The Last Time We Say Goodbye

  The average person, or so the internet tells me, spends 20,160 minutes of life kissing.

  I wonder what our total was.

  God. V-Day has infiltrated my brain.

  The first person I ever kissed on the lips was a boy by the name of Nathan Thaddeus Dillinger II. I was 14, and Nate was the kind of guy whose parents bought him a sports car for his 16th birthday, which he would total (but survive to tell the tale) before he got halfway to 17. He was tall, dark, and handsome, wore designer jeans, and had one of those high-wattage smiles that made the female teachers go easy on him.

  Yes, he was hot. Yay for me.

  But for all his many qualities, Nate Dillinger was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

  He was failing algebra.

  You see where this is going.

  The first kiss happened in a study room of the Williams Branch public library. I was teaching Nate about the systems of equations. We were doing a story problem:

  John buys 3 goldfish and 4 betas for $33.00. Marco buys 5 goldfish and 2 betas for $45.00. How much would Celia spend if she bought 6 goldfish and 4 betas?

  Our heads were close together, bent over my notebook, where I had just finished writing out the equations

  3g + 4b = 33

  5g + 2b = 45

  when suddenly, without any kind of warning, Nate Dillinger kissed me.

  Hmm, I remember thinking as his lips moved over mine. This is not entirely unpleasant.

  Then he tried to stick his tongue in my mouth, and I thought something like, Ew, no, gross, and pulled away.

  “Sorry,” Nate said, smiling in a very non-sorry way.

  “That’s okay,” I said, stunned. I mean, he had just stolen my first kiss. I was never going to get it back. That was it.

  He took my “that’s okay” for permission to do it again, and leaned in. I leaned away.

  “Wait, do you even like me?” I asked.

  He frowned, confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you find me, well, I don’t know, attractive?”

  He shrugged. “You’re all right.”

  Be still my heart.

  “Just all right?” I snorted. “Then why did you kiss me?”

  Another shrug. “I was bored.”

  He was bored. He stole my first kiss because he was bored.

  Oh, the horror.

  I sighed and resisted the urge to say something hurtful. He was a boy, thus biologically engineered for stupidity of this type. We could get past it, I thought. I could still get through this tutoring session and receive the $50 I’d been promised. “Let’s get back to John and Marco, okay?” I suggested. “Now, the first thing we want to do is multiply the second equation by -2, so then we have a +4b and a -4b, which will cancel each other out, and then we’ll add—”

  That’s when he tried to kiss me again.

  And that’s how:

  Nate Dillinger + bloody nose = me - $50

  Yeah, so my first kiss was no big deal.

  My second kiss, the one that matters, didn’t happen until last summer.

  That day I was supposed to meet the gang at the SouthPointe Pavilions Barnes & Noble to chill for a bit, then go see a movie at the theater next door. As usual, Steven arrived early; he was already there when I showed up. But El had texted that she had one of her headaches (read: Downton Abbey marathon) and Beaker had called to report that she and Antonio were “having car trouble” (as in they were busy in the backseat of her car) and she didn’t think they’d make it out before the film started.

  “It looks like it’s just going to be you and me today,” I told Steven when I found him flipping through a Scientific American in the magazine section. “The others are flakes.”

  “Good,” I remember he said, with a quiet, knowing kind of smile he gets sometimes. “It’s been too long since I had you all to myself.”

  I laughed, but I was suddenly, inexplicably, nervous at the idea of having Steven “all to myself.” Maybe I could sense that something was going to happen. A change in the equation.

  I told myself I was being silly. Steven and I were friends. We’d known each other since we were 12, when we decided that the smart-kid types in our middle school were better off sticking together. Safety in numbers, you know. I thought Steven was cute even back then. But his attractiveness wasn’t really about how he looked, because there were periods when he had bad acne and braces and he was skinny as a beanpole. There was just something about him. The way he got excited about stuff like Tolkien and quantum physics and Doctor Who. He still had a sense of wonder that gets shamed out of the majority of the teenage population by the time we turn 18. He still loved things about the world. I found that inherently sexy.

  That and I could always tell he liked me. There’d been the paper flower on Valentine’s Day, and sometimes I caught him looking at me in a way that went beyond friendly. Interested.

  But Steven was too reasonable for romance, I thought. Like me.

  We wandered over to the science fiction and fantasy section and bonded over our adoration of Ender’s Game and discussed how Hollywood hadn’t screwed up the film too badly but it would never come close to the experience one gets reading the book, and I relaxed. Everything felt the same between us as it had always been.

  Then Steven pulled out Contact.

  “You should read this,” he said.

  “Carl Sagan, as in the astrophysicist?” I squinted at the cover, which had a picture of Jodie Foster on it for some mysterious reason. “He wrote fiction?”

  “It’s an amazing book,” Steven said. “It shows how the belief in religion and the belief in science are fundamentally alike. We believe, even when we can’t prove it, even when we can’t see.”

  “But in science, there’s evidence,” I argued. “There’s proof.”

  “Read it. You’ll see what I mean. You’ll like it.”

  I put my hand on my hip and smirked up at him. “How do you know what I’d like?”

  Looking back, I can see that this could have been construed as a lame attempt at flirting on my part.

  And it worked.

  “Oh, I think I know you, Lex,” Steven said, the sound of his voice changing from what it had been a minute ago. “I know what you’d like.”

  “Okay,” I murmured, and reached for the book, but he didn’t release it.

  “While we’re on the subject, you know what else you’d like?” He cleared his throat and glanced around. We were alone, at least in that particular section of the bookstore. “You’d like to go out with me. On a non-friend type of outing. A date, I mean.”

  Boom. A date.

  I sucked in a breath. “Is that a question?” I asked stupidly.

  “Yes. I mean, would you consider . . . would you go out with me?”

  I stared at him. A dozen reasons why this definitely would not be a good idea marched through my brain: This kind of thing would only complicate matters, make a mess. I hated messes. My life was enough of a mess as it was. I was just starting to feel like I had the ground under me again after my parents’ divorce. I needed to focus on school, keep up my perfect grades, get into college, figure out my life’s trajectory. I liked Steven—I liked him so much; that was easy to admit; he was one of my favorite people—but if we were together like that, it would make the other members of our group feel awkward. It would ruin our friendship.

  We’d end up hurting each other.

  “Steven—” I started to brace myself to say all of the hard things.

  “Wait,” he said. “Hear me out.” He extracted the book gently out of my hand and returned it to its place on the shelf, then took my other hand in his. “I know a romantic relationship could be considered risky at this stage. We have a year left of high school before we go our presumably separate ways. I know the purpose of romantic engagement, on a biological level, is for procreation, and neither one of us wants that, of course. But . . .” He glanced down at our joined hands. “That’s not all there is to it. There’s
the social aspect, of learning to interact with someone, as a partner, which could be useful for our future experience. And it’s been proven that romantic companionship is good for your health: it promotes the release of endorphins, relaxation, a sense of greater security, and . . .”

  We were both blushing by this point. We’re so similar, I thought. When we get nervous, we both start talking like idiot savants.

  “You’re babbling,” I observed.

  “I know.” He sighed and then kept talking. “I think we could be good together, Lex. I promise I wouldn’t pressure you, about . . . anything, and I won’t have any kind of expectations about what’s going to happen a year from now. I just want to find out what we could be like. An experiment, of sorts.”

  I bit my lip. He was making it sound reasonable. Logical. Tempting. That and he was gazing at me with those unbelievably warm brown eyes of his, and his expression said:

  PLEASE SAY YES.

  “So the experiment would be whether or not there’s chemistry between us,” I said.

  He let go of one of my hands to push his glasses back up on his nose, and smiled. “Exactly. A simple experiment in chemistry.”

  Which made sense. There was nothing Steven loved more in the world than chemistry.

  “So this would entail you and me going on dates,” he continued, moving onto the logistics of how it would happen. “Maybe once or twice a week, or more than that, if you want. Whatever you prefer, really . . . We could—”

  “Yes.” The word was out of my mouth before I could talk myself out of it. “I’ll go out with you. Yes.”

  “Excellent,” he said, looking so thrilled I thought he might start dancing right there in the bookstore. “You won’t regret it.”

  And that’s how it started.

  He held my hand during the movie. I sat in the flickering dark stunned by the idea that it had happened so easily, after all this time knowing each other. He asked me to think of him romantically, and I said I would. Just like that.

  “This isn’t too weird for you, is it?” he whispered after a while.

  “No.” I squeezed his hand. “This is good.”

  And it was.

  After the movie he drove me across Lincoln to the Oven, an Indian restaurant downtown. He opened the door for me, pulled my chair out as we were being seated, and insisted on paying for dinner.

  That was a little weird.

  Then he drove me home and walked me to the front door. And at the porch, he stopped.

  “Can I kiss you?” he asked hoarsely. There was so much in his expression, and I could read it all. He liked me. He really liked me. He didn’t want to mess this up. He thought it might be too soon, but he wanted to kiss me. He wanted to know that I felt what he felt. It was a real part of the experiment, this kiss. It was:

  Does me + Steven + dating = chemistry?

  That’s what kissing is supposedly for, on a biological level. It’s a taste test, to see if you’d be a good match.

  “Yes,” I said, and stepped closer to him. “You can kiss me.”

  Slowly he lowered his head until his lips almost touched mine. He smiled, and I felt light-headed with how much I found I wanted this. I dragged my bottom lip between my teeth to wet it and smiled too. Breathless. Waiting.

  “Okay,” he whispered, his breath hot against my cheek. “Here we go.”

  His mouth came down on mine gently, without pressure, and I don’t have words to describe what it was like outside of warm and wonderful and alive, and none of those words even come close. After a minute our mouths opened and my tongue touched his, and the furthest thing from my mind would have been the words ew or no or gross. He tasted like red curry and sweet tea. Electricity zinged down my body and pooled low in my belly and I thought, Wow. So this is how it feels. All this time, I’d wondered. I was almost 18 years old and I’d never felt so connected with another person.

  I curled my hand around the solidness of his shoulder and pulled him closer. He made a small rough noise deep in his chest and changed the angle, and our glasses banged against each other. We broke away from each other, laughing.

  “That was . . . ,” he started.

  “Spectacular,” I breathed.

  “Spectacular,” he repeated, his brown eyes sparkling. Because the results of our experiment were conclusive:

  Me + Steven + dating = spontaneous combustion

  He tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear, his thumb lingering on my cheek. I shivered. I wanted to kiss him again.

  “Good night, Lex,” he said, and then he turned abruptly and jogged back to his car. He sat there for a few minutes without driving off, and I wondered what he was doing until my phone buzzed with a series of rapid-fire texts. Which read:

  There are some things I didn’t get to say before.

  You are an amazing girl, Lex. You’re smart and funny and kind and beautiful. You’re the whole package.

  Thanks for saying yes.

  I’ll see you tomorrow?

  I texted back that yes, I would love to see him tomorrow. We grinned at each other through the glass of his car window, and he drove away, and I went inside.

  It was June 20.

  I’d get six months with Steven, six months to the day, 183 days of kisses, before the equation would change again.

  9.

  TY AND I ARE WALKING IN THE WOODS. There aren’t a lot of woods to choose from in Nebraska—we’re more of a plains-type state—but when we were kids Mom and Dad took us to this one part of the Nebraska National Forest where there were tall trees and a lake and a campground. We camped in tents, Ty and me in one and our parents in another. I can’t remember how old we were, but little, I think. Little enough that our very own tent with just the two of us seemed like the greatest adventure. We stayed up half the night whispering, making shadow puppets with our flashlights, gazing up through the see-through mesh at the top of our tent at the dark shapes of the tree branches swaying over us, imagining the stars. The next morning, we got up early to fish on the lake. Ty caught five fish to my four, but he threw his back into the water. He was tenderhearted, even then, too sweet to murder an innocent fish. But Dad bashed mine in the head with a special hammer and fried them up over the campfire for lunch. And then he said to Ty, “This is reality. Eat up.”

  Dad’s not so much with the sentimentality. My apple didn’t fall far from his tree, I guess.

  Anyway. It’s those woods, I think. Where Ty and I are walking now.

  He’s wearing a white tee and dark jeans.

  The sun is going down somewhere behind us. I don’t know where we’re walking. I’m wearing my backpack, and it’s heavy. I want to stop, just so I can get a good look, in the fading light, at Ty’s face. I’m starting to forget it. The shape of his nose. His ears. His lips, which were perpetually chapped. I used to say to him, “Dude, invest in some ChapStick already.” Now I just want to memorize him, every detail I can get, chapped lips and all, to push the image of him yellow and stiff and covered in a layer of funeral-home makeup out of my brain.

  “Hey,” I say to him. “Can we rest for a minute?”

  He turns to me. “You’re tired already? We only just started.” But he sits down on a large rock. “Give me some of your water.”

  I find I’m carrying a large water bottle. I hold on to it. “What’s the magic word?” I tease.

  “Puh-leeze,” he says, reaching, smiling, and I shake my head.

  “Nope.”

  “Moist,” he says. “The magic word is moist.”

  “Ew. No.”

  “It’s not delusion, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “Shut up. I was improvising.”

  “What word are you going to write your essay about?”

  “I’m not planning to do that assignment,” I inform him.

  “You. Aren’t going to do your homework. You.”

  “How do you even know about that?”

  He shrugs. “What word?” he persists. “What word would you write
about?”

  “Doofus,” I retort.

  “Brilliant. It fits you,” he says with a roll of his eyes. “Now give me the water, Lex. I’m dying here.”

  I arch an eyebrow at him.

  He smirks. “Figuratively speaking.”

  I hand him the water. He gulps down like half of it, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand in a gesture so familiar it makes my chest ache, and hands the bottle back.

  I miss you, I want to say. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I think, If I call attention to the fact that this is a dream, then I’ll wake up.

  I don’t want to wake up.

  Something snaps in the woods. A flock of birds startles from a tree and takes flight, their wings crackling in the air. The light is fading by the minute. I look at Ty. He’s staring off into the darkest part of the woods.

  “We should go,” he says as he gets to his feet.

  “Okay.”

  We start walking again. I still don’t know where we’re going. There doesn’t seem to be a path, but Ty acts like he knows the way. He keeps looking over his shoulder, behind us, like he’s afraid, and this makes me afraid. It’s suddenly so dark. The shadows are coming at us from every direction.

  We walk faster. I’m out of breath. I stumble on a tree root or something.

  I fall.

  Ty grabs my hand and helps me to my feet. In the woods behind us there are more snapping branches and crunching leaves, the sounds of something moving toward us. Something stalking us. Something big.

  I’ve hurt my ankle. Bad.

  “It’s a bear,” Ty says, when I open my mouth to tell him that I’m not going to be able to run. “A grizzly.”

  “There aren’t grizzlies in Nebraska.”

  “We should climb that tree.” Ty picks a huge, spreading oak, which also shouldn’t be in these woods. “Can you climb it?”

  I don’t have any experience climbing trees, but I try. I scramble up the trunk, ignoring the pain in my ankle, reaching at branches. Ty follows behind me, helping me balance, pushing me up, coaching me. But I’m slow. I don’t climb high enough or fast enough. I’m clumsy.

  “Hurry!” Ty cries. “It’s here.” It’s so dark I can hardly see, but I can make out the huge silver-tipped shoulders of the bear below us, impossibly big. It makes a kind of chuffing noise, like a bark. It stretches up toward us. Then it has Ty’s foot in its mouth. It starts to pull him out of the tree.