The Last Best Kiss

by Claire Lazebnik

  He says to me again, “Are you okay?” and again I tell him I am.

  “Someone must have let it out,” Phoebe says. The dog ducks her head and pulls, straining against the collar, and Phoebe says, “Stop it, Rowley!” I have a feeling she says that a lot to this dog. “Who went into my parents’ room?”

  We all shake our heads.

  “She must have gotten out by herself,” Lucy says.

  “How? She can’t turn a knob. No opposable thumb.”

  “Maybe she bribed a guard,” Oscar says.

  “Come on,” Phoebe says to the dog. “You’re going back in. Stay away from my parents’ room, guys.” She drags the dog by her collar down the hallway.

  “You okay?” Lucy says to me.

  “Fine.” Now that I’m safe, I’m also embarrassed. “I’m sorry I screamed. It’s just—it kept blocking my way. And growling at me.”

  “That is one scary-ass dog,” says Eric sympathetically.

  “You should have seen Finn when you screamed,” Lily says. “He was out of the room before the rest of us even realized it wasn’t coming from the TV set. Total hero.” She takes his arm. “Come on, hero. I’ll buy you a drink.” He laughs and willingly follows her back down the hallway. The rest of us follow. I’m still clutching the Diet Coke bottle to my chest. In the family room, I pour myself a cup with shaking hands.

  A little while later, Lucy says she has to go home to work on an English paper, and I hitch a ride back to my house with her. Some nights you just want to have end.

  I try to get out of eating dinner at the Swan on Saturday night with my father, Lizzie, and Ginny Clay.

  I know. Poor me. Having to eat at one of the newest, fanciest restaurants in all of LA. But honestly I would rather eat at a fast-food place. The food at these gourmet places is never worth the pretension and the endless discussion about it.

  Dad says I have to come. “It’s Lizzie’s last night at home.”

  Lucy had told me I could use her as an excuse—that I could say she was having some sort of emotional crisis. (“Which I am, you know,” she said. “I’m freaking out about the SATs.” And, yes, even dealing with that sounded more pleasurable to me than this dinner.) So I try that, but Dad says, “Your friend will survive for four hours without you” and refuses to hear any more arguments. It’s fine when he wants to withdraw and ignore the demands of family, but when he decides we should be together, I don’t get a say.

  Dinner turns out to be just as delightful as I’d anticipated.

  The waitress has committed the horrible crime of not being super thin, and every time she stops by the table and leaves again, Lizzie murmurs something like, “She’s heading back to the kitchen. They’d better hide the bread.” Ginny Clay opens her big green eyes wide at every comment and covers her mouth with her hand, laughing and protesting.

  “You’re terrible!” she says with delight. “Stop making me laugh! I feel awful laughing!” Then she laughs some more.

  The couple sitting next to us—whose only sin was picking this restaurant for a romantic dinner—are also considered fair targets for Lizzie’s delicate wit.

  “Should we tell her her boyfriend’s gay?” Lizzie asks, jerking her head toward their table.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” my father says with a wink. “Ignorance is bliss. Maybe the situation works for them.” Dad’s looking handsome tonight in a jacket and tie. He likes to dress up for dinner out. I’m wearing dark jeans and a leather jacket over a silk top, Lizzie is wearing black pants and a tight sweater, and Ginny Clay is wearing a narrow skirt and a brightly colored, flowing top with a wide neck that shows the lacy camisole underneath.

  “Now you two stop that!” she protests with a giggle. “They’re just having a nice date!”

  “Ginny, Ginny.” Lizzie shakes her head fondly. “You are so innocent. You probably still believe in the tooth fairy.”

  “Oh, is that who that guy is?” says my father with a nod toward the next table. “The tooth fairy? That explains everything.” And the three of them laugh while I check my texts under the table so no one will notice.

  Dad calls the waitress over and tells her that Ginny needs a refill on the white wine that she and Lizzie both ordered. (Lizzie’s still six months shy of her twenty-first birthday, but the waitress didn’t ask for ID.) He orders himself another scotch while he’s at it.

  Lizzie says, “I like your pants,” to our waitress, who thanks her for the compliment. After she’s walked away, Lizzie whispers, “That’s because they make me think of sausages and I love sausages!”

  Ginny slaps her wrist. “You’re awful! So terrible!” Then she turns to Dad. “Thank you for ordering for me. I love being taken care of.” Dad smiles magnanimously as she goes on with a pretty little flutter of her hand. “Although I really shouldn’t have any more wine. I’ll get tipsy. And in front of one of my students!”

  “I’m not actually one of your students,” I say.

  She brings a slender-fingered hand to her chest. “Maybe not officially, but I feel like I’m mentoring you.” She turns to the others. “Anna has so much talent.” She touches my father lightly on the wrist. “But you already know that—there is no way she could have gotten this far without a supportive parent.”

  “I try,” he says. Which is debatable.

  “I’ve just been urging her to push herself a little more.” Ginny taps her chin thoughtfully. Her blond hair is piled on top of her head, and tonight she’s wearing the kind of small black glasses that pretty young women wear to make themselves look like pretty young intellectual women. “She needs to spread her wings artistically, but I think she’s scared of stepping out of her comfort range.”

  My father peers at me. “Anna, I hope you’re not going to be one of those people who goes through life crippled by the fear of taking risks.”

  I roll my eyes. “Really? But that sounds like such a good plan.”

  “If I could wish one thing for my girls,” Dad tells Ginny, “it’s that they have the courage to take chances in life. That’s how you succeed.”

  “You are so right,” she says eagerly. “That’s what made the great artists great—Van Gogh, Picasso, Gauguin . . . they all took risks.” What a genius: she can distill all the greats down to one single shared quality that I lack.

  “Are you a risk taker?” my father asks Ginny.

  She tilts her head sideways and slowly fans her long, mascaraed eyelashes at him. “Just try me.”

  Dad lifts his chin ever so slightly and smiles.

  “I think Ginny was flirting with Dad,” I say to Lizzie later that night. We’re in her room, where she’s desperately trying to finish all her packing. The taxi to the airport’s coming early in the morning. Dad didn’t want to give up his training session at the gym to drive her. “Not after that huge meal,” he said cheerfully, when he told her to call the cab company.

  “Flirting? Don’t be ridiculous.” Lizzie holds up a pair of shorts. “Are these too long? Do they look like mom shorts to you? I mean, not our mom—she couldn’t squeeze into these if her life depended on it. But you know what I mean.”

  “They’re fine. You can always roll the bottoms up. But didn’t you see how Ginny kept touching his arm? And she kept telling him how brilliant he was. . . . You really didn’t see that?”

  “She was just being friendly. That’s how she is.” She smirks. “You should try it sometime.”

  I ignore that. “I just thought it was weird.”

  “Plus she’s only a couple of years older than me. Dad’s not a cradle robber.”

  “He’s dated younger women before.”

  “Not that young. And even if he did, Ginny’s not his type. I know Dad better than you.” That’s a frequent refrain from her: how close she and Dad are. How similar they are. How Molly and I are more like Mom, which she pretends isn’t an insult but we all know is one. “What about these pants?” She holds up jeans with a floral print. “I thought they were kind of cool at the store,
but now I’m thinking they’re stupid. You want them?”

  “Not after you called them stupid.”

  “They’d probably be too tight on you, anyway. They barely fit me.”

  I give up and leave the room, telling her I have to do homework. We forget to say good-bye that night, and she’s gone by the time I get up the next morning.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  four

  A few days later, Lucy and I are studying together at the Starbucks near school when Jackson Levy walks in with a guy I don’t know. Lucy bounces up from her chair and calls out to Jackson, who waves before placing his order with the barista.

  Lucy gazes at him as she sits back down. “He’s so perfect,” she says. “Have you ever seen anything so perfect?”

  He is handsome in a beefy all-American sort of way, with a killer body. Even from fifteen feet away, I can see his biceps bulge where his T-shirt sleeves end.

  “I hear he’s gotten three offers from colleges already,” Lucy says dreamily. “They all want him for their lacrosse teams. He told me that Yale is his number one choice. Which is yet another reason we belong together—it’s mine too.”

  “Yeah, but the odds of both of you ending up there—”

  “I can dream, can’t I?” She sneaks another look at him. “I love that he’s so built. I could never date anyone short or skinny.”

  “You have a serious daddy complex,” I say.

  “No, I don’t. I just like the way it feels to get crushed against a big, strong chest.”

  “Yeah, that’s not how a little girl feels with her dad at all.”

  “Shut up.”

  Once Jackson and his friend get their enormous iced triple venti drinks, they come over to our table. “Hey,” Jackson says.

  “Hey,” Lucy says, beaming.

  Jackson introduces the guy he’s with, whose name is Wade Porter. He has gray-blue eyes and wavy black hair and is wearing a crimson Harvard T-shirt. He’s a lot more slender than Jackson, and since I don’t have Lucy’s daddy’s-girl issues, I prefer that. He is, in fact, totally attractive.

  “Anna and Lucy go to school with me,” Jackson tells him.

  “Wait a second,” Wade says. “You go to Sterling Woods?” We both say yes. He looks at me intently. “And your name is Anna? You’re not Anna Eliot, are you?”

  “Yeah. Why? Am I famous?”

  “This is going to sound weird, but you and I are related.”

  “Seriously?” I’ve never heard of him before. “Is this some kind of new pickup line?”

  “Nope.” He grabs a chair from another table and sits on it. Jackson does the same thing, but he has to go farther to find a free chair, so Wade starts talking before he’s settled. “We’re cousins—not close ones, obviously—third or fourth and probably a bunch of removeds. I think my grandmother was first cousins with your grandmother? They were both Latimers before they got married.”

  I stare at him, surprised. I thought he was joking at first. “Whoa—that’s totally right. But how’d you know I was her granddaughter?”

  “I applied to Sterling Woods for ninth grade, and we were looking at the roster of kids, and my mother pointed to your name and said, ‘Oh, look—Anna Eliot—she’s your cousin.’ Some relative had done a big family-tree thing a few years before that he sent around with everyone’s name on it and where they lived, and she had thought about getting in touch with your father because you lived so close and then chickened out. My mom’s like that,” he adds. “She’s kind of shy. But she did Google your dad.”

  “Googling,” I say. “The next best thing to a family reunion.”

  “I’m jealous,” Lucy says. “I want to discover a long lost relative.”

  “Which one of us is the long lost one?” I ask Wade.

  “I’ve always known where I was,” he says with a smile.

  We compare relatives. There are a couple of great-aunts and uncles we’ve both heard of, but other than that there’s not a lot of overlap.

  Lucy and Jackson break off into a separate conversation. I can hear her talking about the SATs. Seems like a bad choice of topics—sort of the opposite of fun and sexy—but at least she’s not being phony.

  I know I should be worrying about the AP biology notes in front of me—we have a huge test in two days—but I’m kind of liking both the idea and the reality of connecting with this distant cousin of mine, so I keep the conversation going. I nod toward the T-shirt he’s wearing. “So what’s the story with that? You get recruited at Harvard?”

  “Recruited? For what?”

  “Aren’t you a lacrosse player?” I’d assumed that was how he knew Jackson.

  “Nope. I play on my school’s tennis team, but—” He glances around like he doesn’t want anyone else to hear, then leans forward and whispers, “I’m not actually very good. I’m just hoping no one notices.” He leans back. “You play anything recruitable-ish?”

  I shake my head. “Not even close. Do you know where you want to go?”

  “Where I want to go? Sure. An Ivy would be nice, but Stanford’s my top choice. Now ask me where I think I can get in—sadly that’s probably a different list. What about you?”

  I tell him a little about my hopes for getting into an art school, then ask him how he knows Jackson (it turns out they met in preschool), and then Jackson glances over and says, “We should get going, dude,” and Wade nods and they both stand up.

  “It was cool meeting you, cuz,” he says to me.

  “Sure was, cuz,” I reply.

  And he has me send him a text so we’ll have each other’s phone numbers.

  After they leave, Lucy says, “Your long lost cousin is pretty cute.”

  “Too bad it could never work out between us. Our kids would have three heads.”

  She rolls her eyes. “That’s only when you’re like siblings. You guys are so distantly related, you’re probably as genetically similar to him as you are to me.”

  “Then why won’t you sleep with me?”

  “I do,” she says. “Practically every weekend.”

  “Oh, right.” I open my bio book. “That wasn’t exactly the kind of sleeping together I meant, you know.”

  “Well, it’s all you’re getting,” she says with mock primness. Then she stops goofing around and gets serious about biology, because Lucy hates getting anything less than an A on a test.

  “Homecoming after-party is always the best party of the year,” says Lily at lunch the following week. The plate in front of her is half filled with French fries, half with beets from the salad bar. She said those were the only two foods that looked good to her. She’s been alternating eating them, dipping first one then the other into mayonnaise. On the one hand: disgusting. On the other: somehow she’s managed to make it look delicious, and I sort of want to sneak a taste.

  “What are you talking about?” Hilary says. “Remember last year? They oversold tickets, and we got turned away at the door. And the year before that when the shuttle bus we were on broke down and it took two hours before they got us another one? And by the time we got there, everyone was drunk and it was too crowded? You said you’d never go again.”

  “Third time’s the charm,” Lily says cheerfully.

  “The triumph of hope over experience,” I say. “That’s Samuel Johnson, in case anyone was wondering.”

  “No one was,” Lily says.

  I stick out my tongue at her. She wiggles her fingers at me. They’re stained with beet juice.

  “So are we going to try to go this year or not?” asks Lucy.

  “To the after-party?” Hilary says. “We have to. We’re seniors.”

  “It is our moral obligation,” I agree.

  “But no shuttle buses,” Lily says. “We’ll find someplace nearby to park.”

  Hilary says, “We’re not supposed to do that.” Lily just gives
her a look and she sighs. “Yeah, I hate the shuttle buses too.”

  “So who’s driving?” Lily points a pink-tinged finger at Finn. “You have the most ecologically responsible car, so you should.”

  “Okay, but we can’t all fit in my car.”

  “Lucy can drive too.”

  “Hold on,” Lucy protests. “If I drive, I can’t drink.”

  “See? That’s why you should drive,” says Lily. “You’re actually responsible about this stuff.”

  “Yeah,” Lucy says glumly. “I am.” She turns to me. “You have to promise me not to get drunk either. It’s not fair if I’m the only one who’s sober.”

  “Finn has to drive too,” I point out. “So he’ll be sober.”

  “But he won’t be in my car. I want another rational person in my car with me. You don’t have to be stone-cold sober, just not wasted. Okay?”

  “Yeah, fine.” So now I’m committed to being in Lucy’s car.

  Which . . . you know . . . means I can’t be in Finn’s.

  He’s clearly devastated by that same realization. You can tell by the way he’s laughing at something Lily says so hard that his head has fallen back and his mouth is partially open. Total devastation.

  If you’ve never been to an after-party, then you haven’t missed much. We all go because we all go. Not because anyone really enjoys it.