Ander and I are a whirlwind. Of glitter and puppies and everything that’s good and right in the world. We are perfect and beautiful and I’ve already gone through two tubes of Chapstick. It’s like every day I date him is the best day of my life.
Today is off to a great start too. Over breakfast, my parents told me that Dad got called to an emergency meeting in Utah and Mom’s going with him because their marriage counselor says that their Janie-less time is a vital pillar of their marriage. They’re going away again in a few weeks because it’s really, really vital. Gag. They’re very, truly, horribly, terribly endlessly sorry to leave me alone on my eighteenth birthday, but they’ll bring me back wonderful presents and lots of them, so I assured them that I’d be okay. I came to school and Piper brought me coffee and I invited her and Ander and a bunch of his friends over to help me celebrate my adulthood.
Ander kissed me when I told him, or maybe I kissed him. Who cares? Literally everyone because they were all watching because the two of us are too damn perfect.
It’s like I can really get to know him now, really see him. I look at him and I see freshman year, when he had just gained a foot in a summer and it seemed like it was still giving him vertigo. I look and I can just see his second-grade class picture—the crooked teeth and the haircut he did himself the night before, and the eyes the color of maple syrup.
And I see me too, Freshman Me with her new backpack and schedule clutched in sweaty fingers, looking around corners to find classes and—“Ohmygod here comes Ander Cameron.” I wasn’t even friends with Piper then, was I? No, so it would have been someone else’s shoulder that I turned and buried my face in. Who was it? It doesn’t matter. I used to look at Ander and imagine waking up with him. Stretch, yawn, see him beside me, smile. I wanted to talk to him and be friends with him and try out a different kind of living with him—the kind that happened with your lips.
Sometimes, back then, I’d see him and he’d see me, and he would blush and I would blush and our mutual blushing was like—like how Disney told me that love at first sight would feel.
And sure, he became more of a douche.
And sure, I became—
I don’t even know. I became me, less so and more so.
And now that we are Officially Going Out, it’s everything I thought it would be. It’s so damn easy. Zero percent commitment, a hundred percent fun. He’s started wearing his thick Ralph Lauren sweaters again—you know the ones, the big chunky-knit things made of boyfriend material—even though it’s not quite sweater weather yet, and every time I see him, I bury my face in his chest and thank God that fall is a season.
And best of all, he pretends with me. He pretends that we’re crazy in love, pretends that the air is our love and we’re swimming in it, and it’s just easy. There’s so much kissing.
Kissing him is so. Much. Fun.
This is it. This is true freaking love.
Until the moment passes.
I get a now. I deserve a now, don’t I? I do.
And here’s what’s happening now: AP Bio lab, which doesn’t ruin the best day of my life because it involves fire. I don’t read the lab closely enough to figure out why, and Piper is being an amazing friend by doing the experiment while I sit on the counter and swing my legs and light matches and blow them out in Ander’s direction like kisses. He’s across the room and laughing and winking his angel eyes.
(Micah’s in this class too, but we’re very good about not looking at each other.)
I don’t even notice the fire until Piper screams that our lab sheet is burning.
Someone pulls the fire alarm before Mr. Kaplick can tell us to chill, and we’re rushing into the hallway and out the door into the sun that keeps the day just above chilly, and I can’t stop laughing as the rest of the school pours out. I’m about to lie down and start making grass angels when someone catches my hand.
Ander spins me around with his finger on his lips. I pull it away and kiss him, hard, and he pulls me away and we sprint for the parking lot.
We go to the diner down the road and lounge in greasy seats talking about nothing in particular for hours. He plays with my hair and I order every milkshake on the menu so we can taste them all. His favorite is Clementine Dreaming and mine is NuTELLA Like It Is.
After, he drives me home, and I tell him to stop where the road forks between my new house that I fucking hate and the quarry.
He listens, because that’s what boyfriends do. He turns off the car and smiles his crooked smile and leans over and we start making out. I melt like girlfriends do, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him back. We love each other with the kind of love that begins and ends with our lips.
Outside the car, the lamplight is fighting the rain. The Metaphor is just down the hill, and I imagine it while he kisses me, the perfect scene: the two of us dancing under shy streetlights, spinning closer to the water, hand in hand, climbing my mountain of rocks and falling flat on our perfect asses. Can’t you just see it? I can.
Maybe we even make it to the top together.
I always knew I’d make it to the top one day. I had painted the moment of triumph in watercolor, in oil, in acrylic; I had sculpted it in clay and stone and plaster, welded it in copper and iron; I had dreamed it in color and sepia, oversaturated and in black-and-white. And never once had Ander been there with me.
It was always Micah. Always, anything, everything.
We kiss for a while, until Ander starts getting frisky and I pull away. He never stops grinning at me, not even when he drives me up the hill to my new house, where all the lights are on because my parents have probably been waiting for me to come home for hours now. My lips are swollen and I use the last bit of my third tube of Chapstick. He kisses me again before I get out of the car, and he gives me his jacket to run to the house so I don’t get wet.
At the front door, I turn back to blow him a kiss good-bye, but he’s already gone.