Spiritual Smoothies could be our offshoot business…catering to synagogues, churches, mosques…I made a mental note to think about that at a later time.
“I guess they do need us.” I propped my foot up on his knee to tie my shoe. “How weird is that, though?”
“Eh.” He shrugged. “Adults are wack. They’re pretty much just big children.”
“You think?” I sat back in my chair. We were in the break room, and I definitely wasn’t supposed to be here. But summer was winding down, and Emmett was leaving soon anyway. And let’s be honest—his dad was some major guy on the corporate side. He could pretty much do whatever he wanted.
“I think so.” Emmett looked at me and I wanted to pull his face in and keep it in my pocket forever. I knew it was creepy and possessive, but more than anything, I just wanted him to stay with me.
“So you started to tell me something crazy happened last night,” he said, leaning his head on my shoulder.
“Okay, so are you ready for this?” I asked him. I had to tell him. I was nervous about how he was going to respond, but I just had to. The story was bubbling out of me.
“Um, yes?”
“Okay, so, right at the end of school Mia’s douchebag boyfriend cheated on her at a party we were at, and then broke up with her,” I said. “So I did what any sensible best friend would do. I made up a fake online person, and stalked him, and got him to fall in love with the fake girl and want to meet her, and then he actually showed up at the diner. After the whole summer of Katie talking to him. I think he, like, loved her in a way…or was falling in love with her.”
As I talked, I still felt that heart-racing victorious pride feeling alongside the twinge of embarrassment and creepiness.
“Who’s Katie?” Emmett asked.
“The girl I made up,” I said, clenching my teeth.
“So basically you Catfished your friend’s ex-boyfriend and he fell for it?”
I nodded.
“For real? You’re only just telling me about this now? And it’s been going on all summer?” His eyes were squinty. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No,” I said, regretting telling him. He was about to break up with me right then. He knew I was totally messed up. “It’s all true.”
He jerked his head back, eyebrows raised. “That’s pretty intense.”
“Yeah, intense and totally screwed up. I know that. But I couldn’t just let Seth do that to Mia. He couldn’t, like, just get away with it.”
“Whoa, dude.” I liked when he called me dude. I wasn’t sure why. I wanted to be hot, feminine, someone he wanted to make out with. But at the same time, when he called me dude, it felt like he knew me. “It’s psychotic, but it came from a good place. It’s pretty bold how much you wanted to help Mia.”
“It’s bold, yeah. It was, like, I had to do something.” I looked over at him. “Situations are never just one thing, ya know?”
“Never.” He put his hands on my knees and leaned in, and we put our foreheads together. It made me feel connected to him. Like our brains were intertwined, like we understood each other.
And that was pretty much all I ever wanted.
—
Emmett called me later that night, which was odd and caught me off guard. We weren’t phone talkers. We texted sometimes, but we were more the in-person types. Everything that happened between us happened face-to-face, forehead-to-forehead.
“Justine?” he said after I answered, like he wasn’t sure it was me on the phone. That was so strange because it was my cell phone and no one else would answer it. Did I look like the kind of person who would leave her cell phone unattended?
“Yeah? Hey.”
“I was gonna come by and tell you this in person, but I didn’t want to wait that long to talk to you.” He paused. “I just found out I’m leaving a week earlier than I thought.”
“Wait, what?” I turned down the TV. “You’re leaving next week?”
He hesitated and then said, “Yeah. Friday.”
I sniffled.
“Don’t cry,” he said.
“Oh, I’m not,” I replied, because I wasn’t crying. I felt like crying, but I wouldn’t actually do that on the phone with him. And then the notion that he thought I was crying felt so sweet that I actually did start to cry. And then I thought how funny it was that I’d actually started crying when I’d never expected to cry, and I started laughing.
“I don’t even know what’s going on,” he said. “Girls are nutty.”
“We are,” I said.
“I wanted to tell you as soon as I found out,” he said.
“Okay.” My mind was spinning. Emmett was leaving. I’d known he would leave eventually, but this was sooner than I thought. I wasn’t ready.
“I want to meet Mia before I go,” he said. “She’s your best friend and you spent all summer helping her and doing crazy stuff. I want to meet her.”
“Okay,” I said.
I wasn’t sure how to tell him that Mia didn’t know he existed.
MIA
We sat on the love seat in Dennis’s backyard after Uncle Rick and Dennis’s mom had gone to bed. The bottom was wicker and the cushions were nice enough to be on an indoor couch.
“This backyard is so fancy,” I said. “I kind of feel like we’re at a resort.”
“Yeah, they drag these cushions in every night, in case it rains.” He shook his head. “They need to hire some resort staff.”
I giggled a little, and yeah, we were talking about outdoor furniture, quite possibly the most boring conversation in the world, but it felt okay, not forced or anything.
There was only a slight breeze so the air felt warm and thick. Dennis had made some fruit punch and we sipped it out of tall glasses with colorful straws.
We sat side by side, but then he inched closer. He put his arm around me, and he started kissing my cheek. And maybe it was the breeze or the way he stroked my hair or the way he smelled like fruit punch, which sounds disgusting but actually wasn’t. And then he said, “Mia, you’re so beautiful.”
And the way he said it—I believed him.
And soon we were kissing. I looked up to Uncle Rick’s bedroom window to make sure they were really asleep and the lights were off. And then I looked back at Dennis. He pulled me up onto his lap. I wrapped my arms around his neck.
“I know about your smoothies,” he said, pulling back.
Okay, not what I expected to hear from the boy I was making out with.
“What?” I cracked up.
“Your smoothies. You and Justine. You have your own side smoothie business?” He half-smiled. “You’re very popular.”
“Oh. Right.” I chewed my bottom lip. “Our smoothies.”
“People post pictures of themselves with the smoothies all the time, they put the location and everything.” He smiled. “Did you really think it was going to stay a secret? I’ve known for weeks now.”
“Um.” I half-smiled and kissed his cheek.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Your secret’s safe with me, and I don’t think Rick’s savvy enough to figure it out. He doesn’t do social media.” He looked up toward the window. “And ya know, I’d never rat out my girlfriend.”
I smiled. So this was happening.
“You are my girlfriend, right?” he asked. “I mean, I hope you are….Is there a way for me to ask you to be my girlfriend? Or it’s just assumed? Like after a certain amount of time…or something?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. But I can be your girlfriend.” I kissed him again. “And thanks for keeping our secret. I mean, it may not always be a secret, but for now it is. Who knows?”
If anyone had told me at the beginning of the summer that this was how things were going to be in August, I never would have believed them. Never ever in a million years.
But right then, it felt like everything had worked out exactly how it was meant to.
I could be myself with Dennis.
I felt happy.
I felt lighter, too. I’d lost about six pounds from drinking the smoothies and not snacking as much as I had been, but that wasn’t the only reason.
I didn’t have the Seth stuff weighing me down. I’d gotten rid of all the obsessive thoughts, and the memory slideshows, and the stalking.
I’d put the pen away in the memory box in my closet.
It had taken so long, but I finally felt free.
JUSTINE
“Okay, we need to talk,” I said to Mia as soon as she got into my car.
I planned to get right to the point and tell her about Emmett. I’d explain how it was hard to open up about him because it was so new and I was unsure about where it was going. Hopefully she’d understand and not be mad at me. I had to be done with the secrets and the lies. I decided that was going to be my New Year’s resolution for senior year: Be upfront and honest. And tell the truth all the time.
“What’s up?” Mia asked. She was distracted, looking at her phone. I tried to peek over at what she was doing, but it was too hard to see.
“So I haven’t told you some stuff,” I said.
“Ummm.” Mia looked over at me, but I was driving so I couldn’t make eye contact with her. Maybe that was easier. Maybe it was harder to tell the truth when you had to look them in the eyes and see their reaction. Maybe life in general was harder face-to-face, and the Katie experiment was proof of that. Seth and Katie talked so easily, so quickly over Messenger because they didn’t have to look at each other.
“So, you know how I’ve been going to the bank and depositing all the money?”
She nodded. “Please don’t tell me you spent it all on some really intense tattoo or something.”
“What? Ew. No. You know I hate tattoos.”
“I know,” Mia replied. “But you’re scaring me.”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s kind of a long—”
“Just tell me!” Mia screeched, turning down the music.
“Okay, so I met this guy on one of the first days I went to deposit the money,” I told her. “And we, like, hit it off right away.”
“Yeah?” Mia put down her phone. “So far this is better than I thought it was going to be.”
“It was hot, Mi,” I continued. “We hooked up in the safe-deposit box room!”
“What?” She screeched again. “Are you serious? And you didn’t tell me.”
“I know….” We finally got to a red light and made eye contact. “I was scared to tell you, because I kind of thought it was going to end. And I didn’t want to, like, bring anyone else into it if it was just gonna end. Ya know?”
She tilted her head to the side. “Not really. But okay. Go on.”
“But it didn’t end,” I said. “We’ve been hooking up all summer.”
“Justine!” she yelled. “Pull over. This is way too crazy a story for you to just keep driving. Come on. It’s not even safe, really.”
So I drove into the parking lot of the ice cream place we always went to after band concerts.
“You kept this from me all summer?” Mia asked, staring at me. “I don’t get it. I feel so weird now.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s so crazy,” I admitted. “I honestly thought he was gonna end it because whatever, I have zero hooking-up experience…and no boys ever like me.”
“Justine,” she whispered. “Come on. Elliott Chaffler. You totally rejected him.”
“Okay, but aside from Elliott Chaffler, who just wanted to get some on the Outdoor Ed trip…” I giggled. “I just didn’t expect this to become anything real. But it is. I mean, I like him. And he likes me.”
“That’s awesome,” Mia said. “You’re starting senior year with a boyfriend. That’s huge. You probably already have a prom date. This is amazing.”
“Well, not really. He lives in Boston with his mom. He was just here for the summer, because he was staying with his dad,” I told her. “And I thought he was gonna be here a few more weeks. But he’s actually leaving, like, in a few days.”
“Oh.” She looked down at her flip-flops. “That sucks. I’m sorry.”
I could tell she was still a little mad that I hadn’t told her before. But underneath that, she did feel bad that my first-ever boyfriend was leaving and that he didn’t live here to begin with.
“Why’d you decide to tell me now?” she asked.
“Well, he’s leaving, and I couldn’t keep it from you anymore.”
“Oh” was all she said for a few minutes. “Well, I’m happy for you. But can you please just tell me stuff from now on?”
I sniffled a little, like I was actually going to cry. I wasn’t sure what was happening to me. It felt like my emotions were taking up the whole car.
“And speaking of telling people stuff…” Mia’s voice trailed off. “Uncle Rick. Are we telling him or no? Summer is gonna end soon.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Actually,” Mia said, “I don’t think we should tell him. The only thing he really wants to hear is that his snow cones were a huge success. And they sold pretty well! There’s money in the account. We don’t need to take that away from him by talking about our business.”
Maybe she was right. “I get what you’re saying.”
There were reasons for telling the truth, a lot of reasons, actually. There were probably more reasons for telling the truth than for not telling the truth. But I guess there were times when lying was okay, too. There were times when lying was actually the right thing to do.
MIA
We kept driving, and we were almost at work when I couldn’t take it anymore. All this talk about lying made me burst with guilt and anxiety. Enough was enough.
“Justine…I have to tell you something, too,” I started.
“Yeah?” She’d been singing along to the radio. “There was only you and me. We were young and wild and free.”
I wondered if she was thinking about that Emmett kid. I wanted to meet him. I wanted him to stay. I wanted Justine to be happy like this all the time.
“I’ve been hooking up with Dennis,” I blurted out.
“What?” she screeched. “I thought you guys just quizzed each other on losing candidates, or whatever?”
I was going to have to force her to pull over again, but we were almost there. I wasn’t used to this much commotion so early in the morning. I needed my smoothie.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Well, it started out that I’d complain to him about Seth. But then Dennis just made me feel so…great about myself, and beautiful. And it just became a thing.”
“He’s my stepcousin, Mia.”
Justine looked like she was about to barf. I cleaned out the inside of an old smoothie cup I found lying on the floor of her car, just in case.
“I know. And I’m sorry.” I mushed my face together, half-scared she was going to barf and half-scared she was going to yell at me. “It’s not like he’s your biological cousin, though?”
“Ew. Ew. Ew.” She said that word over and over again. I guessed this wasn’t the time to tell her that Dennis was actually pretty good at hooking up, and that he knew about our smoothies. I’d save that for another time.
We drove the rest of the way in silence, and I hoped she was warming up to the idea, or at least getting used to it.
Finally we were at the shop. Uncle Rick was washing the outside of the truck. He was wearing a tank top. I hoped the grossness of that image would wipe away Justine’s icky feelings about Dennis and me.
“Hey, Uncle Rick,” Justine said.
“Oh, hello to my favorite salesladies!” He saluted us. “Go on in, we have to discuss your last day…and when we’re closing up for the season.”
Dennis was inside the shop, on the computer, tweeting depressing quotes about the end of summer on the Mobile Cones Twitter account.
I read over his shoulder, breathing in his Old Spice deodorant. Why did it smell so good?
What good is the warmth of summer, without the
cold of winter to give it sweetness.
JOHN STEINBECK
“Nice,” I said. “And totally true.”
He shrugged. “I found it on one of your quote pages.” He kissed my hand when Justine and Uncle Rick weren’t looking.
“Listen up,” Uncle Rick said. “I just need to thank all three of you. To be honest, I wasn’t sure we could make a go of this snow cone business. It was a dream of mine, but I have a lot of dreams, and many don’t pan out.” He looked down at his shoes—old worn-in Reeboks; he could clearly afford another pair. “But I’m thrilled with how everything has turned out. And I have you all to thank.” He paused like he was giving an Oscar speech. “So thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Uncle Rick.” I smiled.
What if I ended up marrying Dennis one day? And Uncle Rick became my stepdad-in-law? Eventually I’d have to tell him about the smoothies. I’d be like, Want to hear a really crazy story about the summer I worked at Simply Snow Cones? And I’d tell him everything—about the lady and the kale, about when Dennis and I became something. Maybe I’d even tell him about Katie.
We’d laugh about it because it would all be so far in the past that none of it would matter and all of it would seem funny.
I liked to picture myself then—older, smarter, more sophisticated, even.
But I didn’t want to rush it, really.
For once, I was pretty happy with the way things were.
MIA
“So this is the famous Mia,” Emmett said as he sat down in the booth at the diner.
“I don’t know about that.” I laughed.
“Mia, Emmett. Emmett, Mia.” Justine moved her hand back and forth, introducing us. “Sorry it’s taken so long for you two to meet.”
“Apology accepted,” I said.
“Same,” Emmett added, looking at the menu. “So what’s good here? The filet of sole? Or the complete Thanksgiving dinner? The pork chop?”
Justine closed his menu and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. “Very funny. Cheese fries. That’s it. The only acceptable thing to order.”
Kale, My Ex, and Other Things to Toss in a Blender Page 16
