Once and for All

  I just looked at him. Across from me, Leo snorted into his beer.

  “Anyway, don’t let me interrupt your night,” he said, bending down to untie Ira from the deck rail. “We’ll just make our exit and hope for better results at the next party.”

  “There’s always another party, isn’t there?” I asked.

  “Hope so,” he said cheerfully. “Because this one is too small for me and Melissa. You might want to avoid her, you know, just to be on the safe side.”

  “Won’t she wonder why Louna’s talking to another guy if she’s with you?” Leo asked.

  “No, I told her she has a wandering eye and is super promiscuous,” Ambrose told him. “That’s why we broke up.”

  “You did what?” I said.

  “I’m going now!” he said, wrapping the leash around his wrist. “You two kids have fun.”

  “Leo! What are you doing here?”

  Once again, Ambrose was saved by the blonde—this time, a very pretty girl with long straight hair wearing denim shorts and a peasant blouse, gladiator sandals wrapped around her tan legs. Everything about her screamed beach and flowy, and I instantly was aware of my own drab ensemble.

  “Lauren,” said Leo, breaking into a smile. “Hey.”

  They embraced, her kissing his cheek, then both turned to face us. “Hi,” she said, sticking her hand out. “I’m Lauren.”

  “Louna,” I said.

  “She’s the girl I met at work, the one I told you about,” Leo explained. “And this is . . .”

  “Ambrose,” Ambrose said, offering his own hand. He was looking right at her, of course; full attention, focused. “And this is Ira.”

  “Hello, Ira,” Lauren said, crouching down to pet him. “Aren’t you a handsome boy?”

  “He takes after me,” Ambrose told her. I rolled my eyes.

  Lauren got back to her feet, then gave Leo a friendly punch to the arm. “You jerk. You didn’t tell me you’d be here when I said how I was dreading it earlier.”

  “I didn’t know it was the same party,” he told her.

  “I’m newly single,” Lauren explained to me. Ambrose, hearing this, visibly increased his attention level. “And Leo’s been on me to try to get back out there and date. But it’s hard.”

  “I know it,” I told her. “I’m in the same boat. My best friend basically had to drag me here.”

  “Then you get it!” She sighed, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, which was studded with a row of gold and diamond hoops. I’d never seen anyone so, well . . . shimmery. “Once you get dumped, the last thing you want is to offer up your heart again, right?”

  “Someone dumped you?” Ambrose asked, aghast. “What are they, crazy?”

  In response, Lauren smiled gratefully. “You’re sweet. And, well, yes. We were together for four years.”

  “And had known each other since kindergarten, where we met,” Leo added. “We were the Fearsome Threesome on the playground.”

  “Never date one of your best friends,” Lauren said to me. “When it ends, you lose so much more than a boyfriend. It sucks.”

  On this last word, her voice broke a bit, and she smiled, embarrassed. Leo put his arm around her, and she put her head on his shoulder. “Patrick’s a doofus. You’ll find someone else. Someone better.”

  “Which I guess is why I’m here,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll stay for one beer. Then I’m going home to get into bed and eat ice cream.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” Ambrose said. He reached over, grabbing a red cup and filling it, then presented it with a flourish. “Personally, I like Rocky Road after a bad breakup. It’s like a metaphor, fitting.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Lately I’ve been mainlining rainbow sherbet. I was hoping it had antidepressant powers.”

  “Just avoid the chocolate peanut butter or pralines and cream. Too couply for the newly single.”

  “That’s good advice,” she said.

  “Ambrose was just leaving,” I told her.

  “Only because I had no reason to stay,” he said. “Now we’re talking ice cream, so I do.”

  Lauren blushed slightly, then looked down into her beer. “I’m warning you, I might be terrible company. If I get buzzed I’ll probably start telling you my entire sad story.”

  “I love sad stories. So does Ira,” Ambrose told her. The dog, for his part, started tugging toward the stairs that led down to the yard, clearly sending a message. “Oh, looks like someone needs a walk. I’ll be back in a sec.”

  “I’ll come with you, if you want,” Lauren offered.

  “Yeah?” he said, pushing that curl out of his face.

  “It’s not like I really want to stay here,” she said.

  “Lead the way, then.”

  Ambrose waved his hand, motioning for her to go first. She glanced at Leo, shrugged with a smile, and then started down the steps, Ambrose and Ira following along behind her. I could hear their voices, already chatting, as they disappeared into the dark of the yard below.

  “He’d better behave himself,” Leo said, as we watched them cut across the grass, their shadows thrown in the moonlight. “That girl’s a real prize.”

  I believed this, even though I’d just met her, and was pretty sure Ambrose got it, too. And watching this particular departure, I knew something was happening. Even from a distance, you could tell when two people simply clicked. Starting with a nighttime walk, well—that just sealed the deal.

  CHAPTER

  16

  ETHAN DID phone me from the parking lot, just as he’d promised. I missed the call.

  In my defense, I was packed in the elevator with a group of people who’d just arrived, all talking over each other. If I heard a ringtone of soaring soprano, backed by moaning violins, I probably just assumed it belonged to one of them. It wasn’t until I got off on my floor and it rang again in the quiet of the hallway that I realized the noise was coming from my pocket. I pulled it out.

  “You might be annoyed now,” he said, in lieu of hello, “but that song will grow on you. Someday, it might even make you cry.”

  When I remembered this later, it broke whatever pieces were left of my heart. But that was later.

  “You put a Lexi Navigator song as my ringtone?” I asked.

  “While I was getting my bag,” he told me. “And before you get mad about me jacking your password for Tunage,” he said, “you really should make it harder to figure out.”

  “How did you know it was William?” I asked.

  “You did say he was the alarm code at the house,” he told me. I had, while telling a story about how this was the way I learned to spell his name as a kid. William was our password for everything. “I took a guess.”

  “Well,” I said, still working through all this. I’d had to stop walking just to catch up, so to speak. “Now you know all my secrets.”

  “Don’t worry. They’re safe with me.”

  I turned, looking out over the balcony to the street below. Somewhere, a red car was driving steadily away from me, putting a mile, then another mile between us.

  “What am I supposed to tell people when they ask me why I have a Lexi Navigator ringtone?” I asked him now.

  “That you are her biggest fan because your boyfriend loves her,” he replied. Boyfriend. I liked the sound of that. “And then you show them your screensaver.”

  “My—” I pulled my phone down, flipping to that setting. Sure enough, there was Ethan grinning next to Lexi Navigator in her stage outfit. I put it back to my ear. “Okay. That’s pretty cute.”

  “I’m glad you think so. As we were driving off I started to worry that maybe you would hate it. Hold on a sec.” I heard a voice in the background, then Ethan saying something. “Look, we’re stopping for gas and snacks. I’ll call back in a bit, okay? You’ll know me by ‘Pay Attent
ion, the Words Are Changing.’”

  “What?”

  “The name of the song about her grandmother, Lulu. Come on! How are you going to date Lexi Navigator’s number one fan if you don’t know her biggest hits?”

  I smiled, turning back to my room. “I’ll get right on that.”

  “You can start with your Tunage library, under Recently Purchased. Talk to you in a few!”

  With that he was gone, leaving me to just stare, open mouthed, as I went to my music app to find, yes, five new songs, all by Lexi Navigator. I’d listen to them all, over and over again, in between the dozens of short conversations we’d have in the following hours as we each headed back to our respective homes. With Ethan in my ear, the drive back to Lakeview felt, and looked, entirely different. I felt like a different girl. I would never again be who I was when I walked down those beach stairs, took off my shoes, and stepped into the sand. And I was so, so glad.

  Once home, we talked constantly, and when we weren’t talking, we were texting or chatting face-to-face on HiThere! He’d linked the S.O. (significant other) part of his Ume.com page to my profile right after our first phone conversation, at the same time I was adding his to my own. Despite my having dated a few guys already, it wasn’t until Ethan that I understood what all the love songs and sappy movie endings really were all about. I finally understood Jilly’s buoyant romanticism, the hopefulness that seeps into every part of your life when you know someone loves you in that way. I ate, slept, and dreamed Ethan. When he wasn’t in my ear or on my screen in one way or another, I was running over our night together in my mind, hour by hour, so I’d be sure not to forget a single detail.

  As we’d promised, we immediately began to make plans to get together again. His dad, still eager to get on Ethan’s good side post-divorce, said he’d buy him a ticket down for his fall break, which was in mid-October, overlapping by a few days with mine. I circled the days on my desk calendar and began a countdown on my phone, getting teased regularly by my mom, William, and Jilly about my visible impatience with how slowly time was passing.

  “I have never seen you like this,” Jilly said to me, staring as I hummed along to Lexi Navigator on the car radio as we drove to school the first day of senior year. “It’s like you’ve been body swapped or something.”

  “What?” I said. “You’ve been in love tons of times.”

  “Not like that. This, what’s going on here?” She swirled her finger at me. “It’s some serious first love stuff. Sometimes I look over at you and you’re just sitting there, smiling at nothing.”

  “I am not.”

  “You are. And I’m jealous.” She sighed, checking her reflection in the visor mirror. “I want an Ethan, too.”

  I couldn’t blame her. To me, he was perfect: this gorgeous, funny, smart boy who thought I, Lulu, hung the moon as well. It was like my life had been silent in a way before, and now there was a soundtrack, the very best music playing along in the background at every moment. You didn’t miss it when it wasn’t there. You didn’t know to. But once it was, nothing ever sounded the same again.

  “Tell me where you are now,” I’d say to Ethan when we talked before school, and then at lunch, and after last period, and several more times up until bed, when he was the last voice I heard before going to sleep.

  “Walking across the quad to practice, stuffing my face with a bag of Cheese-pops,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “Heading to the coffee shop for afternoon caffeine for Mom and William.”

  “Double shot for her, or no?”

  “Just the one. She already sounded like she was buzzing.”

  He just knew me so well, already. Mostly because we talked so much, but there was something else, as well. The time we’d been together had been so short and yet so intense that everything was sped up, like the difference between dog and people years. I already felt like I’d known him forever. This was what love was. I knew it now. And it changed everything.

  “When this boy does come,” William said to me in early September, as I sat texting with Ethan after school as he rode the bus to a lacrosse game, “I’m going to have to sit him down and have a talk.”

  “You?” my mom asked from her desk, where she was busy checking a spreadsheet of attendees to the next wedding. “Isn’t that my job?”

  “I’m the father figure. If anyone gets to sit cleaning a gun while making the boy squirm talking about honor and chivalry, it’s me.”

  “A gun?” I said.

  “You maced yourself the last time you tried to carry pepper spray,” my mom told him.

  “Well, I obviously wouldn’t do that while giving this talk,” he replied snippily.

  “No one is lecturing Ethan about anything,” I told them both, using my own stern voice. “We’re all just going to make him feel welcome and show him the best of Lakeview.”

  “Which is what?” William asked.

  “Louna, of course,” my mom said. “That’s what he’s coming for after all, right?”

  At this, I blushed, even as my phone beeped, Ethan responding to my last message. NOW WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

  PUTTING UP WITH MY MOM AND WILLIAM TEASING ME ABOUT YOU.

  HA! CAN’T WAIT TO MEET THEM.

  “Look at our girl,” William said then. “She’s crazy in love. We didn’t ruin her with our bad attitudes after all.”

  “Not yet,” my mom said. “Remember, they’ve only spent one night together.”

  William gave her a look. “Natalie, for God’s sake. Let the girl have her fun. It’s not her fault we’re all dried up and unlovable.”

  “Speak for yourself. I am very lovable.”

  William snorted. My mom caught my eye, then mouthed an I’m sorry, looking genuinely apologetic. I knew in truth she was happy for me, but just worried, as her own love story hadn’t ended well. But this was different. I was different. And Ethan, well, was Ethan. He would never do anything to hurt me. It never occurred to me that, in fact, it might be someone else.

  CHAPTER

  17

  SURELY AMBROSE had always been a person who hummed. I probably just hadn’t noticed.

  “Isn’t it time for morning coffee run?” I asked him, as he launched into the second go-round of a currently popular dance song, wordlessly. “You know how my mom gets without her caffeine.”

  He paused the instrumentals. “I thought you’d want to do it. To see Leo. Don’t you?”

  I shifted in my seat, then realized I was literally squirming at this question and made myself still. “I’m kind of deep in these place cards right now.”

  He looked over from his own stack, equal in size to mine. “You are?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  I tried to sound breezy, offhand, two things I never was. It didn’t work, a fact made clear when he gave me his full focus of attention. “Hold on. I thought you guys had a good time the other night.”

  “We did,” I said, folding another card. The paper was thick and embossed, each name done by a professional calligrapher. Wreck it, you pay for it, had been my mom’s directive. Never before had paper made me nervous. “I’m just, you know. . . .”

  Usually, when you trail off, people just finish the sentence for you in their own heads. Ambrose’s was clearly still full of beats and choruses, because he said, “You’re what?”

  “I’m busy,” I told him. “And it’s your job.”

  He drew back. “Gosh. Okay. Sorry. I’ll go right now.”

  With that, he pushed out his chair and got to his feet, then headed to the back office, where my mom and William were conferring with the valet parking company about Elinor Lin’s rehearsal dinner, whistling as he went. I was sure he’d never done that before.

  So he was happy. No crime in that. And just because he’d had a great time with Lauren the night before—he hadn’t said so exactly, but the mu
sic-making spoke volumes—didn’t mean he was going to win our bet and me lose. I only had to keep going on dates, just like I’d done with Leo. I wasn’t humming, mind you. But I’d done it.

  I winced to myself even as I thought this. After Lauren and Ambrose had left the night before, Leo and I had talked for another hour or so, mostly about his writing, the conversation interrupted occasionally by Jilly, coming to complain that the party sucked and she wanted to go home. Finally, around eleven, she bumped into some guy she knew from yet another food truck—the community was wide reaching—and decided she wanted to stay indefinitely just as I was ready to leave. In the end, I got a ride with Leo on the back of his fixed-gear bike, where I felt every bump and rattle of the handful of miles back to my house.

  Once there, I could tell he expected to be invited in by the way he kept glancing at the door. But William’s car was still there and I didn’t feel like making introductions. In the end, we sat on the curb, the bike lying beside us like a literal third and fourth wheel. I was tired of talking, tired in general, and trying to come up with a good exit strategy, but Leo was still going full speed about his writing.

  “Really, it’s all process,” he explained to me. “You have to dig, you know? Fiction is blood, sweat, tears, shit, all mixed together. Like the lotus from the mud. If you nurture it, something beautiful comes.”

  I could admit this all sounded exotic and dramatic at one point. But that had been a few hours earlier, and I still didn’t understand exactly what his book in progress was about. “That’s cool,” I said, a response I’d taken to alternating with a few others like “Wow,” “Interesting,” and, just for variety, “I never saw it like that.” For someone so interested in words, he didn’t seem to notice this repetition.

  Now he smiled, like I was cute, before reaching out and rubbing his thumb along the side of my mouth, then down my chin. I was thinking maybe I had something on my face, and wondering for how long, when he suddenly moved in to kiss me. It was swift and abrupt and took me by total surprise, even before he leaned me back into the grass with one smooth movement. I had a flash of a vampire whipping a cape over his head, which was not exactly romantic, and then his mouth was on mine, tongue wriggling.