The Crew would always be friends.
Best friends.
But being best friends and being “together” would not always mean the same thing as it did right now.
It wasn’t until later, hours later, that Alex, Zoe, and Emma realized what had happened. Layla was right. Alex was with Joey. Zoe was with Dylan. And Emma with Savannah. They all knew they weren’t going to make it to froyo, but they each thought that they’d be the only one. They didn’t realize that all three of them had the same no-show plan. And none of them texted The Chat, even though they probably all should’ve . . . and so, as soon as they could, Zoe and Emma and Alex showed up at Layla’s front door.
Almost immediately after that all four of the girls ended up on Layla’s trampoline. It was quiet for a while. No one knew quite what to say as the trampoline swayed softly beneath them.
“Layla,” Alex started, trying to find the right way to apologize.
“I am so sorry,” Zoe said, already looking like she might cry.
“Guys . . . ,” Layla said, brushing her bangs out of her eyes. “It’s okay. Really.”
“No, it is not, really . . . ,” Emma said.
“I know you’ve all been busy . . . with the boys or the girl.”
“Yeah, but . . . ,” Emma said. “That shouldn’t be more important than this . . .”
“It’s not more important,” Alex insisted.
“Not at all!” Zoe added.
“I know, I know,” Layla said
“Like, all those other people—any other people—they just don’t even compare—”
“Emma, stop—”
“No, you stop. They’re all important, yes, but this isn’t about them. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Everyone else in the entire world is orbiting in an entirely different universe than we are. There’s just no contest.”
“We really are the luckiest . . . ,” Zoe said, as they always did.
Layla knew that. Really and truly. And it was what finally made her cry . . .
“See. I knew you were sad,” Zoe said, a tear streaming down her face too.
“No, but I’m not,” Layla tried to explain. “The thing is, when I was sitting there, at our table all by myself . . .”
“Twist the dagger . . . ,” Alex teased.
“She’s allowed to twist it if she wants to twist.” Emma laughed.
“I’m not twisting,” Layla said, smiling. “I’m saying that I was sitting there, and I kept thinking that maybe I was going to cry . . . but I didn’t. And I . . . I want to say that I didn’t know what to do without all of you or that I just don’t know who I am without you guys, but the truth is that I do. The truth is that I know who I am even when I’m ‘without you’ because all the best parts of you are already a part of me. . .” A few fresh tears ran down Layla’s cheeks. “So. These tears right now aren’t because I needed you this afternoon and you weren’t there . . . I think these tears are because you weren’t there, and I was okay. Really and truly.” The feeling was absolutely gut wrenching, but it also filled Layla with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. “Sorry, I swear I’m not actually sad . . . ,” Layla added, still wiping tears.
“Then, why are you crying?” Alex asked, feeling the tears welling up in her eyes too.
“Because now this really feels like the end,” Layla said.
“No! We still have three weeks!” Zoe said. “And summer! And grad night! And prom!”
“Right . . . ,” Layla said. She always had lots of grand visions about prom, but they all circled back to Logan.
“We’re going together, right?” Alex asked.
“Of course,” Layla said.
“No, I mean we’re going together together. ’Cause I literally can’t think of anyone I’d rather pose for pictures with . . .”
As soon as Alex said the word “picture,” a single tear ran down Emma’s cheek. She’d been the last noncrying holdout. “Not you, too, with the tears . . . ,” Layla said through more tears of her own.
“I can’t help it,” Emma said. She sincerely couldn’t.
None of them could.
They were all crying now.
And the tears were mostly happy.
Or at least more happy than sad, but they were still a little bit sad, too.
The girls knew that no matter what happened from here on out, it would never be exactly the same between them. After graduation, they would simply never all be in high school together again. And soon even the memories would fade. All the late nights and the all-nighters and the rainbow sprinkles. All the crushes and the soul crushing kisses, and all the texting and the touching and sexies and sex . . . one day all of it would blur together.
“Kind of like an orgasm . . .” Emma laughed.
“Yeah,” Layla agreed. “At some point, all the feelings and sensations just kind of blur together. I think that’s how our memories will be too: blurred into us, into our souls.”
“A soul of fireworks,” Alex said, clearly liking the sound of that.
“Fireworks really are the perfect metaphor,” Zoe agreed. “They’re so bright and bold and fill up the entire sky, but then they also fade away just as quickly.”
“Oh, now you get it.” Alex laughed.
“I do, actually. I finally do.”
“Zoe. Reed,” Layla said, putting the pieces together. “Tell me everything . . .”
“Phone sex, late last night.”
Everyone erupted into a familiarly epic fit of laughter.
“Finally!” Alex squealed. “I love that so much.”
“Me too,” Zoe agreed.
“Me three,” Emma added.
“This is perfect,” Layla concluded.
“The only thing that would make it even more perfect is if we had . . .”
“ . . . frozen yogurt,” Emma and Zoe chimed in, along with Alex.
“It’s already in my fridge,” Layla said.
“You got frozen yogurt? For all of us? Even though we were assholes and didn’t show up?” Zoe asked as both a question and an apology.
“Have you met me?” Layla laughed. “Of course I did.”
Layla didn’t know for sure that they’d all end up on her trampoline like this, but she had certainly hoped that they might. It was a dream. And, in Layla’s head, hopes and dreams and plans were all still sort of the same thing.
The girls went inside, into the kitchen, and ate all of the frozen yogurt and toppings.
Now Layla couldn’t help but think that it was wrong when she had said that this felt like the end. It wasn’t. Not yet anyway.
But it was, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
28 days until graduation . . .
EMMA invited Savannah to come over and have dinner with her parents.
“First prom, now dinner with your parents?” Savannah teased. “What happened to the expectation-less Emma I know and love?”
Good question, Emma thought.
But the question was also the answer.
Savannah did love her.
And Emma loved her back.
And there were very few things in the universe that Emma was sure about, but at least for right now, and the foreseeable future, she was entirely and without-a-doubt sure about Savannah—and she wanted to make sure her parents were too.
The O’Malleys seemed to be in a good mood before dinner even began, but they were absolutely thrilled to have a teenager at the dinner table who was glad to answer all of their questions. Savannah talked to them about school and her classes and her plans for the future. She still had another year left in high school, but still, unlike Emma, she didn’t cry every time anyone mentioned the word “college.”
Then, the conversation wound its way around to prom.
“We’re actually . . . we’re going to prom together,” Emma said.
“Oh yeah?” Her mom smiled. Emma could tell that her mom wasn’t entirely registering what that meant. “Layla and Alex are going together too, right?”
“Yeah. They are”—Emma nodded—“but they’re just going as friends.”
That statement seemed to get her parents’ attention.
“Savannah is my girlfriend,” Emma said simply.
She didn’t say it to shock them or try to rile them up.
She said it because it was true, and because it mattered to her.
And she wanted her parents to know.
Emma’s parents looked at each other and then glanced back at Emma and then across the table toward Savannah . . . and then her dad said, “Sounds good” and her mom asked if Emma knew what she wanted to wear to prom—and that was it. The conversation marched on. Emma said she had no clue what she wanted to wear, but Savannah chimed in and said she was thinking about buying a new suit. Savannah felt like one of them should wear a suit—’cause it would look better for the pictures or something—and Savannah said she wanted to be the one to do it. Emma’s mother agreed that it would look nice. Especially if Savannah’s suit or tie was color coordinated with Emma’s dress. Turned out, that’s exactly what Savannah was thinking too.
And the rest of the dinner conversation continued like that, back and forth across the table.
This, Emma thought as she listened to the pleasant chatter.
Just simply: this.
23 days until graduation . . .
LAYLA could not have been happier to cross it off her to-do list.
It had been 146 days since she first wrote it down. Now she finally had blond highlights in her hair. It was even more important for her to cross this bullet point off her list, especially since it was looking less and less likely that she was going to cross off anything else . . .
But it was prom night, and Layla was determined to have the best time of her life.
Layla and Alex, Emma and Savannah, and Zoe and Dylan all lined up on the staircase—and took a million and one pictures. The girls were glowing—and honestly, Dylan was too. And Layla’s highlights looked absolutely perfect.
The Crew (and company) took a limo to prom, which was at a fancy hotel in Santa Monica and the six of them basically spent the entire night on the dance floor. At one point, when the DJ switched songs and everybody screamed, Layla looked across the crowded dance floor and saw Logan and Vanessa, dancing. And also kissing. Really, it would’ve been more accurate to say that she was just sucking on his tongue. But Layla didn’t care. Well. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but it certainly wasn’t enough to ruin her night . . . absolutely nothing could do that. At some point, as things started to wind down, Layla and Alex realized that Emma and Savannah had disappeared and so had Zoe and Dylan . . . but Layla and Alex were still there, still dancing—and having the time of their lives.
It might as well have been just the two of them on the dance floor.
* * *
ZOE and Dylan headed upstairs to their very own hotel room.
As they were getting undressed, a new thought occurred to Zoe, something she hadn’t considered until this very moment. Dylan had dated a whole string of girlfriends throughout high school, but he hadn’t slept with any of them. Thinking back through all of their phonefalls, she couldn’t remember him even ever mentioning it as a possibility.
“What were you waiting for?” she asked.
“You,” Dylan said.
“Oh, yeah, I’m sure. . .”
“I was waiting for you to get boobs,” Dylan teased. “Obviously, I can’t say I was actually waiting for you,” Dylan added more seriously, “because that wouldn’t be entirely true. But looking back on it now, it kinda feels like that.”
That’s how it worked, Zoe thought.
You couldn’t fully understand things until you looked backward.
The hard part, of course, was that you still had to live it all forward.
But Zoe knew that it could not have happened any other way.
At the beginning of the semester she couldn’t even say the word “orgasm,” let alone try and have one. And now . . . here they were. Dylan put on some music—a perfectly curated prom night playlist—and Dylan and Zoe got lost in each other for a while . . . in their nakedness and paleness . . . in their laughter . . . and in oh-so-many kisses.
“I love that I can feel you smiling while we’re kissing you. And blushing, too.”
“No, D, come on . . .”
“You come on . . .”
“You cannot feel my blushing. You just know that I am because I always am . . . it’s an unfair advantage.”
“Oh, Z, don’t tell me what I can and cannot feel.” Dylan laughed.
And that made Zoe laugh too.
And they continued kissing. . .
It was incredible how natural it all felt. After so many years of friendship and phone calls and inside jokes . . . this just felt right.
Afterward, and after some more cuddling and more kissing, Dylan went to take a shower and Zoe found herself lying alone in bed. It seemed rather fitting, considering how many nights she’d spent alone in bed, talking to Dylan on the phone. And then she remembered her own phone, and The Chat, and the fact that The Crew was all waiting for a prom sexie. Zoe never liked the way she looked in pictures, but she wanted to take one now. She stayed in the bed with the sheets wrapped around her. She held her phone straight out in front of her, her arms fully extended, and snapped the picture. Just one. She looked at it, expecting to need to take another one. Or two or three more even. But she didn’t.
This was it.
Her face was as red as her hair.
Her hair was as frizzy as it had ever been.
And she’d never felt prettier.
4 days until graduation . . .
LAYLA got an A plus on her final AP English paper of the year.
Officially, that lifted her overall class grade from an A minus up to an A, which meant that she’d crossed every single bullet point off her high school to-do list . . .
. . . except for the one about having sex.
As glad as Layla was to cross off this second-to-last point, it was also one last glaring reminder of the one she wouldn’t finish. It looked so lonely all by itself.
Luckily, Layla didn’t have to stare at it very long, as Alex was already outside, honking. “Usually I’m the one getting honked at,” Alex said as Layla climbed into the backseat of her car along with Emma. Zoe rode shotgun and DJ’d as The Crew drove out to Malibu for a party at Trevor Morgan’s beach house. The party was fun, in that everyone-was-wasted sort of way, but after a while it just felt like too much fun, and Layla needed a breather. She walked down to the waves, pulled off her sandals, and stuck her toes in the Pacific Ocean. The water was freezing, but she liked the cold. And she liked the way the moon reflected off the waves. And just as her eyes and thoughts drifted up to the stars—or at least whatever stars she could see through the California haze—she heard a familiar voice behind her.
“There she is . . .”
It was Logan.
He said it as if he’d been looking for her, which, apparently, he had.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked. “Hiding?” She wasn’t, but all of a sudden she wanted to. “You know I love you to the moon and back, right?” he asked as if they hadn’t broken up back in February. As if he hadn’t chosen Vanessa instead. As if he still really loved her. He had tried to ask as if he weren’t actually drunk, but clearly he was. He was wasted. And all his words just slurred together.
Layla didn’t know quite what to say, so she didn’t say anything at all.
“A penny for your thoughts?” he asked.
It was the kind of question Layla would’ve found so charming back when they were dating. Now he just reeked of alcohol and a bit of desperation.
Layla held out her hand as if to ask for an actual penny. Logan didn’t have one to give her and probably mistook her gesture anyway, so he grabbed her hand and held on, squeezing it tight, which felt familiar but also foreign all at the same time . . .
After a brief moment Layla pulled her h
and away.
“We broke up.” Layla knew that Logan was talking about Vanessa, but it was also what she wanted to say to him.
“I heard,” she said instead. She’d been trying not to pay too much attention to Logan and Vanessa’s relationship, but apparently something dramatic had happened between them on prom night, and Vanessa ended up going home with someone else.
“Shoulda listened to you . . .” Logan laughed. “But then you should’ve listened to me, too.”
“O-kay . . .” Layla didn’t quite know what Logan meant, but she was more than ready for this conversation to be over.
Clearly Logan was not: “There were gonna be rose petals.”
“What?”
“On the beach. That was going to be the last clue on Valentine’s Day. I was gonna decorate the sand in front of my aunt and uncle’s with a whole entire, like, bed made out of red rose petals. And we were gonna have sex on top the petals, on top of the sand, under the stars, and the moon and back—”
“Logan, I really don’t . . .” The missing word at the end of Layla’s sentence was “care,” but she decided she didn’t want to say it out loud. Or she couldn’t. Either way, she decided it was time to go back inside the party. Layla started walking back to the house.
Logan followed closely after her. “Okay, I’m sorry—”
“I don’t need you to be sorry—”
Logan reached out and grabbed Layla’s hand again.
And she pulled hers away again, just as fast as she could.
“Why are you mad at me?” he asked.
“What kind of a question is that?”
“You don’t seem to want to talk to me . . .”
“Logan, I’m not gonna make small talk or whatever—”
“We can make big talk if you want.” Logan laughed.
“You’re drunk, Logan. Go home.”
“Would love to,” Logan said with a crassness in his voice. “But first can we agree that we should’ve lost it to each other?”
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