Once Upon a Kiss

by Robin Palmer

  “Oh. Okay,” I said, disappointed.

  “But I’ll take one,” Brad said.

  This wasn’t going exactly the way it had on that day thirty years before, but it was close. Hopefully it would help get me back to 1986. Suddenly I froze. What if it worked too well and got me back there before I could say good-bye to Jonah? I was pretty sure he’d be there when I got back there, but what if there was some sort of glitch and he wasn’t? If the last few days had showed me anything, it’s that I didn’t want to live in a place where Jonah didn’t exist. And when did I start sounding like a song by that Taylor Swift chick?

  I slapped some mango relish on the dog and handed it to him.

  “Zoe? Is there . . . a reason you’re working here?” Andrea asked tentatively. “Is it, like, something you’re planning on working into your next State of the Class address? You know, kind of like how sometimes the president goes and spends the day with coal miners or steel workers?”

  “Nope. I’ve just always wanted to work here,” I replied.

  “Since when?” Brad asked.

  “Like I just said—since always.” Wow. Good luck to him when it came to reading-comprehension tests.

  Right then Jonah came running over. “Hey, look what I found over at the Farmers Market!”

  My face lit up when I saw the package of Fun Dip. “Excellent. Thank you.”

  “The weirdness just keeps on coming,” Andrea said.

  “What’s that?” Brad asked with his mouth full, pointing at the candy.

  Okay, I’m sorry, but I was right to break up with him. How could I possibly date a guy who didn’t know what Fun Dip was? Just then a woman with two kids started to approach. Jonah and I looked at each other, amazed.

  “That’s just too weird,” he murmured. As much as it had pained me to remember the whole thing, I had told him about what happened with the mean woman that led to me getting fired.

  “Okay, well, great seeing you guys!” I said as I reached over and pushed Brad and Andrea out of the way. “Time for me to get back to work!” I turned to the woman and flashed a big smile. “Welcome to Vegan Dog. Can I take your order?”

  “Hiiii!” she said with an equally big smile. “Omigod, that is such a cute hat.”

  This time when Jonah and I looked at each other, it was with alarm. She wasn’t supposed to be nice! She turned to the kids, who instead of trying to climb in the fountain were standing there well-behaved, as if kid actors in a commercial. “Kids, isn’t that hat just adorable?”

  They nodded in unison, but kept quiet.

  What was going on here? “Wait a minute—you’re supposed to—” I stopped. What was I going to say . . . You’re supposed to be a total jerk and treat me rudely because I’m working at a hot dog stand and being paid to be polite to you?

  “I think we’re going to go,” Andrea said gently and carefully, in the tone that people used in the movies when they were trying to convince someone who was about to jump off a building to come inside.

  “Good, good,” I replied. “Go. Bond. Please. Have a great time.” I turned back to the customer. “Sorry about that. What can I get you?”

  “Would it be possible to get two Vegan Dogs and an order of those sweet potato fries?” she asked politely.

  “Sure,” I said, disappointed as I watched Brad and Andrea turn around and start to walk away. I assembled her order and held the tray out to her.

  “Tell her she needs to pay first,” whispered Jonah.

  “Right. I forgot,” I whispered back. This was why Jonah and I needed to be together—we were a team. I pulled the tray back toward me. “You have to pay me first.” Here it was. The moment she’d make a big stink and things would happen like they did back then.

  She laughed. “Of course! What am I thinking? Sorry about that,” she said as she took out her wallet and handed me a twenty.

  Jonah and I looked at each other. So much for that.

  “Keep the change as a tip,” she said with a smile as I went to hand her her change. “And have a fantastic day,” she added as she took her smiling, well-behaved children and walked away.

  “Okay, that didn’t go as planned.” I sighed as I turned to Jonah. “Now what?”

  “What did you say came after the part when you and the woman starting fighting?”

  “The corn dog flew out of my hand and landed in Andrea’s hair.”

  He searched the crowd. “Look—there they are! Do it now!”

  “You want me to throw a corn dog at my best friend?” I asked. “That’s not very nice.”

  “I thought you said she wasn’t your best friend.”

  “She’s not! But still.” What was I saying? “But I’ll lose my job.”

  “Exactly!” he cried. “That’s what you’re here to do, remember?!”

  “I know, but when you say it out loud, it just sounds . . . wrong.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You don’t even live here!”

  He did have a point.

  “If you’re going to do it, you need to do it now, before they get away.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said nervously. I looked over at the crowd and spotted them. Next to a very large bald man with a tribal tattoo on half of his unsmiling face and a giant silver ring in his left nostril. Who did not look like he’d be too understanding about my lack of coordination if I hit him instead. With a deep breath, I picked up a vegan dog and took aim. Grabbing Jonah’s hand for moral support, I held my breath as it sailed through the air, coming dangerously close to taking out a Hasidic man’s eye. Finally a high-pitched scream could be heard over the music.

  “Omigod, my hair!” Andrea cried as she swatted at the back of her blonde hair.

  Jonah and I looked at each other and high-fived. “Nice shot,” he said, impressed.

  “Thanks.” I smiled.

  We watched as she turned to Brad. “What’s in my hair?!”

  Brad leaned in. “I’m not sure. It’s kind of long and skinny. Maybe it’s an eel.”

  I rolled my eyes. I may have been from another century, but this guy was from another planet.

  Andrea screamed again. “Omigod, I hate eels! Get it out!”

  Brad grabbed it and looked at it. “It’s not an eel. It’s a hot dog.”

  “It’s not a hot dog!” Larry yelled. “It’s a vegan dog.” He turned to me. “You do realize that—”

  I took my hat off and placed it on the counter. “—I’m fired. Yeah, I figured,” I said. I looked at Jonah. “Now what?”

  “We run,” he said.

  We didn’t stop until we got to the passageway that went toward Terri’s, where we finally skidded to a halt, out of breath but unable to stop laughing.

  “Did you see the look on her face when Brad held the hot dog up to her?” Jonah gasped.

  “Vegan dog,” I managed to get out through my giggles. “And the way it got stuck in her hair again as she started batting it away?!”

  “I wish I had filmed that with my camera. If I put that on YouTube, it would’ve gone viral in hours.”

  “Viral? What does that mean?”

  “Forget it.” He laughed. “But I should probably give you a primer on all the stuff you’ve missed at some point.”

  I felt my heart beat as if I had drunk two Red Bulls in a row. (They were definitely one of the most important inventions of the last few decades.) “That would be great, but if we pull this thing off, then I won’t be here anymore,” I said quietly.

  “Oh. Yeah. I forgot,” he replied. Was that disappointment on his face? He looked down at the ground and then back at me. “You have really great teeth,” he blurted nervously. “They’re very straight.”

  “I had braces,” I replied just as nervously. In fact, after watching a rerun of The Partridge Family episode where Laurie Partridge’s braces acted as a radio he
and I had spent hours trying to get mine to do the same thing, with no success. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We stood there for a second, very close. Like, so close that if we were different people or characters in a John Hughes movie, we probably would’ve leaned in and kissed each other.

  “So, uh, I guess you should go try on that dress,” he said, just as I started to lean in.

  I stopped on the balls on my feet and sort of swung there for a second like a cartoon character before pulling myself back. “You’re probably right.”

  “So. I guess this is it,” he said. “I mean, if things keep going the way they’ve been going, and Brad shows up at the shop, then you can get him to kiss you and go back to where you came from.”

  I searched his face, trying to see what he really meant, but I got nothing. “I guess so.”

  He put out his hand. “Well, it’s been nice getting to know you.”

  Really? This was how it was going to end? I felt like crying. That is, until I got mad. I wasn’t even sure who I was mad at. Him, for acting like all this meant nothing? Or me for not having the guts to tell him how I really felt?

  “We already know each other,” I reminded him.

  “Right. I keep forgetting that.”

  I took his hand and shook it. “But, yeah. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it. I’ll see you around, I guess.”

  “Right. Back in 1986.”

  “Exactly,” I said. I just wanted to get away from him so I could cry somewhere private. “I should go.”

  He nodded as I turned and began to walk toward Terri’s. I wasn’t sure how I did it, but I managed not to turn around to see if he was still watching.

  “Hey, look who it is. . . .” Terri said as I walked in.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a robin’s-egg-blue Lycra minidress by any chance, would you?” I asked. Now that it was obvious that Jonah wanted nothing to do with me, I couldn’t wait to get back to 1986.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She walked over to a rack and started flipping through some dresses. “But I have this,” she said, holding up a canary-yellow one.

  Great. Yellow was not my color. In fact, I didn’t think it was anyone’s color. I had gotten this far, only to hit a brick wall. Now what?

  “Whoa. I guess I do,” Terri said, holding up the same blue dress from 1986. “I don’t even remember getting this.”

  I felt the hair on my neck stick up again. That was just weird. Not that I was complaining.

  “Please tell me you do alterations.”

  “Well, yeah, of course. We’re a classy operation here,” she replied. She handed me the dress. “Get changed.”

  I took it into the dressing room. “Hey, so I hope you don’t think this is weird, but I Facestalked you last night,” I heard her say.

  “Facestalked?” I repeated.

  “Yeah. You know, looked you up on Facebook?”

  I was glad I was behind the curtain so she couldn’t see me wrinkle my nose. That was weird. Well, it was weird until I remembered that I had done the exact same thing to Jonah.

  “Your boyfriend’s real cute.”

  I still hadn’t taken down the pictures of me and Brad. I guessed I should do that. “Ex-boyfriend,” I corrected as I walked out and joined her in front of the mirror.

  “Oh. Wow. Sorry to hear that.”

  I shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s for the best.”

  She shrugged. “Well, you sure seem to have a lot of friends on Facebook.”

  I shook my head. “They’re not my friends. They want to be able to tell others that they are, but they’re not.”

  “What about that girl you were here with the other day?” she asked. “The blonde?”

  “Andrea’s not that bad, I guess. But she’s not what a best friend’s supposed to be.”

  Terri shrugged. “She really seems to like to shop.”

  “But that’s not all friendship is about. For me, friendship is about . . . being able to stay on the phone all night talking about everything and nothing,” I said. “And being totally coordinated during snacking sessions. And not having to talk in the car. And finishing each other’s sentences.”

  Terri smiled. “That sounds like Harry and Sally,” she sighed. I guess she saw the blank look on my face. “You know, from the Nora Ephron movie When Harry Met Sally?”

  “What year did it come out?”

  “Mm, late eighties, I think?”

  “Yeah, I missed that one,” I replied. “What was it about?”

  She started pinning again. “It was about these two people who drove cross-country after college and had this debate about whether men and women can ever really be friends,” she explained. “Sally thought it was possible, but Harry was convinced that one of the two was always going to have romantic feelings for the other.”

  “Well, obviously Sally’s right. A girl and guy can totally just be friends. So then what happened in the movie?” I asked.

  “So then they kept running into each other over the years, and finally they decided they would just be friends, and they were, for a long time, but that didn’t work.”

  “It didn’t?”

  “No. Because what neither of them was willing to admit, almost until it was too late, was that, really, they were in love with each other,” she said.

  Why was I starting to sweat? Was it the Lycra? It had to be. Even though I didn’t remember Lycra making me sweat before. “So then what happened?”

  “So on New Year’s Eve, Harry runs through the streets of New York to the party where Sally is and gives this long speech about how he loves all these different annoying things about her, and they end up together,” she replied as she reached for a tissue and wiped her eyes. “Sorry. Just thinking about it gets me all teary. I just love movies where a person finds their person.”

  I was now sweating so much that there was a stain blooming near my left underarm. It was then that I knew it. Just as I knew how many sugars Jonah liked in his iced tea (three). And how sometimes he put Vicks VapoRub on his chest at night before he went to sleep just because he liked the smell. And how he tended to hum when he ate cereal (something that drove me absolutely bonkers when Ethan did it, but not so much when Jonah did). None of these things by themselves meant much at all, but all together they added up to everything.

  Jonah wasn’t just my best friend.

  “Oh my God. Jonah’s my person!” I cried.

  “Excuse me?” Terri asked.

  I turned to her and grabbed her arm. “Jonah isn’t Montana’s person—he’s my person!”

  “Who’s Jonah?” she asked, confused.

  I whipped out my iPhone and clicked on his Facebook page and handed it over.

  “That’s your person?” she said doubtfully.

  I nodded.

  “Oh, honey, but Brad is so much cuter,” she said. “Don’t you want a cute person?”

  “No. I want my person,” I replied. “And Jonah’s kind of cute. In a Matthew Broderick kind of way.”

  “That’s true,” Terri said. “And if it works for Sarah Jessica Parker . . . So what are you going to do?”

  I started to pace. “I don’t know! What do you do when you realize someone is your person?”

  She shrugged. “You tell them? I mean, I think that’s what you do. I’ve got a real fear of intimacy thing going, so I never get that far, but from what I’ve seen in the movies, that’s what it looks like you do.”

  I stopped pacing. “Right. You tell them,” I said nervously. “You tell them, even though the potential for awkwardness if they don’t consider you their person could be huge.” I started pacing again. “But when do you tell them?”

  “You tell them . . . now?” she suggested.

  “I was afraid you’d say tha
t,” I sighed. “But you’re right—I’ll tell him now. Because, really, why not now? If you’ve realized someone is your person, you don’t want to go any longer without them not being your person, right?”

  “Billy Crystal said something almost exactly like that in the movie,” Terri sighed.

  I squared my shoulders and stood up straight. “Then now it is,” I announced as I started toward the door. So what if he had essentially blown me off a few minutes earlier. No matter what happened—whether I got back to 1986, or ended up staying here—I had to tell him the truth. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.

  “Um, you might want to change back into your regular clothes before you go,” she called after me.

  “Right.”

  I changed and was just about to run outside when the door opened and Brad walked in. Oh no! This couldn’t be happening. I mean, it could be happening, because it was supposed to be happening, but now that I knew for sure that Jonah was my person, I needed to put a hold on things.

  “Andrea thought I might find you here,” he said as he walked up to me.

  “And she was right,” I said nervously as I backed away from him. “But I’ve got something I have to go do, so—”

  He grabbed my arm. “This is only going to take a minute. I promise.”

  I didn’t have a minute! I didn’t even have a second! I needed to find Jonah!

  He screwed his eyes shut. “I don’t know how to tell you this but today, when Andrea and I were hanging out at the Dell we had this Moment. . . .” He opened his eyes. “Huh. I guess I do know how to tell you.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. We were in Abercrombie, and she was holding this purple-striped shirt up to me, and she looked up at me, and I don’t know . . . we just . . . realized that we’re meant to be together. Kind of like peanut butter and jelly. Or guac and chips. Or—”

  I held my hand up. “I get it, Brad. You can stop.” Now that I knew he wasn’t going to kiss me, I was a little more relaxed.

  “But before you start going all bath salts on me, I need you to know that nothing happened. Well, at least not yet. Because even though we’re broken up, I felt like I needed to tell you first.”

  Wow. He really was a prince of a guy. “That’s really sweet of you, Brad,” I said, touched. “Seriously. Thank you. I appreciate it.”