He looks at her, finally, and she looks back.
Eventually she glances away and says, “I...” and then drifts off.
He smiles so big. “Oh, just do it.”
She puts her hands on either side of his face and pulls him down and kisses him like a movie star, and I cheer like I have never cheered before.
I know it won't last forever, and I know I have not morphed into a perfect person, and I know this isn't even a requirement to be a perfect person, now: but I have never felt less jealous in my entire life.
27
Everything is an amazing combination of just how we were and brand new, all at the same time. Josey is still horrendously busy, I'm still sneaking around my family, and the wedding is barreling towards me even more violently than before (which makes the aforementioned sneaking around easier, at least, as does the fact that, while none of us talks about it, everybody does actually know where I am when I disappear). So we grab time together when we can, racing down empty roads and screaming along to the radio and stuffing ourselves at the diner. Theo and I spend a lot of time just the two of us, still, and Josey sections out her free time so some of it is for all of us, some of it is just for the two of them, and some of it is just for the two of us.
My doorbell rings on a Saturday afternoon, exactly a month before the wedding, while Josey and Theo are out together and I'm at home helping finalize seating charts. Mom's on the phone and Dominic's giving Alexis her bath, so I answer.
It's Lucas.
We've seen each other at school, of course, and very deliberately avoided eye contact. I was expecting an awkward phone call at some point, I guess. I wasn't expecting this.
I lean against the door frame. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he says.
“Do you want to come in?”
He shakes his head. “I just wanted to come say I'm sorry.”
“Lucas...”
“I was completely out of line,” he says. “But you know that I wasn't...you know, that I wasn't planning for it to go down how it did. I didn't talk to my stepmom for like a week.”
“She needs a hobby,” I say.
“Yeah, I already told my dad he needs to teach her to play golf or something.”
“She'd have to cut her fingernails first.” She has those really awful stiletto nails.
He shudders and we both laugh a little
“Okay,” I say. “So if we were just any people we'd probably just avoid each other for a while and then next year I'd graduate and we'd forget the other one existed, and we'd just all pretend that this never happened.”
He hitches his shoulders up some. “Yeah.”
“But we're not just any people,” I say. “We're family. Which means we're going to figure out how to deal with each other.”
He gives me a half-smile. “That's all you can promise? Figuring out how to deal with each other?”
“Yeah, that's all I can promise. For now.”
He nods and starts to go, and before I can stop myself I say, “Lucas?”
He turns around.
“Do you really want to piss your stepmother off?” I say.
“God, yeah.”
“Want to go to a wedding?”
“So basically,” Josey says, “You avoided the whole issue of who you were going to take to the wedding by taking your stepbrother instead. Zip me.”
I turn her around and work the zipper up over her waist. We're in the dressing room at the same department store where she told us she was pregnant. Theo's waiting outside again. This time, though, we're trying on prom dresses.
Well, she is. In what might go down as the most anti-climactic event of my life, I was starting to get overwhelmingly paranoid that I was clearly about to be dumped because no one had even mentioned prom to me, when I overheard someone else mentioning how annoying it was that seniors couldn't bring juniors as dates. It turned out Josey and Theo had no idea that at some schools you even could bring juniors as dates. They also had no intentions of going to prom, but I told them they had to, and neither of them took all that much convincing. As terrible as they are at being normal high schoolers, they both really do like dressing up. Even if their version of dressing up usually means wearing their flannel shirts without holes in them. But I'm not going to let that happen on prom.
Which is why I'm currently fitting Josey into the puffiest, pinkest dress I'd ever seen. This would have been my bridesmaid dress if my mother hated me, I think.
“It's a peace offering,” I say. “Also yes.”
“Your mom doesn't even know I'm back in the relationship,” she says. “You could have brought Theo and he could have made all nice and you two could have been Perfect Traditional Couple for a night and eased all her fears.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I could have. But I'm not.”
She kisses my cheek when I finish zipping her up and then presents herself to me. “Okay. How do I look?”
“You look adorable. Which I cannot even believe. Did you see that thing on the hanger?”
She smiles at herself in the mirror, twirling a little. “I love pink.”
“Josey?” Theo calls, from the other side of the curtain.
“Go away!” she says. “Or I'll turn into a pumpkin.”
“I don't think that's how it works,” I say.
“But I like pumpkins!” His hand sticks through the gap between the curtain and the wall, Josey's phone outstretched. “It's your mom.”
And Josey and I kind of freeze and look at each other, because of course it could
