“Do you give HJs on the first date?”
Full disclosure: I pretended I didn’t know what an HJ was. I mean, I did—the internet does exist! But I wanted to make sure we were on the same page.
Turns out, she’d caught me staring at a semi-cute dude who’d been browsing the fantasy section five minutes before—the same dude SHE was checking out. On the Kinsey scale, I’m a hard seven, even though that rating doesn’t exist. That’s how confident I am in my gayness.
Ella was cool with it. To her, I was competition.
“And I definitely give HJs on the first date.” She was so chill. I loved it.
After that, we were bonded for life.
Wes folds Ella into a hug. He’s half a foot taller than her, something he never teases her about and, though an anti-hugger, she never complains when he does things like this. Wes likes to think he’s the exception to all of Ella’s rules.
He buries his nose in her hair and inhales. She smells like her favorite brand of grape bubble gum, the Pacific Ocean, and home.
“I can’t believe you abandoned me for a month,” Ella says into his chest.
“Did you miss me?”
“The only thing I miss in life is the ability to go to a coffee shop without the douchebag male barista mansplaining to me the superiority of an Americano.” Ella pulls back, smirking. “You’re very replaceable.”
“I don’t need your snark.”
“Too bad. It’s a built-in luxury.”
Ellen Louise Graham—the last guy who called her that is quite possibly missing a finger—is a punk rock dream: forest-brown eyes, pale rose-white skin, and unreachable levels of confidence in her body.
“I’m fat and damn hot, okay?” she once told him before shamelessly hitting on some college dude loitering in the aisles of the bookstore.
Ella sizes him up. “You look good.”
“Uh. Thanks?”
She slugs his bicep. “Take a compliment. I’m not handing them out like lollipops at the dentist’s office.”
“Fine. Thank you. You look good too.”
“I mean, as if that wasn’t obvious.” Ella winks. “But also, I don’t need your praises to validate my appearance. I reject your masculinist views on beauty and worthiness. My value surpasses physical attractiveness.”
“I, uh…”
He’s isn’t sure how to reply to Ella, mainly because Ella loves a good argument. Wes? Not so much, which sucked growing up with an older brother like Leo.
Wes’s parents were college sweethearts. The seriously nerdy—Calvin named Wes after Wesley Crusher, as in the kid from Star Trek: The Next Generation—accounting major who landed a hipster, creative-writing wallflower. After their first year of marriage, Leo was born. Four years later, Wes popped up. No one’s said it, but Wes classifies himself as an “unexpected visitor.”
A blaring horn startles Wes.
A very impatient woman with frizzy blue hair and a death stare honks from her Buick. She wants their curb space, and Wes’s mini reunion is holding up the process.
“We’re coming, Granny!” Ella shouts, dispatching an equally evil glare. She turns back to Wes. “I really hate LAX.”
Wes jogs to the passenger side. Usually he’d be up for a verbal throwdown between Ella and Grandma Blue Hair, but he’s just graduated high school and been an out-of-work-almost-adult for less than a month. He doesn’t have bail money.
Ella pulls into traffic, slowly giving Grandma Blue Hair the finger in her rearview mirror.
Wes exhales happily. “Damn, it’s good to be back.”
“Car, car… another car!”
It’s a shame that Wes is going to die young.
He’s got one hand on the passenger door, another braced on the dashboard, and his small intestine is currently lodged in his throat: Ella whips her car around the 405 as if she’s a Formula One driver. Above his head, a forest of tree-shaped car fresheners swings joyfully from the rearview mirror. A Taylor Swift Funko Pop figure, scribbled over with a black Sharpie to look dark and menacing, mocks him from the dashboard.
This is why Ella’s runner-up in the best friend category: because Wes, who hasn’t left his mark on the world or met his favorite comic book writer, Geoff Johns, and has only been to one Weezer concert in eighteen years of existence, will die an underachiever.
From the driver’s seat, Ella cackles. “Chill, Wesley.”
“Do not call me that,” he says through his teeth. “Also, eyes on the freaking road!”
The car weaves between two SUVs, dodges a Corvette, and barely misses making out with the grill of a semitruck.
How is she able to drive at these speeds? It might be eight o’clock on a Sunday evening, but there’s no lack of traffic in Southern California. In fact, there’s never a shortage of traffic in the entire state of California.
“Did you piss your Spider-Man briefs yet?”
“I hate you,” grumbles Wes, but his words are drowned out when Ella cranks the volume on her cheap stereo system.
The real travesty is that Wes is going to die while listening to “High Hopes” by Panic! At the Disco.
Ella is aggressively in love with her emo-pop-punk music. Wes, on the other hand, is a ‘90s alt-rock singer stuck in a geek’s body. He’s hardcore about garage bands and summer punk anthems—without the tattoos and flannel overload, of course.
As they merge onto the I-10, the traffic smooths. Ella decelerates to NASCAR-levels of road debauchery. She lowers the volume on the stereo and cracks the windows just enough for Wes to breathe in a lungful of sweet, sticky California air. There’s this flavor to it, as if the ocean is so close, as if the sunset tastes like heat and oranges. It’s still early July, but summer is alive and kicking this close to Santa Monica.
“Now that you’re done being all Euro-hot,” Ella says with a sly grin.
“That’s not a thing.”
“It is.”
“It’s very much not a thing,” Wes argues. “Besides, I’ve always been way hot.”
“Like, anyone can edit the definition, Wikipedia hot?”
Wes’s body betrays him with a snort, then a chuckle. Ella isn’t that funny. He kicks his russet-orange Pumas up on the dash, nearly knocking over Evil Taylor Swift, then slouches in his seat. “Listen, El, I’m not some cynical, self-deprecating Netflix teen who complains about how boring he looks, when in actuality I’m super-attractive after you peel back my ‘nerdy layers.’ Geek is the new hot.”