Palmer nodded. “Like half a mile.” Toby sighed and reached down to take off her wedges, but didn’t complain. All of us knew the drill. And tonight, especially, not getting caught was crucial.
I’d been to only one party where it had happened. It was freshman year, and it was only the second real high school party I’d ever been to, and I was still thrilled and excited to be there. We were only there because Palmer’s brother Josh, who was a senior, had been invited. He’d agreed to let us come if he could disavow all knowledge of us if anyone got mad that freshmen were there. I was drinking a beer from a red Solo cup, like an idiot—I hadn’t yet learned any of the tricks I’d later need to employ at parties—when the red and blue lights streamed in through the living room window, bathing everyone in color. For a second the entire party seemed to freeze, but then everyone was in motion, running in a hundred directions, for cars or hiding places, just trying not to get caught. The excitement of being at a senior’s party had been eclipsed utterly by a wave of fear so all encompassing I started shaking. If I were caught at a party, drinking underage, it would be very, very bad for my father.
I hadn’t gotten caught—I’d been yanked out of harm’s way at the last moment. But that close call had been more than enough to scare me. My friends knew now that I wouldn’t go to a party that looked like a target, and I had all sorts of techniques for staying under the radar once we got to the party. And even now, as we walked in a single-file line along the side of the road, I could feel myself on high alert, looking around to make sure there weren’t too many cars parked along the road, nobody looking too long at us, nothing that might give us away. I didn’t even want to think what it would do to the story if, on today of all days, I was caught at a party. It would be like pouring gasoline on a forest fire.
We’d been walking in silence for a few moments when Toby cleared her throat. “Guys,” she said, her tone grave. “At the party tonight, something has to happen. This is when the curse gets broken. Because I refuse to spend another summer without a boyfriend.”
“I’ll be your wingwoman,” Palmer volunteered immediately. “We can totally make this happen.”
“No,” Toby said firmly. “You’re fired from ever being my wingwoman again. Last time you tried, everyone asked you out, and Tom got really mad at me.”
Palmer opened her mouth to protest this, and I just shook my head. “Toby has a point, P.”
“It’s not your fault you’re a blonde,” Bri added. I laughed as Palmer’s expression turned from disgruntled to embarrassed. Palmer was beautiful, though she seemed to have absolutely no understanding of this fact. She had long, thick blond hair that would be four shades lighter by the end of the summer. She was a head shorter than me, and whip-thin, with the ability to eat us all under the table, and she seemed to laugh more than most people. You wanted to spend more time with Palmer the second you met her.
“I’ll take over wingwoman duties,” I said. “What do you want me to look for? Are you still into the floppy-haired thing?”
“I honestly don’t care about looks.” Toby said, her voice wistful. “I’ll look across a room, the crowds will part, there he’ll be . . . and I’ll know.” Bri, Palmer, and I exchanged looks, but nobody said anything. We each had something that was off-limits for teasing, and love was Toby’s.
She’d had the misfortune of growing up with a babysitter who regularly brought DVDs of romantic comedies with her whenever she sat for Toby. Toby had eaten them up, and so, from a much-too-young age, she was watching Julia Roberts bargain with Richard Gere and lose her heart in the process. She was watching Meg Ryan scrunch up her nose before bursting into tears and Bridget Jones run through the snowy London streets looking for Mark Darcy. When Toby wasn’t around, the three of us talked about it all the time—how this had warped her perception of romance forever. She now expected what she’d grown up seeing—that was what she thought love would be like. She expected guys to lift boom boxes outside her house and talk in declarations about what they loved best about her and she was always—though she denied it—trying to turn Bri into her plucky sidekick.
I had tried to tell her, over and over, that romance in real life was nothing like the movies and that you shouldn’t want it to be. That, really, all you needed was a guy who was a blast to hang out with, a great kisser, someone to have fun with. None of the rest of us expected movie-love. Palmer and Tom were practically married, and Bri tended to date seniors for three or four months at a time. But Toby wanted her happily ever after, her last-minute chase to the airport, her declaration of love. Which was why, I was pretty sure, she’d never had a real boyfriend. She approached every guy wondering if he was the end of her romantic comedy, which invariably freaked them out.