Once Upon a Kiss

by Robin Palmer

  She squinted. “Right. I think Jonah likes that song.”

  “He does.”

  Her eyebrow started to go up.

  “What I mean is . . . I saw it on Facebook.”

  Her eyebrow went up higher. “Oh. I didn’t know you were Facebook friends. When did that happen?”

  Was it my imagination or did she sound the teensiest bit jealous?

  “Yesterday?”

  “Did he friend you?” she demanded.

  When did “friend” become a verb? I shook my head. “No. I friended him.”

  “Oh. That’s good,” she said, relieved. “I mean, it’s not a big deal either way. You friend him, he friends you . . . but . . . why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you friend him?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Because I want to be his friend?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Is this like some kind of prank?”

  “No! What is it with everyone getting so freaked-out about me doing things differently?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure? Because just so you know, I tend to be kind of blunt.”

  I shrugged. “Blunt away.”

  “Okay, then. See, the thing is, Zoe, you’re not really known for being . . . nice.”

  My face fell. While I guess I knew that, hearing it from another person was hard to swallow.

  “In fact, you’re kind of known for being a bitch.”

  My face fell even further. While I had gotten the feeling that I wasn’t in the running to take over Mother Teresa’s spot, I didn’t know I was that bad.

  “So when you do things like take the Go Green Club seriously, or friend unpopular people—”

  “Jonah’s not unpopular,” I said defensively.

  “Well, he’s not popular. And neither am I. Which is why we’re such good friends.” Her eyebrow went up again. “Why are you defending him like this?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. He just . . . seems really nice.”

  “He is,” she agreed. “Like, the nicest guy in the world.”

  “I know.” Boy, did I know.

  Before I could say anything more, the bell rang, and Montana was out of her seat. “It’s been nice talking to you,” she said. She cocked her head “Which is kind of weird. See you around.”

  “Yeah. See you around,” I said.

  Things just got more and more strange.

  “YOU WANT TO HANG OUT BY YOURSELF this afternoon?” Andrea asked as we walked to the parking lot after school with Octopus Brad (I had started calling him that—at least to myself—after second period, when he always seemed to grow another hand no matter how quickly I removed one of his from my body).

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Because I want some alone time.”

  “But alone time makes a person feel so . . . alone,” Andrea said.

  “That’s kind of the point,” I replied. “Actually, I think I’ll work on my class president speech.”

  “Didn’t Andrea write it for you?” Brad asked as he tried to snake his arm around my hip.

  “I did, but she didn’t like it,” Andrea pouted.

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t like it,” I corrected. “It’s just that I’m feeling inspired to put some different ideas out there.” Ideas that—once she and Brad heard them—would make them think I had gone even farther off my rocker.

  “I can’t believe we’re not going shopping,” Andrea sighed. “We always go shopping after school,” she said. “It’s, like, a tradition.”

  One that I did not need to partake in again for a long time.

  “And what about me?” Brad asked. “I thought you were going to take me shopping to get new polo shirts.”

  Suddenly a light bulb went off. “I have an idea,” I said. “Why don’t you two go shopping together?”

  They looked at each other. “Just the two of us?” asked Andrea. I could tell she was trying to keep the excitement out of her voice, but some of it snaked through anyway.

  “Like . . . alone?” Brad asked doubtfully.

  “Yeah. I mean, Andrea, you’re a genius when it comes to shopping. And so good with color—”

  “I am, aren’t I?” she said, pleased.

  “Oh yeah,” I agreed. “See, I’ve been thinking about it and as my two favorite people in the world, I think you guys need to spend more time together. Without me.”

  Brad cocked his head and thought about it. “Sorry, but I’m lost.”

  That wasn’t surprising, but you couldn’t really blame the guy. It’s not like I was making a ton of sense. “You know . . . in case I end up, I don’t know, gone or something.”

  He gasped. “Is this the part where you tell us you have some sort of terminal disease and you only have a few months to live? Like in a Nicholas Sparks book?”

  Where did that come from? I had no idea who Nicholas Sparks was. And did Brad actually read?

  “Hey, do you think Channing Tatum could play me in the movie?” he asked excitedly. “I know he’s a lot older than me, but I think our pecs are the same size.”

  I had no idea who Channing Tatum was, but I sure hoped for his sake that he was smarter than Brad.

  “I’m not going to die,” I said.

  “Oh good,” he said. “Wait—you mean like if aliens came and abducted you?” he said excitedly.

  “Actually, I meant more along the lines that I . . . I don’t know . . . moved or something.”

  His face fell. “You’re moving? How could you not have told me?”

  I sighed. “I said ‘or something.’ It’s, like, a hypothetical thing.” Man, I’d hate to be his teacher. “I’m not moving.” I turned to Andrea. “I would hope that as my BF—”

  They looked confused. “I’m your BF,” Brad said.

  “And I’m your BFF,” Andrea added.

  I needed to write all those abbreviations on the bottom of my shoe so I didn’t keep screwing them up. “That’s what I said. I just said the second F at very low volume. Anyway, as my BFF, I hope that if at any time I could not fulfill my girlfriendly responsibility of making sure my boyfriend looks good, that you would fill in for me.”

  “Oh, well, sure,” she said, again trying to hide her excitement and, again, barely succeeding. “I’d be happy to.” She grabbed Brad’s arm and dragged him toward her car. “Let’s take my car and leave yours here so we don’t waste any time apart.”

  “Hey, what about me?” I called after them. “I need a ride home!”

  Andrea was already peeling out of the parking lot before all the words were out of my mouth.

  “I guess I could drop you off,” a voice behind me said.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I turned around. “Really? You wouldn’t mind?” I said to Jonah. Even if he didn’t know it was me—his real Montana—just seeing his face made me feel better.

  He shrugged. “It’s okay. I have to go over Coldwater anyway.”

  I smiled. “Thanks. I’d really appreciate it.” I stopped walking. “Wait—you know I live on Coldwater?”

  He stopped as well, looking confused. “No. I have no idea why I said that. That’s weird.”

  He knew! He didn’t know that he knew knew, but he did! On some level, he recognized me as well!

  He started walking toward his car and pointed to the passenger door. “You have to—”

  Before he could finish I was already giving it a couple of bangs with my hip.

  “How’d you know that’s what you have to do to open the door?” he asked, clearly weirded out.

  I tried to appear as confused as he had earlier. “I have no idea.” I wanted so badly to tell him what was going on, but I didn’t
know how without coming off as a complete nut.

  The first few minutes of the ride were painful. Literally—because one of the springs was sticking out of the seat—and figuratively, because neither of us said anything. How did you go backward with someone, and talk to them like they were some stranger rather than the one who knew everything about you?

  “Thanks for being my friend on Facebook,” I finally said.

  “Oh. You’re welcome.”

  We went back to being silent, save for the radio. “This is a good song. Who is it?” I asked.

  “Local Natives?”

  “Of course. Right. Local Natives. I love them,” I lied. They were okay, but they were no Psychedelic Furs. “I, uh, liked the photos on your Facebook page.” It was weird to feel nervous around Jonah.

  “Thanks,” he replied.

  I wondered if he was nervous around me. Seeing that, you know, I was the most popular girl in school. And how weird was that for those words to be strung together in that order in a sentence?

  “And you have cool taste in books,” I went on. “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is one of my favorite books, too.”

  He looked at me. “Really?”

  I nodded. That was one of the things we had bonded over when I was at his house for the first time. “I say you can tell everything—”

  “—about a person by their bookshelves and music collection,” we finished together.

  “Okay, that was bizarre.” He laughed nervously.

  The thing was, it wasn’t weird. That was what we did. We finished each other’s sentences and read each other’s minds and did all other sorts of Wonder Twins–like things. In fact, Jonah was always saying that if one of us ever got a monkey, we’d have to name it Gleek because that was the name of the Wonder Twins’ pet monkey in the Saturday morning cartoon.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, we don’t even know each other.”

  “Right. But don’t you think that sometimes people can know each other even if they don’t know each other?”

  “You mean, like they knew each other in a past life or something?”

  Was 1986 a past life? With all the computer gadgets and the apps and the social networks, it sure seemed like that. “Kind of. Something like that. Past life . . . time travel . . . that kind of thing.”

  “You believe in time travel?” he asked, amused.

  “Oh yeah. Sure I do.”

  He laughed.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just didn’t take you for a time travel kind of girl.”

  “Oh, I am. You have no idea,” I said ruefully.

  “My buddy Wayne—”

  “—just wrote a log post about it,” I finished. “I mean a blog post.”

  “How’d you know?” he asked, surprised.

  I shrugged. “We were talking about it in study hall,” I said nonchalantly.

  As he reached over to the dash and pushed the buttons, “Melt with You” came on.

  “I love this song,” we said at the same time.

  We looked at each other. I smiled. Obviously I wasn’t surprised—I knew Jonah loved the song. He, on the other hand, looked freaked-out again.

  “Why do you keep looking so freaked-out?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess because we have so much in common.”

  “And you think that’s weird because we’re in different social circles?”

  “‘Different social circles’?” He laughed. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “We’re really not,” I insisted. “At the end of the day, we’re all the same. Just trying to make sense of life.” That was pretty good. I was going to have to remember that for my speech.

  He laughed. “Okay, changing the subject. So you like New Wave?”

  “I do.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected that.”

  “See? You’re doing it again,” I said. “What, you think I like people like Justin Bieber and One Direction and Katy Perry?”

  “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “I mean, they’re listed on your Facebook page.”

  Huh. So he had taken the time to study my Facebook page. Probably not to the extent that I had studied his, given the fact that mine had so many posts that I gave up reading my own page after getting through only a week. But still—that meant something.

  “Well, it’s a mistake,” I said. “Who I really meant to put was the Psychedelic Furs and New Order and Echo and the Bunnymen and Depeche Mode—”

  His nose wrinkled.

  “You don’t like eighties stuff?”

  He shook his head.

  That made me sad. I motioned to the radio. “You like this song enough to have put it on your Facebook page.” The minute the words left my mouth, I cringed. That made me sound like a class A stalker. Especially because he had posted it, like, a year before. Maybe he wouldn’t notice. He was a guy. Guys didn’t analyze things like girls did.

  “That was a long time ago,” he said. “You went that far back in my Facebook history?”

  Of course he noticed. The reason I loved Jonah was because he noticed things and wasn’t a typical guy guy.

  “Huh,” was all he said.

  What did that mean? I’d be dissecting that one for at least an hour. And since when did I spend time dissecting anything that Jonah said? That was the kind of thing you did with guys you liked liked.

  Luckily, we were almost to my house. “Hey, you missed the turn,” I said as he sped right past it.

  “Sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “How could you—” I stopped myself. “—know where it was?” I said as a save. “Unless, you know, you were some creepy stalker or something. It’s the Spanish one with the red roof.”

  After he pulled into the driveway, I turned to him. “Well, here we are.”

  “Yup.”

  “Yup,” I echoed as I continued to sit there.

  “So . . . did you need something else?” he asked.

  Yeah. I needed to tell him what was going on, and I needed him to believe I wasn’t nuts, and I needed to feel like everything was the same it had always been between the two of us. “Just . . . thanks for the ride.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  What was my problem? I had gotten what I wanted: I was alone with Jonah and could spill my guts about everything that was going on. And because his car was so old and it took a while to open the doors, he’d be a captive audience for at least as long as it took me to tell the whole story and maybe, just maybe, he’d help me solve my problem. Because as my best friend, that’s what Jonah did—helped me solve my problems. Everything from where to hang my posters in my room to how to tell my parents that the more I thought about it, college felt like a waste of time when what I really wanted to do with my life was direct music videos. Jonah was the one who was always there for me; the one who had my back; the one who I knew I could tell anything to, no matter how crazy, and he’d understand.

  But telling someone you had time traveled thirty years, and you were now someone else on the outside, but on the inside you were still the person you had always been? That seriously pushed the bounds of normalness.

  I took a deep breath. “And there’s one other thing I need to tell you—” Apparently I was going to push it.

  “What?”

  “I need to tell you that . . . I really need to get going because I have to go work on my presidential speech.”

  “Okay. I have to get going, too. On Tuesdays I—”

  “—go to the nursing home to see your grandfather, I know.”

  He looked confused. “How do you know that?”

  “I . . . saw it on Facebook?” I said hopefully.

  “Why would I put that on Facebook?”

  �
��Maybe it wasn’t Facebook. Maybe it was . . . Twitter. Or Insta—?”

  “Instagram?”

  “Yeah.” The reason I knew was that he went every Tuesday and had for years. Sometimes I went with him. Especially if it was around the high holidays or Hanukkah, when all the relatives dropped off tons of pastries for the residents because they felt guilty they had shoved them in the nursing home to begin with. “I think I saw it there.”

  “You follow me on Instagram, too?” he asked suspiciously. “I didn’t see a notification about that.”

  That was because I was lying. I could barely figure out Facebook, let alone conquer another one of those things. “Yeah, don’t know what to tell you,” I said quickly as I reached for the door handle.

  “To open it you have to—”

  “Jiggle it three times and then push. I know.” Whoops. “At least that’s how it works on mine.” I jumped out. “See you tomorrow!”

  I ran into the house and saw Rain sitting on the couch with her legs crossed in a way that looked super uncomfortable. Her eyes were closed and some Indian-like music was coming out of her iPhone. I tried to tiptoe as quietly as possible toward the stairs.

  “Greetings, Zoe!” she chirped.

  “Oh hey, Rain. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “It’s okay. I’m done anyway. I was just doing my afternoon gratitude-to-the-goddess meditation.”

  “That’s good. Those are very important.”

  “I meant what I said last week—anytime you want me to teach you how to meditate, just let me know. I know you think it’s all weird and airy-fairy, but I’m telling you—it’ll totally change your life.”

  “You know, I think I’m good for now, but thanks for the offer.”

  “So how was school?”

  “Fine.” I shrugged.

  “That doesn’t sound so convincing.”

  Was that what meditation did? Made it so you could tell when someone was lying? “You don’t seem to be yourself these last few days,” she went on. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

  I flopped down on the couch next to her. I don’t know why I felt like I could be honest with her, but I did. “If I tell you something, do you promise not to tell my parents?”

  “Of course,” she replied. “You know that everything we discuss is sacred and just between us goddesses. You know, like how you enlisted my help to cover for you on Friday when you spend the night at Brad’s.”