The wind whipped fiercely as she and Lu made their way across Park Avenue toward Will Kingfield’s brownstone.
Tiny was wearing high-rise cut-offs and a black crop top, neither of which was hers. She kept pulling down the hem of the top, which was starting to drive Lu crazy.
“Leave it!” Lu yelled. “If you got it, flaunt it, Tiny. At least you have boobs. I’m basically, like, a stick insect.” As Tiny was still vaguely uncomfortable with the boobs that had popped up, seemingly overnight, this was not a fair comparison.
Tiny had come over wearing a navy blue T-shirt dress and floral Vans, but Lu said you could hardly see her awesome bod under it, which was kind of the point. Lu had found the cuts-offs and crop top in her closet and decided that Tiny had to wear them to the party, and if she even thought for a minute about wearing something else, it would have been the greatest tragedy known to man, and the universe as they knew it would disintegrate into gazillions of miniscule dust particles and get sucked into, like, a black hole, or something.
“You can kind of see my butt cheeks though,” Tiny had said, inspecting her reflection from the rear.
“You’ll thank me for doing this,” Lu said now as she dragged Tiny across the street by the elbow, freshly painted Poor Li’l Rich Girl–red nails scratching lightly against Tiny’s goose-bumpy skin. It was October, and even though the weather was still sort of warm enough for them to go jacketless, their wardrobe choices involved some wishful thinking. “You didn’t want to study for the SATs, anyway,” Lu informed her. “You’ve been studying all year—what more could you possibly fit in there?” She poked Tiny’s temple affectionately. “You’ll reach your parents’ target score, easy. I’m the one who has to worry about not bombing.” Lu linked her arm tighter through Tiny’s, and grinned like the devil. “Lucky for me, famous actresses don’t need to go to college. Besides, what if the world ends tonight? We’re going to live a little.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” Tiny said, struggling to keep up with Lu’s manic pace, and leaning into the wind. “It’s just pressure systems colliding.” The wind blew her hair into her face, and she pushed it back. “Just . . . really big ones. How did you convince me to do this again?”
“It wasn’t that hard.” Lu snorted. “I lured you out with the prospect of seeing Josh, like, outside of school property.” She fluttered her eyes and clasped her hands to her chest. “Oh, Joshuwaaa, read me The Waste Land again while we talk about fear in a handful of lust!”
“Dust.”
“Whatever.”
“According to the news,” Tiny said, ignoring her, “we should be inside right now with our windows taped up and our bathtubs filled with water, just in case.”
“Tiny.” Lu turned to her. “Do you know what a storm is? Do you? It’s water. Are you going to let a little water stop you from making memories you’ll have forever?”
“I guess when you put it that way . . .”
“Besides, you’re a great swimmer. If I start to drown, you could totally save my life.”
“But what if I drown?” she said under her breath. Lu didn’t seem to hear her.
“I don’t get why I have to convince you to go to a party where you’re going to see the guy we’ve been planning your first kiss with for months,” Lu muttered. “He’s almost definitely going to be there. He’s such a floater.”
It was true. Josh was equally at home with the arty lit mag crew as he was at a party thrown by the soccer team. He was liked and accepted by all. It was part of his alluring mystique.
“Tonight could be the night!” Lu sang. “The night you swap spit with Josh Herrera!”
Tiny’s heart muscles tensed up.
According to Lu, the following truths were held to be self-evident:
1) Tiny had a massive crush on Josh Herrera.
2) Tiny wanted to get Josh Herrera alone and smoosh her lips against his.
And those two truths were built upon a third piece of relevant information Lu believed was true:
3) Tiny had never been kissed.
But Tiny was lying. She had been kissed once. A perfect kiss. Her first and last kiss. The kind of kiss she sometimes wished could be her only kiss, for the rest of her life, because there would never be another one as perfect as that.
She had never told Lu.
And she still wasn’t over it.
The thing was, Josh was cute. If Tiny had a crush on anyone, it would be Josh. He was coeditor of the school lit mag, Calamity, with Malin Kopparberg. He was into books and poetry. He was someone she should like. She wished she had a crush on Josh. But when Lu talked about Josh, Tiny was still thinking about someone else.
And she had to kiss Josh. She had to get him to notice her, somehow. It was the only way to forget that other someone. It was the only way she’d be able to move on.
Part of her felt guilty. But was it really so bad to want someone to see her again, the way she was seen the night of her first kiss?
So she bought the hair dye. She came to the party. She had a plan, and she was going to stick to it.
Lu was reapplying bright-red lipstick, using a car window as a mirror.
“Trust me,” she said with a smack of her lips. “You look hot. Very Lana Del Rey meets Taylor Swift. Josh will love it.” She turned to Tiny and grinned. “Maybe this is what you’ll be wearing when you have your first kiss.”
Tiny sighed and tugged her shirt down again. “I hope so.” Lu batted her hand away.
“You have to stop hoping for things, Tiny.” Lu stopped in the middle of the dark street, and instinctively Tiny looked both ways. To their left, a pair of headlights loomed large and bright.
“Car,” Tiny said, and they stepped out of the way as the dark shape of a car swished past.
“Hope is how you get yourself into trouble,” Lu continued, standing still in the middle of the street, even though more cars were probably going to come along any second. “When you hope for things, you only get disappointed. But when you know something will happen, you will it to. Come on. Say it with me: I know so.”
Tiny smoothed her hands over her hair. “How could I possibly know when it hasn’t happened yet?”
“Because you can’t know anything until it happens. But you can believe it will. It’s all about attitude.” Lu took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and centered her hands over her heart. Then she cracked one eye open. “Come on. Live a little.”
This was something Lu told her to do at least once a day. If life were a movie, there would literally be a montage of clips set to music, just of Lu telling Tiny to live a little.
They started walking again at the same time, as if they’d planned it.
Sometimes Tiny thought she’d never have the guts to do anything if she didn’t have Lu there by her side. When it was the two of them, they could do anything. They could go to parties to which they weren’t technically invited. They could do the unthinkable and go out on the night before the biggest test of their lives. They could talk about kissing Josh like it was something that might really happen.
It was too bad they didn’t hang out as much as they used to.
Out of the corner of her eye, Tiny snuck a glance at Lu’s outfit again. She was wearing black skinny jeans and a tight T-shirt that said PROSE BEFORE HOES in gold glitter, under an etching of Shakespeare. Her blunt black bangs were flat-ironed stick straight, and thick stripes of black liner extended out at least an inch past the outer corners of her eyes. It was a look Tiny could never pull off, but she couldn’t help admiring Lu’s effortlessness at that kind of thing.
She tucked her own brown hair behind her ears, but the wind whipped it right back.
Stupid wind. Stupid hair.
She wondered if Josh would notice. She wondered if he would say something about the poem she had submitted anonymously to Calamity. The committee had discussed the poem at this afternoon’s meeting. People had taken its anonymous moniker as a free pass to analyze away, tearing it apart, using words like trite and structurally unremarkable, and saying things like, “I’m pausing on the part where . . .”
Jordan Brewster got all twitchy. “On a technical level, it’s unimpressive.” She stacked and unstacked the silver rings on her fingers, making a silvery clinking noise. Jordan Brewster had written a poem that the committee had voted on the week before. Tiny was pretty sure it had been about sex, but it was hard to tell. She’d used a lot of fruit metaphors, and on top of that, Tiny had never had sex, so she had nothing to compare it to.
Josh was scribbling something in a black moleskin notebook. He didn’t look up when he said, “I dunno. I like it. It feels emotionally authentic.”
“Well, should we vote on it?” Malin didn’t so much suggest as command. Malin was in top form, presiding over the committee as she perched cross-legged on the table. She wore denim cut-off shorts over bee-yellow tights, black Converse high-tops, and a large, white, men’s undershirt cinched at the waist with a black belt. Her multitonal hair (Tiny counted four but was sure there were more: auburn, honey, gold, strawberry-blond . . .) dangled defiantly in her face, perfectly contrasting with her dark brown skin.
There was a flourish of pencils, pens, and people ripping the corners off notebook pages. The results were never announced at the meeting—that would have been too humane. You had to wait agonizingly until the issue came out at the end of the year to see if your piece was accepted.
Malin collected the shreds of paper, marking cryptically in her notebook one tally mark for each vote. When all the votes were in, she looked up and smiled grimly.
“Next,” she said . . .
Josh didn’t look at Tiny once.
Maybe he knew, maybe he could just tell, because they shared some mind connection he hadn’t even realized yet. If Tiny wished it hard enough, maybe she could make him notice her in the way she wanted to be noticed.
It’s just that no one noticed her, not really. Not since that night three years ago.
There wasn’t anything worth noticing, anyway.