“He just does.”
“Did you call him your archenemy?”
“No, but—”
“Did he call you his archenemy?”
“No, but—”
“Did you chase after him and try to kiss him?”
“No!” I grabbed his bony shoulders and shook him. “You are a crazy boy! Shut your mouth, you crazy thing!”
He giggled, which was a good sign. “Girls and boys kiss when they like each other,” he said. “Tongue-kiss.”
“Where did you hear about tongue kissing?” I demanded.
“I don’t know. But I bet Sandra will tongue-kiss Bo when she finds out about the surprise party.”
“Surprise party? What surprise party?”
He clapped his hand over his mouth. Through his fingers, he said, “Oops. I’m not supposed to tell.”
“You can tell me,” I said. “Is Bo throwing Sandra a surprise party?”
“He came over yesterday. I had to go up to Sandra’s room and get one of her rings, so he could see what size it was. And then he gave it back. He’s going to give her a whole new one tonight, when he surprises her.”
Excitement bubbled up in my veins. Bo wasn’t secretly dumping Sandra for Kristi! He was throwing her a surprise party, she just didn’t know it! And he was giving her a ring, which was very symbolic, even if it wasn’t—of course—an actual engagement ring.
I was so happy for Sandra. It made me buzz.
“Listen,” I said to Ty. “Maybe today you could ask Lexie to do something, like go swing, and then she’d know she wasn’t your archenemy.”
“Anymore,” Ty said.
“Right. Although she never really was.”
Ty thought about this. I let him.
“If I do that with Lexie, will you do it, too?” he asked at last.
“What do you mean?”
“With the boy you like.”
My heart fluttered, jacking up the adrenaline already flowing through me. “In junior high, people don’t swing.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t even have a swing set!”
“Oh.” He tilted his head. “Then will you kiss him? On the lips?”
“Ty! No!”
“Then I’m not asking Lexie to swing.”
I gaped at him. He was good.
I regained my composure. I couldn’t let a six-year-old get the best of me.
“Dude,” I said, feeling like Cinnamon. “I will maybe kiss him, if I ever get the chance.”
Ty grinned.
“If,” I said again, holding up a finger to stress the conditional nature of my promise.
“Okay,” he said. He nudged the trash can between his legs. “Now will you tape my fingernails back on?”
“No, but I’ll put them in a baggie for you.”
“And I can keep them? Forever?”
“And you can keep them forever.”
He scrambled off the tub. “I’ll go get the bag.”
He ran out of the bathroom. A few seconds later, Mom came in.
“Thank you, Winnie,” she said.
“No problem,” I said. I paused. “It wasn’t the fingernails. It was something else.”
“It always is,” Mom said.
“A girl.”
“Great.”
But she didn’t sound all that alarmed, and I had a horrible thought. “You weren’t listening, were you? Outside the door?”
She assured me she hadn’t, and my panic smoothed out. Whew.
I did kind of want to touch base with her about it, though. Not the Lars part or the tongue kissing, just the boy-girl thing in general.
“It’s odd that it starts so young,” I said. “Don’t you think?”
“It’s the way of humans,” Mom said. “You, for example, were a flirt from the moment you were born.”
“Oh, please.”
“When you were a baby and you saw a handsome man, you’d wink at him.”
“Mom!”
“Never at the women, just the men. And you’d bat your eyelashes.”
I blushed. “Mom, I would not.”
“I always worried they’d think I taught you to do that, that I was some desperate housewife using my baby to lure them in.” She smiled. “But you did it all on your own. Knowing how to flirt was just…wired into you.”
“Well, if it was, it’s gone now,” I said.
“Don’t worry, you’ll find it again,” Mom said.
“I will?”
“I’m absolutely positive. Just…not right away, all right?”
Ty reappeared with a Ziploc bag clutched in his hand.
“Here,” he said, thrusting it at me.
Mom shook her head and laughed, and I knew what she was thinking. I’d gone from flirt to fingernail-gatherer, and she was glad.
But her tales of me as the Amazing Winking Baby gave me hope, and what I was thinking was that what Mom didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. And as I plucked little fingernail moons out of the trash, my resolve solidified. I’d made a promise to Ty, and I intended to keep it.
May
GIRLS, I’VE GOT NEWS,” Cinnamon said over our three-way call. “Memorial Park? Fifteen minutes?”
I groaned, not out of lack of interest, but because it was nine o’clock Saturday morning and I was in my PJs. I’d planned on staying in my PJs for hours and days and years.
“Why don’t you guys come over here?” I said to her and Dinah. “You could bring beignets.”
“No,” Cinnamon said decisively. “This is no-unwanted-ears sort of news. I’m talking juicy, baby.”
“About what?” Dinah asked.
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
“Is it about Brad’s party?” Dinah pushed. Brad was an eighth grader with actual sideburns and a tattoo of a lizard that no one had ever seen. He threw legendary parties with zero parents on the premises. All three of us were fascinated by Brad—in a repulsed sort of way—but Dinah the most. I figured it was because she liked soap operas, and Brad (and his parties) definitely fell into the soap opera category.
“Maybe,” Cinnamon said, which meant yes. None of us had gone to Brad’s party last night, because we were lowly seventh graders and hadn’t been invited. But Cinnamon’s neighbor was an eighth grader named Steffie, who held a mid-level position in the eighth grade popularity scene. Steffie had gone to the party.
My guess? Steffie had popped over to Cinnamon’s this morning to brag, and now Cinnamon was in the envious position of being able to spread the dirt.
“Was Lars there? Did you hear anything about Lars?” I asked.
“La la la,” Cinnamon said. “Memorial Park?”
“Fine,” I griped.
“And, Winnie?” Cinnamon said just a wee bit too sweetly.
“What?”
“Do bring beignets. An excellent idea.”
The sun warmed my neck as I biked from Huey’s to Memorial Park, a paper bag holding a dozen beignets and a pint of milk gripped between my fingers and the handlebar. The beignets’ powdered-sugary smell puffed up as I pedaled. Yummy yum yum.
At the park, the three of us climbed to the top of the rickety metal play structure, which was shaped in the vaguest of ways like a spider. Or maybe an alien, with curved, runged legs. Either way it was a pathetic, pathetic play structure, and it was high time the city replaced it with one of those snazzy castle-themed dealies all made of wood. But when they did, I knew I’d be sad.
“Here you go,” I said to Cinnamon, handing her a beignet. “And here you go,” I said to Dinah, who looked froglike with her legs scrunched high.
“You are a goddess,” Cinnamon said.
“Aren’t I?” I pulled out my own beignet and placed it on my leg. The milk was trickier. I opened the cardboard carton, considered my options, then wedged it between my feet, which were propped on a metal crossbar.
“So,” I said, after taking my first scrumptious bite of beignet. Powdered sugar snowed onto my shirt. “Spill.”
 
; “Well,” Cinnamon said. “The first thing you need to know is that the party was unchaperoned, just as I suspected.”
“No way,” Dinah said.
“Way,” Cinnamon said. “Steffie said Brad’s parents were at some charity event where they had to dress all wacky.”
“Wacky,” I echoed, saying it in an appropriately wacky way. Wacky was one of those words that couldn’t be denied.
“The event was at a hotel, and they stayed overnight, which meant Brad had the whole house to himself,” Cinnamon said.
Dinah did a shivery kind of thing, but not because it was cold. Her shiver had more to do with the unnerving and too-old concept of having a party your parents didn’t know about. That was my interpretation.
“Did he have beer?” I asked. I felt tough for tossing out “beer” so nonchalantly, but also, more privately, like a poser.
I’d certainly never drunk beer, nor would I if somebody offered me one. Beer was nasty.
“He had beer and wine coolers and a bottle of gin from his parents’ liquor cabinet,” Cinnamon said. “But I don’t think anyone drank the gin. According to Steffie.”
“That is so stupid,” Dinah said. She eased the milk from my feet and took a swig. She carefully wedged the carton back. “Don’t they know how busted they could get for that? Plus it’s bad for their livers.”
“I highly doubt they drank enough to damage their livers,” Cinnamon said. “Anyway, not everybody drank.” She turned to me. “But Malena did, and Gail Grayson.”
Gail Grayson was my nemesis from elementary school. She was the full-of-herself purple-bra-wearing new girl who came in and stole away my ex-BFF Amanda. And Malena…well, she was even worse than Gail. Malena was a longtime Westminsterite like Cinnamon, which meant I had the joy of meeting her at the beginning of the school year, when Dinah and I transferred over.
Malena had boobs, and she wasn’t afraid to use them. She applied lipstick right there in class, in front of everyone. She wore sheer blouses over camisoles, which just barely met the dress code. She wore glittery hair clips from San Francisco that had swaying, jeweled bits dangling down. You couldn’t even find hair clips like that in Atlanta.
“Did Amanda have anything to drink?” I asked. “Was she there?”
“Um…do you really want to know?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“She was there, and she did drink, according to Steffie,” Cinnamon said. “A peach wine cooler.”
Dinah met my eyes. Unlike Cinnamon, she’d known the pre-junior-high Amanda. Sweet, smart Amanda with the heart-shaped freckles. Amanda who liked Cheetos. Amanda who used to make fun of people for being all snobby and superior and popular.
“Did she…get drunk?” I asked.
“Off one wine cooler? I don’t think so,” Cinnamon said. She was wiser than us in the way of alcohol because her brother, Carl, was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina. “She might not have even drunk it. Who knows? Maybe she just held it to look cool.”
“So stupid,” Dinah said.
I shifted my weight on the jungle gym, handing the milk to Cinnamon so I could let my legs dangle. “Is that the juicy part, that Gail and Malena and Amanda drank? Or is there more?”
“Why were they even there?” Dinah said. Out of all three of us, she probably felt the most threatened by the seventh grade popular girls, because she was the most different from them. Or maybe I was misreading? Maybe she wasn’t threatened by them at all, for that very reason. Maybe I was the only one threatened?
“Because Brad invited them,” Cinnamon said in a duh voice. “Because they’re wild.”
“Amanda didn’t used to be wild,” I said.
“She is now,” Cinnamon said. “She kissed Alan Bauer in the hot tub.”
“What?!” I cried.
“That’s the juicy part,” Cinnamon said, clearly pleased with my reaction.
“But Alan’s an eighth grader—”
“So is Lars,” she pointed out.
“—and he’s not even cute. Or nice. He told Carmen De La Cruz she needed to wear deodorant!”
Cinnamon shrugged. “They kissed in the hot tub. That’s what Steffie said.”
“That is just gross,” Dinah said.
Cinnamon downed the last of the milk, then dropped the carton through the bars of the play structure to the ground below. “Anyway, I just thought you should know, so you’d be prepared for Bryce’s next weekend.”
“Oh, God,” I said. Bryce’s parents were throwing a party for Bryce in celebration of the end of junior high. Well, the end of junior high for the eighth graders, since unlike us, they’d be moving on to high school. Bryce was an eighth grader. He was Lars’s best friend. And because Lars was his best friend, Lars got to invite me. Which, when he called last week and told me, made me fizz up with happiness.
Now the fizziness turned to dread.
“Ah, it’ll be fine,” Cinnamon said. Now that she’d cranked up my worry, she switched gears and acted dismissive, as if I were making a bigger deal of it than necessary. I didn’t know why Cinnamon liked to do that. “His parents are going to be there, right?”
“Right…” I said hesitantly.
“So that means no wine coolers. So you have nothing to worry about.”
Dinah shook her head. “I’m glad I’m not going.”
An expression crossed Cinnamon’s face that told me she wished she was. I wished she was, too. Then I wouldn’t be alone.
“You do know what this means, though, don’t you?” she asked.
“That I’m destined for abject humiliation and a terrible outbreak of zits?” I said. “And I’ll have to order Proactiv Solution from that infomercial? Which supposedly Kelly Clarkson uses, but somehow I’m thinking not really?”
“No,” Cinnamon said. She looped her legs over the topmost bar on the jungle gym, swung upside-down, and dropped off. She didn’t pick up the milk carton. “It means, my friend, that if Amanda can kiss Alan Bauer, you can kiss Lars. Finally and at last.”
Dinah giggled, but didn’t disagree.
Cinnamon looked up at me with her hands on her hips. “Winnie? Babe? It’s time.”
In the olden days, boys had to do all the work. They brought girls flowers; they held hands on charming wooden porch swings. Eventually, they made the bold move of kissing. The girls just had to be pretty and charming and demure.
Unfortunately, I was in no way demure. We didn’t have a porch swing, and I preferred Junior Mints to roses.
But while the olden days may have had some perks, did I really want to return to a way of life when girls had to wear stockings and flutter their eyelashes? My feminist leanings might not be up to Sandra’s standards, but of course I thought that every human should get to do what he or she wanted to do. Boys should be able to wear pink and play with dolls; girls could be tough and rowdy skateboarders or whatever.
But the truth of the matter was this: even with all that, even knowing that the olden days were long gone and that I was brave, independent Winnie who could do my own thing, I would still rather Lars make the first move and kiss me. I couldn’t help it. I wanted romance and anticipation and a wonderful, beautiful moment to hold in my heart forever. We were talking first kiss here, for heaven’s sake!
My first kiss, anyway.
Eeek! Had Lars kissed other girls before? Eeek eek eek!
Okay, let’s think about the positives. Just say Lars had kissed a girl before. Or two or three or whatever, although the thought of him having kissed three different girls made my stomach flip. But in one way, that would be good, because he’d know what to do. I knew what to do in theory, but the only person I’d ever touched tongues with was Amanda, back in the second grade. Just our tips touched, just for a micro-second. It felt extremely weird, one wet tongue touching another. We’d also pricked our fingers and pressed them together, meaning she’d be my blood sister for always.
And now here she was frequenting hot tub parties and swigging wi
ne coolers. Her first kiss had already happened. Probably lots more “firsts” that I wasn’t even aware of.
So why don’t you call her and ask for some tips? I thought. But I didn’t truly consider it. Sometimes the brain just made words come into your head that in no way reflected reality. Amanda wasn’t a buddy I could call out of the blue anymore. Weird and sad and true.
If Lars hadn’t kissed anyone, that would be better. He would be my first, and I would be his. I didn’t want other girls existing in his memory, anyway. Still, I wondered: Who might he have kissed? No seventh graders, surely. I scrolled through the set of eighth grade girls he sometimes hung out with: Taryn, who liked anime; Chloe, who was in French with us and who seemed chummy with him; Miranda, who liked him—that was obvious—but who wasn’t pretty, so who cared?
Was I a bad person for thinking that?
Girls who weren’t pretty were allowed to get kissed, too. Just not by Lars. My Lars.
I sighed. It wasn’t even the middle of the day on Saturday, and already the weekend seemed too long. After leaving Memorial Park, Cinnamon had gone to a baseball game with her dad, and Dinah had returned to her house to read a book she was into. Something about vampires. So I’d gone back home, too. I’d crawled into bed and tried to go back to sleep, but that hadn’t happened. Obviously, being in my own obsessive company wasn’t working out that well for me.
So I got up off my butt and found Sandra and Bo lounging on a quilt in the backyard. It was just starting to get warm—yay spring!—and Sandra was wearing cutoffs. Her legs were pale.
I plopped down beside them. “Hi, guys,” I said.
“Hey, Winnie-O,” Bo said. He scooted over their Boggle game to give me more room. Bo and Sandra were in a Boggle phase, keeping a running tally of who was kicking whose fanny.
“Can I ask a question?” I said.
Sandra stretched. The silver ring Bo had given her gleamed on her index finger, making her look artsy. The stone in its center was a moonstone.
“What’s up?” she said.
I was glad she was mellow. Otherwise I’d have backed off.
“Well…”
“Yessss?” Bo said.
“I was hoping we could discuss kissing.”