Chloe and I make ourselves comfortable on the staircase that leads to the second floor, listening to Cardi B rapping tinnily from the Bluetooth speaker on the coffee table. A couple of awkward-looking freshman guys cluster around a video on somebody’s cell phone. Slutty Deanna Montalto lounges on the sofa next to Trina Meng.
“Did you hear the thing about Deanna and Tyler Ramos in the auditorium?” Chloe asks quietly, running her thumb around the mouth of her beer bottle. “I feel like she’s basically the whole reason behind the new dress-code memo.”
“Oh my god, the no-more-knee-socks thing?” Emily asks, plunking down on the stair below us with a can of spiked seltzer in one hand. “So dumb.”
“So dumb,” I agree. “Like, explain to me how these delicate, precious boys are supposedly going to be too distracted by our knees of all things to get any work done.” I stand up and grab Jacob’s arm over the banister, pulling him partway out of the scrum of lacrosse bros. “Can I ask you a question?” I say, lacing our fingers together. “How exactly is us wearing tights instead of knee socks going to help you idiots learn better?”
“It’s not,” Jacob says immediately, his grin wide and wicked. “What it is going to interfere with is Charlie Rinaldi’s robust side hustle of taking pictures up your skirts in the cafeteria and selling them online.”
Joey and Ahmed bust up laughing. Even Chloe cracks a grin.
“You’re disgusting,” I inform Jacob, smacking him gently on the elbow, but I can’t help but let out a laugh of my own.
The only one who isn’t laughing is Gray, who’s leaning his lanky body against the post at the bottom of the staircase. “Anybody need a beer?” he asks, holding up his empty bottle. He tips it at us in a salute before he turns and walks away.
“That dude is the fucking weirdest,” Jacob says once he’s gone, slinging a heavy arm around my shoulders. I watch Gray’s broad back disappear into the crowd.
The party breaks up early—turns out Emily Cerato’s parents didn’t know she was having one to begin with and weren’t super thrilled when they came home from dinner and a show down in the Theater District and found two dozen teenagers sprawled all over their furniture.
“How the hell did Emily not realize they were seeing a one-act play?” Chloe asks as we dash across the lawn to Jacob’s car, her scarf flapping behind her in the sharp autumn wind.
“Maybe we should have tried to convince them they were at the wrong house,” I shoot back. That cracks her up, which cracks me up; by the time we manage to get our seat belts buckled Jacob looks about ready to leave us both on the side of the road altogether. “Take a little pity on your sober driver, here.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I assure him, still giggling; I’m pretty sure he finds Chloe and me kind of annoying together, though he’s too nice to say so. “Let’s go.”
Turns out all three of us are starving, so we swing through the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s for fries and milk shakes before heading over to Chloe’s to drop her off.
“See you at work tomorrow?” I ask, turning around in the passenger seat to look at her. Usually the two of us are on the same Saturday schedule, but tonight she shakes her head.
“I’m off tomorrow,” she explains, prying her milk shake out of the cupholder and slinging her bag over one narrow shoulder. “I’m spending the weekend at Kyra’s.”
I frown. “Really?”
Kyra is her slightly younger cousin, who lives in Watertown and is super into her Greek Orthodox youth group. I know her from years of going to Chloe’s birthday parties, and she’s cool in a straightedge kind of way, but I definitely wouldn’t call them super close.
“Why?”
She shrugs. “My parents want us to be friends, I don’t know. They’re probably hoping she’ll teach me to pray in Greek.”
“Oh man,” I tease. “Good luck, Kyra.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Chloe rolls her eyes. “Thanks for the ride, Jacob. I’ll see you guys Monday.”
Once she’s inside, Jacob turns to me, his sharp face familiar in the light from the dashboard. “You need to get home right away?” he asks.
I glance at the clock, hesitating. I’ve got a little over an hour before my curfew, truthfully, but I also know what he’s actually asking, which is whether I want to go park under the copse of trees at the far end of the Bridgewater parking lot and mess around for a while. “Um.”
“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, obviously,” Jacob says quickly.
“Gee, thanks.” I make a face.
“Oh, come on.” Jacob frowns, wounded. “You know what I mean. I’m not trying to be some, like, pressuring douchebag. I just meant—”
“No, I know.” I wave a hand to stop him, a little embarrassed. He’s right, actually—Jacob’s never given me a hard time about the fact that we haven’t had sex yet, even though I can tell he’s a tiny bit disappointed every time we’re getting up to something and I finally stop him. And it’s not even that I don’t want to, necessarily. I meant what I said to Bex the other day—Jacob is great. He’s smart. Everybody is always saying how funny he is. He’s the assistant coach of his little brother’s peewee basketball team, for God’s sake. And if sometimes I feel like I’m still kind of waiting for some crazy zing of recognition, some feeling of Oh, it’s you—well, this is high school, not a Netflix original rom-com. There’s no reason to be such a girl about the whole thing.
Finally I sigh, reaching out with one finger and snapping Jacob’s seat belt lightly across his chest. “Let’s go,” I tell him.
Jacob grins.
Three
Gracie has a chess tournament in Harvard Square the following weekend, so I tag along with my parents to go see her play. The thing about competitive chess is that even at the middle school level—especially at the middle school level—the various matchups are basically more complicated than March Madness seeding, which means that over the years I’ve spent an awful lot of time sitting around in random auditoriums waiting for it to be my sister’s turn to wipe the floor with supposed prodigies from Newton and Andover.
Today the proceedings are even slower than usual; somebody’s little brother is kicking the back of my chair periodically, and the dry, forced heat is making me yawn. Gracie sits to my side with her eyes closed and her head tilted back against the red velvet auditorium seat, listening to Christmas music. My phone buzzes with a text from Jacob—a Bitmoji of himself snowboarding, his tongue hanging out like a dog’s. I stopped him—again—before things went too far the night of Emily’s party, though he didn’t actually seem put out about it. He’s spending this weekend at his cousin’s house in Vermont, so possibly he’s too excited about “shredding the mountain”—his words, not mine—to be annoyed about not getting into my pants.
“I’m going to find a coffee shop and do some homework,” I finally whisper.
My mom nods. “Don’t go too far,” she instructs, fishing a ten-dollar bill out of her purse and handing it over. “I’ll text you before her match.”