Saturday was different. I could feel it when I woke up, and I heard it in his voice when he called me to ask about going out that night. We were both sick of these polite dates that ended with him giving me a peck on the cheek at my front door. I made sure that when I opened my front door on Saturday night, he had something to look at.
He gaped at me. Simply looked me up and down with his mouth open.
“You’ve never seen me quite so clean before.” I bent toward him. “Smell me.”
He obliged, taking a long whiff of my floral hair. “Great dress.” He stared at my legs.
“Thanks.”
He lifted my chin with two fingers. “Is that . . . mascara?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed, triumphant.
His eyes roved all over my face, making me feel like our senior class’s Best Looking, a title I’d never wanted but that didn’t sound too bad when Will was the one bestowing it on me. Finally he said, “Your hair’s down.”
“It unravels from the braids, sure enough.”
“Indulge me for a minute.” He tapped his phone, then held it out in front of us. “Selfie. Kiss me right here.” He pointed to his cheek.
Taking this picture reminded me a bit too much of Beverly’s treacherous selfie with Will’s best friend back home. But I wasn’t going to deny him this. I pursed my lips—with shiny gloss on them, even—and gave the phone a knowing glance. He snapped the photo.
As we looked down at the image, he slipped his arm around my back with more of that Minnesotan sleight of hand. He said ruefully, “I wanted to post it online to show my friends how cool I am. It’s not going to work. You look gorgeous, but I look too exuberant standing beside you, like I can’t quite believe it.”
I laughed. He did look a little starstruck. Guys didn’t get starstruck around me. “I think it’s perfect.”
***
Kaye was throwing the night’s party in her big, beautiful historic home on a lagoon where the homeowners docked their massive sailboats and had access to the ocean. As we parked at the end of a long line of cars stretching along the grass near her house, I explained to Will that Kaye didn’t have parties when her parents weren’t home. Her mom actually helped her throw them. Consequently there was no alcohol, but the food was good enough that people came anyway. These gatherings had an innocent, fifties, sock-hop vibe. Frankly, I found them a refreshing change from sitting on the ground and trying to use an empty Coke can as a weed pipe. But guests really bluesing for a drink could always access a box of wine. One had only to determine whose truck bed it was in.
As we hiked up the lawn to her house, holding hands, Will asked the next logical question, knowing me. “Do you want a drink?”
I had a crazy answer: “Not if you’re not. It’s really hard to communicate with somebody when one of you is drinking and the other isn’t.”
He gave me a quizzical smile. Now that we were walking near the house, we were getting close to other couples making their way up the yard, so he lowered his voice. “That’s an excuse. You don’t want to drink every time you go to a party, but by now you have a reputation to uphold. You’re glad I’m here, aren’t you? You can blame me for all your good behavior.”
This boy scared me sometimes, he was so right. I tried to throw him off balance by murmuring, “If I cut down on my drinking, I will still have plenty of bad reputation left. I’ll show you later tonight.”
He laughed out loud. He looked as pleased and astonished as he had when we took a picture a few minutes before.
“Aw, you’re blushing!” I exclaimed, squeezing his hand. “You’re cute.”
Chelsea and DeMarcus were walking a few yards away—approximately fifteen, in my expert estimation from years of marching up and down a football field. Chelsea called, “I thought it was a robot, but it laughs!”
“It laughs only for me,” I called back. I said more quietly to Will, “Seriously, I think that’s where we went wrong the first night, why we were misreading each other. I was drunk and you were . . . new.”
He winced. “It’s terrible being new.”
“Is it? Sometimes I fantasize about what it would be like to start over.”
“You want to move to Minnesota?” He made it sound like a threat.
“No. I would freeze to death.”
Keeping hold of my hand, he backed far enough away to get a good look at my gauzy dress. “You would,” he agreed, “because I would want you to keep wearing stuff like that.”
“And I think it’s beautiful here.”
He looked up at the live oaks arching over the house. “It is.”
“But I fantasize . . . this is terrible.”
He tugged me closer. “You’ve told me a lot of terrible things.”
“Er, this is not sexy-terrible but actual-terrible,” I said. “I wonder what it would be like to start over without sisters. Not that I want them dead, of course, but if they never existed, and it was just me. I wonder if I would be the same person, or if I would be like Angelica, fighting it out for valedictorian with Aidan and Kaye and DeMarcus and Xavier Pilkington.”
Will gave me a dubious look. “You would never be anything like Angelica.”
That hurt. After he’d been so nice tonight, though, I was pretty sure he hadn’t meant to spray lighter fluid on my feelings and set them on fire. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t mean that!” he exclaimed. “It’s just . . . Angelica tries really hard, but she’s not that bright.”
“Really!”
“Yes. Not to be mean. Just my opinion.”
Why do you want to date her, then? I wondered. But we didn’t all want a rocket scientist, did we? Girls didn’t hang out at Xavier’s locker. I tried to edit the bitterness out of my voice as I said, “That’s my opinion too. I’ve never heard anyone else say it, but I’ve known this about Angelica since kindergarten.”
He nodded. “She does well in school because she cares and she worries. Like me.”
At the bottom of the grand stairs up to the covered front porch, I pulled him to a stop. “You’re not like that. Angelica and Aidan care, and they worry, and it’s part of their nature. You care and worry too, but it makes you tired.” I reached up and rubbed my thumb across the worry line between his brows. “Do you feel tired?”