The Last Best Kiss (2 page)

My life compartmentalized that fall. There was home, where I stayed quiet and worked hard and practiced drawing and painting and tried not to mind that Dad preferred Lizzie’s inane conversation about designer clothing and expensive restaurants to anything I could say. There was my life with my friends—at school and at parties—where I laughed a lot at things that weren’t always funny and spent a lot of time shopping for the same shoes and dresses my friends were buying. And there was the car ride in the morning, when my world was four feet wide, and where, for about twenty minutes every day, I felt totally relaxed and entertained and even sort of happy. In the backseat, I didn’t have to figure out who to be. I just was.

Sometimes I stayed up late surfing the web just to find something interesting to download onto my phone—a photo or website that Finn might not yet have seen—and once or twice I did manage to surprise him. But even when he hadn’t seen a photo before, he always knew more about it than I did. His mind was like the Google search engine—he could instantly produce information on any subject and then connect it all to other equally fascinating facts.

He liked when I showed him my drawings. He told me I was good, and I told him he was just saying that. “I
would
just say that to be polite, but I’m not,” he insisted. “You really are good.”

“But you just admitted you’d say that even if I weren’t.”

“But I wouldn’t have admitted
that
if I hadn’t been sincere in the first place,” he said calmly, and shoved his glasses back up his nose. They were always sliding down. The nose bridge was too big, and his nose was too thin. I don’t know why he’d bought that pair in the first place. They didn’t fit, and they were ugly, the colors weird and muddy, the shape too round. It was like he’d just grabbed the first pair he spotted at the optometrist. It was like he just didn’t care how he looked. Sometimes I wished he did. Just a little.

We used carpool time to quiz each other before tests. Finn always came up with mnemonic devices to help me remember information, and my grades—already pretty good—got even better because of him. I wanted to return the favor, but the truth was that whenever I tried to quiz him, he already knew all the answers. He had a ridiculously good memory.

When Cameron was sick one week, I had to sit up front with Lizzie for a few days. I tried talking to Finn over my shoulder, but it wasn’t the same, not with Lizzie sitting next to me, rolling her eyes and snickering at everything we said.

“King Nerd totally has a crush on you,” she said to me one day that week, after we’d gotten out of the car and Finn had slipped away with a quick wave.

“We’re just friends.”

“Don’t be so narrow-minded,” she said. “He’s perfect boyfriend material—you could carry him around in your pocket. He could be your little pocket boyfriend, and you could take him out whenever you felt like it and then stuff him back in when you got bored.” I stalked away from her, upset mostly because she was right: Finn liked me.

I knew it, even though I pretended I didn’t. His scrawny face lit up whenever our paths crossed at school. Sometimes in the car, when we were studying pictures on one of our phones and our heads were close together, I’d realize he wasn’t looking at the screen at all. He was looking at me. But if I’d glance up, he’d quickly lower his eyes, his cheeks reddening.

One day he asked me if I wanted to do something with him after school, like get frozen yogurt or something.

I hesitated. And then I said yes.

I wasn’t sure if I liked him as much as he liked me, but I did like him a lot. I liked his big brown eyes, I liked his enthusiasm for the natural world, I liked his brilliance and his cheerfulness, and I liked the fact that he liked me. Those were all reasons to say yes, and the only reason to say no was a sort of fear that our friendship couldn’t last outside of a car—that the real world would make it seem wrong and ridiculous.

Four feet of leather interior expanded to a couple of vinyl chairs at Yogurtland, which we could walk to from school.

We went once and then again.

And then again.

There was also a Starbucks nearby; when we got sick of yogurt, we went there and got icy, thick drinks that were even sweeter than the froyo.

Without Lizzie and Cameron a couple of feet away from us, our conversation expanded—became more personal. We talked about our families. I told him about Mom’s leaving and how that didn’t hurt nearly so much as Dad’s letting Marta go, and about losing Molly to college, and about how Dad and Lizzie were a party of two and I was odd man out in my own home.

He told me about his parents, who were both scientists: his father taught; his mother worked in a lab. He had a much older brother who was already out of college. His parents were nice, just a little old and a little distracted. “We move around a lot,” he said one day, when we were at the frozen-yogurt place. “I’ve lived in five different cities. Every time one of my parents gets offered a more interesting job, we hop.”

“Is it hard?” I asked. “Starting over again every time?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have nothing to compare it to.” He dug his spoon into his chocolate-vanilla swirl then glanced up again. “I like it
here
,” he said.

I didn’t tell Lucy and my other friends about going out with Finn; I only went on days when they wouldn’t notice. A couple of times I had to cancel with him at the last minute, because my friends asked me to do something after school, and I didn’t want to explain to them why I couldn’t. I told myself it was because my friendship with Finn was no big deal—not worth even bringing up.

But I’d had less intense flirtations with other guys that I’d talked about endlessly to my friends in middle school. And Phoebe had pretty much driven us nuts over the last month or so, obsessing about some guy who had never even said hello to her. But still I never mentioned Finn to them.

My friend Camille ran into us at Starbucks one day and came over to say hi. The next day she asked me at lunch why I was getting Frappuccinos with Finn Westbrook, and I just said, “Carpool,” and all my friends nodded.

No one bugged me about it, for one simple reason:

It never occurred to any of my friends that I could actually be romantically interested in Finn. Like I said, he wasn’t on the radar.

I could have put him there with just a few words, but I didn’t.

Finn kissed me one day after winter break.

No, that’s not true.

We kissed each other. I wanted to as much as he did.

We had gotten frozen yogurt and were walking back to school, where I was supposed to meet up with Lizzie for a ride home, when he suddenly took my hand and tugged me down around the corner into a quiet alleyway where no one could see us.

It was the first time we had touched, other than by accident.

His hand was warm and dry and—a nice surprise—larger than mine.

He looked at me, and I knew he wanted to kiss me and I smiled to let him know I knew and it was okay. My heart was beating fast. Which seemed so silly—I mean, it was only Finn, right? But apparently my circulatory system thought it was a bigger deal than my brain did.

Our faces were about level, because I was wearing flip-flops. I briefly thought about how I was glad I wasn’t wearing heels and also that Finn was noticeably taller than he had been in the fall. He’d grown.

It was a good kiss. I’d kissed three other guys by that point in my life, and this was the best one so far. One guy had shoved his tongue into my mouth way too fast, and another had tried to suck my lips, and the third one had pecked me quickly and uncomfortably.

Finn did it right. His lips were warm and gentle, and I didn’t want him to stop. I think he was new to the whole thing, but his instincts—to be patient and go slowly—were good ones.

For a while I completely forgot that Lizzie wasn’t the kind of sister who was willing to wait.

It was the vibration that brought me back to reality—the one from my phone, I mean. “Hold on,” I said, and pulled away.

Finn stepped back and waited, shoving his glasses up his nose.

Lizzie’s text:

Get here in five or you’re on the bus.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Because you want to?”

I slipped my hand in his, smiled, and shook my head. We walked back to campus together, but I let go of his hand when we were within sight of it.

After that, when I slid over in the backseat to make room for him, we let our legs and shoulders press against each other, and at school, when we passed in the hall or spotted each other across the room, we shared a secret, happy glance.

After
school we met each other and found places to be alone.

“I don’t understand people who are all over each other in front of everyone,” I said to him once, when we were alone. “It’s better like this.”

He didn’t say he agreed with me, but he didn’t argue either.

I had a sleepover with Lucy and Phoebe, and of course we talked about the guys we liked, and I swear I was just on the verge of telling them all about Finn when Phoebe said something about Carlos Mercado—about how she knew the nerds would one day be all rich and famous and everything, but who cares when they looked the way they did
now
?

And Lucy laughed and said, “And what if you start going out with some ninety-eight-pound nerdling now, and then he
doesn’t
get all rich and famous? And you could have been with, like, Sawyer Thomas all that time?”

“Sawyer Thomas has backne,” Phoebe said.

“Stay in front of him, and it won’t be a problem,” Lucy said. “His shoulders are like ten feet wide.”

And so I didn’t say anything about Finn and me.

I should have. But I didn’t.

We were all taking Modern Civilization that year, and between Christmas break and spring break, we did a unit on Nazi Germany. I remember wondering if I would have been one of the people who stood up to the Nazis—and got myself sent to a concentration camp—or if I would have kept my head down and done whatever heinous, evil thing I was ordered to do.

It’s the kind of thing you think about when you start doubting your own integrity.

Spring break, Finn and I spent a lot of time together. We’d meet between our houses and walk to the nearby bluffs, where we’d watch the waves roll in below us, and our profound awareness of both the enormity of the ocean and our own deeply meaningless insignificance usually led to a lot of kissing.

The more time I spent with Finn, the more I liked him. He was nice—not just to me but to stray cats and jumping spiders and little kids. He listened intently and responded thoughtfully to anything I said. His kissing only got better, and it had started out pretty good. His face had grown handsome to me now. I could see beyond those stupid ugly glasses to the beautiful brown eyes behind them. Maybe it was just because my feelings about him had changed, but it seemed to me he was growing stronger and more manly as the year went by.

Break ended. The first lunch back at school, he came over to my table with his tray and sat down next to me. He’d never done that before. I turned to my friends and said, too brightly, “You know Finn, right? He’s in my carpool.”

He didn’t add anything to that, just kind of nodded politely to my friends’ brief hellos and then listened quietly to our conversation without joining in, but later, when we were alone, instead of kissing me as soon as he had the chance, he stepped back—away from me—and said, “‘He’s in my carpool’?”

I laughed an artificial laugh. “What? You are.”

Sometimes things don’t feel like a big deal when they happen, and it’s only later that you look back and think, Maybe that was
it
, the moment when things could have gone in one direction, but they didn’t, they went in a different one.

Maybe that was one of those moments, and maybe it wasn’t. Finn got quiet for a little while, but before the afternoon was over, we were kissing again. It wasn’t hard for me to cajole him into being okay with whatever I did. I knew I had a lot of power over him, and I may even have thought it was infinite.

A few days later, a school email went out about semiformal, and Finn asked me to go with him.

I said, “I’d better check with my friends. If they don’t have dates, it would be weird for me to go with you.”

“Would it?” was all he said.

I did ask Lucy and the other girls what our semiformal plans were—without mentioning that I’d been asked to it already—and Lucy said she was thinking we should all go as one big group with some guys we were friendly with, not pairing up or anything, just sharing a limo and hanging together at the dance. “I think Justin’s planning to ask me to go with him,” Phoebe said, and Lucy made a face and shook her head. “That would be weird,” she said. “The only people who go in couples to this are, like,
real
boyfriends and girlfriends. If you go to semiformal with a guy, you’re basically publicly committing to him for
life
.”

I slept over her house that night, and in the dim, sleepy moments right before we both drifted off—the best time for confiding in someone—I told her that Finn had asked me to go with him to the dance.

“Oh, god,” Lucy said. “I hate when stuff like that happens and you have to hurt someone’s feelings. Especially since you have to sit next to him every day for the rest of the year. It’s like he
wanted
to put you in an awkward position.” A yawn thickened her last couple of words. We were lying side by side on the queen bed in her room, which I knew almost as well as my own, since I’d been sleeping over there pretty much every weekend since seventh grade. Her mother made pancakes in the morning, and her dad cuffed us both affectionately on the shoulders as he passed by. I liked staying at her house. “He knows you’re never actually going to go with him,” she added. “So it’s just mean.”

“Finn isn’t mean,” I said. “He’s not like that.”

“But he
knows
there’s just no way. . . . I mean, come on. You’re like totally gorgeous, and half the guys in our class are in love with you.” Part of the reason Lucy was my best friend was because she said these kinds of things and even seemed to believe them. Maybe she did—I certainly thought
she
was gorgeous, even though Lizzie and my dad were always tut-tutting about how Lucy needed to lose a few pounds. But they were crazy. She was adorable with her big eyes and round face. “And he’s . . . you know. Not in your league.”