I WAS NEATLY FOLDED into Kevin’s lap on my living room couch while we waited for Britt and Dad to come home from an ice cream run. I had ordered chocolate chip cookie dough. Kevin, for some godforsaken reason, was getting boring old vanilla.
What was wrong with that boy?
The four of us were spending an awesome evening watching a really stupid movie.
I loved how perfectly I fit into Kevin’s lap. I was scrunched up with my head tucked into his shoulder and my knees folded into his legs. With Britt and Dad gone we were all over the map. I had one hand inching a few degrees south of his belt buckle. He had one hand drifting north of my inner thigh while his other hand slid east to west in delightful circling motions under my top.
I was hoping Dad’s car would break down. Or maybe the ice cream store would get robbed and Britt and Dad would have to be interrogated as witnesses. Or at the very least, the two of them would be abducted by aliens and whisked off to another planet to get prodded and probed and poked for at least another hour or two. Anything to delay their coming home. Anything to allow Kevin to continue doing exactly what he was doing.
And then, suddenly, Kevin stopped kissing me. He looked into my eyes.
“You know what?” he said, this time circling my lips with his fingers. His voice was trembling.
“What?” I asked, twirling his hair. I loved to twirl his hair. He had been all set to get it cut the day before but I had convinced him to leave it long for at least one more week. Longer was so much more twirlable.
“I really, really, really like you,” he said.
“I am so, so, so glad.”
“And you know what else?”
“Tell me,” I said, twirling away.
“That’s as high as it goes.”
“High as what goes?”
“Reallies on the likeability scale. Three of them. It doesn’t go any higher than that.”
“So you can’t really, really, really, really like me?”
“Nope. Can’t do it. Against the rules. Three reallies is the max.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said, faking a frown. Kevin put his fingers on my lips and pushed them up into a smile.
“I’m not so sure,” Kevin said. “Maybe it is fair. Maybe it’s even better than fair! This is, like, uncharted territory for me, but I’m kind of thinking that if you do one more really cute thing, or even look at me one more time in that way that you do, then we may have to switch it up.”
“Switch it up?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
Kevin kissed me. One kiss on each of my eyes, on each of my cheeks, one on my chin, and then a long, slow yummy mouth kiss.
Once more he pulled away and looked at me.
“Switch it up,” he whispered. “Begin a brand new scale. You know, upgrade. Move on to something beyond like.”
“Beyond like,” I murmured. I could barely breathe.
“Yeah,” he said. “Beyond like.”
I took his face in my hands and kissed him hard.
Kevin sat up. “That’s it!” he said. “That’s what I was talking about. Now you’ve gone and done it! There’s no turning back!”
“That one more really cute thing. Just like I said. Do you know what that means?” He took both my hands in his and looked right into my eyes. I held my breath.
“Tell me,” I whispered.
“That means that I am totally and completely . . .”
The door opened and Britt came crashing in.
“I scream! You scream! We all scream for ice cream!” she sang. “Never fear, ice cream is here!” She flung herself over the top of the couch, plopped down next to us, and slung her legs onto mine, which were still draped over Kevin’s.
“You didn’t watch any more of the movie did you?” she asked. “It’s like the worst thing ever, but I kind of like it.” Britt stopped and stared at the two of us.
“What?” she asked. “What’s going on? What did I miss?”
I nestled my head back onto Kevin’s shoulder, reached around him, and held him as tight as I possibly could.
•
“Wow!” Ashley said. “He was going to say it! He was going to come right out and say it!”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me? He was! He definitely was! What else could it possibly have been?”
I had given Ashley the blow-by-blow of last night’s episode, and she was right. At least, I hoped she was.
Kevin had almost said it! He was that close! That close!
I could have killed that half-wit twit of a Britt!
Sisters! Achh!
“What would you have said?” Ashley asked. “He was going to drop the L-bomb. You know he was! What were you going to say?”
What was I going to say? I probably wouldn’t have been able to move my tongue at all. It would have just flopped there, hanging out and rolling around dripping pools of saliva like someone in the middle of a seizure, for goodness sake. Maybe, just maybe, I might have spit out some such incoherent spaz gobbledygook that would have left poor Kevin wondering what part of Planet Ditz I came from.
“Plumph!” I would have sputtered. Or maybe “Blurph!” Or something equally insane.
Either that or I would have just passed out.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t been thinking about this forever.
I had liked Kevin from the get go. And then really liked him. And then really, really, really liked him.
And now?
I knew I loved my father. But that’s because he took care of me and gave me things and got all misty-eyed whenever I brought home good grades and, well, he was my father. I was supposed to love him.
I knew I loved Auntie Sadie, because she was a lioness and I was her cub and she would have faced a herd of charging hippos and kicked their asses to save mine.
I knew I loved my sister, even though she was a royal pain in my butt and was always into my things and driving me crazy, and had totally blown Kevin’s big moment. But she was, after all, my little sister. What else was I supposed to do? It’s not like I really had a choice.
I knew I loved Ashley, because she was my Ashley and I would always love her, even when she screwed up. And she would always love me, and that was just the way that it always had been and always would be.
I knew I loved Mount Tom and his trees and his animals, because the thought of the bastards blowing his top off made me so totally crazy that I was ready to do just about anything, anything, to stop them.
And then there was Kevin. Just like he had said, this was uncharted territory.
One thing that made me nuts was when kids said they loved someone and adults pooh-poohed it and got all dismissive and stupid and said crap like “You don’t even know what love is.” As if adults have cornered the market on love, with so many of them blowing it big time and screwing around and breaking up and getting divorced and generally making mayhem and mockery out of the whole love thing.
The way I see it, if someone says that they’re in love, then they’re in love. No questions asked. I mean, who am I, who is anyone, to tell them that they aren’t?
“What would you have said?” Ashley asked again.
I had spent a sleepless night, eyes wide open, replaying the conversation over and over in my head and thinking up the most awesome reply had Kevin actually come out with it. An Academy Award–winning reply. A reply that would be the title of the number-one hit song by Beyonce or Taylor Swift or whoever was the hottest star of the moment. A reply that would go viral and be on the lips of every teenage girl in the entire world. A reply that would have completely blown Kevin away and made him get down on bended knee, weeping with joy, and ask me to marry him on the spot even though I was a few weeks shy of sixteen and he was less than two years older.
“And you would have said what again?” Ashley asked for the third time.
“Plumph!”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“Blurph!”
“Ahhh. . . Now I get it. Weird-girl-speak for totally and completely!”
Ashley hugged me.