“Story of your life?”
“Exactly. Why is that? I wish I could fix whatever’s wrong with me.”
“Just one kiss” is never just one kiss. The one with Shiv changed my whole idea about kissing. And when I went to the dance with Jackson, there was “just one kiss”—but it made everything even worse than it was before.
You wouldn’t think that was possible, but it was.
After Jackson asked me to the dance, I had a lot of phone calls to make.
First, I had to call up Angelo and tell him not to take me. I was super nervous. I had never called him before, and here I was canceling on him. But he was nice about it. “That’s cool,” he said. “If he’s your boyfriend, you should go with him.”
“I don’t know if he’s my boyfriend,” I said.
“Whatever. You should do what you gotta do.”
“Okay.” There was a weird silence. “There’s a party on the dock by my house after,” I said, feeling guilty. “Around eleven. You should swing by if you’re around.”
“Sure,” said Angelo, though I was sure he was only being polite.
“You shouldn’t go,” said Cricket when I called her. “It’s way too complicated.”
“It’s just as friends,” I said.
“Still.”
“Kim told him to take me.”
“But that’s Kim. She feels bad about everything.”
“Yeah? She doesn’t act like it.”
“Trust me,” said Cricket. “She does.”
“I’m still going,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”
“You shouldn’t go,” said Nora when she called me.
“I know, but I so want to,” I said. “I have that dress.”
“You could wear that dress with Angelo,” she said.
“I want to go with Jackson. I was always supposed to go with Jackson, he asked me a long time ago.”
“Not exactly,” she reminded me.
“But still.”
“It’s your funeral,” she said. “Maybe you should come to dinner with me and Matt, to keep it all under control.”
Matt added two more onto his reservation, and we all had dinner at the top of the Space Needle, which is this restaurant inside an old World’s Fair building that turns around and around so you get a 360-degree view by the time you finish your dinner. They didn’t have any vegetarian food, so I ate three side dishes: creamed spinach, mashed potatoes and a salad. Then we drove to the pier in two separate cars, and got on the miniyacht just as it was pulling out.
Here’s what I remember from the dance: Cricket looked beautiful, in a pink dress with her sleek blond hair piled on top of her head. Nora looked sexy, showing off her great boobs in a low-cut black thing. She took pictures of us all with her Instamatic.
Jackson touched my hand when we were dancing and told me I was pretty. There was hardly anywhere to sit down. When the band played a slow song, Jackson asked me to dance, and put his cheek against mine as we did. Then he suggested we go upstairs and get some air.
I didn’t have a coat. It was freezing on deck. He put his arm around me to keep me warm. It was the first time we were alone all evening. We were standing in the moonlight, looking over the railing at the lake, watching the light play across the dark water, like I’d imagined. Jackson was talking about some anime movie he’d seen.
I wasn’t listening.
I was looking at his mouth and feeling his warm hand against my chilly shoulder.
It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do what I did: I put my hand on his neck and kissed him.
He kissed me back.
I thought: This is right. I forgive everything. He wants me again. We’ll be together.
Then he pushed me away. “Ruby,” Jackson said in a strange, loud, public voice. “What are you doing? That’s not how it is, now. We’re here as friends. You know I’m with Kim.”
I looked across the deck. Standing there, looking at us—Heidi Sussman and Finn Murphy. Jackson pushed past them and ran down a set of steps.
