by Siera Maley
Mom returned with our boutonnieres, and Riley examined hers for a moment, confused. “Wait, how does this work?”
“I’ll show you when Josh gets here,” I started to say, but the doorbell rang and I lit up. “Good timing!” I went to the door and opened it.
It was Josh, as I’d expected. He offered himself up, arms stretched out to the sides, and asked me, “How do I look?”
His tuxedo was sky blue with a matching tie, and he’d put hair gel into his black hair to make it lay flatter. He looked older than he usually did. “Very handsome,” I told him as I took his hand to lead him inside. “I was just telling Riley she needs to watch me pin this thing on you.”
“Hi, Josh,” Riley very clearly forced herself to say, and Evan good-naturedly offered his hand for Josh to shake.
“Hey, guys,” Josh replied, and then did a double-take as he looked to Riley. “Wait… purple hair girl?”
“The one and only,” Riley replied. I could practically see her resisting the urge to roll her eyes and held back a sigh myself.
“Nice!” Josh looked to Evan and told him, “You’re a lucky dude,” which very quickly caused Evan’s face to heat up.
“No, ah… well, thanks, but we’re friendly. Friends. Just going as friends, I mean.”
“Oh. Whoops.”
“Here, you just stick it on the lapel like this,” I told Riley, hastily redirecting the conversation. She watched me, then walked to Evan and mimicked my actions. Hers was a little crooked, but Evan straightened it once she’d stepped away.
Josh slipped his corsage onto my wrist and then offered me his arm. “Shall we go?”
“Not without pictures!” Mom interrupted. I’d almost forgotten she was there.
“Oh, sure thing, Ms. Copeland,” Josh agreed. She took a few pictures of just Josh and I, some of just Evan and Riley, and then a few of the three of us, without Josh. When we all got together for a group picture, it was with Riley and me in the center. I reached out and took her hand.
“Say cheese and smile!” Mom called out. “One, two, three…”
Riley’s hand squeezed mine tighter, and I grinned as the camera flashed.
Chapter Two
It was strange to me that Evan kept an arm wrapped around Riley throughout the drive to the dance.
I noticed it first when we were five minutes into our limo ride, and the two of them were sitting across from Josh and me. Vanessa was on my other side, and I half-listened to her go on about the songs she hoped the DJ would play, my eyes fixed, unmoving, on the way Riley leaned on Evan and his hand rested against the seat on her opposite side, his arm stretched out behind her back. It seemed oddly possessive, and while I knew they were both wary of their company and clinging to each other for support, I didn’t like the look of them together the way they were.
Then I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake asking them to come with me together. Evan had liked Riley for years, and I’d just assumed his crush had faded because it was no longer obvious. But what if he’d just gotten better at hiding it? And what if Riley was lying and felt the same way? Was I just a side character in some kind of epic love story they’d both be telling their grandchildren in sixty years?
The thought made me shudder, and that caught Josh’s attention. “Cold?” he asked me.
“I’m fine,” I insisted, and resumed pretending to listen to Vanessa. I glanced to Riley again and caught her eye, and she offered me a small smile.
I forced one back, picturing an elderly Riley and Evan describing how they’d met in first grade and always kind of liked each other and just never had the guts to act on it until this other friend of theirs – because in my horrific vision, I was no longer around and was left nameless – had made them go to their junior Prom together, where they’d finally gathered the courage to admit how they felt.
I shuddered again, feeling as though I’d potentially made a terrible mistake. Neither of them had even wanted to go in the first place. Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed.
Our group stopped for dinner, where I mostly ate in silence, too busy disturbing myself with the idea of Evan and Riley together to hold a conversation. We showed up at the dance another hour later, and Josh immediately pulled me out onto the dance floor.
I forced myself to cheer up. I was probably just paranoid. Riley had never shown an interest in dating, and there was no reason to believe she’d start now.
Still, I kept an eye on the two of them on and off over the course of the night. They mostly stuck together, dancing to the fast songs with each other and awkwardly agreeing to leave the floor for the slow songs. I abandoned Josh, Vanessa, and the others to dance with the two of them a couple of times, which, unsurprisingly, were the more fun dances of the night.
As the dance wound down and the fast songs gave way to slower ones, I stayed pressed to Josh, my hands hooked behind his neck while his rested on my back and waist.
“I’m so ready for tonight,” he murmured into my neck, and I inhaled deeply and closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure that I was ready, but I wanted to be.
I pulled away from him a little and looked around. Vanessa was pressed close to her date, and they were making out, which had already gotten them into trouble twice already. I chuckled a little and shook my head, then searched the crowd around us for Evan and Riley. I couldn’t find them on the edge of the dance floor.
When I checked my other side, I realized why. They were a few feet away, swaying together with a gap between them. It was very middle school. I caught Riley’s eye and she gave me a small shrug, as if to say, “Yeah, I don’t know, either,” and it made me laugh again. I knew for sure I’d been paranoid, then. It didn’t matter that they were slow-dancing together. Riley didn’t like Evan. Riley didn’t like anyone. She was just above the whole high school dating thing, I supposed.
And maybe that was the best way to be. Here I was, with a dark cloud hanging over my head and a half-hearted commitment to sharing a hotel room with a boy I wasn’t sure even wanted to do the long-distance thing. I liked Josh, but it’d certainly been stressful to be with him this year.
Eleven o’clock came, and those of us in our Prom group who hadn’t already found an alternative way to leave the dance early piled into the limo. I sat between Josh and Riley this time, exhausted, and felt her lips press to my ear. When she spoke, her breath tickled, creating goosebumps on my arms. “Do you know what you’re doing yet?”
I shook my head silently, and she sat back, visibly disappointed. A part of me knew that for all her efforts to be a supportive, impartial best friend, she very clearly didn’t want me to go with Josh. Probably because she didn’t like Josh. But they were from two different worlds, so it was understandable. It didn’t mean either of them were bad people.
When we reached Josh’s home, I said goodbye to Vanessa and got into his car with Riley and Evan. I fidgeted all the way to my house, very aware of Riley and Evan staring holes in my cheek and the back of my head from the seats behind Josh and me. Josh reached over with his free hand and took hold of mine. I breathed in slowly as we pulled up in front of my house, suddenly feeling very hot, and rolled my window down to get some cool air on my face.
“Good times, you guys,” Josh told Riley and Evan distractedly, examining his hair in his rear-view mirror. I nudged him, and he turned around to smile at them. “Seriously. It was fun. Riley, you looked really pretty tonight; I’m impressed.”
“Thanks,” Riley replied flatly. She got out of the car on my side while Evan exited on Josh’s side, and I hesitated, glancing to Josh, who had gone back to checking himself out in the mirror. I didn’t know what to do.
Riley paused outside of my window and arched an eyebrow at me in a silent question.
“Um.” I shot her a desperate look, hoping she wouldn’t be upset, and then said, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
She stood there for a moment that felt much longer than it was. And then her gaze dropped to the ground, and she shrugged her shoulders
and moved away from the car. “Yeah, whatever.”
I let out a sigh and pressed the back of my head to the seat, inwardly berating myself for getting stuck in between my boyfriend and my best friends in the first place. Josh started his car back up again, and we drove away.
***
The hotel room was nicer than I’d expected it to be. There was a mini-fridge, a television, a bed much bigger than the one I slept in at home, and even a couple of complementary bottles of water.
“Sweet,” said Josh when he spotted the water. “I didn’t know they gave us that.”
“Free water, imagine that,” I joked. He rounded on me, grinning, and then hoisted me into the air and carried me to the bed. I laughed the whole way despite myself; he’d always had a way of making me feel comfortable when I was second-guessing something. It was one of the things I liked most about him.
We kissed for a moment with him hovering over me, before I lay back on the bed and swallowed hard. “I’ve never…” I started to say, and his smile faded.
“I know.” He hesitated, and then admitted, “I actually haven’t either.”
I was taken aback. He had so much more dating experience than I did. “But-”
“But I’m the basketball captain? But I’ve had other girlfriends?” He shrugged. “You and I started dating when I was sixteen. I never actually got around to it before then, and when we started talking, I thought it’d be cool if it were you. Because I really liked you.” He brushed a strand of my hair away from my face. “So… here we are.”
I swallowed hard and reached up to touch his cheek. I didn’t want to ruin our night, but I agreed with Riley that I had to get the elephant in the room taken care of before we went any further. “But what about after this?”
He sighed and hung his head for a moment, and then shot me an exasperated look. I knew then that he’d been hoping to avoid this discussion. “Why do we have to worry about that right now? We’ll figure it out later.”
“You always say that,” I insisted, sitting up. “You always say we’ll figure it out later. But this is a big deal to me, and I don’t want to have this moment with a guy who doesn’t see a future with me. Even if I am only seventeen.”
“But in this moment, right now, it isn’t about the future. It’s about me and you, and the fact that we’ve been planning this for months now. We said Prom night at the latest, and c’mon, Kayla, it’s Prom night! Life is too short to not live in the now, so just…” He leaned in and I pressed a hand to his chest, stopping him. He sighed and climbed off of me, running a hand through his hair.
“I want to have this conversation tonight,” I told him.
“Why tonight? Literally every night other than tonight would be better than tonight!”
“Then we should’ve had it before now,” I countered. “But we didn’t because you wouldn’t, so here we are. What happens after graduation?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “How am I supposed to know? All I know is that I’ll be in California, and you’ll be here. And it’s, like, a ten-hour drive or something, so… I guess it’s gonna be kind of hard to visit.”
“And there’ll be a ton of girls there,” I reminded him. “Really attractive girls from California.”
“C’mon, Kayla, it’s not like I don’t think you’re attractive. I never shut up about how hot I think you are.”
“Well, you might feel a little differently when you haven’t seen me in two months and a girl a year older than you is walking to the communal dorm bathroom in just a towel,” I retorted, rolling my eyes.
“What, you think I’m just gonna sleep with the first girl that pays attention to me? That’s really what you think of me?”
“No, I just think that you’ll probably meet someone and… what if something happens, and then I’m here alone? Or… what if I find someone else here when you’re not around?”
At that, he tensed, and I fell silent, biting anxiously at my lip. He shook his head.
“If you wanna date someone else, you should just say it.”
“I don’t!” I groaned and pressed a hand to my forehead, squeezing my eyes shut. “But how are we supposed to date someone we never see?”
Josh was silent for a while, his legs crossed in front of him and his chin in his hands. At last, he said, “Maybe we aren’t.”
I looked over at him, letting out a deep sigh. He’d come to the same conclusion that I had, deep down, several weeks ago. It was only now that I was finally acknowledging that conclusion. “You really think so?”
“I don’t know. It kind of seems like long-distance relationships don’t work out. Do you even want to go to school in California?”
“It’d be nice. But I won’t have the scholarships that you do, and my mom didn’t have the money to send my sister anywhere out of state, so I’ll probably have to stay in-state, too. So… we’d be living in different states until you graduate. In-” I inhaled deeply, pausing. “In four years.”
There was a long silence, and then Josh mumbled, “So that’s it? We’re really just gonna call it quits on Prom night?”
“You’re not leaving yet,” I reminded him half-heartedly. “There’s still the next two months, and then summer.”
“But you don’t want to do tonight, so why would you want to keep dating me?”
I hesitated, and then admitted, “I wouldn’t. I kind of just said it because I didn’t know what else to say.”
“I figured.” He looked over at me, sighed, and then leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. “You sure you don’t want to have sex tonight?” he joked.
“Pretty sure.”
He stood and offered me his hand, then helped me get to my feet. “Figured it was worth a shot. It’d be nice to have a good final memory to look back on, you know? You’re… you, uh, were my first real girlfriend.” He winced, and gave his head a quick shake, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. His voice choked up, he mumbled, “Shit.”
I stood on my toes and pulled him close for a long kiss, and then told him, trying to keep my own voice steady, “I’ll miss you.” Maybe it had been inevitable, but that didn’t make it any easier.
He pressed his forehead to mine and I felt his hands tremble at my waist. “Well, I miss you already,” he said.
***
It was after midnight when I finally got back home, so I resisted the urge to text Evan and Riley and waited until morning. I knew that Vanessa was probably the better person to go to and that Evan and Riley had never really liked Josh, but they were also my best friends, and I wanted my best friends to be the ones to get me through my first major break-up.
I cried a lot that night. I’d been with Josh for a year and a half, and I wasn’t going to just immediately be over it, even despite the fact that I’d sort of initiated our break-up. I didn’t know how to handle it. Could I still talk to him, or was that not allowed? Could I even text him? Would he even want me to?
I woke up feeling groggy the next morning, and after I showered and changed, I picked up my phone to contact Evan and Riley. My eyebrows furrowed when I saw I had a text message from Evan already. It said exactly what I’d wanted to send him: “Creek?”
“Ten minutes,” I sent back, and went downstairs to tell my mom where I was going. She tried to ask me questions about Prom, but I avoided them. The longer I could go without mentioning breaking up with Josh to her, the better. I didn’t want to deal with her meltdown when I was still trying to prevent having one of my own.
I didn’t text Riley, mostly because I assumed that Evan had texted her to come to the creek, too. So I was surprised to see Evan alone at our old makeshift shelter when I got there.
His eyes were closed, and he looked completely drained. He didn’t even look my way until I was standing right next to him. “Rough night?” I joked.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he fired back.
“Ha ha. Where’s Riley?”
“Left her out of this one. She’s not answering my texts,
anyway.” He sighed deeply and elaborated, before I could even ask, “I think I screwed up last night.”
I sat down next to him, concerned. He still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Oh, god, Evan, what did you do? Did you guys have a fight?”
“I kissed her,” he groaned, looking to me at last.
My eyes widened. I was sure I’d misheard him. “What?”
“I kissed Riley. After the dance we went to my house to play video games and we were hanging out and talking and she looked pretty and you know – don’t act like you don’t – that I’ve always kind of liked her and I just kind of kissed her.”
“Okay.” I tried hard to absorb every word with a straight face. “So she pushed you away and then what?”
“Pushed me away?” he asked, confused. “What? No, we made out for like… I don’t know, a few minutes? Maybe even close to ten or fifteen. It felt like a long time.”
I went through a range of emotions in that moment, and, frankly, deserved an Oscar for keeping my face from changing. First, there was alarm, for obvious reasons. Then, also obviously, disgust. But then there was a third emotion I couldn’t identify, though it felt like a searing heat that started in my stomach, shot to my heart (it stayed there, burning, for a few seconds), and then exited through my ears like invisible steam. But it wasn’t entirely like anger.
“You made out with Riley,” I echoed dumbly. “Riley made out with you.”
“Yeah. I mean, I knew I wasn’t imagining things,” he said. “There was always something there, you know? And we made out for a while, which was… really nice-”
“Okay, I got that part,” I interrupted.
“And then she kind of… freaked out and left.”
The searing feeling faded slightly. That sounded more like Riley. “Freaked out how?”
“Well, we were kissing, and then we stopped kissing, and she didn’t push me away or anything but we just sort of stopped and kind of just sat together for a few seconds. Then she said she had to go, practically ran out, and isn’t returning my calls or texts. And I’m guessing you haven’t talked to her because you look totally freaked out right now.” He said all of this in one breath, with very few pauses, and I blinked a couple of times, trying to keep up.