by Jen Brady
I finished pulling my fingers through her hair and covered her hand (which was skimming back and forth over the bare skin on my leg again).
“It’s not that. We’re just not getting much done.” I leaned in to kiss her. “Not that I mind. But I don’t need anything else film-wise. We got all the footage. You helped me jazz it up a bit. I think I got it from here. I’d rather spend our time together doing other things.”
“Like going to another movie?”
“Yep. Or out to dinner or for a walk together or . . . this.”
I kissed her again, this time longer.
“So you think you’re good?”
“I’m definitely good.”
“You’ll let me take one final pass over your finished product, right?” she asked, like she didn’t trust me to finish my own film right. Strangely, her micromanaging didn’t bother me at all.
“I would love for you to look at my finished film and critique it to death.”
She gave me a look and shoved me in both shoulders, knocking me backwards on the couch. I reached out and grabbed her waist, pulling her with me. Her hair fell in a curtain around our faces, her pretty gray eyes hovering over me as the length of her body pressed into mine.
“You’re such a pest,” she said before lowering her face to meet mine.
23
JOANNA
THIS WAS THE LONGEST editing session of my life.
Ted and I were working on the video we wanted to post tonight, and we couldn’t agree on which parts to include and which to cut. I wanted to string together the highlights of several of the reactions and play the full segments of the three best ones, but Ted wanted to play pieces of every reaction. Neither one of us showed any signs of budging, which made for a frustrating couple of hours.
But mostly it was dragging because once we were done, I had the rest of the evening free. And what I planned to do with it was call Rick. My heart flipped over just thinking about his kisses from yesterday.
I was also really, really hungry. Ted had ordered a pizza what felt like hours ago, but it hadn’t come yet, and all I’d eaten so far that day were four apples and a crappy school lunch.
I was about to give in to Ted’s wish to let the video run over the fifteen-minute mark just so we could be done when the doorbell rang.
“Yes! I’m starving!” I said.
Ted jumped up. “I’ll get it.”
“Thanks,” I muttered as I went back to splicing part of the video.
All I could think about was driving to Rick’s, picking him up, and taking him to Hastings Park. It was, hands down, my favorite place to enjoy the outdoors, no matter the season, the perfect place to walk and talk. And kiss. There would definitely be a lot of kissing going on, too.
I grabbed my phone off the table.
ME: Be ready in about an hour because I’ll be over to take you somewhere amazing!
RICK: Hmm. Can I guess where?
ME: Nope! But you can guess the activity we’ll be doing . . . .
RICK: I hope it’s making out.
ME: Ding, ding, ding!
RICK: Can’t wait!
I grinned to myself as I shut off my phone screen and placed it face down on the desk again. I went back to the video and almost had the splice perfect by the time Ted came back upstairs. I felt the warmth of the delivery box as he set it next to me on the desk. Without looking, I flipped the lid up and reached for a piece.
“No, wait!”
I froze, my hand just about to tug at the warm, crispy crust of the piece closest to me.
I looked up at Ted. “What?”
His eyes met mine for the briefest moment, then started darting around as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It was almost as if he felt uneasy about something. I’ve seen him flustered about four times in my life, so it was a little unsettling. He finally focused his gaze back on me.
“Look at it before you eat it.”
I glanced down. “Pepperoni and mushroom. Perfect.”
“No, look at it.”
I did and found that the pepperoni was cut up into weird shapes. “Why’s the pepperoni—oh.” It had been sliced, diced, and rearranged into letters. A large O was obvious, as was an M. I turned my head and squinted at the rest of the pepperonis until I could make out the four-letter word and punctuation.
PROM?
A barely-contained smile was on Ted’s face now.
“Did you just ask me to prom with pepperoni bits?”
He nodded, the contained smile turning into an all-out grin. “So? What do you think?”
“Yes,” I said, an idea already forming. “Absolutely!”
“Really?”
He looked way more excited than one should over a school dance, especially Ted, who hates school dances.
“Well, yeah.” It was a given that we’d go together. He hadn’t needed to give me a prom-posal, but it was fun that he had. We’d have to take a picture and use it later in the vlog we’d do about prom.
He let out a relieved sigh. “I had no idea how you were going to react.”
I jumped up and started pacing, the wheels turning in the YouTuber part of my brain. “What should we do for our prom video?” This had fantastic potential if we could come up with something hilarious and unique. “Maybe dance fast during all the slow dances and slow during the fast dances. That should get some awesome reactions. Or we could gender-clothing-swap and I’ll go in a tux and you go in a dress. Oh, my gosh, that would be so funny! I bet we could get a million more subs if we did that. What do you think?”
I turned to face him. The grin had slipped off his face. His forehead wrinkled, furrowing his eyebrows into the serious expression I so rarely saw there.
“No, I mean . . . prom, JoJo.” He reached out to take my hand, and the air seemed to change around us. “Like . . . for real.”
This couldn’t be happening. It had to be some sort of strange dream. We’d spent how many hours, days, weeks, months in that attic together, and in that moment, everything turned upside-down. Such a familiar place and a familiar person—but it was suddenly weird and confusing and wrong.
My entire mouth and throat had gone dry. I swallowed hard. “What do you mean for real?”
He couldn’t mean . . . there was no way . . . .
He tugged me toward him, and I was in such shock that I let him. My body collided with his. My hand ended up on his chest as he put his arm around my waist, pulling me so close that when he bent his head, I could feel his breath on my ear as he whispered.
“I mean, let’s finally give them what they want.”
Christopher Columbus!
And maybe Amerigo Vespucci and Hernán Cortés, too!
This was Ted. Ted! My best friend. An honorary member of our family. Ted, who had seen me in ratty, old PJs countless times and when I hadn’t taken a shower for three days and at four in the morning when he went to Niagara Falls with us two summers ago and we left at the butt-crack of dawn.
Ted was not supposed to ask me to prom via pizza toppings unless it was a joke for our YouTube channel. He wasn’t supposed to hold my hand, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to clutch me against him like this. His heart was doing strange beat-skipping things under my palm, too, which didn’t help reassure me.
“Give who what they want?” I managed to get out.
“Everyone. My grandpa. Your mom and sisters. All of our viewers. Everybody at school. They all ’ship us. They have for years. Let’s make it official and debut the new JoJo Plus Teddy at prom.”
“But . . .” My head was reeling too fast for me to finish the sentence.
“But what?”
Many possible endings to that “but” came to mind:
But we don’t like each other that way.
But you’re like my brother.
But it will ruin our perfect friendship.
But I don’t want to make life choices based on comments viewers make.
But you hate school dances.
But what if I sit on a cupcake again?
I had a feeling none of those would satisfy him.
“But no!” was what I so eloquently blurted out.
He pulled his head back to look me in the eye. “No?” His expression was completely puzzled, as if he’d not even considered this possible response. “Why not?”
“Because if you want an actual date, you should ask someone girly, someone who’ll do her hair and nails who doesn’t want to go just to do something wacky and film it for her YouTube channel. Someone like Megan or Sallie. Someone you actually want to date.”
“But I don’t want to go with someone girly who does her hair.” He reached out and combed his hand through the front of my hair. My heart didn’t flip-flop the way it did when Rick played with my hair. It froze at how weird this all was. “I want to go with you.”
“No, you don’t!” I burst out—because there’s no way Ted wanted to go to prom—for real—with me. If he wanted that, it would ruin everything.
He frowned. “Is this because of your whole in-high-school-self-worth-shouldn’t-be-based-on-prom-dates-and-social-circles thing?”
It felt like the attic walls were closing in on me. Instead of safe in his arms, I just felt awkward. It wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I stepped back. His arm dropped from my waist. I stepped back again half a dozen times until I backed into my desk. He stayed rooted to the floor, his eyes boring into me as I put enough distance between us so I could breathe again.
“No.” The word came out as a squeak. I cleared my dry throat and tried again. “No, it’s because you shouldn’t date someone you don’t have feelings for just because other people in your life want it to happen.”
“But . . . .”
“But what?”
He ran his hands through his hair and when he looked at me again, his curls stuck out haphazardly, which only reminded me of another head of dark, messy hair. Ugh. I could not be thinking about two guys at the same time. That was the opposite of everything I’d declared I’d never do.
“I’ve been in love with you for years.”
Wait—what now?
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Yep, I, who always had a sassy comeback; I, who never let boys fluster me; I was speechless.
Ted’s eyes grew stormy. “This is because of him, isn’t it? Boring Grumpy Bench Guy. You have a thing for him.”
“No,” I said right away. Then my brain caught up to my mouth. “Yes. Maybe. It doesn’t have anything to do with Rick. Or with anybody. It’s only about you and me. You’re the most important person in my life. I don’t want anything to change between us. And you know I’m not interested in dating in high school. I don’t want a boyfriend. It’s too much pressure, too distracting from all the things that matter.”
My stomach twisted with guilt. It had been the first lie I’d ever told my best friend because, turns out, I did want a boyfriend. It just wasn’t him.
He laughed, but it was sarcastic, a laugh I rarely heard escape from his lips. “Yeah, you will.”
“No—”
“At some point, you will.” He backed up, shaking his head. I could see the anger in his eyes. Anger, and hurt. Real cut-to-the-core pain, much different from the flashes of annoyance our usual petty disagreements brought out.
“Ted, wait.”
“You’ll find someone worth being a distraction, and I’m not going to be the loser standing there behind the camera, capturing it all to show the world on our channel.”
He turned and stumbled down the stairs. I stood frozen, staring after him, until the door slammed. Then I bounded to the window, slumped onto the stool, and sat with my arms leaning against the ledge. He appeared a few seconds later, storming across my yard to his. He yanked his back door open and slammed it violently behind him, so hard that it caught and popped back open. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care because it slowly swung back, then opened again, leaving the back entry protected by only the inner screen door.
I leaned my forehead against the cold pane in shock.
What in the world had just happened?
24
RICK
A NOTIFICATION DINGED on my phone. Even though I’d promised myself no checking my phone until I was at least at the forty-five-minute mark of my film, curiosity won out and I took it off my desk and turned it over. It could be another flirty text from Joanna, and I definitely didn’t want to miss that.
“JoJo+Teddy=BFF4EVAH is LIVE now!” appeared on my screen.
That was strange. Since I’d subscribed to the channel, they’d never done a livestream. I’d only run across two or three in their entire backlog of past videos. Over five years and five hundred videos and only a couple of lives. But now they were live?
My film could wait. I had to check this out. It had to be something important. Plus, I just wanted to see her, although that wouldn’t help me squash the thoughts of kissing her that had been running through my head all day, distracting me from my work.
It was official; I had it bad for her.
I clicked the notification, and the screen transformed into Ted Laurence’s gigantic face. Okay, so the image wasn’t exactly gigantic. Nothing is gigantic on a phone screen. But it was just his face, so it seemed gigantic.
His eyes were red and tired. And the dude looked . . . sad . . . and ticked. Seriously ticked. Maybe someone took his fifth credit card away, and he had to make do with four. Or maybe his grandpa banned his pool from challenge videos.
He didn’t say anything for so long I began to wonder if he’d accidently hit the record button. That would explain the out-of-the-blue livestream. Then he let out this dramatic, forlorn sigh, looked directly into the camera, and shook his head slowly.
“It’s been an . . . interesting day.” He tried for a half-smile, but the effort was pathetic and made him look even more dejected. “I’m trying to process something, and I needed to share it with someone, so I figured who better than our amazing viewers, since what happened will affect you guys, too.”
I grabbed my half-finished bottle of soda off the top shelf of my desk and sat back.
“Five years ago, when I was in sixth grade, my mom was killed in a car accident.”
Whoa. I did not know that. Neither of them had mentioned it, at least not on any of the videos I’d watched, which, I had to admit, had been a lot lately.
I leaned forward, focusing on his story.
“I had to move to Concord to live with my grandpa, and it totally sucked. All my friends were in Pittsburgh. I had no other family. I didn’t really know my grandpa very well. He and my mom didn’t get along, so I’d only met him a couple of times in my life. I had no friends and my mom had died and my grandpa was basically a stranger.
“The one bright spot in my day . . .” His eyes glazed over, as if he were picturing the memory he shared, “. . . was watching my next-door neighbors out my window, which probably makes me sound like a cool ninja spy . . . or a creeper.”
I found myself chuckling as he looked right at the camera again and made a funny face. The origin of their friendship was interesting now that I knew I was the one she wanted to kiss.
“But they had parents,” he went on, “and four sisters. I had no parents and no siblings. Just a crabby old grandpa who didn’t like it when I played his piano. So I spent hours at my window imagining I was part of their family.
“They were so happy and they played music all the time. My mom loved music.” He stopped for a few seconds as his dark eyes watered. Then he sniffed, composed himself, and went on. “I wanted to be part of it so bad. It might surprise you guys to know that I was shy when I was younger. But I was. It never occurred to me that I could just walk over there and hang out with them.”
Laurence? Shy? No freakin’ way. He was the picture of outgoing over-confidence.
He laughed without humor. “Then came the middle school Christmas dance. I didn’t want to go, but my grandpa made me. He thought it would help me mak
e friends. He dropped me off, and I went inside, but when I opened the gym doors, it was so loud and packed with people I didn’t know. It was dark and all these bright lights kept flashing, and the music was blaring. Not my scene at all.”
Loud, blaring music? I grinned to myself. Luz would have loved it.
“So I let go of the door and kept walking down the hall. I sat on the steps in the nearest stairwell and played a game on my phone. I had enough battery to mess around until the dance was over. Then I could walk out when everyone else did and pretend like I’d been with the other kids in the gym. My grandpa would never know.”
He should have filmed his grandpa’s reaction if he found out he skipped the dance. It would probably be as good as his reaction to the bald video.
“I was perfectly happy sitting in the stairwell by myself, but a few minutes later, the door banged open and a girl rushed in. Her whole face went surprised when she saw me, and it took me a second to realize it was one of my neighbors because she was wearing a dress and had her hair curled. But it was her. The loud, bossy one who ordered the other three sisters around. The one who sat on top of the monkey bars in their backyard, even though their mom told her not to. The brave one. The one I most wanted to be friends with.
“She tried to leave, but at this point, I was so desperate for a friend that I bribed her to stay by saying she could play with my phone. But she wasn’t interested in my phone. She marched right up the steps and sat down next to me and started asking me all these personal questions about my grandpa, being new to town, the trips my mom and I took every summer to Europe. She was easy to talk to, and she felt like she didn’t fit in either, so we ended up talking about everything.
“She was out in the hallway because the school dance was the last place she wanted to be. Her older sister had made her go. Shout out to Megan.” He waved. “Hey, Megs! Love ya. Anyway, she’d accidentally sat on a cupcake, and Megs was embarrassed to be seen with someone who had cupcake frosting on her butt.”