by Jenny Han
Stormy claps her hands together. “Then you must bring him by. Give me advance notice, though, so I look my absolute best. Who else have you got waiting in the wings?”
I laugh. “No one! I told you, I have a boyfriend.”
“Hmm.” That’s all she says, just “hmm.” Then, “I have a grandson who could be about your age. He’s still in high school, anyhow. Maybe I’ll tell him to come by and see you. It’s good for a girl to have options.” I wonder what a grandson of Stormy’s might be like—probably a real player, just like Stormy. I open my mouth to say no thank you, but she waves me off with a shh. “When we’re done with my scrapbook, I’m going to transcribe my memoirs to you, and you’ll type them up for me on the computer. I’m thinking of calling it The Eye of the Storm. Or Stormy Weather.” Stormy starts to hum. “Stormy weather,” she sings. “Since my man and I ain’t together . . . keeps rainin’ all the time. . . .” She stops short. “We should have a cabaret night! Picture it, Lara Jean. You in a tuxedo. Me in a slinky red dress draped over the piano. It’ll give Mr. Morales a heart attack.”
I giggle. “Let’s not give him a heart attack. Maybe just a tremor.”
She shrugs and goes on singing, adding a shimmy to her hips. “Stormy weather . . .”
She’ll go off on a singing jag if I don’t redirect her. “Stormy, tell me about where you were when John F. Kennedy died.”
“It was a Friday. I was baking a pineapple upside-down cake for my bridge club. I put it in the oven and then I saw the news and I forgot all about the cake and nearly burned the house down. We had to have the kitchen repainted because of all the soot.” She fusses with her hair. “He was a saint, that man. A prince. If I’d met him in my heyday, we really could’ve had some fun. You know, I flirted with a Kennedy once at an airport. He sidled up to me at the bar and bought me a very dry gin martini. Airports used to be so very much more glamorous. People got dressed up to travel. Young people on airplanes these days, they wear those horrible sheepskin boots and pajama pants and it’s an eyesore. I wouldn’t go out for the mail dressed like that.”
“Which Kennedy?” I ask.
“Hmm? Oh, I don’t know. He had the Kennedy chin, anyway.”
I bite my lip to keep from smiling. Stormy and her escapades. “Can I have your pineapple upside-down cake recipe?”
“Sure, darling. It’s just yellow box cake with Del Monte pineapple and brown sugar and a maraschino cherry on top. Just make sure you get the rings and not the chunks.”
This cake sounds horrible. I try to nod in a diplomatic way, but Stormy is onto me. Crossly she says, “Do you think I had time to sit around baking cakes from scratch like some boring old housewife?”
“You could never be boring,” I say on cue, because it’s true and because I know it’s what she wants to hear.
“You could do with a little less baking and a little more living life.” She’s being prickly, and she’s never prickly with me. “Youth is truly wasted on the young.” She frowns. “My legs ache. Get me some Tylenol PM, would you?”
I leap up, eager to be in her good graces again. “Where do you keep it?”
“In the kitchen drawer by the sink.”
I rummage around, but I don’t see it. Just batteries, talcum powder, a stack of McDonald’s napkins, sugar packets, a black banana. Covertly, I throw the banana in the trash. “Stormy, I don’t see your Tylenol PM in here. Is there anywhere else it could be?”
“Forget it,” she snaps, coming up behind me and pushing me to the side. “I’ll find it myself.”
“Do you want me to put on some tea?” Stormy is old; that’s why she’s acting this way. She doesn’t mean to be harsh. I know she doesn’t mean it.
“Tea is for old ladies. I want a cocktail.”
“Coming right up,” I say.
13
MY SCRAPBOOKING TO THE OLDIES class has officially begun. I won’t deny that I’m disappointed with the turnout. So far it’s just Stormy, Alicia Ito, who is sprightly and put-together—short, buffed nails, pixie cut—and wily Mr. Morales, who I think has a crush on Stormy. Or Alicia. It’s hard to know definitively, because he flirts with everyone, but they both have full pages in the scrapbook he’s working on. He’s decided to title it “The Good Old Days.” He’s decorated Stormy’s page with music notes and piano keys and a picture of the two of them dancing on Disco Night last year. Alicia’s page he’s still working on, but his focal point is a picture of her sitting on a bench in the courtyard, gazing off into space, and he’s affixed some flower stickers around it. Very romantic.
I haven’t got much of a budget, so I’ve brought my own supplies. I’ve also instructed the three of them to collect scraps from magazines and other little bobbles and buttons. Stormy’s a pack rat like me, so she has all kinds of treasures. Lace from her kids’ christening gowns, a matchbook from the motel where she met her husband (“Don’t ask,” she said), old ticket stubs to a cabaret she went to in Paris. (I piped up, “In 1920s Paris? Did you ever meet Hemingway?” and she cut me with her eyes and said she obviously wasn’t that old and I needed a history lesson.) Alicia’s style is more minimalist and clean. With my black felt tip calligraphy pen, she writes descriptions in Japanese underneath each picture.
“What does it say here?” I ask, pointing to a description below a picture of Alicia and her husband, Phil, at Niagara Falls, holding hands and wearing yellow plastic ponchos.
Alicia smiles. “It says ‘the time we got caught in the rain.’”
So Alicia’s a romantic too. “You must miss him a lot.” Phil died a year ago. I only met him a couple of times, back when I’d help out Margot with Friday cocktail hour. Phil had dementia, and he didn’t talk much. He’d sit in his wheelchair in the common room and just smile at people. Alicia never left his side.
“I miss him every day,” she says, tearing up.
Stormy jostles her way between us, green glitter pen tucked behind her ear, and says, “Alicia, you need to jazz up your pages more.” She flicks a sheet of umbrella stickers Alicia’s way.
“No, thank you,” Alicia says stiffly, flicking the page back at Stormy. “You and I have different styles.”
Stormy’s eyes narrow at this.
I quickly go over to the speakers and turn up the volume to lighten the mood. Stormy dances over to me and sings, “Johnny Angel, Johnny Angel. You’re an angel to me.” We put our heads together and chorus, “I dream of him and me and how it’s gonna be . . .”
When Alicia goes to the bathroom, Stormy says, “Ugh, what a bore.”
“I don’t think she’s a bore,” I say.
Stormy points at me with her hot-pink manicured nail. “Don’t you dare go liking her better than me just because you’re both Asian.”
Hanging around a retirement home, I’ve gotten used to the vaguely racist things old people say. At least Stormy doesn’t use the word “Oriental” anymore. “I like you both equally,” I tell her.
“There’s no such thing,” she sniffs. “No one can ever like anyone exactly the same.”
“Don’t you love your kids the same?”
“Of course not.”
“I thought parents didn’t have favorites?”
“Of course they do. My favorite’s my youngest, Kent, because he’s a mama’s boy. He visits with me every Sunday.”
Loyally I say, “Well, I don’t think my parents had favorites.” I say it because it seems like the right thing to say, but is it true? I mean, if somebody put a gun to my head and said I had to choose, who would I say was Daddy’s favorite? Margot, probably. They’re the most alike. She’s genuinely into documentaries and bird-watching, just like him. Kitty’s the baby, which automatically gives her an edge. Where does that leave me, the middle Song girl? Maybe I was Mommy’s favorite. I wish I could know for sure. I’d ask Daddy, but I doubt he’d tell the truth. Margot might.
I’d never be able to pick between Margot and Kitty. But if, say, they were both drowning and I could only throw o
ne a life jacket, it would probably have to be Kitty. Margot would never forgive me otherwise. Kitty’s both of ours to care for.
The thought of ever losing Kitty puts me in a kinder, more contemplative mood, and so that night after she’s asleep, I bake off a tray of snickerdoodles, her favorite cookie. I have bags of cookie dough in the freezer, frozen into perfect cylindrical balls so that when any of us gets a taste for cookies, we can have them in twenty minutes flat. She’ll have a nice surprise when she opens her lunch bag tomorrow.
I let Jamie have a cookie too, even though I know I shouldn’t. But he keeps looking up at me with sorrowful puppy eyes and I can’t resist.
14
“WHAT ARE YOU DAYDREAMING ABOUT?” Peter taps my forehead with his spoon to get my attention. We are at Starbucks doing homework after school.
I dump two raw sugar packets into my plastic cup and stir it all up with my straw. I take a long sip, and sugar granules crunch satisfyingly against my teeth. “I was thinking about how it would be neat if people our age could be in love like it’s the 1950s.” Right away I wish I didn’t say “in love,” because Peter’s never said anything about being in love with me, but it’s too late, the words are already out of my mouth, so I just press on and hope he didn’t catch it. “In the 50s, people just dated, and it was as easy as that. Like one night Burt might take you to a drive-in movie, and the next night Walter might take you to a sock hop or something.”
Bemused, he says, “What the hell is a sock hop?”
“It’s like a dance, like in Grease.” Peter looks back at me blankly. “You’ve never seen Grease? It was on TV last night. Never mind. The point is, back then you weren’t somebody’s girl until you had a pin.”
“A pin?” Peter repeats.
“Yes, a fellow would give a girl his fraternity pin, and it meant they were going steady. But you weren’t official until you had the pin.”
“But I’m not in a fraternity. I don’t even know what a fraternity pin looks like.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“Wait—are you saying you want a pin or you don’t want a pin?”
“I’m not saying it either way. I’m just saying, don’t you think there was something cool in the way it used to be? It’s old-fashioned, but it’s almost . . .” What’s Margot always saying? “Postfeminist.”
“Wait. So do you want to go on dates with other guys?” He doesn’t sound upset, necessarily, just confused.
“No! I just . . . I’m just making an observation. I think it would be cool to bring back casual dating. There’s something sweet about it, don’t you think? My sister told me she wishes she didn’t let things get so heavy with her and Josh. You said yourself how you hated how serious it got with Genevieve. If we break up, I don’t want things to ever get so bad that we can’t be in the same room together. I want to still be friends no matter what.”
Peter dismisses this. “With me and Gen, it’s complicated because of who Gen is. It’s not like with me and you. You’re . . . different.”
I can feel my face get all flush again. I try not to sound too eager as I say, “Like different how?” I know I’m digging for a compliment, but I don’t care.
“You’re easy to be with. You don’t make me get all crazy and worked up; you’re . . .” Peter’s voice trails off as he looks at my face. “What? What did I say?”
My whole body feels tight and stiff. No girl wants to hear what he just said. No girl. A girl wants to get a boy crazy and worked up—isn’t that part of being in love?
“I mean that in a good way, Lara Jean. Are you mad? Don’t be mad.” He rubs his face tiredly.
I hesitate. Peter and I tell each other the truth; that’s how it’s been since the beginning. I’d like it to stay that way, on both sides. But then I catch the sudden worry in his eyes, the uncertainty, and it’s not something I’m used to seeing on him. I don’t like to see it. We’ve only been back together a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to start a new fight when I know he didn’t mean any harm. I hear myself say, “No, I’m not mad,” and just like that, I’m not anymore. After all, I’m the one who was worrying about going too far too fast with Peter. Maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t get crazy and worked up over me.
The clouds in his face clear away instantly, and he is sunny and bright again. That’s the Peter I know. He gulps at his tea. “See, that’s what I mean, Lara Jean. That’s why I like you. You just get it.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
15
EARLY MORNING BEFORE SCHOOL, JOSH is chiseling ice off his windshield when I run out to my car. Daddy’s already scraped the ice off mine and started the engine and turned on the heat. By the looks of Josh’s car, he’s not going to make it to school on time.
We’ve hardly seen Josh since Christmas; after all the strangeness with me and then the breakup with Margot, he’s been a ghost in this house. He leaves a little earlier for school now, comes home a little later. He never reached out to me when all the video stuff happened either, though part of me was relieved for that. I didn’t want to hear I told you so from Josh about how he was right about Peter.
I back out my driveway, and at the last second I open the window and lean toward it. “Do you want a ride?” I call out to Josh.
His eyes widen in surprise. “Yeah. Sure.” He throws his ice scraper into his car and grabs his backpack, then comes running over. Climbing in, he says, “Thanks, Lara Jean.” He warms his hands on the heating vents.
We make our way out of the neighborhood, and I’m driving carefully, because the roads are icy from the night before.
“You’ve gotten really good at driving,” Josh says.
“Thanks.” I have been practicing, on my own and with Peter. I still get nervous sometimes, but each time I get in the car and drive, it’s a little bit less, because now I know I can do it. You only know you can do something if you keep on doing it.
We’re a few minutes from school when Josh asks, “When are we going to talk again? Just tell me so I have a general idea.”
“We’re talking right now, aren’t we?”
“You know what I mean. What happened with me and Margot was between us—can’t you and I still be friends like we were before?”
“Josh, of course we’ll still be friends. But you and Margot have been broken up less than a month.”
“No, we broke up in August. She decided she wanted to get back together three weeks ago, and I said no.”
I sigh. “Why did you say no, though? Was it just the distance?”
Josh sighs too. “Relationships are hard work. You’ll see. After you’ve been in it with Kavinsky longer, you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
“Oh my God, you’re such a know-it-all. The biggest know-it-all I ever met, besides my sister.”
“Which one?”
I can feel a giggle bubbling up inside of me, which I push down. “Both. They’re both know-it-alls.”
“One more thing.” He hesitates, then keeps going. “I was wrong about Kavinsky. The way he’s handled this whole video thing, I can tell he’s a good guy.”
“Thanks, Joshy. He really is.”
He nods, and there is a comfortable quiet between us, and I’m glad for the bad weather we had last night, glad for the ice on his windshield this morning.
16
AFTER SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY I’m sitting on a bench, waiting for Peter out front, when Genevieve walks out the double doors on her phone. “If you don’t tell her, I will. I swear I’ll do it.”
My heart stills. Who is she talking to? Not Peter.
Her friends Emily and Judith burst out the doors then, and she abruptly hangs up. “Where the hell have you bitches been?” she snaps.
They exchange a look. “Gen, chill out,” Emily says, and I can tell she is walking that tightrope, a little bit feisty but careful not to further incur her wrath. “We still have plenty of time to shop.”
Genevieve notices me then, and
her peevish expression disappears. Waving, she says, “Hey, Lara Jean. Are you waiting for Kavinsky?”
I nod, and blow on my fingers just to have something to do. Also, it’s cold.
“That boy’s always running late. Tell him I’ll call him later tonight, okay?”
I nod without thinking, and the girls walk away, arms linked.
Why did I nod? What is wrong with me? Why can’t I ever come up with a good comeback? I’m still berating myself when Peter appears. He slides onto the bench beside me and slings his arm around my shoulders. Then he ruffles the top of my head the way I’ve seen him to do to Kitty. “What up, Covey.”
“Thanks for making me wait for you outside in the cold,” I say, pressing my freezing fingers on his neck.
Peter yelps and jumps away from me. “You could’ve waited inside!”
He has a point. That’s not what I’m mad about anyway. “Gen says to tell you she’ll call you later tonight.”
He rolls his eyes. “She’s such a shit stirrer. Don’t let her get to you, Covey. She’s just jealous.” Standing up, he offers me his hands, which I accept begrudgingly. “Let me take you for a hot chocolate to warm up your poor frozen body.”
“We’ll see,” I say.
In the car, he keeps sneaking peeks at me, checking to see if I’m still annoyed. I don’t keep up my chilly routine for much longer, though; it takes up too much energy. I let him buy me a hot chocolate and I even share it with him. But I tell him he can’t have any of the marshmallows.
That night my phone buzzes on my nightstand, and I know without looking that it’s Peter looking for more reassurance. I take off my headphones and pick it up. “Hi.”
“What are you doing?” His voice is low; I can tell he’s lying down.
“My homework. What about you?”
“I’m in bed. I just called to say good night.” There’s a pause. “Hey, how come you never call me to say good night?”
“I don’t know. I guess I never thought of it. Do you want me to?”
