Plus there were the various stresses of the last year, with both of us applying for school. We hadn’t ever talked about it, but I could tell all the college stuff I’d done with my father—applying to Ivy League schools far away from Colby and, by extension, Luke himself—he’d taken a little personally. I mean, why wouldn’t I go to East U, where I’d get a free ride and we’d be together? For him, that was perfect. And even though he never said as much, I knew he wondered, more than once, why it wasn’t for me.
“Wait.” I pushed myself up on my elbows. “I swear, I think I just heard a car door.”
“There is nobody here.”
“Just listen for a second.”
This time, he didn’t move, just stopped. As he humored me, I looked up at his face, familiar and gorgeous. I could not imagine my life without him, and I thought I’d kill any girl who tried to come between us. And yet, I knew he was right: it was the week before last.
He looked at me. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
For a moment, we stayed right where we were, him above, me below, our eyes locked. I love you, I thought, but instead of saying this, I slid my arms around his neck, pulling him closer. He whispered my name and then his lips were on mine, erasing the space between us and everything it encompasses and doesn’t. At least for now.
* * *
“You just take a shower?”
I blinked, startled. I didn’t know what it was about Mrs. Ye, my best girlfriend Daisy’s mom, but she had this way of totally disarming me. Even about something so simple as having damp hair at twelve thirty on a weekday.
“Um, yeah,” I said, as she went back to applying hot pink polish to a woman wearing a terry cloth beach cover-up. “I got hot cleaning up the storeroom at work. Plus it’s filthy in there.”
“Hmmh,” she replied, the meaning of which even without the language barrier—which was sizeable—was impossible to decipher. Then she said something to Daisy in their native Vietnamese, the undecipherable words flowing off her tongue as quickly as the polish off the brush.
“Okay,” Daisy replied. “Do you want mayonnaise?”
Her mom added something else, again so quickly I couldn’t have caught it even if it was in a language I spoke. This time, Daisy said nothing, only giving a quick nod of her head. I followed her out into the parking lot of Coastal Plaza, where her parents’ salon, Wave Nails, was located right between a liquor store and AZ Grocery. Booze, food, and pampering. What else did you need on vacation?
“Hot,” Daisy said, putting on her huge sunglasses as we started down to the other end of the mall to Da Vinci’s Pizza and Subs. “Too hot.”
“Well,” I pointed out, “you’re not exactly dressed for summer.”
She turned, leveling her eyes at me. Daisy had been my closest girlfriend since her family had moved here in seventh grade, but her beauty could still totally disarm me at random moments. My style was slapdash at best, but she was always photo ready, cribbing styles from the fashion magazines she read nonstop. She was small, with delicate features she made even more stunning with the makeup she got up early to apply carefully every morning. Nobody dressed like her, mostly because she produced most of her looks at her mom’s sewing machine, which she’d taught herself how to use when she was twelve. Colby was not exactly New York or Paris when it came to fashion, but you wouldn’t know this by looking at Daisy. She was dressing for the life she wanted, not the one she had.
Which was why, while I was sporting my basic summer uniform of cutoff shorts, tank top, and flip-flops, she had on a black sleeveless dress and platform wedges, her hair pulled back in a neat chignon. Like Audrey Hepburn, if she passed Tiffany’s and headed south. Very south.
“What you don’t understand,” she said now, smoothing her small hands over her dress, “is that this is the perfect dress.”
“It’s black and long and it’s ninety degrees out.”
She sighed. After Daisy spent much of the first year we knew each other trying to get me to be even slightly fashionable, we decided for the sake of our friendship to agree to disagree. Which we did pretty much constantly.
“Black and long,” she repeated, her voice flat. “That’s really how you describe this?”
“Am I wrong?”
“It’s a vintage A-line, Emaline. It’s classic. Knows no season.”
“It’s a dress,” I replied. “It doesn’t know anything.”
This she didn’t even dignify with a response. Despite our sartorial differences, the reason we’d bonded, at least initially, was our shared perfectionism when it came to school. Before she arrived, I’d regularly been near the top or the best student in just about every class I took. Then, suddenly, there was this new girl, whip smart, better read, and bilingual. If we hadn’t hit it off I was pretty sure we would have hated each other.
Now she adjusted her sunglasses as a guy on a moped passed us, engine whining like a gnat. I hated mopeds, but for whatever reason they were ubiquitous here, like saltwater taffy and hermit crabs being sold as pets.
Daisy wrinkled her nose. “God, I hate mopeds.”
I smiled. “You better talk to Morris, then. He’s still making noises about getting one.”
“That boy needs a car, not a toy,” she said, sighing. “But first he needs a job. Did you hear he got let go from that catering gig?”