“Points, points, points.” She leans in, lightly pressing her lips to mine.
I’m light-headed. We kiss, but it’s stubborn. Each heartbeat grows more scattered and clueless than the last. We try too hard to be every movie we’ve ever seen, and it’s awful. She angles her head, I do the same, but it’s the wrong side, and we buck. I’d laugh, but I’m too embarrassed. I’ve read how many books and seen how many movies, and this is putting study into practice? I feel like a fraud.
There’s a wall of gritted teeth keeping me out. It’s like she’s terrified. I am too, because this is my first real kiss. This one actually counts and I want it to be good. Scratch that: I want it to be amazing. I want this day to never end.
But she’s not there. I pull away. “You okay?”
Her eyes are clenched shut. “No. Can we stop?”
My insides collapse. The cliff slides into the ocean.
“I’m scared,” she whispers.
It’s so unfair—I know what her lip gloss tastes like now. Pineapple.
“Did I do something wrong?”
Jamie opens her eyes. Her hand is soft as it touches my cheek. “No,” she says firmly. “You’re wonderful.”
Warmth creeps up my spine and floods my chest. Another person, who’s not my mom or another blood relative, thinks I’m wonderful. “We don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want to.”
Her head plunks against my chest. “Thank you,” she murmurs.
We’ll just pretend it never happened. I reach for her camera and place it in her lap. “Here. Take some pictures.”
She pushes it to the side. “The only subject I want to capture is off limits.”
I reach for the camera, take off the lens cap, and turn it on. The SLR chatters itself digitally awake, flinging the lens in and out with a jolt. I hand it to Jamie. “Knock yourself out.”
“Really?”
I take a deep breath. “Really.”
She aims the camera at me. My face twitches into a smile. It feels worse than getting my back waxed, but I want to do it. For her.
“Be natural,” she says, her finger on the button. “Pretend I’m not here.”
“Impossible.”
“All right, then think of something that makes you happy.”
I think of her and turn red. She fires a million shots, and I dunk myself backward on the grass to soak up the sun. Jamie hovers and slinks up alongside me, snapping shots again and again. There’s no place I’d rather be. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing. In the distance little kids squeal and play, and I feel like one of them.
That magical time when you were really, really small and all that mattered was finding an open swing. Back when you let go and ran however the hell you wanted to. Before other people’s opinions mattered. Being with Jamie feels like that. Free and good. I didn’t know one person could make you a better version of yourself. And the sun is shining down and saying, welcome to the world, dummy. Tale as old as time.
But it’s pretty cool when it’s your song. I smile and she laughs with me. “I like you,” I tell her.
“I like you too,” she says. “You are a wonderfully horrible boy.”
She brings the camera down and our noses slowly creep closer.
The timer on her phone rings, splitting the air between us like a barb. The day I wished would last forever is done. I hobble and huff back to my chair. Jamie takes the handles and pushes me.
I let her.
THIRTEEN
I’m skeptical about luck.
Nothing dramatic, just real used to the fact that if I go to grab a lucky rabbit’s foot, the bunny will whip around and bite me. When I was a kid and things would go south, I’d ask my dad to please help me out. Please influence that kid to invite me to his birthday party, please give me all the right words before I try talking to that girl. Please let me know you can hear me.
If anything remotely good happens, it’s my dad pulling a few sky strings from above, because luck and I are not on speaking terms.
It doesn’t apply to school. As long as I do the work and study hard, my academic achievement is never touched by the chill finger of doom. It’s everything else that occasionally goes to shit. Whenever things start to go my way, I sit back and wait for a kick in the teeth.