The Last Best Kiss (9 page)

“You are so right,” she says eagerly. “That’s what made the great artists great—Van Gogh, Picasso, Gauguin . . . they all took risks.” What a genius: she can distill all the greats down to one single shared quality that I lack.

“Are
you
a risk taker?” my father asks Ginny.

She tilts her head sideways and slowly fans her long, mascaraed eyelashes at him. “Just try me.”

Dad lifts his chin ever so slightly and smiles.

“I think Ginny was flirting with Dad,” I say to Lizzie later that night. We’re in her room, where she’s desperately trying to finish all her packing. The taxi to the airport’s coming early in the morning. Dad didn’t want to give up his training session at the gym to drive her. “Not after that huge meal,” he said cheerfully, when he told her to call the cab company.

“Flirting? Don’t be ridiculous.” Lizzie holds up a pair of shorts. “Are these too long? Do they look like mom shorts to you? I mean, not our mom—she couldn’t squeeze into these if her life depended on it. But you know what I mean.”

“They’re fine. You can always roll the bottoms up. But didn’t you see how Ginny kept touching his arm? And she kept telling him how brilliant he was. . . . You really didn’t see that?”

“She was just being friendly. That’s how she is.” She smirks. “You should try it sometime.”

I ignore that. “I just thought it was weird.”

“Plus she’s only a couple of years older than me. Dad’s not a cradle robber.”

“He’s dated younger women before.”

“Not
that
young. And even if he did, Ginny’s not his type. I know Dad better than you.” That’s a frequent refrain from her: how close she and Dad are. How similar they are. How Molly and I are more like Mom, which she pretends isn’t an insult but we all know is one. “What about these pants?” She holds up jeans with a floral print. “I thought they were kind of cool at the store, but now I’m thinking they’re stupid. You want them?”

“Not after you called them stupid.”

“They’d probably be too tight on you, anyway. They barely fit
me
.”

I give up and leave the room, telling her I have to do homework. We forget to say good-bye that night, and she’s gone by the time I get up the next morning.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

four

A
few days later, Lucy and I are studying together at the Starbucks near school when Jackson Levy walks in with a guy I don’t know. Lucy bounces up from her chair and calls out to Jackson, who waves before placing his order with the barista.

Lucy gazes at him as she sits back down. “He’s so perfect,” she says. “Have you ever seen anything so perfect?”

He
is
handsome in a beefy all-American sort of way, with a killer body. Even from fifteen feet away, I can see his biceps bulge where his T-shirt sleeves end.

“I hear he’s gotten three offers from colleges already,” Lucy says dreamily. “They all want him for their lacrosse teams. He told me that Yale is his number one choice. Which is yet another reason we belong together—it’s mine too.”

“Yeah, but the odds of both of you ending up there—”

“I can dream, can’t I?” She sneaks another look at him. “I love that he’s so built. I could never date anyone short or skinny.”

“You have a serious daddy complex,” I say.

“No, I don’t. I just like the way it feels to get crushed against a big, strong chest.”

“Yeah, that’s not how a little girl feels with her dad
at all
.”

“Shut up.”

Once Jackson and his friend get their enormous iced triple venti drinks, they come over to our table. “Hey,” Jackson says.

“Hey,” Lucy says, beaming.

Jackson introduces the guy he’s with, whose name is Wade Porter. He has gray-blue eyes and wavy black hair and is wearing a crimson Harvard T-shirt. He’s a lot more slender than Jackson, and since I don’t have Lucy’s daddy’s-girl issues, I prefer that. He is, in fact, totally attractive.

“Anna and Lucy go to school with me,” Jackson tells him.

“Wait a second,” Wade says. “You go to Sterling Woods?” We both say yes. He looks at me intently. “And your name is Anna? You’re not Anna Eliot, are you?”

“Yeah. Why? Am I famous?”

“This is going to sound weird, but you and I are related.”

“Seriously?” I’ve never heard of him before. “Is this some kind of new pickup line?”

“Nope.” He grabs a chair from another table and sits on it. Jackson does the same thing, but he has to go farther to find a free chair, so Wade starts talking before he’s settled. “We’re cousins—not close ones, obviously—third or fourth and probably a bunch of removeds. I think my grandmother was first cousins with your grandmother? They were both Latimers before they got married.”

I stare at him, surprised. I thought he was joking at first. “Whoa—that’s totally right. But how’d you know I was her granddaughter?”

“I applied to Sterling Woods for ninth grade, and we were looking at the roster of kids, and my mother pointed to your name and said, ‘Oh, look—Anna Eliot—she’s your cousin.’ Some relative had done a big family-tree thing a few years before that he sent around with everyone’s name on it and where they lived, and she had thought about getting in touch with your father because you lived so close and then chickened out. My mom’s like that,” he adds. “She’s kind of shy. But she did Google your dad.”

“Googling,” I say. “The next best thing to a family reunion.”

“I’m jealous,” Lucy says. “I want to discover a long lost relative.”

“Which one of us is the long lost one?” I ask Wade.

“I’ve always known where I was,” he says with a smile.

We compare relatives. There are a couple of great-aunts and uncles we’ve both heard of, but other than that there’s not a lot of overlap.

Lucy and Jackson break off into a separate conversation. I can hear her talking about the SATs. Seems like a bad choice of topics—sort of the opposite of fun and sexy—but at least she’s not being phony.

I know I should be worrying about the AP biology notes in front of me—we have a huge test in two days—but I’m kind of liking both the idea and the reality of connecting with this distant cousin of mine, so I keep the conversation going. I nod toward the T-shirt he’s wearing. “So what’s the story with that? You get recruited at Harvard?”

“Recruited? For what?”

“Aren’t you a lacrosse player?” I’d assumed that was how he knew Jackson.

“Nope. I play on my school’s tennis team, but—” He glances around like he doesn’t want anyone else to hear, then leans forward and whispers, “I’m not actually very good. I’m just hoping no one notices.” He leans back. “You play anything recruitable-ish?”

I shake my head. “Not even close. Do you know where you want to go?”

“Where I
want
to go? Sure. An Ivy would be nice, but Stanford’s my top choice. Now ask me where I think I can get in—sadly that’s probably a different list. What about you?”

I tell him a little about my hopes for getting into an art school, then ask him how he knows Jackson (it turns out they met in preschool), and then Jackson glances over and says, “We should get going, dude,” and Wade nods and they both stand up.

“It was cool meeting you, cuz,” he says to me.

“Sure was, cuz,” I reply.

And he has me send him a text so we’ll have each other’s phone numbers.

After they leave, Lucy says, “Your long lost cousin is pretty cute.”

“Too bad it could never work out between us. Our kids would have three heads.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s only when you’re like siblings. You guys are so distantly related, you’re probably as genetically similar to him as you are to me.”

“Then why won’t
you
sleep with me?”

“I do,” she says. “Practically every weekend.”

“Oh, right.” I open my bio book. “That wasn’t exactly the kind of sleeping together I meant, you know.”

“Well, it’s all you’re getting,” she says with mock primness. Then she stops goofing around and gets serious about biology, because Lucy hates getting anything less than an A on a test.

“Homecoming after-party is always the best party of the year,” says Lily at lunch the following week. The plate in front of her is half filled with French fries, half with beets from the salad bar. She said those were the only two foods that looked good to her. She’s been alternating eating them, dipping first one then the other into mayonnaise. On the one hand: disgusting. On the other: somehow she’s managed to make it look delicious, and I sort of want to sneak a taste.

“What are you talking about?” Hilary says. “Remember last year? They oversold tickets, and we got turned away at the door. And the year before that when the shuttle bus we were on broke down and it took two hours before they got us another one? And by the time we got there, everyone was drunk and it was too crowded? You said you’d never go again.”

“Third time’s the charm,” Lily says cheerfully.

“The triumph of hope over experience,” I say. “That’s Samuel Johnson, in case anyone was wondering.”

“No one was,” Lily says.

I stick out my tongue at her. She wiggles her fingers at me. They’re stained with beet juice.

“So are we going to try to go this year or not?” asks Lucy.

“To the after-party?” Hilary says. “We have to. We’re seniors.”

“It is our moral obligation,” I agree.

“But no shuttle buses,” Lily says. “We’ll find someplace nearby to park.”

Hilary says, “We’re not supposed to do that.” Lily just gives her a look and she sighs. “Yeah, I hate the shuttle buses too.”

“So who’s driving?” Lily points a pink-tinged finger at Finn. “You have the most ecologically responsible car, so you should.”

“Okay, but we can’t all fit in my car.”

“Lucy can drive too.”

“Hold on,” Lucy protests. “If I drive, I can’t drink.”

“See? That’s why you should drive,” says Lily. “You’re actually responsible about this stuff.”

“Yeah,” Lucy says glumly. “I am.” She turns to me. “You have to promise me not to get drunk either. It’s not fair if I’m the only one who’s sober.”

“Finn has to drive too,” I point out. “So he’ll be sober.”

“But he won’t be in my car. I want another rational person in my car with me. You don’t have to be stone-cold sober, just not wasted. Okay?”

“Yeah, fine.” So now I’m committed to being in Lucy’s car.

Which . . . you know . . . means I can’t be in Finn’s.

He’s clearly devastated by that same realization. You can tell by the way he’s laughing at something Lily says so hard that his head has fallen back and his mouth is partially open. Total devastation.

If you’ve never been to an after-party, then you haven’t missed much. We all go because we all go.
Not
because anyone really enjoys it.

“We’re lemmings,” I say to Lucy, when we’re in her mother’s minivan. I’m up front with her. Phoebe and some friend of hers named Ronna, who goes to a different high school, are sitting together in the middle row, and Eric and Oscar are in the way back. “We do what everyone else does, even if it’s a mistake.”

“Is it a left or a right on Garden?” is her reply.

We should have taken a shuttle bus. At least then we’d have been let off right in front of the club. But instead we have to search and search for a parking space and discover that the public lots charge a twenty-dollar flat rate on weekend nights, which we’re not willing to pay. We end up driving all the way up the hill to find a neighborhood that isn’t permit parking only. We have to walk what must be a quarter of a mile back down to Sunset Boulevard, which is rough on all the girls, since the whole point of after-parties is to wear your shortest skirts and your highest heels. Lucy and I are both sober, but the others were drinking in the car, so they’re laughing and stumbling behind us as we lead the way.

“Whose idea was it to skip the shuttle?” Lucy says irritably as we wait at the light to cross to the club. “Oh, well, at least I can go inside and get drunk and forget all about this—oh, wait, no, I
can’t
, because I have to drive us home again. Isn’t this just fun for me?”

“It’s not all bad,” I say. “Jackson’s here—I just saw him go inside.”

“Really?” She turns to face me, her arms raised to tighten her ponytail. “Do I look okay?”

“Seriously amazing.” The theme for the after-party is always something sexist and borderline offensive for the girls—like “zombie whores” or “nympho schoolgirls”—but the boys get easy costume assignments like “cowboys” or “heroes.” This year the theme is “trashy cheerleaders and jocks” which is why all of us girls are wearing our shortest miniskirts with tight tank tops and the guys are all wearing whatever team uniforms they already had lying around.

“Now do me,” I say.

She fixes my locket, pushing the clasp back behind my neck where it belongs, winds my ponytail around her finger to curl it, and pronounces me perfect.

“Was Jackson with anyone?” she asks me as the light changes and we cross, the rest of our gang right behind us.

“Just that guy we met at Starbucks.”

“Your long lost cousin?”

I nod and smile. I’m kind of looking forward to another family reunion tonight.

I find Wade by the guacamole—or what used to be the guacamole. There’s not much left: just some green mush and a few chip crumbs around the bowl.

“Hey, cuz!” I have to shout—the music’s loud.

He looks up, registers it’s me, and says a welcoming “Hey!” He leans in to say, “I like that we barely know each other and yet we already have nicknames. Also? You look really great.” He’s got on a baseball jersey in lazy deference to the party theme.

“Looks like I’m too late for the guacamole,” I say.

“Don’t blame me. I swear it was like that when I got here.”

“After-parties aren’t known for the plentifulness of their food,” I say. Then: “Is
plentifulness
a word?”

“I’m kind of doubtingful.”

I laugh. “So . . . if there’s no guacamole and we’re standing at the guacamole table . . . what does that make us?”

“Hungry,” he says. “And ready to give up on the idea of food to go dance.” He tilts his head back and peers at me. “Yes?”