Once Upon a Kiss

by Robin Palmer

  “You’re welcome. And Andrea and I were talking about it, and she thinks it’s fair that in the split, you get the table on the Ramp—well, until the Ramp comes down—and the bench in the quad, and the—”

  I put my hand up. “It’s okay. You can have all of it. In fact, I think I could probably benefit from a different point of view.”

  “You do?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I think this is good,” I said. “I have a feeling you guys will make a great couple.”

  “Is that the psychotic part of you saying that?”

  “You mean the psychic part? Yeah, I guess.”

  He smiled. “Thanks for being so cool about this. Andrea thought you’d freak out, but I told her you’re not like that.”

  I smiled back. “You seem to know me pretty well.”

  He opened his arms. “Even though we’re broken up, can I still have a hug?”

  I nodded and walked into them. A hug was safe. A hug would not take me anywhere. At least I hoped it wouldn’t.

  “You’re really awesome, Zoe,” he said as he hugged me. “You’ll find someone else.”

  As he eased up on the hug, I realized I was still here. Or there. Or wherever it was that I was. Phew.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Either way I’ll be okay,” I replied. And I would be. Even if Jonah didn’t agree that we were each other’s person.

  As I tilted my head up to smile at him he leaned in, and before I knew what was happening, his mouth was coming straight toward me. “Wait! What are you—” I yelped. Before I could stop it, his mouth was on mine, sucking away like a jellyfish. The kiss seemed to go on forever, and the entire time all I could think about was where I might end up when it was over.

  And then, finally, it was over.

  “Wow. That was awesome,” Brad said after he pulled back. “I figured that because I’m not Facebook-official with Andrea yet, a good-bye kiss wouldn’t be considered cheating.” He cocked his head again. “You okay?”

  I opened my eyes and looked around. “What year is it?” I demanded.

  “What kind of question is that?” He laughed. “It’s . . .” He paused and took out his iPhone. “It’s 2016. You know that.”

  “Oh thank God.” I sighed.

  His phone dinged with a text. “I should get going. Andrea scheduled a photo shoot for a new photo to put with our changed relationship status. I guess I’ll see you around.”

  “Yeah. See you on Monday. Back at school. Bright and early,” I replied, excited.

  After he left, Terri looked at me. “I’ve never heard anyone who was so looking forward to a Monday morning before.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I’m weird that way.” I was weird in a lot of ways, I guess.

  She held up the dress. “So I’ll have this for you in a week. Okay?”

  In the light of 2016, it suddenly seemed kind of tacky. “Actually, I think I’m going to pass on the dress if that’s okay.”

  “Not a problem. With the amount of traffic I got in here last week because of you, I owe you.”

  I started to go again before I realized I didn’t have my bag. “My bag—”

  “Check in the dressing room,” Terri said.

  As I ran back in there, I heard the front door open.

  “Welcome to Terri’s. I’m Terri. What can I do for you, hon?”

  “I was looking for . . . I guess she’s not here, though.” He sounded disappointed.

  I froze. It was Jonah.

  “You talking about Zoe? Yeah, she’s here. She’s just in the dressing room,” Terri said. “Oh, and the fact that I know you’re Jonah and that she would be the one you’re looking for has nothing to do with the fact that we were talking about you,” she added. “I just happen to be very intuitive.”

  I pulled my shirt down and looked at myself in the mirror. After the day I had had, I looked like I had been dragged five miles down Coldwater Canyon by a car and then thrown in the washing machine and put through the heavy-duty spin cycle, but whatever. I walked out to find Jonah standing there in the middle of the store, hat off, hair sweaty, like he had just run a marathon.

  “You’re still here,” he said, relieved.

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw Brad as I was running over here, and I thought that—”

  “He had kissed me?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “He did. But nothing happened,” I replied. “Well, other than the fact that it feels like a vacuum cleaner got hold of my tongue.”

  A smile began to bloom across his face. “So it didn’t work.”

  My lips began to twitch as I began to smile as well. “I guess not.”

  He came closer to me. “Is it bad to say that I’m glad?”

  I took a step closer to him. “No, it’s not bad. Not at all.”

  “But that means you’re stuck here. Probably for good.”

  We were so close I could smell his breath. It smelled . . . like Jonah. Not minty fresh, not gross. Just normal. “Seems that way.”

  “Listen, I was wrong about you,” he said. “I had an idea about who you were, and I judged you based on that, and I really had no interest in being proved wrong. But you pushed and pushed, and the more we hung out, the more I got to know you, and the more I got to see that you’re not this stuck-up elitist person that the world thinks you are—” He cringed. “Sorry. That makes you sound so—”

  “Horrid? Yeah. It does,” I said. “Because I was. Well, this version of me was. Is.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. You can just let me talk. Because if I don’t say this now, I’ll lose my nerve and I’ll never say it, and it’ll go on to be my big regret in life, and if I were a songwriter, every single song I ever wrote would end up being about it in some way, even if I tried to hide it, and critics would catch on and write something like ‘get over it already, man,’ and then—”

  Poor guy. Jonah could babble at times, but this was impressive. It meant he was super nervous. “Jonah. It’s okay. Just say what you need to say.”

  “Okay. This is going to sound completely crazy, but in light of everything that’s going on, I guess, really, not much could sound crazy.”

  Talk about the understatement of the year.

  He took a deep breath. “So like I was saying, the more I got to know you, the more it makes me think that maybe . . . you’re my person.”

  I was shaking at this point. And not even trying to hide it. “Really?” I said softly.

  “Really.”

  “I’m so glad you said that because I don’t think you’re my person—”

  His face fell.

  “—I know you’re my person.”

  At that we both smiled. Because I was near a mirror, as I did, I got a glance of myself and saw a piece of something smack in the middle of my front tooth, but I didn’t care.

  “Well. If we’re each other’s person, now what?” he asked.

  Yeah. Now what? I had been so freaked-out about realizing that my best friend was my person that I hadn’t got any further than that. “I don’t know,” I confessed.

  He moved closer. “I have an idea how we can start.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded as he leaned in. “Yeah.”

  As his head bent toward me, I relaxed. Finally I was about to be kissed by the right person. And then just as his lips hit mine, I freaked. But if I was kissed by the right person, I’d go back to 1986!

  “Wait—you can’t kiss me! You’re the right person!” I cried.

  But it was too late. Before I knew it his lips were on mine, and I could immediately tell that, yes, he was definitely the right person, and this was definitely the right kiss, and it went on and on and on, and I felt like I was soaking in a warm bath with lots of bubbles, and
it felt so good that I didn’t want to stop it, even if I ended up as Marie Antoinette’s BFF.

  But then it did stop, and I came to and opened my eyes, and Jonah was smiling at me and still holding me.

  “We’re still here,” I said, dazed.

  “We are.”

  “But . . . is it still 2016?”

  He took out his smartphone and looked at it. “It appears so.”

  Frankly, I didn’t care what year it was.

  As long as I was with him.

  WHATEVER FEARS I HAD ABOUT BEING stuck in 2016 with all the technology quickly went away. When you see a mother ask her two-year-old to find something for her on the iPad and the kid does, you realize that if he can do it, you can, too. As far as my family went, they may have looked different (i.e., perm-less) but they were still the same in all the ways I was used to (read: super into work, trying way too hard to be cool and act younger than they were). I had once heard this saying: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Years 2016 and 1986 were the same in enough ways that I figured 2016 was as good a place as any to be. Not only did I have Jonah, but now I had Montana as well. And I was looking forward to taking away the negative connotation from the word popular and giving it a different spin.

  Because high school is all about the drama of the hour, let alone the day, by the time the Ramp came down—about two weeks after the vote passed—so much had happened that barely anyone paid attention. Brad and Andrea hooking up was big news for a few days. That is, until they broke up when Andrea walked in on Brad examining Cassandra Levin’s tonsils in a bathroom at a party a week later. I felt bad for Andrea—so bad that I asked her if she wanted to go hang out at the Dell after school one day and do a little retail therapy—but oddly enough, she and Cheryl from the Go Greeners began spending a bunch of time together.

  I had thought that the campus TV station would do a report on the Ramp coming down, seeing that it was such a historical moment, but they felt that Penelope Strickland refusing to unchain herself from a tree because she was protesting the fact that the school refused to carry rice milk in the cafeteria was bigger news. So when it finally came time for the destruction (the administration was allowing me to swing the first hammer, which was nice of them), there were only a handful of students on hand to watch. Pretty much the ones who happened to be in the cafeteria right then, and, of course, my friends—Montana, Nerdy Wayne, and Jonah.

  There was a smattering of applause after I brought the hammer down on one of the steps, and then everyone dispersed.

  “Do you think you could do that again?” Jonah asked. “The picture I took is all blurry.”

  “Mm, I think the moment’s passed,” I replied.

  “I guess you’re right.”

  Montana gave me a hug. “Awesome job, my friend. If I were you, I’d write a piece about it tonight, while it’s still fresh in your mind, and try to see if you can get it picked up by the Huffington Post or Salon or something like that. Colleges would go nuts for that stuff.”

  I shook my head. “Can’t. I have plans tonight.” I grabbed Jonah’s hand. “He’s taking me to see Depeche Mode.”

  “Who?” Nerdy Wayne asked.

  “It’s an eighties band,” Jonah explained.

  Wayne and Montana tried to look interested, but failed.

  “They’re not so bad,” he said. “I’m kind of getting used to them.”

  “Okay—for you to go to a concert where there’s eighties music? This really must be love,” Montana teased.

  Jonah and I looked at each other. It was. And it had been the whole time.

  It had just taken me twenty-some-odd years to figure it out.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was written during a period where I a) fell in love; b) moved from New York to Louisiana; c) got pregnant; d) got married; and e) gave birth. So the fact that it even got written is a miracle. While I may have been the one with my butt in the chair typing the words (or, during my pregnancy, lying down and balancing the computer on my bump), it could not have been born without the help and support of many. It’s always scary working with someone new, but Dana Bergman at Puffin provided genius feedback and guidance on the manuscript, along with my editor Jen Bonnell, who has been my literary midwife on all eleven of my book babies. My agent, Tina Wexler at ICM, is a brilliant editor as well and the perfect first reader. The days I knew I was meeting Charlotte Aaron for coffee after a writing session made my fingers fly faster. Trying to write in a new space with something other than two cats around is asking a lot of person, but my husband, Lewie Blanche, went above and beyond to make sure that I was comfortable, physically and emotionally, and showed me that princes do indeed exist. And lastly, when I showed my daughter, Colette, this book, and she shoved it in her mouth and started gumming it with a huge toothless smile, I realized that this—and everything I’ve written in the past and will write in the future—is for her.

  chapter one: dylan

  One day as I was watching Oprah, waiting for her to get to her “Favorite Things for Spring” segment (she has the cutest taste in accessories), I heard this self-help guru guy say that the word for crisis in Chinese is actually two words: danger and opportunity.

  The reason I looked up from Vogue when the guru said this is because I have one of those lives where there’s always a crisis going on. Like 24/7. My best friend, Lola Leighton, says that I’m just a drama queen and that they’re not real crises, like, say, the kind she would’ve had to deal with if her parents hadn’t adopted her from the orphanage in China. Okay, yes, when you put it in that context, I guess Lola’s right. But since I live in Beverly Hills and not a third-world country, my crises and the crises of nonadopted kids are bound to be different, you know?

  Take, for instance, the time I was driving home from the Justin Timberlake concert at the Staples Center and I was all by myself because I had a huge fight with my boyfriend Asher after I caught him staring at Amy Loubalu’s boobs like seven times that night even though he swears he wasn’t, and my BMW conked out on the 405 freeway at midnight and I had to wait an hour for Triple A to arrive. Now, that, in my book, is a crisis—especially since I was wearing a miniskirt and tank top because it was a million degrees out. I mean, if a serial killer who liked girls with long blonde hair and blue eyes had driven by at that moment, I would’ve been dead meat. The only “opportunity” there was the opportunity to be chopped up into a million little pieces.

  As far as I’m concerned, sometimes a crisis is just a crisis. Like what happened last week with my Serge Sanchez bag. Yet another crisis—and the only opportunity there was to see what $1,200 worth of red leather would look like after it dried out. (FYI, it turns out that it doesn’t look so bad—sort of a cross between my two favorite nail polishes, OPI’s I’m Not Really A Waitress and Essie’s Scarlett O’Hara.)

  It was Tuesday afternoon and I was at The Dell, which is a huge outdoor mall on the border of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood that my dad happens to own, with Lola and Hannah Mornell, our other best friend. The day before I had seen these absolutely darling J.Crew red gingham ballet flats that I just had to have because I knew they’d look so cute with my black capris and a white shirt I had bought the week before. Very 1960s movie-starlet-ish, which was going to be my new look for fall. So I had gotten the shoes (plus two dresses, some tank tops, a cashmere hoodie, and some lip gloss) and the three of us were hanging out in front of the fountain deciding whether we should go to Urth Caffé for sugar-free iced vanilla lattes or Pinkberry for frozen yogurt when the Crisis-with-a-capital-C occurred.

  “Omigod, Dylan,” said Hannah as she clipped a tortoiseshell barrette onto her short auburn bob. Hannah is incredibly preppy for L.A. standards. While I may buy something from J.Crew occasionally, like the ballet flats, almost her entire wardrobe is from there. B-o-r-i-n-g, if you ask me, but I do believe in freedom of speech in fashion choices, so whatever. “I c
an’t believe I forgot to tell you who Jennifer Bonnell saw at Pinkberry on Sunday afternoon!”

  “Who?” I asked, with my face tipped up to the sun as I tried to get some fall rays.

  “Amy Loubalu.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So,” said Hannah, “she just happened to be talking to Asher.”

  My head snapped down so fast I’m surprised I didn’t break my neck.

  This is when the Crisis began.

  “She is so Single White Female-ing me!” I cried. Single White Female was a movie I once saw on HBO about this woman whose roommate starts dressing like her, and gets the same haircut, and then steals her boyfriend and kills him.

  Lola rolled her brown eyes as she put on some lip gloss. “Um, excuse me but she looks nothing like you. If anything, she looks like me.”

  “Um, don’t take this the wrong way, but if you haven’t noticed, you’re Asian,” I said.

  “Yeah, but we both have long dark hair,” she replied.

  “She has a point,” added Hannah.

  Okay, so maybe Amy didn’t look like me, since I’m blonde and she’s brunette, but she was obviously trying to copy me by stealing Asher away from me. People like to say that when people copy you, it’s supposed to be flattering, but I don’t see it that way. Frankly, I find it very lazy. I’ve worked very hard to be the most popular girl in the senior class at Castle Heights High and it’s not fair for some girl to think she can just ride on my coattails.

  As I continued going off on Amy in front of the fountain, I was waving my arms a lot, which is what I tend to do when I go into what Lola calls DQM (Drama Queen Mode). Just then my Serge Sanchez bag—which had been hanging on my right arm like it always was because I was terrified of having it stolen—went flying into the fountain. Apparently my arms had gotten really strong from Pilates because it’s not like the bag just sort of plopped over the edge so I could easily fish it out. It went soaring all the way into the middle, and since it’s such a huge fountain, there was no way I could get it out myself.