The Last Best Kiss (13 page)

The three of us are sent to different rooms. As we part, we wish one another luck—Finn even tosses good wishes my way, so he can’t be
too
mad.

I’m glad I end up in my ninth-grade English room, because I loved my teacher that year, and the way she has the room decorated still feels cozy and welcoming to me. And I’m also kind of glad the three of us were split up. I really don’t need to sit near Lucy, who’ll be chewing her lip and twirling her hair and groaning out loud when she doesn’t know an answer. She wraps herself in anxiety during exams. And I think it would be hard for me not to glance over at Finn if we were in the same room. And I really need to focus on the test: I don’t want to have to take it again in December.

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seven

I
get a text that afternoon from Lily, inviting me over to their house to celebrate being done with the SATs, and I’m superstitious enough to wince a little at the “being done” part, but I text back that I’ll be there at eight.

Their housekeeper lets me in—Lorena lives with them, and I’ve seen her way more often than I’ve ever seen either of the twins’ parents, so I give her a big hug and she tells me to go on back.

As I walk through the curved archway that leads to the great room in the back of the house, something rains down on me. A bunch of somethings. I instinctively throw my arms up to protect my head, and Lily laughs. She was waiting for me with a handful of M&M’s—“Minis,” she points out, “so they wouldn’t really hurt. It’s like getting married,” she adds. “Finally being done with the SATs. It’s a rite of passage.”

“Stop saying stuff about being all done with them.” I stoop down to pick up some M&M’s to throw back at her. “You’re going to jinx us all.”

“I said the exact same thing,” says Lucy, who’s perched on their enormous coffee table next to Hilary. She looks a thousand times better than she did this morning: her blond hair is all blown out and down on her shoulders, and she’s even wearing a little makeup. Mostly she looks a lot less like she’s ready to jump out of a window. She and Hilary are both wearing jeans and sweatshirts, like me, but Lily’s got on a short black skater dress that has a white outline of a skeleton on it that lines up with the bones of her real body.

“How’d it go?” I ask Lucy. We didn’t see each other after the test.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.”

“You guys?” I glance back and forth between the twins.

“It was great!” Lily says. “This one girl came running in ten minutes late and got into a huge fight with the proctor because he wouldn’t let her start, and she actually tried to grab a test and start filling it out, and he had to wrestle it away from her and call security to escort her out of the building. It was amazing.”

“Were you there?” I ask Hilary, who shakes her head.

“I was in a different room. Thank god. It was hard enough being in a strange school with no one I knew.”

“And now we’re done talking about the SATs,” Lily says. “Oh—that’s the doorbell! It’ll be Finn or Oscar. Someone help me throw M&M’s.” She takes a new handful out of the bowl and positions herself at the door.

Lucy whispers to me and Hilary. “Wait—just quickly—did you guys get that reading-section question about dictators? Was the answer ‘malevolent’ or ‘culpable’?”

Hilary and I both shake our heads quickly. You can’t let Lucy start with this stuff. It won’t end. She’ll be asking for reassurance about questions all night long.

The guys walk in together. I didn’t see Finn right after the SATs, but since then he’s put in his contacts and showered and combed his hair and changed into jeans and a sweater. He looks older and less familiar. Oscar just looks like himself: very handsome and neat, with an Oxford shirt tucked in behind a canvas belt.

Lily pelts them both with M&M’s and is reaching for more when Finn grabs her arm. “No more,” he says with mock sternness.

She nods meekly, but as soon as he lets go, she whips another handful at him.

“I warned you,” he says, and gets a fistful of his own, which he throws rapidly, one by one, right at her face. They’re so light, they can’t hurt much, but she shrieks and puts up her hands and promises not to throw any more. He stops, and she instantly grabs some more and tosses them right at him. He calls her a “liar and a traitor” and reaches for a handful, which he pelts her with, and then she grabs the entire bowl and dumps them over his head.

She crouches down, still clutching the bowl and helpless with laughter, as he shakes his head, sputtering a little. “You got a bunch down my shirt,” he says, and pulls his sweater and tee away from his body to release them.

“Bet you missed a few,” she says with a waggle of her eyebrows. “You’d better strip down.”

“
You’d
better clean these up,” he says.

She shrugs. “Lorena will do it later.”

Eric and Phoebe arrive together while Hilary’s calling in a pizza order. The way they walk in together turns my suspicions about them into a certainty. Which is great for Eric, who’s one of the nicest guys in the world but hasn’t had a lot of luck with girls. He’s grown out of the worst of his baby fat, but he still has a round face and he’s not exactly ripped, and the fact that Phoebe—who’s only dated alpha-type jocks up until now—is willing to see past all that makes me proud of her.

But it also makes me nervous. If they go out and then break up, it’ll ruin our group.

Then I remember: we graduate in seven months. So maybe it doesn’t matter all that much. Besides, Lily and Finn are probably going to start going out soon too. (Not a welcome thought. But true.) Maybe this kind of thing is inevitable in a coed group of friends.

Lucy nudges my leg with hers and bobs her head questioningly in Phoebe’s direction, and I nod my agreement:
something is definitely going on with them
. We’ll get it out of Phoebe before the end of the evening.

“What do people want to drink?” Hilary asks. We’re in the kitchen now, which the family room connects to with another enormous arched opening—their ceilings must be like fifteen feet high—and she’s pulling out snacks to hold us until the pizza gets here. “We have Coke, Diet Coke, sparkling water, juice . . .”

“Anything stronger?” Eric asks hopefully. “We all had a tough day.”

“Not Oscar,” Lucy says. “He didn’t have to take the SATs again.”

“We can’t all be natural geniuses,” Eric says.

“True, true,” Oscar says loftily. “But don’t you ordinary folk worry about a thing. We superior beings will fix the world for you, so you can go about your daily lives without a care in the world, like the lower-order animals you are.”

“Whatever,” Eric says. “No one’s answered my question.”

“We can have wine,” Hilary says. “Our parents are cool with that.”

“What about beer?”

“Our parents are cool with wine,” she repeats. “Take it or leave it, Manolo.”

He looks at Phoebe like he needs to check with her—another sign that something’s going on with them. She flicks her light brown hair behind her shoulders and says, “Wine sounds good to me. Do you have rosé?”

“I doubt it, but I’ll check.” Hilary opens a door in the back corner of the kitchen. It’s filled with intersecting diagonal shelves; a bottle nestles in every diamond-shaped hole. There are dozens of holes, dozens of bottles.

Hil picks out two bottles and brings them back to the counter. “No rosé, sorry, Phee. Just red and white. Who wants what?” She hands Finn a bottle opener, and he sets to work uncorking the bottles.

“Hold on!” Lily says. “I have an idea.” She grabs a glass from one of the cabinets. “Phoebe, this is for you.” She fills it partway with red and then adds some white and holds out the glass. “Look! Instant rosé!”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Oscar says.

She makes a face at him. “They made fun of Thomas Edison too.”

“Actually I don’t think they did,” Finn says. “As far as I know, he was well-respected in his own lifetime.”

“But they
would
have laughed at him if he’d mixed red and white wine,” I say.

“Phoebe? Back me up here,” says Lily. “Tell them it’s delicious.”

“I’m not drinking it,” Phoebe says, backing away.

“Fine.
I’ll
drink it.” Lily takes a big sip. “Delicious. You guys are cowards. Take a chance on something new.”

“What the hell,” Finn says. “I’ll take a Lily-rosé.”

She grins at him. “You’re not a coward.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “But he did just give in to peer pressure.”

Oscar laughs. “Anna’s right.
You
may be a maverick, Lil, but Finn’s just following your lead.”

“I don’t have a problem with that,” he says. “You follow Lily, you’re going to end up somewhere interesting.” They clink glasses and toast each other.

That wasn’t the point I was trying to make.

Later, after we’ve all agreed that wine and pizza make the best combination ever, Lily declares that she wants to make brownies. When she can’t find a brownie mix in the pantry, she pouts for a while and then brightens up. “I’ll make some from scratch! What goes into a brownie? Flour? Sugar? Eggs?”

“Look up a recipe,” Hilary says.

“That takes all the fun out of it.” Lily disappears into the pantry. “Just you wait,” she calls out. “These are going to be fantastic.”

“Can we watch a movie?” Oscar asks Hilary, who says, “Absolutely.”

Finn stays with Lily in the kitchen while the rest of us head back to the sofas in the family-room area. Eric and Phoebe are already sitting close together. They move apart when we enter. Then shift back again. I cock my head at Phoebe, who shrugs at me with an uneasy smile. I give her a surreptitious thumbs-up, and she looks relieved.

Oscar and I squeeze into a big armchair together. He’s nice and warm, and I’m cozy and a little sleepy from the wine and exhausted from taking the SATs that morning and at risk of falling asleep until Eric talks Hilary into live streaming
Arachnophobia
, which is an old movie about enormous spiders and not at all the kind of thing that puts you to sleep. I am, in fact, wide awake (and clutching Oscar’s arm so hard, he has to ask me to stop) when Lily comes in with her pan of brownies. She sets it down on the coffee table and orders Hilary to pause the movie.

When she tries to cut the brownies, they turn to mush under the knife. They’re very runny and slimy.

“They look not unlike turds,” Oscar whispers to me as Lily scoops out pieces and passes them around on napkins. People take their first tentative bites. We instantly recoil, one by one.

“Ugh!” says Hilary, wiping her tongue with a napkin. “Lily, these are disgusting. They’re, like, raw. And they taste weird.”

“Yeah,” Lily says cheerfully, spitting her bite back onto the napkin. “My brownies suck.”

“They really do,” Finn agrees.

“Toss them here,” Lily says, holding out the pan. “I’ll throw them out.”

“And next time use a recipe,” Hilary says as we hand back our brownies.

“Never!” As Lily stands up, a napkin-wrapped brownie falls out of the pan onto the floor. She kicks it toward the kitchen. Bits of goo fly out of it.

“What are you doing?” her sister says. “Pick it up!”

“Score!” Lily says as she kicks it again with a giggle.

“You’re making a mess!”

Oscar puts his mouth to my ear. “Here’s the thing,” he whispers. “I love John Green as much as the next gay teen. But the whole manic-pixie-dream-girl thing? It gets a little annoying in real life.”

I kind of agree with him and can’t help glancing over at Finn, to see what he thinks. Except I can’t see his face, because he’s on his feet, bending down, carefully using a napkin to pick up the brownie crumbs off the floor. When he stands up, his back is still to me, but I hear Lily say to him, “A noble experiment, right?”

Finn’s back shrugs. He says something I can’t hear. All I know is that Lily looks—for just a second—uncharacteristically uncertain. Maybe even embarrassed. Then she turns around and goes on into the kitchen.

And Finn follows her.

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Eight

W
ade Porter and I have been texting. Nothing too major—we just check in with each other every now and then. We keep agreeing that we should hang out together sometime, but with the SATs hanging over us for the last couple of weeks, that just wasn’t going to happen.

But now they’re over, and I get this:

Could I drop by your house just to say hi on Tues evening? I have a physics test that morning and need something to look forward to.

I didn’t think we were at the dropping-by-each-other’s-houses stage of things yet, but why not? I text back a
Sure
and my address.

Dad’s home and in his office when I hear the doorbell. I race down the stairs to get to the door before Wade rings again—Dad will ignore a first ring on the assumption I’ll get it, but a second one risks bringing him out, and I don’t really want to launch into the whole introduction thing.

I fling open the door.

Only it’s not Wade—it’s Ginny Clay.

“Hi, Anna!” she sings out. “Surprise!”

“What are you doing here?” I ask. That sounds too rude. I fix it. “I mean, hi, what are you doing here?”

She squeezes by me. She’s wearing cigarette jeans and a shrunken cardigan over a long, narrow top. Her blond hair is sleek on her shoulders. She’s carrying a brown paper bag with a fragrant baguette sticking out of the top.

“I just found the most amazing new gourmet food store in Santa Monica,” she says. “I wanted to buy everything there, but I couldn’t just buy it for myself, and then I remembered how you’re all such foodies in your family, and so I figured I’d satisfy my greed by buying everything I wanted to for you guys.”

“Really?” I say. “You bought us food? For no reason?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She’s still smiling. “Is your dad home?”