Four things I will never understand: dogs that are smaller than cats; trigonometry; people who don’t like mustard on their hotdogs; bras. I’m running my fingers along the back of Jayla’s lacy, ribbon-y death trap right now, trying to be cool as I search for the clasp. Her shirt is still on and it has some kind of elastic thing that goes all the way around because this definitely needed to be more complicated. I still can’t find the clasp. I give up trying to be suave and run my whole hand back and forth across her bra. It isn’t there. I mean, there is no clasp. WHAT KIND OF SORCERY IS THIS?!
Jayla’s face is all squeezed up like she’s trying not to laugh.
I make a pitiful face. “Help?”
The giggles burst forth. “It’s a front clasp.”
“Front clasp?!” Who decided those were a good idea?
She laughs harder.
“And you couldn’t have brought this to my attention, oh, sixty seconds ago?”
“It was more fun this way.” She pulls down the straps of her tank top.
“I’m so glad torturing me is fun for you.”
“It’s a little fun.” She flips down the top of her shirt, unsnaps the infernal front clasp, and in 0.2 seconds, there are boobs right in front of me. I forget to breathe. There are a lot of things I would like to do right now, but my stepmom is upstairs making dinner, so I will only do, like, one-fourth of them.
“You’re beautiful,” I say.
She laughs. “You say that every time.”
“It’s true every time.” It really is. Her skin is so flawless, I wonder if she actually has pores.
I’m just getting started on the one-fourth when I hear a floorboard creak. I jump back/adjust my shorts/sit up straight/wipe my face/look guilty as all hell. Pam is standing at the bottom of the stairs. Jeez, I didn’t even hear her open the door. She’s like a freaking CIA operative. I glance back at Jayla, who is currently wearing all her clothes and smiling like a model citizen. How does she do that?
“Hi, Miss Pam.”
“Hi, Jayla. Are you staying for dinner?”
She shakes her head. “My dad’s picking me up soon, and we’re gonna go get Mexican food.”
“Okay.” Pam brushes her hands off on her pants but doesn’t move to go back upstairs. Her eyes dart back and forth between us. “What are you two doing down here?”
“Running Jayla’s lines for the play,” I say way too fast and grab the script, like, see, here’s proof she didn’t just have her shirt halfway off.
Pam raises her eyebrows. It’s how she reads minds. “I think you should run lines on the porch.”
As she creaks back up the stairs, we hold in our laughter, but as soon as the door closes, it all comes out.
Jayla whacks me with the script. “You are so the opposite of stealth.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. How do you always get your clothes on so fast?”
We grab our stuff and migrate to the front porch. I sit on the porch swing, and she drapes her legs over me, and this time we really do run lines. I read Teddy and she plays Tina, and we practice one of The 9 Worst Breakups of All Time. It’s warm for October, which means we’re wearing shorts, but we’re not dying of heat stroke.
“This is nice,” I say.
“Yeah.” Jayla stops with the lines for a minute and rests her head on my shoulder.
“This play is really funny. But, um, I don’t see a kiss scene.”
Jayla lifts her head off my shoulder. “Yeah, they’re just nosey kisses. That’s probably why I’m allowed to play opposite a white dude this time.” She rolls her eyes.
“Yeah, but.” Do I even bring this up? “When I picked you up after play practice last time, you and Justin were still onstage practicing, and it started as a nose kiss, but it slipped into a real kiss.”
She makes a face. “Whoa. First of all, we were acting. And yeah, Justin’s a really good actor, and a lot of time he’ll improvise stuff and make it more intense. But second of all, I love you. Not Justin or anyone else.”
“I’m not worried about you. I’m just—” Worried about Justin. Justin with the lips that seem to “slip” and the eyes that I watched follow my girlfriend’s ass all the way across the stage and down the stairs.
“Please don’t ask me to hold back from doing what I love because it makes you uncomfortable.”
“No, I would never.” I squeeze her hand. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”
“Good. Because the only person I want to be kissing for real is you.” She smiles. “But it would be nice to be able to do it without getting walked in on every time.”
“Pam is the best kiss-interrupter in fifty states.”
“Can you imagine what it would be like to be together and not have to worry?”
“Oh, I can imagine.”
It’s not that we’ve never been alone. There have been bits of time here and there, in the back of my truck, in Jayla’s living room before her parents get home from work. But it’s all sneaking around, which is fine for some things, but neither of us wants our first time to be like that.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something,” she says. She’s breathing faster. It makes me breathe faster.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. My parents are going to visit my grandma in Savannah next weekend.” She swallows. “I’m staying home.”
She’s staying home. Alone. She’ll be . . . Oh! “Do you want me to—”
“Yes. I’m ready. I think I’m ready.” She moves her legs out of my lap. “I want it to be special, you know?”
I catch her hands and hold them between us. “It will be. It’s going to be so special.”
She leans into me, and I tic just as her lips are about to touch mine, and she smiles and kisses me anyway. I remember being terrified of this very thing before we had our first kiss. And thinking about not tic-ing sometimes makes me tic worse, so it got to where just thinking about trying to kiss Jayla for the first time would send me into a flurry of tics. It’s better if I tic after we’ve already started kissing.
The sound of her dad’s car pulling into the driveway makes us jump apart.
“Crap. I gotta go,” she says. “Hey, are you coming with me to Ashley’s birthday tomorrow?”
I groan. Ashley’s dad is throwing her a huge sweet sixteen/Halloween party with a ballroom-size tent and a dance floor and drama. Parties like that don’t happen often around here, so it’s a really big deal. It’s also sooo many people. Just not my thing.
“Do I have to?”
She puts her hands on her hips. “Yes.”
I know she’ll talk me into it eventually, so it makes the most sense to smile and get it over with. “Okay.”
“Yay!” She squeals and gives me a quick hug, but nothing more because, hello, we are RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER DAD. I give him an awkward wave, and he returns it, and they drive away.
When I turn around, Hope is flat-out sprinting out of the woods behind our houses. She’s wearing a T-shirt and her hair is up in a ponytail. I can’t remember the last time I saw her like this. I almost do a double take.
She screeches to a stop beside me and promptly collapses on the grass.
“Hey. When did you start running again?”
“Today,” she pants. “Can you tell?”
“No . . .” She lifts her head off the grass to side-eye me. “Okay, yes.”
“I think I’m gonna go out for track this spring. Assuming I can figure out how to not suck before then.”
Her arms are over her face, blocking the sunlight.
“That’s awesome! I mean, that’s really great.” I try not to get too excited. She hates that.
She drags herself into a heel stretch. I want to say other things but don’t.
“Hey, Hope, we’re friends, right?”
She gives me a funny look. “Yes.”
“Like, the kind where I can ask you for girl advice?”
“Yeah, totally.” She’s smiling brightly and being extra still like I’m a small animal she might scare away.
“Okay.” I wait for what is definitely an awkward amount of time because I’m not sure where to begin with this. “So, Jayla and I are probably going to have sex next weekend.”
Hope chokes and tries to play it off as a cough. (Having had Tourette’s for nine years, I am an expert on letting one behavior flow into another so I can play off my tics, so it’s clear to me that me talking about sex with Jayla nearly killed Hope.) She laughs. “Okay, so we’re not easing into this.”
“Sorry.” Is this awkward? It’s probably really awkward.
“No, it’s fine. Um. So, what would you like to know? About sex. But you’re not going to ask for tips or anything, right? Because that’d just be gross.”
I thought I was embarrassed before, but now I know I wasn’t, because THIS is the most embarrassing thing ever. “No, I wasn’t—I mean, I wouldn’t—I mean—” Oh, crap, do I NEED tips? Because I’m pretty sure I don’t know anything at all, and despite Dean’s propensity for bragging, I can’t remember him ever saying anything useful. “I just want to make sure it’s really special, you know?”
Hope’s face softens. “Of course you do.” She sits up on her knees. “Here’s the deal. Most guys are good about first times during the during. It’s the after they fail at.”
“The after?” I am way more worried about the during. Apparently, most guys are good at that.
“Yeah. I mean, you both want to do this and you’re both ready, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then, it’s definitely the after. Trust me,” she says when she sees the doubtful look on my face. “I’ve had a lot of girlfriends confide in me about this. Most guys just—they don’t act like it’s a big enough deal. And it’s a really big deal.”
I throw up my hands. “I know it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal to me, too.”
This seems to appease Hope, and she settles into a butterfly stretch. “Good. So, tell her that. After. Tell her what it meant to you. Tell her that you love her. Ask her how she’s feeling. Ask her again because the answer might change. Even if she was never planning to wait until marriage, even if she acts like she’s totally cool, give her tons and tons and tons of hugs, and maybe even some flowers or a poem or something. Because maybe she’ll be like, ‘Wow, I thought I was ready, but now I’m not so sure.’ Or, ‘I was definitely totally ready, but now my boyfriend is lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling like the words IJUSTGOTLAIDIJUSTGOTLAID are scrolling around his brain on a teleprompter. Does he even love me?’ Or, ‘I think I was ready, but now I’m feeling all these feelings, and they’re so big that they scare me, and I don’t want to be alone in this.’”
I don’t say anything.
Hope doesn’t say anything.
“Wow, this is a lot.” I am now nervous for a whole new set of reasons.
“Yeah,” Hope says gently. She reaches out her hand and pats me on the shoulder. “But, hey, you’re going to be great, okay? You’re a really good guy, Spencer.”
“Thanks. And thanks for being my friend, like, who I can ask stuff like this.”
She grins. “No problem.”
“If you ever need to ask me anything, you totally can.”
“Oh, I will. Now that we’re friends, and not just friends, I’m going to come up with all kinds of things to ask you about.”
“I’m really glad we’re friends,” I say to the grass. I’m talking about something totally different now.
“Me too,” she says. No boisterous grin.
I laugh and shake my head.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing. It’s dumb—I mean, silly.”
“No, what? We’re friends. You have to tell me.”
“Oh, is that how it works?”
“One hundred percent. I have a copy of The Friendship Code on my desk right now. You are not permitted to laugh in my presence without revealing the cause of said laughter.”
“Well, then. Do you know I used to have the biggest crush on you in middle school?”
She cocks her head to the side. “Um. I’m pretty sure everyone in the tri-county area knows that.”
“What? No, they didn’t.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“Okay, fine. Maybe they did. I told you it was silly.” I laugh again, but this time it feels like I’m forcing it. “Anyway, it was a really long time ago.”
She sits up straighter. “I used to have a crush on you, too.”
“Are you serious?” But. I mean. No.
“Yep. I used to talk alllll about you in these epically long e-mails to Janie.” She shakes her head. “Poor Janie.”
“But then why didn’t we—”
“Sophie.”
“Sophie? That girl from camp?”
“That girl from camp that you used to talk about. All. The. Freaking. Time. I thought she was your girlfriend.” She shrugs. “And then by the time I figured out she wasn’t, Dean happened.”
“Yeah. I remember that part.”
I still can’t believe she used to like me. Hope liked me. If I had never mentioned Sophie, I wonder if things would have turned out differently. Maybe we’d be together. Or maybe we would have ruined everything.
“It’s funny how things work out,” I say. “You and Dean. Me and Jayla.”
“You guys make a really cute couple.” But she says it like her heart is dying a slow, quiet death. “I broke up with Mikey,” she adds quickly.
Oh. Well, that explains it.
“What happened between you guys? Never mind. I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.” I can’t believe it. I mean, they were together a surprisingly long time considering he’s Mikey.
“No, it’s okay. Friends, remember? It’s . . . complicated.”
I don’t know what to say.
“Well, actually, maybe it’s not. Mikey’s fun, but it’s really hard to talk to him about anything real. He sure was great for pissing off my mom, though.”
I think about her mom, and about what Hope told me about having to be two people.
“Hey, Hope?”
“Yeah?”
“Dating Mikey and all that . . . stuff.” I wave my hands around, searching for the right words. I don’t want to seem like I’m judging. “Does it make you feel less like Hope-plus-Janie and more like Hope?”
“Not really.” She thinks for a minute. “Not at all. But it does help me forget for a while.”
I understand all about how good forgetting feels, but I also understand that it keeps you from ever getting anywhere. I think the conversation is over, but then she says, “Sometimes I think about ditching the Janie things. Doing more Hope things.”
“I think you should. You should tell your mom to screw it. I mean, not in those exact words, because your mom can be kind of scary, but, you know, something. It’s not fair for her to ask what she’s asking.”
“I know. And it’s not that I don’t want to do good things in the world and help people. I do. But, like, I don’t think I can handle dealing with people who are really sick. I started shadowing a doctor in Warner Robins—a surgeon, the kind that Janie shadowed. And sometimes I have to sneak out of the room and throw up, and sometimes I cry all the way home. I think it’s great that some people can do stuff like that, but I don’t think I’m one of them.” She hugs her arms to her chest, and she can’t seem to make her eyes meet mine.
“But that’s okay. Not everyone’s meant to help people the same way. Maybe you’ll be a lobbyist or take photographs or write.”
“Yeah.” The corners of her mouth turn up. “Yeah, I was thinking of taking a photography class next semester. If I dropped AP Chemistry, I’d definitely have room.”
She’s still for a while, thinking it over. And then, “Hey, Spencer?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.” She takes a step closer, and I think maybe she’s going to give me a hug or something. But then she looks scared, like she forgot something or maybe remembered something. It’s hard to say.
“I better go,” she says. “It’s important to hydrate.”
She jogs up the stairs of her house, and she doesn’t look back.