Neither Morgan nor I had ever French-kissed anyone. We were still playing those pretend games at her house.
“She’s not boy crazy or anything,” Morgan whispered to me later on the ride home, as if she could read my mind. “She’s just . . . uh . . . not shy.” And then she threw in, “Like you!” to put me at ease.
Of course, after Elise’s dad lost his job and they moved to Aberdeen, I saw plenty of Elise’s sweet and churchy side, and I think that’s ultimately what I liked best about her, those two identities mashed up together. She was super-sweet with her little brothers, and if we came over when she was babysitting, she’d be playing with them just as much as hanging out with us. And she never talked shit about anyone, even people who completely deserved it, like Wes. Meanwhile, her phone was full of numbers, boys we’d meet at the mall or the movie theater or who went to her church. Elise wasn’t so much interested in having a boyfriend as she was in having someone to crush on.
I think, at first anyway, having a boy to obsess about kept Elise from feeling jealous of what Morgan and I had together. Because as close as the three of us were, every so often there were moments where our threesome was eclipsed by the previous twosome. I say this with no offense to Elise, of course. But you can only have one best friend. My friendship with Morgan went all the way to the cradle, because our moms were best friends too. She couldn’t compete with that.
Later on, though, when it was both Morgan and Elise getting that kind of attention together, I became the odd girl out.
“Anyway, Jesse and I weren’t flirting,” I corrected her. “We were joking around.”
Again, there is a difference. One I knew all too well.
Morgan cleared her throat. “Keeley, he checked out your butt as you grabbed us bottles of water from the cooler.”
I couldn’t play off my shock. I spun toward her. “He did not. Shut up.”
“He totally did! He watched you walk the entire way!”
I wanted so badly to believe her. And maybe it was the truth. But we’d both heard what her ex-boyfriend Wes had said about me, the kind of girl I was, and I knew Morgan wanted to undo that damage. It was why she broke up with him in the first place. So there was that possibility too. And for me, it was the possibility that seemed more likely.
Because like I said before, I had only kissed two boys in my lifetime. Neither one was from Aberdeen. They were both friends of boys that Elise and Morgan were interested in.
We’d get dressed up cute and make the drive to Hillsdale, or some other town, to meet them. At first, it was more Elise’s thing, but then boys started asking Morgan for her number.
Over the past year, I lost count of how many times Morgan or Elise would stand off a little ways with the boys they liked, whispering to them or showing them something on their phones, leaving me with whoever else had tagged along. Unlike my friends, I never knew how to act. I’d either completely clam up, afraid I’d say something dumb, or I’d swing too far the other way and say, like, many many many dumb things.
In the last three years, I’d met lots of boys, obviously. But I’d only ever kissed two.
• • •
By the time Morgan dropped me off, it had started to rain yet again. Lightly, but the way the wind whipped through the trees, it was clearly the beginning of another big storm. The weathermen were right after all.
Mom’s car was long gone. I knew she’d be working. The only patch of driveway that wasn’t getting slick was underneath Dad’s old work truck. It sat in our driveway like a clunker because Dad didn’t drive anymore, but it still ran fine. We’d been trying to sell it forever but there were no takers. Mom said Dad was asking too much. Dad defended his price by listing off the truck’s attributes—how dependable it was, the low mileage, how he’d splurged on new brakes right before his accident.
Before I went in the house, I climbed inside it and started it up, letting the engine run for a few minutes as I looked at Jesse’s text again. I did it to make sure that the battery wouldn’t die. I was hoping it wouldn’t sell and then I’d get to drive it when I turned seventeen next March.
I jogged the path to our house, a clapboard cottage with shingles the color of buttercream and the front door painted robin’s-egg blue. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor, a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the first floor, plus a small attic with a pull-down ladder and a musty root cellar, which had always scared the crap out of me. We had a front porch just big enough for a swing, and the moss-covered roof came out from directly under my bedroom window.
I crept inside, knowing Dad would be sleeping.
Dad had become nocturnal ever since his accident. He’d spend every night on his computer, and then sleep pretty much the whole day away. It was easier for him, I think, to be asleep while everyone else in town was out doing the things he couldn’t anymore. So I wasn’t surprised to find his computer on. He used two chairs, one to sit in and one with a couch pillow on it where he could prop up his leg. I cleared away a coffee cup and a dirty plate, turned off the monitor, pushed the chairs back in, picked up his cane, and set it next to the stairs so it would be waiting for him when he woke up and came down again.
I went into the kitchen and made myself a grilled cheese. My sandwich in one hand and my phone in the other, I reread Jesse’s text a few more times before I forced myself to delete it.
It wasn’t even hard, because I was 99 percent sure I’d never hear from Jesse again. I didn’t even blame Wes for making me think so pessimistically. It was just my reality, to never have a boy be interested in me romantically for more than one random moment. Like a TV show you don’t like but you end up watching anyway, because there’s nothing else on.
And remember, this was Jesse Ford. Not some less-cute friend of the boys Elise and Morgan were interested in. Jesse could get any girl in school he wanted. He was so charming and funny and disarming that it didn’t matter if he wasn’t the most traditionally handsome guy. It didn’t even matter if the girl he was after had a boyfriend. The year before, some meathead football player found out that his cheerleader girlfriend had secretly kissed Jesse, and he punched Jesse square in the jaw in the middle of the cafeteria. The picture of the aftermath, Jesse proudly grinning with a bloody lip and a purple cheek, was still his profile picture.
I couldn’t imagine a single scenario where he’d want to be with me.
2
* * *
Monday, May 9
Cloudy, scattered thunderstorms throughout the day, high of 42°F
* * *
Jesse texted me on my way to first period the next day.
Not a message, but a video he’d taken of the jacked-up speaker in his homeroom during morning announcements. That thing was so crackly, you couldn’t make out one single word. Jesse spun the camera from the speaker to his confused face, back to the speaker, back to his confused face, and then cupped a hand to his ear like an old man hard of hearing, saying, “What? I’m sorry, what? Could you say that one more time?”
Jesse regularly posted videos of himself online. They were mostly funny, sometimes stupid, usually ridiculous. Our entire school watched them. But this video was only for me, one he made just to make me laugh. He never put it up.
It sounds weird, but I consider that my very first love letter.
I agonized over how to respond for the next two periods, but then, a gift from heaven, I spotted a mistake on the bulletin board outside the cafeteria.
PLACE AN ORDER FOR YOU’RE YEARBOOKS TODAY!
The Guy Who’s Going Places! aside, our school didn’t have the best reputation. Kids from nearby towns made fun of our tattered jerseys, our saggy, shedding pom-poms, our basketball hoops without nets. Only a handful of Aberdeen seniors went on to college each year. The others took jobs at the Walmart, joined the army, worked for their parents. Morgan’s plan was to go to beauty school, though I guess that’s a kind of college.
I get that college isn’t for everyone, but
the bulletin board was an embarrassment, so I stopped to snap a picture with one hand, framing the shot so you could see me giving a thumbs-down with the other. The letters had been individually hung, so I used my fingernail to ease out the staples and let both the apostrophe and the unnecessary E fall on the floor, and took another picture, this time with a thumbs-up.
When I turned around, Levi Hamrick was glaring at me with his arms folded. I think he was trying to guilt me into picking up the papers from the floor. Or maybe he was pissed because I was blatantly using my phone. He probably considered himself an unofficial hall monitor; he was that big of a geek. I pretended I didn’t see him and disappeared into the crush of students heading to fourth period.
After that, it was on. Jesse and I texted each other on the regular, different funny observations and pictures all day long. Once, he sent me a picture of the janitor’s ass crack. I replied with a covert video of Mr. Kirk digging in his ear with his pinky and then smelling it. That sort of thing. A couple of times I’d send Jesse a joke between periods and hear him laugh at whatever I’d written from somewhere down the hall, and I’d be soaring on cloud nine.
Entertaining Jesse became my one and only focus. I totally slacked on my history quiz, I blew off grabbing pizza at Mineo’s with Morgan and Elise when they scored an off-campus pass for lunch. The only thing I cared about was making sure I sent him something funny or clever enough to make him want to write me back one more time. I probably took a hundred selfies before I got one pretty enough to send, and forced myself to wait at least one class period before responding to whatever text he’d sent me, so he wouldn’t think I was too eager. But whenever my phone buzzed with a new message from him, I’d feel absolutely euphoric.
When they’d returned from church camp the summer before our sophomore year, I’d immediately suspected Elise was no longer a virgin. Morgan would neither confirm nor deny it for me when I straight-up asked her, which I took as confirmation that Elise had, indeed, lost it. Elise would never tell me herself.
Morgan promised me she was definitely still a virgin, but admitted doing “stuff ” with a boy named Douglas Bardugo she had also met at camp. Thankfully, she was much more forthcoming with info, and she stayed up an entire night answering even my most insanely personal questions—“Okay, but what if a guy tries to go to third base with you after you just peed?”—shyly but also with a level of clinical maturity reserved for teaching toddlers the actual names of their private parts. I remember leaving her house the next morning feeling exactly that way, like an inexperienced kid. And nearly two years later, I still basically was.
That’s why, I initially kept Jesse’s texts a secret from my friends. I was ashamed of how much each one meant to me.
Also, as amazing as it felt to have Jesse’s attention, I knew every text could be the last.
He’d been driving a sophomore girl with insanely large boobs to and from school up until a few weeks ago, but I’d noticed that she was back to riding the bus. I still couldn’t assume he was single, because Jesse also had a long-standing thing with another senior named Victoria Dunkle. They were on and off, on and off, but it wasn’t drama. It was easy between them. When she wasn’t with anyone, and he wasn’t either, they’d find their way back together.
I tried forcing myself to face the reality of my situation. Maybe I’d caught Jesse in a sweet spot, but half a week of texting was barely anything. If I added up the actual number of texts sent and received, it felt a lot longer, but that kind of crazy girl math just made me seem, well, crazy. And it wasn’t like Jesse was actually pursuing me in public. We were secret pen pals, that was it.
I even made myself remember the crappy things Wes had said about me to Morgan to kill any last bit of lingering hope left in my heart. Although that backfired big-time, because I ended up fantasizing that Jesse and I would run into Wes one day, our hands in each other’s back pockets. I’d point him out, whisper to Jesse the awful things Wes had said about me, and Jesse—in all his hotness—would stare Wes down and laugh at what a spineless little turd he was.
I didn’t beat myself up too badly for that daydream. Even if it was the longest of long shots, it still felt therapeutic.
3
* * *
Wednesday, May 11
Scattered showers in the morning, growing steadier throughout the afternoon, high of 40°F
* * *
Morgan and Elise were planning what outfits to wear to some youth group thing during lunch when they saw Jesse’s picture pop up on my phone.
“Wait up. You once filled an entire notebook practicing your hyphenated signature if you married Jesse Ford, and now you two have been texting it up and you never bothered to tell us?” Morgan said us, and she even glanced incredulously over at Elise, but I knew she was really only talking about herself.
“There’s nothing to tell! We’re just joking around with each other!” I wished it were more than that, obviously, but it wasn’t.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Morgan said, grabbing my phone. She and Elise leaned in to each other to look at the picture.
Jesse had gone into town for lunch. Or maybe he’d taken the picture on his way to school; I wasn’t sure. Either way, it was a shot of him making a very sweet and angelic face, eyes looking up and to the right, a hint of a smile, in front of some caution tape and a service truck from the power company.
“I don’t get it,” Elise said. “What’s the joke?”
“Look closer,” I said.
There’d been lots of electrical glitches with the recent rainfall, little sizzling power outages here and there, and there was always a van from the electric company around to patch something up or pump water out of a manhole. Anyway, the men had cordoned off the middle of the street with bright orange cones and posted a sign that Jesse made sure was in focus just over his shoulder. It read DANGER: ELECTRIC MANHOLE.
I expected the girls to both make gross-out faces, because I was acutely aware that the way Jesse and I were talking was nothing like the way they talked to boys. But Morgan put a hand on my back and said, “Yup. This is flirty. No doubt about it.”
Elise looked less convinced. “I mean, maybe? I’m not sure. It’s kind of too weird to say.” She tapped her finger to her lips. “Though I guess any reference a boy makes to his hole could be considered flirty.”
I got a rush of good feelings from Elise saying that. She was the boy expert.
I’d only wanted them to look at the one picture, but they insisted on scrolling through all our correspondence. They examined every one of Jesse’s messages to decipher hidden clues or hookup potential. They also critiqued every one of my responses.
Elise tapped the screen. “Now wait. Okay, see? What he sent you here is definitely flirty.” She looked up at me with genuine surprise. I would have been insulted, if it hadn’t been Jesse Ford we were talking about. Because of all the Saint Ann’s boys Elise had in her orbit, there wasn’t one of Jesse’s caliber among them.
“Why?”
Morgan and Elise shared a look. “Because he used the doggy smiley, not just a smiley smiley,” Elise said. “And you kind of blew it by just writing LOL. I mean, Keeley, come on. You’re not that basic.”
“Yes, I am. I am that basic and you both know it!” I tried to wrestle my phone away.
Elise held it out of my reach. “What are you going to write back to that manhole picture? You need to have a flirty response. Otherwise he’s going to think you’re not interested!”
That seemed completely impossible. But suddenly our entire text history was recast in my mind. Was Jesse actually real-deal flirting with me this whole time?
“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly panicked. “Maybe I should send him a doggy smiley back.”
“No!” they both screamed.
“Wait! Two seconds ago you both agreed doggy smiley was flirty!” I wrestled my phone back. “How about I send a banana? Banana is code for penis, right?”
Even though I was
totally joking, Morgan held my arms while Elise pried my phone free again. Together they worked out a response for me. I made a big deal about it, sighing like they were cramping my style, but honestly, it was a relief. Usually when Morgan and Elise talked about boys, I had to occupy myself with finding a better song on the radio or getting us snacks. I was glad to have their help. I really didn’t know what I was doing.
They went all emoji for the first text—a lightning bolt, a scared smiley face, and then the one with the girl crossing her arms like hell no. They followed that up with a second text. You should probably see a doctor about that ASAP.
“How is that going to make him think I’m interested?”
“Trust us,” Elise said.
Jesse wrote back before the end of the period. So that wasn’t cute? #flirtingfail
And then, Don’t worry. I’ll do better next time.
I couldn’t believe it. I almost didn’t believe it.
And then Jesse made good on his promise.
4
* * *
Thursday, May 12
Rain showers, heavy at times, high of 40°F
* * *
Spring Formal tickets went on sale the next morning, and Morgan and Elise and I put our coats and hats and scarves into our lockers and headed to the folding table set up outside the gym. We were about to round the corner when we heard music. There was Jesse, positioned next to the ticket table, dancing to songs coming out of his phone speaker. He had on a button-up that was open like a vest to his bare chest. A stripe of his boxer shorts—polka dot—lifted slightly above the waist of his jeans. He had a white sweatband across his forehead, and matching ones on each wrist. His friend Zito was holding a key-chain-size disco ball over Jesse’s head.