“Your feet are too big for socks as cute as these. Your toes would pop right out. You know what, I bet I could find you some socks that fit at . . . um, the zoo.” Peter sits up and starts tickling me. I gasp out, “I bet the—pandas or gorillas have to—keep their feet warm somehow . . . in the winter. Maybe they have some kind of deodorized sock technology as well.” I burst into giggles. “Stop . . . stop tickling me!”
“Then stop being mean about my feet!” I’ve got my hand burrowed under his arm, and I am tickling him ferociously. But by doing so, I have opened myself up to more attacks.
I yell, “Okay, okay, truce!” He stops, and I pretend to stop, but sneak a tickle under his arm, and he lets out a high-pitched un-Peter-like shriek.
“You said truce!” he accuses. We both nod and lie back down, out of breath. “Do you really think my feet smell?”
I don’t. I love the way he smells after a lacrosse game—like sweat and grass and him. But I love to tease, to see that unsure look cross his face for just half a beat. “Well, I mean, on game days . . . ,” I say. Then Peter attacks me again, and we’re wrestling around, laughing, when Kitty walks in, balancing a tray with a cheese sandwich and a glass of orange juice.
“Take it upstairs,” she says, sitting down on the floor. “This is a public area.”
Disentangling myself, I give her a glare. “We aren’t doing anything private, Katherine.”
“Your sister says my feet stink,” Peter says, pointing his foot in her direction. “She’s lying, isn’t she?”
She deflects it with a pop of her elbow. “I’m not smelling your foot.” She shudders. “You guys are kinky.”
I yelp and throw a pillow at her.
She gasps. “You’re lucky you didn’t knock over my juice! Daddy will kill you if you mess up the rug again.” Pointedly she says, “Remember the nail-polish-remover incident?”
Peter ruffles my hair. “Clumsy Lara Jean.”
I shove him away from me. “I’m not clumsy. You’re the one who tripped over his own feet trying to get to the pizza the other night at Gabe’s.”
Kitty bursts into giggles and Peter throws a pillow at her. “You guys need to stop ganging up on me!” he yells.
“Are you staying for dinner?” she asks when her giggles subside.
“I can’t. My mom’s making chicken fried steak.”
Kitty’s eyes bulge. “Lucky. Lara Jean, what are we having?”
“I’m defrosting some chicken breasts as we speak,” I say. She makes a face, and I say, “If you don’t like it, maybe you could learn to cook. I won’t be around to cook your dinners anymore when I’m at college, you know.”
“Yeah, right. You’ll probably be here every night.” She turns to Peter. “Can I come to your house for dinner?”
“Sure,” he says. “You can both come.”
Kitty starts to cheer, and I shush her. “We can’t, because then Daddy will have to eat alone. Ms. Rothschild has SoulCycle tonight.”
She takes a bite of her cheese sandwich. “I’m making myself another sandwich, then. I don’t want to eat old freezer-burn chicken.”
I sit up suddenly. “Kitty, I’ll make something else if you’ll braid my hair tomorrow morning. I want to do something special for New York.” I’ve never been to New York before in my life. For our last family vacation, we took a vote, and I picked New York, but I was voted down in favor of Mexico. Kitty wanted to eat fish tacos and swim in the ocean, and Margot wanted to see Mayan ruins and have a chance to work on her Spanish. In the end, I was happy to be outvoted. Before Mexico, Kitty and I had never even left the country. I’ve never seen water so blue.
“I’ll braid your hair only if I have time left over after I do mine,” Kitty says, which is the best I can hope for, I suppose. She’s just so good at doing hair.
“Who will braid my hair when I’m at college?” I muse.
“I will,” Peter says, all confidence.
“You don’t know how,” I scoff.
“The kid will teach me. Won’t you, kid?”
“For a price,” Kitty says.
They negotiate back and forth before finally settling on Peter taking Kitty and her friends to the movies one Saturday afternoon. Which is how I come to be sitting cross-legged on the floor while Peter and Kitty sit on the couch above me, Kitty demonstrating a French braid and Peter recording it on his phone.
“Now you try it,” she says.
He keeps losing a piece and getting frustrated. “You have a lot of hair, Lara Jean.”
“If you can’t get the French, I’ll teach you something more basic,” Kitty says, and there is no mistaking the contempt in her voice.
Peter hears it too. “No, I’m gonna get it. Just give me a second. I’m gonna master it just like I mastered the other kind of French.” He winks at me.
Kitty and I both scream at him for that. “Don’t talk like that in front of my sister!” I yell, shoving him in the chest.
“I was kidding!”
“Also, you’re not that good at French kissing.” Even though, yeah, he is.
Peter gives me a Who are you kidding? look, and I shrug, because who am I kidding?
*
Later, I’m walking Peter to his car when he stops in front of the passenger-side door and asks, “Hey, how many guys have you kissed?”
“Just three. You, John Ambrose McClaren—” I say his name fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid, but Peter still has enough time to scowl. “And Allie Feldman’s cousin.”
“The kid with the lazy eye?”
“Yeah. His name was Ross. I thought he was cute. It happened at a sleepover at Allie’s; I kissed him on a dare. But I wanted to.”
He gives me a speculative look. “So me, John, and Allie’s cousin.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re forgetting one person, Covey.”
“Who?”
“Sanderson!”
I wave my hand. “Oh, that doesn’t really count.”
“Allie Feldman’s cousin Ross who you kissed on a dare counts, but not Josh, who you technically cheated on me with?” Peter wags his finger at me. “Nuh-uh. I don’t think so.”
I shove him. “We weren’t actually together then and you know it!”
“A technicality, but okay.” He gives me a sidelong look. “Your number’s higher than mine, you know. I’ve only ever kissed Gen, Jamila, and you.”
“What about the girl you met at Myrtle Beach with your cousins? Angelina?”
A funny look crosses over his face. “Oh yeah. How’d you know about that?”
“You bragged about it to everyone!” It was the summer before seventh grade. I remember it drove Genevieve crazy, that some other girl had kissed Peter before she did. We tried to find Angelina online, but we didn’t have much to go on. Just her name. “So that makes it four girls you’ve kissed, and you did a lot more with them than kiss, Peter.”
“Fine!”
I’m on a roll now. “You’re the only boy I’ve ever kissed kissed. And you were the first. First kiss, first boyfriend, first everything! You got so many of my firsts, and I didn’t get any from you.”
Sheepishly he says, “Actually that’s not entirely true.”
I narrow my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“There was never any girl at the beach. I made the whole thing up.”
“There was no Angelina with big boobs?”
“I never said she had big boobs!”
“Yes you did. You told Trevor that.”
“Okay, fine! Geez. You’re missing the whole point, by the way.”