The Last Best Kiss

  I toss a “hello” back in her direction and kind of hunch over my artwork, but of course that’s not going to stop Ginny, who’s the sort who’ll peer over your shoulder even if you don’t invite her to.

  “Oh, Anna,” she says plaintively as she peers over my shoulder. “Aren’t we ever going to get you to take some chances with your artwork?”

  I stiffen. Everything about this statement annoys me, from the assumption that she’s been mentoring me to the implication that I’m artistically stunted. I say, “This isn’t done yet,” because it’s not, and because I’m hoping that will stop her from analyzing it.

  “Oh, Anna,” she says again—and now just those two words are enough to make me want to drive a sharpened colored pencil through her eye. “It’s not a question of done or not done. Nothing artistic is ever really done, is it? The important thing is whether you’re extending yourself. Are you stretching creatively? This feels so similar to what I’ve seen from you before.”

  I don’t want to defend myself to her. I shouldn’t have to. But it’s hard not to respond when someone’s standing two inches from you criticizing something you’ve made. “This is for my application portfolio.”

  “Art schools are going to want to see your range,” says Ginny, who—just to be clear—never studied at an art school. She went to USC, where she majored in Human Performance. “I’m sure you have plenty of samples of this kind of thing.” She flicks, almost contemptuously, at my drawing. “You need to show them you can do something like a vase of flowers. Or a plate of fish!” Maybe she notices my expression, because she quickly adds, “Or anything that’s colorful and close-up—the point is to let them see there’s more than one side of you.”

  “I really have to finish this.” I bend over my work.

  “You should be using an easel, you know.”

  “I like to work this way.”

  “Your poor back.” She starts rubbing it with the palm of her hand, which just makes me stiffen it more. “Oh, and when you see her, will you tell Lizzie that I can’t wait until Saturday night?”

  “Okay. You guys doing something?”

  “Yes—with you! I’m joining your family dinner to say good-bye to her before she leaves. I am going to miss her so much. And I bet you will too.” Ginny throws her arms around me, and I’m enveloped in a cloud of musky perfume. “We’ll just have to spend more time together.” She gives me one last big squeeze before releasing me. “It’s crazy how late her school starts, isn’t it? It’s that silly quarter schedule. But at least it means she’s not gone yet, and we’re going to have so much fun at dinner! But now I have to run to practice.” She turns to go. Then looks back. “And try to branch out a little artistically will you, Anna? You have so much potential. You just need the maturity and courage to make it blossom into something real. Love you! Bye!”

  With a swish of her barely clad butt, she’s gone.

  I bend back over my work, but my focus—my lovely, wonderful, stress-relieving, happy-making focus—is shot, thanks to her visit. I put aside the black, thin pen I was using and drop into a chair. I study the picture.

  Ginny’s right about one thing: you can definitely tell that the same artist is responsible for all the work I’ve produced over the last couple of years. Somehow I started doing these weird landscapes—vast wastelands, most of them, often burned red and black, although sometimes they’re wet with huge lakes or unevenly covered with tiny stones—lands that don’t look like they should belong on Earth, and maybe they don’t. I’m not even sure in my own mind whether they do or not. I usually do that part in a mixture of watercolor and pastel, to get some texture into it, but I’ve experimented with almost every kind of paint and surface—I just like the watercolor/pastel combination the best so far. Anyway, then I go in with ink pens—I use the sharpest I can find—and sketch in something small and weird. Something that doesn’t belong in the landscape at all. Sometimes it’s humans—two middle-aged women having tea, maybe, against a menacingly red Martian-looking landscape. Sometimes it’s something mechanical: a robot trying to dig its way out from behind a rock. Sometimes it’s animals, like a couple of tiny rabbits chasing each other on the edge of a world that’s covered in ice.

  I stopped questioning why I made the kind of art I did a long time ago. It’s just what I do. I go into a kind of trance, and it makes me happy and it feels right. I don’t paint vases or still lifes or portraits. (Sorry, Ginny.) I do this.

  My art started turning into this at some point in my tenth-grade year. Sometimes I’d lie in bed after working on one of these pieces and I’d still be thinking about it and working on it in my head, and then suddenly I’d picture myself in the backseat of Lizzie’s car, and Finn—the ninth-grade Finn who was long gone by that point—would pull out his phone and say, “Let me show you this incredible photo I just found,” and I’d say, “And let me show you this.”

  And I’d hold up my picture. And he would like it.

  And then I’d tell him he inspired it.

  And he would like that too.

  I’m heading out the door for Phoebe’s VMA party on Thursday night when I stop on our threshold and scan the empty street.

  My car is nowhere in sight.

  I go back in the house and shout for Lizzie. She’s not there—which explains the absence of the car. She must have driven off while I was in the shower. Nice of her to check to see if I needed it. Which I’m pretty sure I already told her I did. Which probably explains why she left without checking.

  Dad’s not home either, so no chance of borrowing his car.

  Phoebe’s house is pretty close, but not close enough to walk. So I text Lucy:

  I need a ride. Get me?

  Already at Phbs—she says she’ll tell Lily to grab you.

  The doorbell rings about ten minutes later, but when I open the front door, it’s not Lily.

  It’s Finn.

  “Hi,” he says. “Someone here call for a cab?”

  He’s wearing khakis and a green button-down shirt that looks soft, not stiff. He’s rolled the sleeves up to just below his elbows. It’s the first time this fall that I’ve seen him wearing glasses. They’re black and small and rectangular and a lot cooler than the oversize ones he used to wear, but even so they make him look more like the old Finn.

  “Why are you here?” I say, a little stunned by his sudden appearance on my doorstep.

  “Phoebe asked me if I could grab you.”

  “She said Lily was going to.”

  His lips compress briefly. “Sorry,” he says. “You’re stuck with me. But it’s a short ride.”

  Oh, god—I just offended him. “I didn’t mean it like that! I was just confused.”

  “Shall we go?” is his response. He’s already turning around and heading toward the car.

  I follow him, and we get into the car.

  “1044 Burlingham, right?” he asks as he pulls away from the curb.

  “Yeah. It’s about two minutes away—I carpooled with Phoebe and her sister for two years.”

  He doesn’t say anything to that, and I wish I hadn’t brought up carpools.

  I look down and smooth my skirt over my lap. I feel self-conscious. I’m wearing a long, gauzy skirt with a tight green sweater on top and short black boots. The last glance in the mirror back home had been reassuring, but suddenly I’m filled with self-doubt. The skirt is too boho, the sweater too preppy—Lily could pull off the clash of styles, but I look silly, like I’m in some kind of costume. I tug on my hair, which I straightened with a flat iron but which is already softening into its usual waves, and desperately try to think of something to say so we don’t just keep sitting there in silence. I come up with a brilliant “Is it nice being back in LA?”

  “Yes,” he says. “It feels like home. More or less.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  Could this conversation get any more hollow?

  He doesn’t look at me at all, just drives, one hand on
the steering wheel, the other resting on the gear drive like it’s a stick shift, which it isn’t—the car’s an automatic. I bet he was driving a manual car back wherever he’s been for the last few years and hasn’t gotten out of the habit of keeping his hand on the shift. It’s a glimpse into the mystery of his life away from LA.

  I say abruptly, “We had fun during carpool, didn’t we?” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize how pathetic they are. What am I hoping for?

  A connection. That’s what. Some tiny shred of friendship that might have survived the last three years.

  I don’t get one.

  Finn says tonelessly, “Yeah. Good times.”

  I know when I’m hitting my head against a brick wall. Sometimes I even know enough to stop pounding. So the only other thing I say on the drive is, “There’s Phoebe’s house. The one with the red door.”

  “Thanks.” He parks, and we start walking toward the house together. Eric Manolo pulls up, and Finn calls out to him. Eric gets out of his car and comes bounding up to us with his round cheeks and big, friendly smile, and Finn asks him about his car, which I guess is some kind of new hybrid or something, and the two of them talk about that until we reach the house.

  I drift back behind them and try to get my mind off that miserable car ride. I stare at Eric’s back and wonder why he’s here. I like him a lot: he brings a mellow, good-natured vibe wherever he goes, which I’m always grateful for, given how type A Lucy, Hilary, and Phoebe can all get, especially when they’re together. But Phoebe hadn’t said anything about inviting him, and even though we’re all friends with him, we almost never see him outside school.

  Eric and Finn join the others, who are in the family room eating guacamole and watching people being interviewed on the red carpet, but Phoebe isn’t there, so I go looking for her. I find her in the kitchen unwrapping plastic cups. “Oh, good,” she says. “Stay here a sec—I need help carrying stuff into the other room.” She’s wearing jeans and a shrunken T-shirt, with her light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I feel overdressed in my skirt and sweater. Phoebe isn’t exactly pretty, but she has a fresh-scrubbed, athletic kind of vibe. Makeup looks wrong on her face since she has big features, but when she keeps her clothing, face, and hair simple, she looks like the kind of girl who’d start off in the movie as the hero’s best friend and then he’d realize he’s in love with her. Speaking of which . . .

  “I didn’t know Eric was coming,” I say.

  “Yeah, we were talking at school today about something else, so I said he should come.” She sounds a little too casual about the whole thing. Like she’s trying hard to make it no big deal.

  “Cool. I like Eric.”

  “Grab the soda for me, will you?”

  I put my hands on the Coke bottles and then freeze, listening. “Wait—what is that sound?”

  “That is the sound of a crazy dog whining in my parents’ bedroom.”

  “You don’t have a dog.”

  She sighs. “We do now. My mother was walking by a dog adoption fair in some parking lot and said he looked right at her and asked her to take him home.”

  “In so many words?”

  “My mother is cray-cray, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  Phoebe’s mother is a little nuts. I’ve only met her a few times, but she’s the kind of woman who takes your hand when she meets you and peers intently into your eyes and says things like, Thank you for being such a special friend to my daughter. Squirm-inducing. “Is he cute?”

  “Not even a little bit,” Phoebe says with disgust. “I’ve been asking for a pug for years, and Mom goes and picks up this weird pit-bull-mix thing with tiny, mean eyes. It loves her—follows her around and sleeps with her. But it growls at me and my dad, and he got so annoyed that he told Mom she was going to have to choose between him and the dog.”

  “The dog’s still here,” I point out. “Should I be concerned?”

  “Dad hasn’t left yet. But he is pretty pissed.”

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “It’s a girl but looks like a boy.” Phoebe plucks at a stubborn bit of plastic wrap clinging to a cup. “Which is why I call it it.”

  “Does she always make that noise?” It’s an unpleasant cross between a howl and a moan.

  “It’s mad because I locked it up. Dad said I had to because it snapped at him this morning. He’s worried someone might get bitten tonight, and we’d get sued.”

  “Shouldn’t you just return her to the adoption place if she’s that dangerous?”

  “You try telling my mother that. She literally said, ‘You don’t give a child back because it misbehaves; you teach it not to.’” Phoebe picks up the plastic cups and a stack of paper plates. “Help me bring everything in, will you?”

  I pick up the soda bottles and say, “Uh, Phoebe? I just wanted to ask you—why’d you have Finn pick me up? Lucy said you were going to ask Lily to.”

  She looks over her shoulder from the threshold. “He called for my address right after you texted, so I asked him instead. Why? Was there a problem?”

  “No,” I say. “I was just surprised.”

  Sometimes crazy things happen at the VMAs—like the year Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift when she was accepting her award and said it should have gone to Beyoncé—but this year’s show is pretty dull, and we end up talking more than watching. Unfortunately I get stuck for a long time on the sofa between Phoebe and Lucy, who decide a party is a good time to discuss the upcoming SATs and proceed to dissect every question they struggled with the last time we all took them.

  I’m worried about the SATs too—my first scores were lower than I’d hoped, and I’ve been taking a class on Saturday mornings to try to get them up—but I don’t get why they want to talk about that stuff tonight when the point is to have fun.

  Since I can hear them laughing a lot, I assume the other guests—Lily, Finn, Eric, and Oscar Green—are having a much more fun conversation on their side of the room, but after that car ride, I feel like Finn would prefer me to keep my distance. Too bad: Oscar’s one of my favorite people these days. He’s funny and self-deprecating and adorable, and normally I’d go sit with him . . . but not right now.

  Lily and Finn are squeezed together in an oversize armchair. It all looks very cozy.

  At least Lily’s made me feel less overdressed. She’s wearing a party dress—a real party dress—the kind a little girl would wear to, like, a big formal event. It’s a light blue satin, with poufy sleeves and a floaty tutulike skirt so big, it covers Finn’s lap too. It probably is a little girl’s dress: Lily’s so small and slender, she sometimes shops in the kids’ department. She’s also wearing knee socks and platform heels and has on some kind of headband encircling her head above spit curls. She looks crazy. Adorably crazy. But crazy.

  She’s brought her ukulele, and when Taylor Swift performs, she pulls it out and sings along. We all applaud, and she gets up and curtseys, grinning and bobbing.

  “You’re better than she is,” says Finn, and Eric chimes in with his agreement.

  When Lily thanks them, she only looks at Finn.

  The evening grinds on. Lucy and Phoebe stop talking about the SATs and start talking about grades and college applications. I alternate between sort of listening to them and sort of watching the TV. The others keep laughing.

  I get up to pour myself some more Diet Coke, but the bottle is empty. I call over to Phoebe, who says to get another bottle from the kitchen.

  I find the Diet Coke in the refrigerator, and I’m turning around with the bottle in my hand when I stop, because there’s a dog in the doorway.

  Her eyes are narrowed, and her head is lowered. She’s pretty big. She’s growling at me, lips pulled back from the sides of her mouth, showing her teeth.

  And, Granny, what big teeth you have.

  I like dogs. My parents refused to get us one—or any pet—because they didn’t want to be “even more burdened than we already are,” but
a lot of my relatives and friends have them and I’ll pet and cuddle and throw balls with pretty much any sweet dog I come across.

  But I don’t like this dog. Mostly because she already seems to have decided that she doesn’t like me.

  “Good doggy?” I suggest hopefully.

  Good Doggy’s upper lip twitches up to show a fraction more tooth.

  “Just let me get by you, okay?” I say. She growls deeply in her throat.

  I can’t remember if you’re supposed to look an angry dog in the eyes or not look it in the eyes. I try looking right at this dog, and she instantly narrows her eyes so malevolently that I quickly look away again. I take a step toward the door, thinking maybe she’ll move aside—maybe she’s just fooling around—but instead she lowers her shoulders into what looks like some kind of pre-lunge position, and I step back.

  I want to yell for Phoebe, but I’m seriously scared that shouting will make this dog attack me. So I say, “Uh, Phoebe?” very quietly into the empty air. Maybe she’ll hear me. “Your dog is kind of blocking my way. She’s kind of terrifying me. Like I think she might kill me.”

  I can hear the sound of applause and music coming from the family room. The TV’s on really loud. No one’s going to hear me talking that quietly.

  “Okay,” I say to the dog. “It’s just you and me. And I really want to get out of here. So you’re going to let me. Right, doggy? Nice doggy?” Trying to keep my voice soft and gentle, I take a careful step toward the door. The dog holds her ground but doesn’t do anything else. “That’s right. Good dog.” I take another step. And another. I’m almost there—

  And that’s when she starts barking—so sharply and furiously that I instantly cringe back. “Stop it!” I say. “Just stop it!” And since I’m shouting, anyway, I scream for Phoebe. Possibly a little hysterically.

  The dog crouches, ready to spring at me—at least I think she is—so I back up, my arms going up to shield my face, but before she can move, she’s suddenly pulled back. She turns her head, snapping furiously at whoever’s got her—which is Finn. He’s there, in the doorway, dragging the dog back, and while he’s wrestling her, he manages to get out a panted and urgent, “Are you okay?” and I say, “I’m fine.” He yells over his shoulder for Phoebe to help him control the dog, and she appears, shoving past the other kids who are piling up in the hallway to see what’s going on. She says, “Stop it, Rowley! Stop it now!” and the dog seems to respond at least a little bit to her name, because she stops snapping and just glares at everyone and especially at Finn, who’s desperately trying to keep hold of her without getting bitten. “Little help here, Phoebe?” he says urgently. She reaches down, and he transfers the collar to her with an audible sigh of relief, backing quickly away.