“Ah.”
I fall into step beside him, walking toward the baby section—which is essentially Pinterest come to life. The ceiling is draped with softly patterned pastel bunting, and there are hanging hot air balloon decorations (not for sale) and impossibly soft stuffed animals (for sale) and everything is organic.
Reid turns to me suddenly. “You’re not going to quit though, right?”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“About there not being a lot of work to do here?”
He bites his lip.
“I love not doing work,” I assure him. And it’s true. Not doing much work is my favorite thing. And my other favorite things include: being around a lot of mason jars, rearranging table displays, and teasing geeky boys about their fondness for historical queens.
“Well, good.”
I smile.
“Otherwise, I was going to have to bribe you with Mini Eggs,” he adds.
“Wait, really?”
“Absolutely. Too late, though. That’s a shame.”
I give him a glare, and his dimple flickers, and hey. Looks like House Lannister Reid knows about jokes, after all.
Here’s the funny part: all the way home, I replay this conversation with Reid in my head. I don’t even realize I’m doing it until I arrive at my own doorstep.
Admittedly, this is the kind of thing a person might do while establishing her twenty-seventh crush. Hypothetically speaking.
But Reid isn’t a crush. I don’t know how to explain it, but a crush is a very particular thing for me. Like crush number eight: Sean of the Eyelashes. It was the second-to-last night of camp, the summer after eighth grade, and it was raining, so we were all watching Wet Hot American Summer in the Lodge. By coincidence (or fate. It felt like fate), Sean was sitting next to me. I found him massively cute: kind of short, with spiky dark hair and bright-blue eyes. And the eyelashes. At least 75 percent of Sean’s body weight was eyelashes. He was sitting in one of those folding nylon camp chairs, and at one point, he leaned toward me out of nowhere to say, “This movie rules.”
I agreed with this statement. And at the time, that felt cosmically significant.
I could barely catch my breath for the rest of the movie, and my heartbeat was probably making those giant zigzags. Literally all my mental energy was devoted to trying to come up with something clever and nonchalant to say to this boy—this perfect boy, whom I’d noticed around camp for weeks, who was now miraculously sitting beside me, and who had—even more miraculously—spoken to me first. But I was suddenly frozen and electrically self-conscious. My thighs felt enormous, and I was acutely aware of the waistband of my shorts digging into the fat on my stomach. It occurred to me that Sean—of course I already knew his name—wouldn’t be talking to me if he knew about the shorts and the fat and the waistband.
So, I just stared at the movie screen, not really watching it.
But when the movie was over, Sean nudged me and said, “That was really cool, right?” I smiled and nodded really fast.
I never talked to him again. I haven’t even thought about him in years. But as I climb the stairs to my bedroom, his face is vividly clear to me. And the mental image of him still makes my heart race.
Molly Peskin-Suso: crushing on the memory of eighth-grade boys. Am I the biggest creeper in the universe? (Check yes or hell yes.)
I sink onto my bed. So, there was Sean. And Julian Portillo, my friend Elena’s older brother. Crush number eleven: Julian of the Experimental Breakfasts. That’s the main thing I remember: the way he used to make these very complicated gourmet breakfasts for us in the mornings after our sleepovers. I guess I found that really charming for some reason. Even though I’m not a person who experiments with breakfast.
Anyway, Julian was a senior when Elena and I were freshmen, and their parents were from El Salvador, and they both had giant dimples in both cheeks. Julian had a really loud laugh, too. I kept a diary back then, and I took note of every single time he spoke to me, which was rare. Mostly because I lost the ability to speak when he was around, and I guess cute senior boys don’t like speaking to walls of awkward freshman silence. Anyway, Julian ended up at Georgetown, and Elena got a scholarship to private school, and neither of them is on Facebook, so I have no idea what they’re up to now. Not a clue.
But the point is, I can’t talk to guys I like. Not really. My body completely betrays me. And it’s a little different with every guy, so it’s kind of hard to generalize—but if I had to describe the feeling of a crush, I’d say this: you just finished running a mile, and you have to throw up, and you’re starving, but no food seems appealing, and your brain becomes fog, and you also have to pee. It’s this close to intolerable. But I like it.
More than like it. I crave it.
Because there’s nausea and fog, but there’s also this: an unshakable feeling that something wonderful is about to happen. That’s the part I can’t explain. No matter how unlikely, I always have a secret shred of hope. And as feelings go, that’s a pretty addictive one.
CASSIE BUSTS INTO MY ROOM at six in the morning, without knocking. “Yo, sleepyhead. Where’s your stringy-ding? Olivia needs bead therapy.”
I blink up at her. “Now?”
“She’s on her way over. Some kind of Evan douchery.”
Right. So here’s a confession: I’ve never entirely understood the appeal of Evan Schulmeister. This is not just me being jealous that Olivia has a boyfriend. I think Evan’s an acquired taste, but without the part where I actually acquire the taste.
“Should I get dressed?”
Cassie laughs. “For Olivia?”
Pajamas it is.
Twenty minutes later, we’re cross-legged on the front porch, surrounded by magazines and scraps and scissors. I’m bleary-eyed, but it’s cool and breezy and actually kind of nice. I think the whole neighborhood is still sleeping.
“So what did that dumbfuck do this time?” asks Cassie.
“He’s not a dumbfuck.” Olivia fidgets with a bead, tugging it up and along the string. This is a thing she and I have been working on for years: our bead strings. Mine is over ten feet long now—maybe thousands of beads. And every single bead is homemade, cut from magazine pages. All you do is cut triangles out of paper and roll them tightly around a coffee straw, starting with the wide point. Seal it with glue and maybe a layer of clear nail polish. Then you slide them onto your string and repeat. Mine’s kind of an ombré rainbow pattern, starting with red, but I’ve worked my way up through the indigo section. Almost ready for violet. When it’s done, I’m going to line it along the top edge of my bedroom wall so it drapes down like lace.
“So, okay. This isn’t even a big deal,” Olivia says. “It’s just something he said that’s kind of been bugging me.”
“Not a big deal?” Cassie asks.
Olivia shrugs, smoothing glue over the end of a bead.
Cassie grins. “You texted me at five thirty in the morning.”
“Ugh. I’m sorry. I’m being ridiculous.”
“Livvy, you’re not being ridiculous.” Cassie scoots closer and hooks her arm around her. “I just don’t like seeing you sad.”
“I’m not sad. I’m just . . .” Olivia looks down at the finished bead nestled in the palm of her hand.
“That’s really pretty,” I say.
“Thanks. Yeah. Anyway, it was just Evan being weird. He was asking me a bunch of questions about waxing . . .”
“What?”
“Like Brazilian bikini waxing.”
“Um. Okay.” Cassie raises her eyebrows.
“Yeah. It was out of nowhere, and he kept saying he was just curious about it, and I was finally like, ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’” She pauses to slide her bead onto her string. “And he says, ‘No, of course not, why do you think that?’”
Cassie sighs. “Jesus Christ.”
“I don’t know.” Olivia smiles tightly. “I really think he was just curious.”
“Pretty sure he’s trying to police your vagina.”