The Last Best Kiss

  “No, I mean about Finn’s family moving away.”

  “That’s what Natalie said. She got his number out of the directory and called him. You didn’t know?”

  “It’s not like we’ve kept in touch,” I said.

  Natalie’s information turned out to be accurate: Finn’s house had a new For Lease sign out front, and when I went back to school, there was no Finn Westbrook in the hallways; no small, thin guy with glasses and big brown eyes to look up and smile at the sight of me; no one to show me pictures of the latest photos from outer space or Outer Mongolia; no one to meet me for frozen yogurt and sweet, stolen kisses.

  I shared the backseat of Natalie’s small Mazda with a freshman named Helena whose one great dream was to be on the cheerleading squad and who first told us all every detail of the tryouts and then, after she didn’t make the cut, devoted herself to shredding the reputation of every girl on the team.

  I sent Finn a text a week or so after school started. It was late one night and I was sick of doing homework and I suddenly really wanted to talk to him. I missed him so much it hurt.

  I spent a long time figuring out what to write and decided—hoped—that simple and casual was the way to go.

  Hey! You’re really not coming back?

  He didn’t respond that night, but when I woke up, I found he had sent a text at two in the morning.

  Nope.

  The fact that he had responded at all made me decide to try one last time.

  Carpool’s not the same without you.

  Again, no response for hours. But that evening one came in:

  LOL.

  We used to joke about how much we hated when people wrote LOL—that no one ever means it literally, and it’s really just a lazy way to get yourself out of an exchange you want to end as quickly as possible.

  So. That. Was. That.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  one

  I’m walking past Molly’s room when she calls out to me, so I go in. She’s home for a couple of weeks between her summer internship at a San Francisco legal aid office and her final year of college, and she’s made it pretty clear this will be the last time she’ll ever live at home. It makes me sad: I like having her around. Lizzie’s been home this summer, but she and Dad mostly talk about the restaurants they want to go to and how badly most of the world dresses and stuff like that. I just can’t get into their conversations, and when I try to switch it to something more interesting, like movies or current politics or . . . you know . . . the relative merits of small versus big dogs, they don’t have much to say and just murmur some empty response before returning to something that interests them. Which is usually food, exercise, and how much classier they are than anyone else in the world.

  In a year I’ll leave for college myself. I can’t wait. Neither can Dad, who’s already talking to Realtors about putting our house on the market. He wants to move into a Century City high-rise. He says he’ll have a guest room for whenever we girls visit, and he told Lizzie she could decorate it, since she has such a “good eye for these things.”

  Whatever.

  I go into Molly’s room, and she’s lying on her bed with a book and she looks up at me and says, “I heard you walking by. Come talk to me.”

  I’m happy to comply. I sit down on her desk chair and swivel it around so I can face her. There’s something effortlessly cool about the way Molly looks, with her honey-colored hair that she wears chin-length and usually tucked behind her ears. She always wears jeans and T-shirts, but they look good on her because she’s tall and thin. I wish I looked more like her, but I’m shorter and curvier, and my hair is thick and dark and wavy, which isn’t completely awful, but I’ve always wanted straight, fine hair like hers. We have the same hazel eyes and arched eyebrows, though.

  “You started packing,” I say, because her suitcase is open in the corner, pants and bras spilling out of it.

  “I never unpacked.”

  “I don’t blame you. A quick getaway from here should always be an option.”

  She smiles briefly, and then she’s silent for a moment. “Anna,” she says, suddenly pushing herself up to a higher sitting position on the bed.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know I’m gay, right?”

  I stare at her. “What?”

  “Then again,” she says, her lips twitching like something’s funny, “maybe you didn’t.”

  “Why would I know? You’ve never said anything.”

  She raises the book in her hand. “Well, there’s this, for one thing.”

  “Rubyfruit Jungle? I just assumed you were reading it for school.”

  “Not everything is assigned reading, Anna.”

  “I guess not. Wow. I mean . . . You know. Wow. So . . . you’re really gay? Definitely?” She just tilts her head at me with a Come on kind of look. “Okay. Fine. Good. That’s cool, Mol. Do you have a girlfriend? Like a steady one?”

  She nods. “Her name’s Wally.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I know. It’s ridiculous, but it’s not her fault. Her parents named her Wallis, after the Duchess of Windsor, but that Wallis was a Nazi sympathizer douche bag, and she hates the name. So . . . Wally. And, yes, that makes us ‘Molly and Wally,’ which is pretty awful, but there’s not a lot we can do about that.”

  “But, I mean, do you . . . um, are you guys like a real couple? Or just dating?” That’s not really what I want to ask. What I want to ask is far more complicated—something about whether they have sex and how they have sex and whether she thinks about girls the way I think about guys and a million other things. But this is what comes out.

  “We’re a real couple,” Molly says. “Whatever that means.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “That I like Wally?”

  “That you were gay.”

  “For a while.” She puts the book down and pulls her knees into her chest, hugging them with her arms. “I mean, I didn’t wake up one day and think, Oh, look, I like girls. It was more that I just knew I reacted to stuff differently than my friends—they were all excited about dating and the guys in our class, and I just didn’t care. It took a while for me to realize why, but by junior year of high school, I was pretty sure.”

  “That was so long ago.”

  “Four years.”

  She’s known for four years. I feel left out. And hurt. “Did you tell anyone?”

  “Not until I got to college.”

  “Were you afraid people would be mean to you? Because there’s a gay guy in my class and he’s totally popular. People can be cooler than you think.” I would have been cool about it. If you’d just told me. Why didn’t you tell me?

  She shakes her head. “I wasn’t worried about being bullied or anything like that. More that my friends wouldn’t be as comfortable with me anymore—that they would start to act weird and think I was staring at them and not want to have sleepovers and stupid stuff like that. It didn’t seem worth it.”

  “Yeah,” I say, trying to be understanding, even though it still stings me that my own sister waited four years—four years—before telling me something this important about herself. I know I’m the member of the family she trusts the most. But not enough, apparently. “I get that.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t,” she says, almost irritably, and my head snaps up with surprise. “I was a wimp. I should have come out.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I wasn’t that comfortable around them, anyway. I might as well have been honest. I’d have been more comfortable with myself, at least.”

  “Do Mom and Dad know? Or Lizzie?”

  “Not yet. I thought maybe they’d notice the lack of boyfriends or something.”

  I feel better: at least she told me first. “You could wait a long time around here for anyone to notice anything,” I say.

>   “I know. I was hoping . . .” Her voice trails off. She looks sad. Then she shifts with a shrug. “But I invited Wally to come visit before we go back to school, and she’s going to take the train down next week. I thought I should probably tell you guys before then.”

  “Don’t tell Dad and Lizzie ahead of time,” I say.

  She tilts her head at me. “Yeah? You think?”

  “Definitely. I want to see if they figure it out.”

  She bobs her head. “All right, then. Why shouldn’t we have some fun with this?”

  I’m starting to feel kind of excited. This is big news. I want to tell all my friends, only I’ll be super casual about it. So my sister’s home . . . my oldest sister . . . the gay one. “You know I think it’s great, right?”

  “Do you?” Molly says, picking up her book. “Thanks, Anna.”

  All right. She’s done with this conversation. I stand up. “I can’t wait to meet Wally.”

  “She’s pretty wonderful,” Molly says with a smile as she opens the book. She glances up. “You have anyone in your life, Anna?”

  “Not in the boyfriend sense.” I’d had a few brief hookups at parties . . . but nothing that mattered. Not since Finn. If that even counted.

  “Wait until college,” she says. “The people are more interesting in college. “

  All Molly tells Dad and Lizzie is that a friend is coming to visit and she’s picking her up at the train stop, so when she and Wally walk in holding hands, I swear Dad’s eyes almost come out of his skull. But he’s polite and doesn’t say anything embarrassing. He’s very civilized that way. I’ve never seen him treat a guest rudely or say the wrong thing in public. He and I might not have much in common, but at least I can introduce him to people without any embarrassment or fear.

  After Molly and Wally head out for dinner together, Dad closes the door behind them and says, “I’m a little confused. . . .”

  “She’s obviously a lesbian,” Lizzie says. I’m surprised she says it so calmly, but then I realize she’s talking about Wally, not Molly. “And she clearly has a crush on Molly. I can’t tell if Molly realizes it.”

  “They’re both gay,” I say.

  Two pairs of light blue eyes swivel to stare at me. Dad and Lizzie look the most alike out of all of us: big, steel-blue eyes; straight noses; and thin lips. “Are you joking?” Lizzie says.

  “Molly told me.”

  There’s a pause. Then: “Molly is a terrible dresser,” Lizzie says to Dad. “She always has been. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in a dress. Except for prom. And she’s never had a boyfriend.”

  “I suppose it makes sense,” he says thoughtfully. “But even so—” He shakes his head. “She could do so much better. I’ve seen the girls at her school, and some of them are very attractive. Even some of the lesbians. And I’ve always said that Molly could be beautiful if she just put some effort into her looks. But this girl—”

  Lizzie’s already nodding in agreement. “That nose! And the short hair . . . Could she be any more of a cliché?”

  “I think she’s pretty,” I say. “And she seemed really nice.”

  They both shrug.

  “I should probably tell your mother.” Dad smooths the front of his shirt, a tailored pinstripe made out of crisp cotton. He has beautiful clothing, all of which he gets professionally laundered and ironed. He prides himself on always looking good, and he does. With his thick, dark hair (which I now know is carefully and regularly dyed) and his well-maintained, slender figure, he looks a decade younger than his fifty-three years, and women at restaurants often turn to stare at him. Sometimes I see my friends’ dads with their ballooning stomachs and balding heads—and overprotecting devotion to their daughters—and wonder what it would be like to have a father like that.

  Lizzie says, “Maybe wait to be sure. It’s really hip right now for college girls to pretend to be gay.”

  “Really?” Dad says. “Times certainly have changed.”

  “I don’t think that’s what’s going on here,” I say. “Molly told me she’s known since high school.”

  “Well, of course that’s what she’d say,” says Lizzie with a toss of her impeccably blow-dried mane of hair. She’s highlighted it so many times, it looks blond now, lighter even than Molly’s natural honey color, but she started with dark brown hair like mine. “But maybe she just couldn’t get a boyfriend, and this seemed like an easy out.”

  I stare at her. “Seriously?” I say.

  “Oh, grow up, Anna,” she says. “People do stuff like that all the time. You’ll see when you’re older.” Lizzie always likes to act like she knows a lot more than me, but most of her “wisdom” makes me stare at her in disbelief.

  Wally stays with us for three days, but she and Molly are almost never home. I go with them for one trip, to see Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. We have fun, but I get the sense Wally and Molly would rather be alone. They share Molly’s room at night, and no one says anything about that.

  The last day of vacation, they load up Molly’s car so they can drive to school together. Wally gives me a quick hug good-bye and then thanks Dad and Lizzie for letting her stay there. They tell her she should come back and visit again—a little too politely. Molly whispers to me to call her whenever I need someone to talk to, and then the two of them are gone.

  Mom calls that same night to say she’ll be in town tomorrow and wants to have dinner with us all. She does this periodically: swoops in and reminds us all why she stays away most of the time. I think she actually comes to LA on business much more often than we know, so I guess I should be grateful these reunions are as rare as they are. She claims to be disappointed that she missed Molly by a day, probably because it’s easier to see us all at once and just get the family obligation over with.

  Anyway, it’s bad enough we have to go meet her at Katsuya—restaurant of the rich and spoiled, where a few scraps of raw fish will run you a hundred bucks a person—but that afternoon Lucy calls to say that Jackson Levy (who’s moved up her list from “has potential” to “we could have a future together”) is taking advantage of his parents’ trip to take his sister to college to throw an end-of-summer party.

  “I don’t know if I can make it,” I say glumly. “My mom wants to have dinner, and she has this whole I’m so cosmopolitan, I can’t think about eating before nine at night thing.”

  “Can’t you just tell her you have something more important to do?”

  “I haven’t seen her in almost a year.”

  “Well, whose fault is that?”

  “Hers—but I still have to go to dinner.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because she’s my mother.”

  “Fine. Just come to Jackson’s as soon as you’re done.”

  Dinner is excruciating. Now that Lucy’s questioned it, I wonder why I feel like I have to make time for Mom whenever she asks. I guess it’s because I don’t know when or even if she’ll ever ask again. And there’s part of me that thinks maybe we’ll connect more as I get older—maybe she’ll see something in the adult me that she didn’t see in the kid me and will actually show some interest in being part of my life. It hasn’t happened yet, but it could, right?

  In the car I ask Lizzie if she knows why we always meet up with Mom when she wants us to, and she says, “Because Mom makes a lot of money, and we might need some of it one day.”

  Dad isn’t with us, of course. He and Mom don’t have much of a relationship. I can’t remember them ever talking much, even when they were still married—usually they were just playing parent tag, each trying to pass the kids on to the other as quickly as possible so they could get work done. They communicated mostly by email, even back then. Neither of them is the type to get all nostalgic about the past, so I don’t really know why they got married in the first place, but Molly once said she figured it was because they were both ambitious, high-earning attorneys who liked the idea of being married and having kids and respected each
other’s genetic makeup. The difference between them, she added, is that Dad felt a real sense of responsibility to the kids he’d brought into the world, and Mom didn’t. The reality of having a family wasn’t what she thought it would be—more work and less glory—and so she moved on. But he stuck it out. Which is definitely to his credit, and I should remember that when I get impatient with him.

  At dinner tonight both Lizzie and I have trouble knowing what to say to Mom, who looks healthy and self-satisfied and much younger than her age, which is somewhere around fifty-five—I’m not sure exactly. After the divorce, she gained some weight, and I think the extra roundness in her face is part of why she looks so good. She once said to me, “Your father was obsessed with my being thin. I realized it was his issue, not mine. I eat what I want now and enjoy every bite.” She added, with a cackle, “And I’m still ahead—after all, I lost a hundred and sixty-five pounds of ugly fat just by divorcing him.”

  She asks me whether I think I’ll get into a good college, and I tell her I’m mostly considering art schools. She makes a face and says, “I had higher hopes for you than that.”

  Lizzie distracts her by saying, “Molly brought her girlfriend home for a visit,” and Mom says, “Girlfriend?” and Lizzie says, “Yes, didn’t you know? Molly’s a lesbian.” “Good for her,” Mom says, and Lizzie says casually, “I wonder if it has something to do with the absence of a maternal influence.”

  Mom just shrugs and says, “Sexual orientation is hardwired, Lizzie.”

  We’re stuck there for a while longer while Mom asks us questions about our lives and then seems uninterested—or at least unimpressed—with our answers.

  Dinner is endless—since we’re all three fidgety, I can’t figure out why Mom orders an after-dinner drink, which forces us to sit for another ten minutes—and it’s almost eleven by the time we say good-bye to her in the restaurant parking lot. I text Lucy from the car to say I’m coming, but she texts me back: Don’t bother. Cops already shut it down. Come to my house and I’ll give you the deets.

  When I get to Lucy’s house, the twins’ Audi is parked in front. Hilary and Lily Diamond came to Sterling Woods in tenth grade. I’ve gotten to be good friends with them over the last year or so. I’m probably closer to Hilary, who’s incredibly smart and in a lot of my classes, but it’s impossible not to like Lily. She’s the kind of girl who’ll start a conversation with the strangers at the table next to you in a restaurant, and by the end of the meal, you’re all exchanging phone numbers and life stories, and the strangers will be hugging Lily like she’s their long lost sister or granddaughter or whatever.