily Diamond came to Sterling Woods in tenth grade. I’ve gotten to be good friends with them over the last year or so. I’m probably closer to Hilary, who’s incredibly smart and in a lot of my classes, but it’s impossible not to like Lily. She’s the kind of girl who’ll start a conversation with the strangers at the table next to you in a restaurant, and by the end of the meal, you’re all exchanging phone numbers and life stories, and the strangers will be hugging Lily like she’s their long lost sister or granddaughter or whatever.

They’re not identical twins, but they still look a lot alike: they both have stick-straight brown hair and the same pointy chins; dark eyes with a mildly exotic tilt to them (their mother was born in Korea); and small, straight noses. But Hilary’s hair is very long right now, and Lily cut hers last year, so it’s asymmetrical, chin-length on one side, midway up her cheek on the other. She changes the way she wears it every day—sometimes she pins it up at the sides; sometimes she lets it swing forward; sometimes she makes these tiny braids in front—and she changes her makeup to suit her hair, so you never know what she’s going to look like, only that she’s going to make everyone else look boring and predictable. Especially her own sister, who has pretty classic taste in general.

Right now, though, all three of them are in their pajamas, because the twins are sleeping over at Lucy’s. I join them at the kitchen table, and Lucy offers me hot chocolate. They’ve already got three steaming mugs in front of them, each one blanketed with marshmallows. I’m still stuffed from dinner, so I pass on the cocoa and beg them to hurry up and tell me what I missed.

“It was an amazing party,” Lily says. She’s wearing a pair of tiny plaid boxers and a tank top. She’s pulled her hair into a ridiculous, small ponytail on the crown of her head and it bobs while she talks. “There must have been, like, five hundred kids there before the cops came.”

“More like seventy,” Hilary says.

Her sister shakes her head. “Way more than that. And then the cops saw someone drinking out front—I don’t know the guy; he doesn’t go to our school—and they handcuffed him and arrested him—”

“No, they didn’t,” her sister says.

“Yes, they did! I heard they shoved him into the back of their car without even reading him his rights.”

“I was
there
,” Hilary says. “I saw the whole thing, and none of that’s true. They just made him pour out his drink and gave him a warning—they didn’t even call his parents. People exaggerate so much.” She tugs on the thick braid that’s hanging over her right shoulder. She’s wearing Harvard sweatpants and a Princeton T-shirt, souvenirs from our junior year East Coast college tour.