The Canadian geese were getting fat . . .

 . . . or at least their bird shit was. Canadian geese fly south to winter in my town and others like it. Because I lived only a few blocks from a tiny lake, I’d usually find one or two in my front yard that time of year. I had to admit they were beautiful, elegant with that white band under their chin like they were wearing tuxedos. But they were also mean and nasty, whipping their long necks at me, hissing whenever I walked to my own front door, forced to step around their slimy shit. One day, a few of them landed in Buster’s backyard, and I had to vault over the fence to save him from a massacre.

With Christmas break just a week away, Alana gave Bryce an ultimatum. “Hawaii or me,” she said.

“It’s not that I don’t want him to have his own friends and do his own thing. It’s just that other guys invited their girlfriends to go with them and he didn’t. So what does that tell you?”

She looked to me for the answer, but what she really wanted was confirmation. He was a jerk, callous and selfish. But the messenger often gets killed, don’t they? What I wanted was for her to come to that conclusion on her own. And eventually she did.

“I’m over him, Hudson,” she said one night on the phone. “He made his choice, so I made mine.”

Her decision turned her into an even unhappier girl. Penelope and Alana were so bonded in their misery I thought I felt actual gamma rays of grief passing between them (through me) during yoga class. They were sisters in sorrow, with Cherie always willing to jump in and wallow with them even though (so far) she hadn’t yet been victimized by a heartless guy. I became the enemy sex.

“Get over it,” I advised her. “If it’s not working for you, then move on.”

Wasn’t this what Pirkle had advised me to do? Yes. Did I do it? No.

“I thought he was like us, Hudson, but I guess I was wrong. He got sucked into that whole football thing and couldn’t handle it.”

“I’m not sure I get what you mean.”

“I mean that even if he wanted me to go to Hawaii with him, I’m not the typical high school jock girlfriend. I don’t fit the mold. And he wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the pressure of the other guys on the team.”

“He seems like he’s pretty good at standing up to pressure. Being the quarterback of the team is a lot of pressure.” The devil in me went for the kill. “Maybe he just didn’t want you to come, have you ever thought of that?”

She got real quiet after that, and I was pretty sure she was mad at me—killing the messenger and all—but the next night she called to talk again. We’d been doing a lot of our visiting by phone those days, with Penelope and Cherie monopolizing her after-school time.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I think you’re right. I think Bryce is just not that into me. Maybe I was fun and exciting to begin with when he was ostracized from his group and could have sex with me anytime he wanted.”

Sex? Anytime he wanted? With Alana?

I always knew that was a possibility, but I tried not to think about it, and we never discussed it until that moment. Of course, a guy like Bryce wouldn’t stay with a girl who wasn’t putting out. He wasn’t desperate like me. My throat got tight with the idea of sex on demand from Alana Love. Too tight to deliver an appropriate response.

“Hudson? You there?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway. I just wanted to tell you something really exciting. My dad’s taking me to Paris for Christmas. It’s gonna be amazing. I’ll check everything out for when you and I go.”

“Cool,” I said.

Christmas lost some of its luster with Alana so far away in Paris. She texted me pictures of the places we’d visit when we went back there together, but they didn’t do anything for me. For her they were experiences, soon to be great memories. For me they were just tiny images on a phone screen. I could go online and find better pictures than those.

Fritzy and I made a pledge to run together every day of vacation. Whenever I ran with her, I knew she held back for my sake. Even if I could match her strength and endurance, which I couldn’t, I could never match the length of her legs. One of her strides equaled about one-and-a-half of mine. But I knew I made up for what I lacked by keeping her company. And she did get a certain satisfaction in witnessing my physical transformation.

One day she was unusually quiet during our run, and when we were done, she suggested going out to grab a burger. I waited for her to shower and change, and then we went over to my place where I did the same. After dinner, we drove around in her truck throwing out scenario after scenario for plan B, all the while wasting a whole lot of gas. We finally parked on top of Windy Hill, which was a well-known make-out spot late at night. But being so early in the evening (and on a weeknight) we had the place to ourselves with its more innocent reputation as just a park.

Below us the city twinkled to life. Above us, the night sky did the same. Windy Hill lived up to its name that night, whipping up a chill that somehow pierced even the steel doors of the truck. Fritzy turned the key in the ignition and left the heater running. Alana was on my mind. Plan B was on my mind. Homework was on my mind. Homework, in fact, was always on my mind those days when school structure was something I actually missed. Life as a home-schooled student meant never being done. Some project. Some test. Some reading was always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind.

“Wheeler,” she said, shaking me from my thoughts, “I’m sorry, I know I’ve been hard on you.”

“About what?”

“About Love. I guess you can’t help it if you’re hung up on her. It’s just that sometimes I get frustrated with you, and I don’t get it.”

“That’s okay. Sometimes I don’t get it either.”

“Are you still going to Europe with her after graduation?”

“That’s the plan. Why?”

“I don’t know. It just makes me sad to think of it.”

“You’ll be off at college. We wouldn’t be seeing each other anyway.”

“Maybe not, but I think we would. We’d find a way to make it happen.”

I didn’t ask her how that would happen. Fritzy wasn’t a great student, but she was a great athlete, and she was going to a great college, one I’d never have a chance of getting into. And anyway, the two colleges my mom made me apply to were in-state. Fritzy would be all the way across the country.

But I was sharing in her blues that night. Maybe it was the remoteness of the hilltop. Maybe it was the reminder of the season, the passage of time, my mounting disappointments, Alana so far away. Maybe I was thinking of Fritzy and the idea that after graduation our worlds would be so different—her with her fancy athletic scholarship, me traveling the world. So different that one day we might even forget what it was that had once brought us together.

“Have you ever kissed a girl, Wheeler?”

That rocketed me right out of my gloom. I always lie more convincingly when there’s a kernel of truth buried somewhere in the lie so I thought about the kiss my mom routinely planted on my cheek whenever she said goodnight.

“And I don’t mean your mom.”

I called upon memories of grandmothers, aunts and anyone else who had innocently brushed my cheeks or even my lips with their own.

“And no other relatives either.”

“Okay, no I haven’t,” I said. “Are you happy?”

“Yes and no, I guess.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, obviously I feel sorry for you that you’ve never kissed a girl. But I think it’d be cool if I was your first. You wanna, Wheeler? Otherwise the first time you go in for the kiss, you’re not going to know what the hell you’re doing.”

I scooted around in my seat so I was facing her, and she draped her arm across the back of my neck. I know I must have looked shocked because I was. But who was I to argue with her logic?

“You wanna?” she repeated. I smelled mint on her breath.

How had I not noticed until that moment she wore her hair loose that night? That her sweater was tight? That her eyes shone from the interior light? That her cheeks (and mine) were flushed from the almost suffocating warmth blowing through the heater vents. She leaned towards me slightly, and like the gravitational pull of the sun I was sucked into her orbit, my lips blending with hers. Soft. Warm. Greeting her tongue with my own. Gathering the silky thickness of her sleek, glossy hair into my closed fist. How did I know what the hell I was doing? It felt so easy and . . . natural.

When it was over, and it was eventually over, I thought there’d be hell to pay. She pulled back, floating away from me like a helium balloon getting smaller and smaller until it finally disappears from sight. And only then did I see Fritzy again.

“Was that gross?” she asked in an uncharacteristically timid way.

“Definitely not gross,” I said. “Weird maybe, but not gross.”

“Was it like brother and sister?” She trailed her fingertips lightly across her lips as if searching for a remnant of the kiss.

“I don’t know any brothers and sisters who do that.”

All sorts of appropriate wisecracks escaped me at the moment. Wisecracks that Gus would have easily come up with.

“It’s okay though. We’re still friends and it was a friendly thing, right?”

“Very friendly.”

It, for sure, had been Heaven to me.