The Last Best Kiss (7 page)

Phoebe says, “All parents have trouble with names. I’m an only child, and my dad sometimes stops and says, ‘Uh, you.’”

I nod, but our family situations are totally different. She once told me that her parents cried so hard at her middle school commencement that her mother burst a blood vessel in her eye and had this weird red spot in all of the photos they took that day. And that was just middle school. I can’t wait to see what happens at our high school graduation—maybe she’ll explode.

“Oh, hey, Anna?” Phoebe says. “Speaking of your father . . . I keep meaning to ask—is it true he does alumni interviewing for Stanford?”

“And self-interest rears its ugly head,” Lily says. She’s drinking a chocolate milk shake for her lunch, said that was all she wanted, although she keeps sneaking fries from the rest of us.

Phoebe flushes. “Shoot me for caring where I go to college.”

I say, “He’s not interviewing this year—he’s not supposed to when he has a kid applying to colleges.”

“He got your oldest sister in, right?”

“Molly would have gotten in anyway. She’s totally brilliant.”

Phoebe raises her eyebrows skeptically. “Maybe. But I bet it didn’t hurt that your dad is a major alum. Can you just tell him it’s totally my first choice and ask him if he has any advice?”

“Sure,” I say. “But I honestly don’t know if it will help.”

“Ask for me too, while you’re at it,” says Hilary. Lucy echoes her.

“It can’t be everyone’s first choice,” Phoebe says, annoyed.

“It would be, if I thought I could get in,” Hilary says. “Anyway, it’s not Lily’s. She wants to go to Bard or Vassar. Right, Lil?”

Lily doesn’t respond, because she’s already rising to her feet and calling out to the guys behind the registers, “This music sucks! Can’t you play something good?”

“No,” one of them calls back, laughing. He’s young and cute. “We don’t get to choose it.”

She draws closer. “If you could, what would you play?”

“I don’t know. The Shins, maybe?”

They talk about music for a while, and somehow it all ends in his slipping Lily a free order of fries when his boss is looking the other way.

On Tuesday I’m working alone in the art room after school when the assistant art teacher comes in. She’s never actually taught me—I’ve only had classes and independent studies with the main art teacher, Mr. Oresco, who’s round and balding and whose praise means everything to me—but Ginny Clay arrived this year to teach a new class called Digital Art and to sub for Mr. O when he’s sick. I doubt she’d have gotten hired if she hadn’t been a Sterling Woods alum: she graduated from here the year before Molly, which means she’s barely out of college and doesn’t look much older than most of the students. She doesn’t
act
much older either—she’s a giggler, and she’s blond and very pretty, but from what I’ve heard about the class she teaches, she’s not actually that good at either computer science
or
art. A lot of the students are way ahead of her in both, and they all say she just sends them over to the computers and sits at the front of the room reading magazines while they use various programs. If someone has a question, she usually asks another kid to help him out.

She was captain of the volleyball team her senior year here, when Lizzie was on the team. The two of them were friends, so I’ve known her for years. Because I’m her friend’s little sister and she’s now in a position of authority at school, she seems to think it’s her obligation to criticize and advise me.

I do not enjoy when she does either.

“Hey, Anna!” Ginny spots me and pounces with delight. She’s wearing tiny volleyball shorts and a shrunken tee and has her blond hair pulled up and back in a neat ponytail. She’s also the assistant volleyball coach for the girls’ team, but it’s not like this outfit is required or anything—she must just like showing off her perfect body. The senior volleyball coach wears a tracksuit and a whistle.

I’m drawing at a table. I don’t use an easel unless a teacher makes me. When I was a kid, I always drew standing up at our dining room table, and I guess the habit of working that way stuck. Mr. Oresco says I’m going to destroy my back if I don’t switch over to easels and I know he’s right, but I get so lost when I’m drawing and painting that I don’t even notice if my back starts to ache.

I toss a “hello” back in her direction and kind of hunch over my artwork, but of course that’s not going to stop Ginny, who’s the sort who’ll peer over your shoulder even if you don’t invite her to.

“Oh, Anna,” she says plaintively as she peers over my shoulder. “Aren’t we
ever
going to get you to take some chances with your artwork?”

I stiffen. Everything about this statement annoys me, from the assumption that she’s been mentoring me to the implication that I’m artistically stunted. I say, “This isn’t done yet,” because it’s not, and because I’m hoping that will stop her from analyzing it.

“Oh, Anna,” she says again—and now just those two words are enough to make me want to drive a sharpened colored pencil through her eye. “It’s not a question of done or not done. Nothing artistic is ever really
done
, is it? The important thing is whether you’re extending yourself. Are you stretching creatively? This feels so similar to what I’ve seen from you before.”

I don’t want to defend myself to her. I shouldn’t have to. But it’s hard not to respond when someone’s standing two inches from you criticizing something you’ve made. “This is for my application portfolio.”

“Art schools are going to want to see your range,” says Ginny, who—just to be clear—never studied at an art school. She went to USC, where she majored in Human Performance. “I’m sure you have plenty of samples of
this
kind of thing.” She flicks, almost contemptuously, at my drawing. “You need to show them you can do something like a vase of flowers. Or a plate of fish!” Maybe she notices my expression, because she quickly adds, “Or anything that’s colorful and close-up—the point is to let them see there’s more than one side of you.”

“I really have to finish this.” I bend over my work.

“You should be using an easel, you know.”

“I like to work this way.”

“Your poor back.” She starts rubbing it with the palm of her hand, which just makes me stiffen it more. “Oh, and when you see her, will you tell Lizzie that I can’t wait until Saturday night?”

“Okay. You guys doing something?”

“Yes—with you! I’m joining your family dinner to say good-bye to her before she leaves. I am going to miss her
so
much. And I bet you will too.” Ginny throws her arms around me, and I’m enveloped in a cloud of musky perfume. “We’ll just have to spend more time together.” She gives me one last big squeeze before releasing me. “It’s crazy how late her school starts, isn’t it? It’s that silly quarter schedule. But at least it means she’s not gone yet, and we’re going to have so much fun at dinner! But now I have to run to practice.” She turns to go. Then looks back. “And try to branch out a little artistically will you, Anna? You have so much potential. You just need the maturity and courage to make it blossom into something
real
. Love you! Bye!”

With a swish of her barely clad butt, she’s gone.

I bend back over my work, but my focus—my lovely, wonderful, stress-relieving, happy-making focus—is shot, thanks to her visit. I put aside the black, thin pen I was using and drop into a chair. I study the picture.

Ginny’s right about one thing: you can definitely tell that the same artist is responsible for all the work I’ve produced over the last couple of years. Somehow I started doing these weird landscapes—vast wastelands, most of them, often burned red and black, although sometimes they’re wet with huge lakes or unevenly covered with tiny stones—lands that don’t look like they should belong on Earth, and maybe they don’t. I’m not even sure in my own mind whether they do or not. I usually do that part in a mixture of watercolor and pastel, to get some texture into it, but I’ve experimented with almost every kind of paint and surface—I just like the watercolor/pastel combination the best so far. Anyway, then I go in with ink pens—I use the sharpest I can find—and sketch in something small and weird. Something that doesn’t belong in the landscape at all. Sometimes it’s humans—two middle-aged women having tea, maybe, against a menacingly red Martian-looking landscape. Sometimes it’s something mechanical: a robot trying to dig its way out from behind a rock. Sometimes it’s animals, like a couple of tiny rabbits chasing each other on the edge of a world that’s covered in ice.

I stopped questioning why I made the kind of art I did a long time ago. It’s just what I do. I go into a kind of trance, and it makes me happy and it feels right. I don’t paint vases or still lifes or portraits. (Sorry, Ginny.) I do
this.

My art started turning into this at some point in my tenth-grade year. Sometimes I’d lie in bed after working on one of these pieces and I’d still be thinking about it and working on it in my head, and then suddenly I’d picture myself in the backseat of Lizzie’s car, and Finn—the ninth-grade Finn who was long gone by that point—would pull out his phone and say, “Let me show you this incredible photo I just found,” and I’d say, “And let me show you this.”

And I’d hold up my picture. And he would like it.

And then I’d tell him he inspired it.

And he would like that too.

I’m heading out the door for Phoebe’s VMA party on Thursday night when I stop on our threshold and scan the empty street.

My car is nowhere in sight.

I go back in the house and shout for Lizzie. She’s not there—which explains the absence of the car. She must have driven off while I was in the shower. Nice of her to check to see if I needed it. Which I’m pretty sure I already told her I did. Which probably explains why she left without checking.

Dad’s not home either, so no chance of borrowing
his
car.

Phoebe’s house is pretty close, but not close enough to walk. So I text Lucy:

I need a ride. Get me?

Already at Phbs—she says she’ll tell Lily to grab you.

The doorbell rings about ten minutes later, but when I open the front door, it’s not Lily.

It’s Finn.

“Hi,” he says. “Someone here call for a cab?”

He’s wearing khakis and a green button-down shirt that looks soft, not stiff. He’s rolled the sleeves up to just below his elbows. It’s the first time this fall that I’ve seen him wearing glasses. They’re black and small and rectangular and a lot cooler than the oversize ones he used to wear, but even so they make him look more like the old Finn.

“Why are you here?” I say, a little stunned by his sudden appearance on my doorstep.

“Phoebe asked me if I could grab you.”

“She said Lily was going to.”

His lips compress briefly. “Sorry,” he says. “You’re stuck with me. But it’s a short ride.”

Oh, god—I just offended him. “I didn’t mean it like that! I was just confused.”

“Shall we go?” is his response. He’s already turning around and heading toward the car.

I follow him, and we get into the car.

“1044 Burlingham, right?” he asks as he pulls away from the curb.

“Yeah. It’s about two minutes away—I carpooled with Phoebe and her sister for two years.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, and I wish I hadn’t brought up carpools.

I look down and smooth my skirt over my lap. I feel self-conscious. I’m wearing a long, gauzy skirt with a tight green sweater on top and short black boots. The last glance in the mirror back home had been reassuring, but suddenly I’m filled with self-doubt. The skirt is too boho, the sweater too preppy—Lily could pull off the clash of styles, but I look silly, like I’m in some kind of costume. I tug on my hair, which I straightened with a flat iron but which is already softening into its usual waves, and desperately try to think of something to say so we don’t just keep sitting there in silence. I come up with a brilliant “Is it nice being back in LA?”

“Yes,” he says. “It feels like home. More or less.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

Could this conversation get any more hollow?

He doesn’t look at me at all, just drives, one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting on the gear drive like it’s a stick shift, which it isn’t—the car’s an automatic. I bet he was driving a manual car back wherever he’s been for the last few years and hasn’t gotten out of the habit of keeping his hand on the shift. It’s a glimpse into the mystery of his life away from LA.

I say abruptly, “We had fun during carpool, didn’t we?” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize how pathetic they are. What am I hoping for?

A connection. That’s what. Some tiny shred of friendship that might have survived the last three years.

I don’t get one.

Finn says tonelessly, “Yeah. Good times.”

I know when I’m hitting my head against a brick wall. Sometimes I even know enough to stop pounding. So the only other thing I say on the drive is, “There’s Phoebe’s house. The one with the red door.”

“Thanks.” He parks, and we start walking toward the house together. Eric Manolo pulls up, and Finn calls out to him. Eric gets out of his car and comes bounding up to us with his round cheeks and big, friendly smile, and Finn asks him about his car, which I guess is some kind of new hybrid or something, and the two of them talk about that until we reach the house.

I drift back behind them and try to get my mind off that miserable car ride. I stare at Eric’s back and wonder why he’s here. I like him a lot: he brings a mellow, good-natured vibe wherever he goes, which I’m always grateful for, given how type A Lucy, Hilary, and Phoebe can all get, especially when they’re together. But Phoebe hadn’t said anything about inviting him, and even though we’re all friends with him, we almost never see him outside school.

Eric and Finn join the others, who are in the family room eating guacamole and watching people being interviewed on the red carpet, but Phoebe isn’t there, so I go looking for her. I find her in the kitchen unwrapping plastic cups. “Oh, good,” she says. “Stay here a sec—I need help carrying stuff into the other room.” She’s wearing jeans and a shrunken T-shirt, with her light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I feel overdressed in my skirt and sweater. Phoebe isn’t exactly pretty, but she has a fresh-scrubbed, athletic kind of vibe. Makeup looks wrong on her face since she has big features, but when she keeps her clothing, face, and hair simple, she looks like the kind of girl who’d start off in the movie as the hero’s best friend and then he’d realize he’s in love with her. Speaking of which . . .