But instead, I looked up at a boy who was being so careful, reading me slowly. His hand on my cheek—the whir of my heart, almost pained by anticipation. He leaned down most of the way and paused. Giving me a beat—letting me choose, and I did.
I’d been worried about remembering how to do this. But that wasn’t relevant, as it turned out. I’d never kissed anyone like this, like Max right now—familiar but entirely surprising. I gripped his shirt to steady myself, relaxing once he got an arm around me.
When we pulled away, dazed, I bit both my lips, shy after such intensity. Sure, we’d flirted from afar all summer. But I had almost a year of friendship muscle memory, and being so obviously into Max felt a bit embarrassing, a side of me he didn’t know.
“Okay,” I said, smiling. “Ready.”
Max blinked at me, then nodded back up to the car. “Well, now I think we should definitely ditch these guys.”
I laughed and opened the gate.
Our friends were bunched around the patio table, hands reaching into snack bowls. Laurel with a white captain’s hat over her waist-length box braids and Tessa on her lap, wearing yellow water wings. Morgan lounged in a purple halter suit and green capris, an homage to fellow lily-pale redhead Ariel. Kayleigh was luminous in a long seafoam-green wig. Malcolm and Josiah were pirates in tricorn hats, and Ryan made a shorter, broader Gilligan in a red polo. A few of Laurel’s friends who hadn’t left for college yet sat together, in everything from foam lobster pincers to some kind of anime costume.
“I’m guessing we missed a theme here,” Max whispered.
Before I could apologize for blanking on that part, Morgan spotted us. “Hey, there you are! … Oh my God! Wait! What?”
“I brought a plus-one,” I said. “Hope that’s okay.”
Every head snapped in our direction, where Max stood with a hand in his pocket, casual as could be. Our friends became a flurry of arms and shrieks. Tessa got there first, nearly plowing Max over.
Considering that she was my best friend and he was my boyfriend, Tessa and Max’s friendship didn’t really have much to do with me. They had taken to each other right away during a shared lunch period, bonding over snobby music tastes and dry humor. While I spent my June scampering between purple-flagged buildings in New York, Max and Tessa carried on, at record shops and lunches they sent selfies of. I liked the idea of them together at home, even when I felt vaguely sick with missing them.
“Interesting,” I said as Tessa pulled away from him. She had her blond curls in a low ponytail, a style she’d taken up this summer. “I recall no such greeting when I got home from New York.”
“Well, that wasn’t a surprise!” Tessa huffed. Morgan squeezed him with a side hug.
“Pasta did you good, Max-O,” Kayleigh said, sizing him up. She’d highlighted her cheeks with a mermaid palette, reflecting like a prism on her golden brown skin.
Max pretended to doff his cap, but I could feel him go squirmy. Even with all that confidence, he sometimes faltered under the attention of my adoring friends.
“Excuse me,” Laurel said, hands on her hips. The pose showcased the temporary tattoos Tessa had ordered: glittery boats on Laurel’s dark brown arms, sailing toward an anchor and a pinup mermaid. “It’s my party and I’m last in line?”
Max gave her a good solid hug. “Came home early to see you off.”
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “Just me, I bet.”
Max greeted Laurel’s friends and Malcolm, a friend of his since elementary school. I knew Malcolm through QuizBowl, and was pleased that he’d started hanging out with our friends this summer, bringing his boyfriend, Josiah, into the mix, too.
Laurel’s gaze slid from Max down to me, then back. “This is wild. Like that very satisfying moment in Concentration.”
We must have looked confused, because she laughed. “You know, the card game? Trying to remember where all the cards are so you can match them? I finally got the pair together!”
“But no costumes?” Ryan chided. “Boo.”
He swung an arm around Max’s neck anyway, drawing him into the fray. After everyone was settled in back around the table, Tessa stood up. She cleared her throat and raised her glass—a girl Gatsby, presiding over the festivities.
“To Laurel King and her reign at Northwestern, which begins tomorrow. You will …” She paused, searching Laurel’s face for the right word. “Dazzle them.”
The apples of Laurel’s cheeks went rounder because, well, Tessa was proclaiming this from firsthand experience. I’d never seen Tessa so grandiose, baring her heart. When she looked around, she seemed briefly surprised that the rest of us were still there. “To Laurel!”
I was close enough to hear Laurel whisper, “Thanks, baby,” and I flushed at the grown-upness of it. Max had called me Janie almost as long as he’d known me, a reference to the shyer, eldest Bennet sister. I could never imagine him calling me “baby”—it was … sexy, or something, in a way I couldn’t imagine Max seeing me.
Shortly after, Ryan cannonballed into the water, and Tessa, never to be outsplashed in her own pool, followed behind. Everyone else eased in, but Max and I sat near the shallow end, our bare feet pale in the water. Last year, he’d nudged me back toward swimming, an attempt to help with what had become a full-blown drowning phobia after Aaron’s death, and it didn’t go well. I’d needed to jump back in on my own. But when I did, I wore Max’s belief in me like wings.
He leaned back, one arm stretched behind me, and I moved close, my right leg warm against his left.
“Hey.” His eyelids looked heavy, jet lag catching up with him.
“Hi.” I nodded to the other side of the pool. “Happy to be back with this bunch?”
“Happy.” The way he looked at me when he said it—with a sigh and the slightest smile. Being together was like sharing a docking station, finally able to rest and refuel. “But feeling a little underdressed. I mean, Kayleigh ordered a wig for this?”
“Oh no. She’s had that for years. Sixth-grade Halloween, I think?” Kayleigh had collected illustrations of Black mermaids since childhood—something her mom started and her aunts continued. They swam in their framed kingdom above her desk, near Kayleigh’s rainbow of volleyball ribbons and a Polish-style paper chandelier her babcia made. “Mermaids are a thing with her.”
Max smiled, unsurprised to hear it. “My life had so much less whimsy before I met you all.”
“You were missing out.”
He looked over and said, seriously, “I really, really was.”
How to explain why I kissed Max Watson, for the third time ever, in full view of our closest friends? I don’t know. I couldn’t not.
Brake, I warned myself. Slow it down. Hadn’t I seen how love could pulverize someone? Didn’t I still have to tell him what next year might have in store? Instead, I rested my hand on his chest, electricity conducting up my arm.
My heart blew through the red like a girl in a convertible, already gone.
CHAPTER THREE
In the morning, I woke up to a text from Max, inviting me over for breakfast, and I pressed my smiling, ridiculous face into a pillow. We didn’t need excuses to hang out anymore; no studying or QuizBowl or plans with our friends.