“Hey,” I said to him during a rare slow number. The only way the Dolly Paranoids could perform a love song was to make it ridiculously over the top. I figured Carter didn’t recognize that it was a parody of a prom theme rock ballad, not the real thing. I touched his huge hand, looked up at him, and batted my eyelashes, like Addison. “Having fun?”
He glanced down at me with the same scowl he’d given the girls onstage. Then he squinted in the dim light. His features softened. The scowl faded, and nothing was left but a quiet, cute sixteen-year-old boy on a first date, at a concert he hadn’t picked, who never knew the right thing to say.
He bent toward me very, very slowly, so I could have turned back to the stage if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t want to. He cupped my chin in his hand, and his lips touched mine.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I had never kissed a boy before. I had seen it done in movies, though. I had even seen Addison do it.
Mostly I let him lead the way. When Carter’s tongue slipped past my lips, I had a moment of panic that I shouldn’t let a boy go that far with me. Then I realized I’d gotten that advice in sixth grade. By one week and six days shy of sixteen, an open-mouthed kiss was probably okay.
I showed him my approval by running one hand up his arm to his thick shoulder and behind his neck. I pressed his head closer to mine and stood on tiptoes to reach him. He put both hands around my waist and kissed me harder.
The band reached the climax of their ridiculous faux love song. It would have been easy to imagine that they were making fun of Carter and me. I didn’t mind. After quite a few false starts, Carter and I had finally found something we had in common.
The song ended, and the lights brightened for the next song. Carter let me go, then applauded the band for the first time all night. When the new song started, he put his heavy arm around my shoulders, and I didn’t shrug away.
I didn’t have to. Addison jerked me out from under him, calling, “Gemma, come with me to the bathroom,” as if I had a choice.
Not again. I really did have to pee this time, though, so I let her lead me as she shoved past Max, dragging me after her. I turned around to mouth sorry to Max because we’d bumped him, but he wasn’t watching us go. He stared up at the stage, not smiling now, with a stubborn set to his jaw that I hadn’t seen before.
Even with the restroom door closed, the music echoed, so I had to listen closely and watch Addison’s lips as she asked, “Why have you stopped talking? You have got to get Max off me!”
“What do you mean, get him off you?” I hollered back, not even caring that sophisticated college girls reapplying lipstick at the sinks were staring over at us. I thought with alarm that she was saying Max had been pawing her, but I hadn’t seen him touch her.
“He is making all these stupid jokes!” she shouted. “He never shuts up!”
“Oh no, that’s terrible,” I said, one hundred percent confident that the sarcasm would be lost on her. But making fun of her didn’t cheer me up. I felt so sad thinking that Max’s jokes were wasted on her, spilling on the floor, to be mopped up late tonight after the concert was over, like so many cups of Coke and beer. I wished there was a way I could help her out, poor thing, but I didn’t see how.
“And why are you making out with Carter in public?” she yelled. “Everybody is looking at you.”
“Well, they certainly are now!” I yelled back. The college girls closed their lipsticks and escaped the bathroom, which had suddenly become a very uncool place to hang out.
I had felt self-conscious about kissing Carter during the concert. So I had snuck peeks through half-closed eyelids, and I had not seen anybody paying us any attention whatsoever, except Addison, who had repeatedly looked over at us and poked Max in the side to show him. “Everybody who?” I asked.
“Just everybody!” she exclaimed, exasperated.
“You made out with Jimmy Farmingdale behind the Dairy Queen,” I reminded her. “I mean, not just kissed him, but really made out with him and let him go down your bra.”
“That was last year. God!” Now that the other girls had left, Addison stepped up to the mirror and reapplied her own lipstick. “And I can’t get Max to touch me.”
I folded my arms. “You want him to touch you?”
“Well, yeah! If you and Carter can do it, why can’t I?”
“I don’t know. You were just saying that you wanted me to talk to Max so you wouldn’t have to.”
“That’s talking,” she said. “That’s different. I would totally make out with him. He is so hot.” She pulled down on the middle of her shirt, exposing more of her cle**age.
I stared at her reflection in the mirror until she stuck out her tongue at me and banged into a stall. Was she trying to imitate my relationship with Carter? Did she realize kissing Carter was a lot easier for me than talking to him, and now she was throwing that back in my face?
I shook my head. Of course she wasn’t. She did not have any insight into what made me tick. That was a completely different friend. Max.
But what she’d said about talking versus kissing made me think, whether she’d meant it to or not. I wasn’t sure if I’d been wrong to kiss Carter when I didn’t really like him. I needed some guidance. When we went back into the theater, I half expected the band to be playing a song about hypocrisy. It was a song about black-eyed peas and collard greens. I listened very hard, but I could not detect any message at all. Sometimes a country speed-metal song was just a country speed-metal song.
The concert ended then. Max and Addison led the way back to the car, but he didn’t offer her a piggyback ride this time. Carter and I held hands.
Inside the car, the first thing Carter said was, “Turn the radio down, Max, would you?” I wondered whether Carter and I were going to have our own conversation. But the four of us just talked together on the way back to Carter’s truck.
I tried to enjoy the drive. All I could think about, though, was Carter’s hand on my hand. We weren’t sitting close on the wide backseat—we both wore our seat belts, which strapped us to opposite ends—but we were attached there in the middle. If he wanted to hold my hand all the way back, he probably planned to kiss me again once we got to his truck, right? I hadn’t minded before. In fact, I’d enjoyed it.
So why did I feel vaguely nauseated at the thought?
Max pulled into the shopping center parking lot and stopped the car next to Carter’s truck. It was after hours and the lot had cleared out, so there was nobody to see what Carter and I did next, except Max and Addison.