It's Kind of a Cheesy Love Story

by Lauren Morrill

“Look, it’s not a big deal.”

  I’ve only kissed two other people. There was Drew Cassidy in a movie theater in seventh grade. We were watching some heist movie that I didn’t care about at all, and missed the last half of it thanks to a very sloppy make out that tasted like fake butter and required several napkins while the credits rolled. Drew and I “went out” for exactly three weeks, but we never actually kissed again or saw each other outside of school. And then there was Jabari Reed at camp the summer before freshman year. He kissed me during a hike when we were supposed to be identifying trees. It was actually a good kiss, but camp only lasted a week, and he lived two hours away. So that was the end of that.

  Tristan makes number three, and that kiss was … well, I wasn’t thinking about oak trees, that was for sure.

  “It is a big deal,” I tell him.

  “It’s really not. Don’t freak out, okay?”

  And suddenly the reality of the situation comes crashing down. Tristan kissed me, and Mac saw him do it. Which means if Tamsin doesn’t already know, she will soon. At which point I will never ever hear the end of it. So maybe the kiss wasn’t a big deal to him, but it was a big deal to me, and that’s separate from the way it made me feel.

  “So, what, I’m supposed to tell my friends that you randomly kissed me in a parking lot, but don’t worry, everyone, it didn’t mean anything. Tristan said so.”

  He sighs, and I can’t believe he has the gall to be frustrated when he created this situation. “Why do you need to tell your friends anything?”

  “Because they’re my friends! Do you not have any?”

  Tristan glares at me. Fully glares, but as soon as he realizes he’s doing it, he stops. Back comes the carefully disinterested face. He holds up his free hand in surrender, backing away slowly toward his van with his delivery. “Look, it was just one kiss.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “That watching Mac kiss that redheaded girl made you cry, so maybe this would be good revenge? Turnabout’s fair play, or whatever. My toolbox was sort of limited. I’m holding an extra large Hawaiian.” He nods toward the pizza box. “You really need to relax.”

  “Relax?” I don’t do well with people giving me one-word orders about how to be. Relax, smile, chill, those kinds of things. It’s like waving a red flag at a bull. I’m surprised there’s not smoke coming out of my nose right now.

  “What do you want me to say? This isn’t the part where we hatch a plot for me to pretend to be your fake boyfriend. It was just, I don’t know, you looked like you didn’t want him to come over here. I kissed you, and he didn’t. So it worked, right?”

  “That was really short-sighted.” Suddenly any trace of appreciation for the kiss is disappearing in a sea of Tristan being so … Tristan. The boy is a walking sneer. Sure, he saved me for the moment, but he just made things exponentially harder. Because I’m definitely going to have to explain that kiss. Hell, I’m surprised Tamsin isn’t already texting me wanting to know what the hell is going on.

  “Don’t make me regret it,” he says.

  Okay, now I’m pissed. “You don’t get to kiss me and then tell me how I’m supposed to feel about it! What about if I regret it?”

  He holds up his one free hand in surrender again. “Sorry, okay? It won’t happen again. I can promise you that.” And then he opens the door to the van, deposits the warming bag on the passenger seat, and heads around to the front to the driver’s side. Whatever conversation was to be had about our kiss, it’s over now, apparently. I have a feeling that when he returns, he’ll be back to his chilly, monosyllabic self.

  And the kiss will be forgotten. At least by him.

  But I won’t forget it.

  Because even though Tristan royally pisses me off, my lips are still tingling and my heart is still pounding from it. That kiss was definitely something.

  I don’t see Tristan for the rest of the night. I don’t know if it’s because he’s avoiding me, or because it’s just a busy Friday night. When my shift is over, I read Natalie’s text about coming over to Tamsin’s and then close it. There’s no trace of anything that would tell me she knows about what happened with Tristan. Which means Tamsin doesn’t know, because Mac hasn’t told her. Yet. But I still don’t want to risk it. Instead, I text my mom and ask for a ride home. After the kiss, I don’t even want to go to Stefano’s. Julianne actually looks bummed when I decline, but I can’t imagine sitting in a booth across from Tristan after that. If he’s serious that the kiss was nothing, then I need to start working on my poker face, which I definitely don’t have down tonight. Already I can feel my cheeks flush every time I think about it.

  It’s best if I’m just alone with my wild thoughts.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  I spend another weekend in social hibernation, this time working on an essay about Inherit the Wind for my En- glish class. Sure, I could crank this thing out in an hour the night before it’s due (which is what I’d normally do), but I decide to toil away at it for two full days like it’s the manifesto that could free me from prison. Anything to avoid picturing the kiss with Tristan.

  No, not picturing. Reliving.

  Because anytime I let my mind wander too far from that literary criticism, I’m right back there, feeling his lips pressed against mine. They were a little rough, coupled with the scruff on his chin and cheeks, but they were warm. Just thinking about it for even half a second has me feeling all fluttery and sighing and ugh.

  It doesn’t help that I’m also panicking that at any moment my phone will burst with a torrent of text messages asking who my make-out buddy is and oh my god are you going out now???

  There’s a question I absolutely do not want to answer. What would even happen then? What if we actually became a thing? Would Tristan join my friend group? I’m trying to picture it. I know he used to be friendly with Mac, but something happened there. Something that may mean a big group friendship ain’t happening. So then what? Would there be a wall between my friends and my boyfriend? And why am I calling him my boyfriend when we kissed once and he promptly told me it didn’t mean anything and to calm down?

  So … Inherit the Wind it is!

  By Sunday afternoon, my mom creeps into my room with a slice of banana bread on a paper towel. So that’s what I’ve been smelling coming from the kitchen for the last hour.

  “Knock knock,” she says, after she’s already taken a full three steps into my room without ever actually knocking. “I brought you a study snack.”

  She lays it on the bed next to my laptop, and I bend down to inhale the warm banana smell. “Thanks, Mom,” I say. Then I return to my laptop, the universal sign for I’m busy, thanks, bye.

  But Mom doesn’t take the hint. Or deliberately ignores it. She sits down on the bed next to me, careful not to jostle the banana bread or my laptop. “So where’s Natalie this weekend?”

  “Dance team competition with Cora and Tamsin,” I say, although they’re probably back by now. Pre-TM (Tamsin and Mac), we would normally be bingeing something on Netflix or lying out by Tamsin’s pool flipping through SocialSquare together on our phones. Post-TM, I’m an academic hermit. At least my heartbreak will improve my GPA.

  “And how’s work? Going okay?”

  Okay, so this is definitely mercenary banana bread, because here comes the interrogation.

  “It’s fine,” I reply. Which is true. It turns out that working at Hot ’N Crusty is the least of my worries. Talking freely about Apex Galaxy has been a perk, and there seems to be an Arctic thaw occurring where Julianne is concerned. I wouldn’t say we’re friends, but she doesn’t seem to hate my breathing guts anymore. Plus sometimes my coworkers kiss me.

  “I ask because this is the second weekend in a row that you’ve hidden in your room like a fugitive. Did something happen?”

  Hoo boy, what a question. My mom knows how to cut right to the heart of it. But instead of sitting up and tucking my knees under my chin and outing with my boy tr
oubles like I know she wants, I simply sigh. “Just school. They keep telling us how important junior year is, so I’m giving it the ole college try.” Wow. I’ll take clichés for five hundred, Alex. It almost sounds true, too. I might just be the only girl on the planet whose boy troubles send her running into the arms of a 4.0 GPA.

  I sell it hard enough that I think even Mom is buying it, despite the fact that her bullshit detector is usually pretty finely tuned.

  “Well, I don’t want to see you stress yourself out so much that you forget to actually enjoy life. Are you sure there’s nothing else? Things with your friends are okay?”

  “It’s fine, Mom.” And to try and distract her from her concern, I break off a hunk of banana bread, the dark, caramel-y crust part, and pop it into my mouth. It’s still warm from the oven, and dense and moist. I let out an involuntary groan.

  Mom’s eyes light up. “Good?” she asks.

  “The best,” I tell her, reaching for another bite. “Is that coconut?”

  “Yes! I toasted coconut flakes and mixed them into the batter. I’m working on perfecting a few recipes so I can expand my catering options. You know, for meetings or baby showers. That sort of thing.”

  “This is truly epic, Mom,” I tell her, and I mean it. This isn’t even a mode of distraction. This is bar none the best banana bread I’ve ever eaten. “You should open a bakery. Seriously.”

  She hmmmmms with a little smile, like she’s trying to brush off the compliment while still seriously thinking about it. Which would be crazy, to imagine my mom opening her own place. Having her not just be here all the time. Although that would mean fewer mom’s intuition interrogations. So maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

  She drifts out of the room while I finish off the banana bread, happy that for a full five minutes, I didn’t imagine Tristan’s lips once.

  Until now.

  Dammit.

  * * *

  I arrive at school on Monday with the best damn essay I’ve ever written and a pit in my stomach the size of a Honeycrisp apple. But my secret appears to be safe, because at the lunch table, there’s no fanfare or waggled eyebrows or even knowing looks. And no looks at all from Mac, who seems intensely focused on his corn dog nuggets.

  Still, I spend the whole lunch period—and the whole rest of the day—nervous that the dam is going to burst and the news will explode out of somewhere. Hell, maybe there was someone else in the parking lot. Maybe Tristan told someone. Although that would require him to actually talk to another person, and thus far I’ve seen no evidence of that. Still, the news could come from anywhere, and I walk around expecting it to leap out at me from behind a locker.

  But it doesn’t. Not on Monday, or Tuesday. And then a whole week has gone by, a week in which I sit mostly quietly at our lunch table and watch Mac and Tamsin flirt and the boys eat copious amounts of disgusting fried food, and nod and smile while the girls scroll SocialSquare and point out makeup looks they want to try.

  As for Tristan, he’s definitely not talking. Not about the kiss or anything else. Like I suspected, he immediately returned to using only nods and grunts, with the occasional prickly, one-word answer whenever he needed to communicate with me, which didn’t turn out to be very often. He was back to slipping in and out of the kitchen door mostly undetected.

  I say mostly, because I managed to detect him quite a lot. Over the last week, I’ve practically become a human Tristan detector. And I’m not happy about it. But every time I see the back of his denim jacket disappear around a corner, or that floppy, wild hair falling over his eyes, my stomach leaps into my throat like when I ride the Death Drop at Six Flags. And then suddenly I’m time traveling back to the parking lot, next to the dumpster, feeling Tristan’s lips on mine so vividly that I actually have to reach up and brush my own with my fingertips to make sure I’m not hallucinating.

  It’s been a real treat, I tell you.

  I’m so mad at him for doing this to me. Working at Hot ’N Crusty was annoying, sure, but until the kiss, there was something to be said for it being a fairly drama-free environment. But now I feel like I’m constantly flashing back to Tristan’s lips on mine, the smell of sawdust and gasoline mingling with the hot, sour smell of the dumpsters. It’s a weird cocktail, that’s for sure, and I’m embarrassed to say that if I could bottle it, I’d consider spritzing it on my pillow at night when I lie there trying to fall asleep, but only succeeding in replaying the kiss.

  It’s almost enough to make me forget about Mac and Tamsin, which is a small blessing. But then the next thing I know they’re nuzzling noses or clasping hands and leaning into each other like they’re surgically attached. It’s beyond gross. Or maybe I’m just jealous.

  Emotions are weird.

  These are the things I think about all day, every day, while watching my friends suck face and Tristan skulk in and out of the Hot ’N Crusty kitchen with deliveries.

  And then it’s fall break.

  Natalie’s family always goes to Fort Lauderdale to visit her grandparents, while Tamsin and Colin head off to Grand Cayman with their parents. Cora is seeing Broadway shows with her mom and grandmother and also doing a massive amount of damage to her father’s credit card, and Mac is in Colorado with his parents and younger brothers skiing and missing Tamsin. I’m guessing, judging from the fact that they haven’t been apart for, like, five minutes since they got together. They’ve been leaving heart emojis on each other’s SocialSquare posts like it’s going out of style.

  We never travel for fall break, which I used to hate, but, honestly, now I’m glad to have nothing to do but binge Apex Galaxy with Dad and eat Mom’s kitchen experiments, which have been growing in frequency since the banana bread. She’s been working on her croissant recipe, and I’m not mad about it. But after three solid days of AxGx and baked goods, I’m ready to get out of the house. When Julianne texts to tell me everyone’s getting together to watch movies at Frank’s house and I’m invited “or whatever,” I’m typing yes faster than First Lieutenant Ringold can order, “Engines at flash jump.”

  * * *

  Frank’s house is a seventies basement ranch not far from my neighborhood. There’s an old, deflated tire swing hanging from an enormous tree in the front yard and a mailbox painted like a ladybug at the curb. A woman who must be Frank’s mom answers the door, though it takes me a few moments to place her because she looks nothing like Frank. She can’t be five feet tall, for starters, with curly blond hair and heavy—yet perfectly applied—makeup. She’s dressed in black jeans and a tight black tank top, and it’s not until I see her name tag that I realize she works at one of the makeup counters at Dillard’s down at the mall. Which explains why her makeup looks so flawless. Her cheeks are so luminous it looks like she’s traveling in her own beam of light. But when she smiles, I can see that she has Frank’s wide, oversized mouth, even if he seems to have inherited nothing else.

  “You must be Becca!” she exclaims, her arms wide like she’s resisting a bodily urge to hug me. And that’s when I realize what Frank did get from his mother: the joy and enthusiasm of a room full of golden retriever puppies. The thread of recognition makes me smile.

  “It’s just Beck, actually,” I say. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Everyone’s downstairs,” she says, nodding to the open door that leads to the basement. “Tell Frank I put the pizza bagels in the oven, so he should listen for the timer.”

  The basement turns out to be Frank’s room, though it’s divided in half between his living space and what looks like an epic entertainment center. There are two full-sized arcade games against one wall, and a giant flat-screen TV at one end with all manner of controllers and consoles coming out of it. There’s a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that’s stuffed with completed Lego sets and Funko Pops. I spy a completed Apex ship roughly the size of my head and am impressed. There are leather couches and armchairs, just like at Tamsin’s house, only these look like they’ve been through a war and
have been patched up with varying ages and colors of duct tape. Jason, Frank, and Greg are parked on the couch, each with a controller in their hand, playing some kind of space game that I can’t look at for too long or the graphics will start to make me motion sick. Julianne is in an armchair scrolling through her phone. She looks up when I enter, and she actually smiles.

  “Thank god. There’s so much testosterone down here I was worried the television was about to grow testicles.”

  “That’s an image that will live in my brain for a while,” I say, laughing for the first time in days.

  “You’re welcome,” she replies.

  I didn’t realize how much I needed human contact—how much I needed this human contact—until I walked in the door.

  “Frank, your mom says the pizza bagels are in the oven.”

  “Thanks,” Frank says, never taking his eyes off the screen but steering hard with his shoulders, like it’ll control the game. And then the screen lights up and Jason throws his controller at the floor while Frank waves his in the air. “Five bucks, dude! Your five bucks is mine!”

  “Whatever,” Jason mutters, but he digs into his pocket until he produces a crumpled pile of receipts and a very abused-looking five-dollar bill. “But I want a rematch.”

  “After the movie, dude,” Greg says. “I’m ready to watch a possessed tree attack a white girl.”

  “Despite my intense protestations, we’re watching Evil Dead. Again,” Julianne says. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, having never been particularly affected by horror movies.

  “You can throw your stuff on my bed,” Frank says, pointing over his shoulder while he juggles like four different remotes to bring up the movie. I’ve got my purse slung over my shoulder and my jacket over my arm, so I turn around to dump it and come face-to-face with rows and columns of the same photo of a smiling, gray-haired white man with cosmetically enhanced teeth and gold-rimmed glasses surrounded by a 1-800 number and CALL NOW in bright yellow letters. The images cover the entire wall behind Frank’s bed, floor to ceiling.