Kitty’s so excited about winning two first-place ribbons and one second place that she forgets to ask where Josh is until we’re in the car driving back home. She’s in the backseat and she’s got her towel wrapped around her head like a turban and her ribbons dangling from her ears like earrings. She leans forward and says, “Hey! Why didn’t Josh come to my meet?”
I can see Margot hesitate, so I answer before she can. Maybe the only thing I’m better at than Margot is lying. “He had to work at the bookstore tonight. He really wanted to make it, though.” Margot reaches across the console and gives my hand a grateful squeeze.
Sticking out her lower lip, Kitty says, “That was the last regular meet! He promised he’d come watch me swim.”
“It was a last-minute thing,” I say. “He couldn’t get out of working the shift because one of his coworkers had an emergency.”
Kitty nods begrudgingly. Little as she is, she understands emergency shifts.
“Let’s get frozen custards,” Margot says suddenly.
Kitty lights up, and Josh and his imaginary emergency shift is forgotten. “Yeah! I want a waffle cone! Can I get a waffle cone with two scoops? I want mint chip and peanut brittle. No, rainbow sherbet and double fudge. No, wait—”
I twist around in my seat. “You can’t finish two scoops and a waffle cone,” I tell her. “Maybe you could finish two scoops in a cup, but not in a cone.”
“Yes, I can. Tonight I can. I’m starving.”
“Fine, but you better finish the whole thing.” I shake my finger at her and say it like a threat, which makes her roll her eyes and giggle. As for me, I’ll get what I always get—the cherry chocolate-chunk custard in a sugar cone.
Margot pulls into the drive-thru, and as we wait our turn, I say, “I bet they don’t have frozen custard in Scotland.”
“Probably not,” she says.
“You won’t have another one of these until Thanksgiving,” I say.
Margot looks straight ahead. “Christmas,” she says, correcting me. “Thanksgiving’s too short to fly all that way, remember?”
“Thanksgiving’s gonna suck.” Kitty pouts.
I’m silent. We’ve never had a Thanksgiving without Margot. She always does the turkey and the broccoli casserole and the creamed onions. I do the pies (pumpkin and pecan) and the mashed potatoes. Kitty is the taste tester and the table setter. I don’t know how to roast a turkey. And both of our grandmothers will be there, and Nana, Daddy’s mother, likes Margot best of all of us. She says Kitty drains her and I’m too dreamy-eyed.
All of a sudden I feel panicky and it’s hard to breathe and I couldn’t care less about cherry chocolate-chunk custard. I can’t picture Thanksgiving without Margot. I can’t even picture next Monday without her. I know most sisters don’t get along, but I’m closer to Margot than I am to anybody in the world. How can we be the Song girls without Margot?
4
MY OLDEST FRIEND CHRIS SMOKES, she hooks up with boys she doesn’t know hardly at all, and she’s been suspended twice. One time she had to go before the court for truancy. I never knew what truancy was before I met Chris. FYI, it’s when you skip so much school you’re in trouble with the law.
I’m pretty sure that if Chris and I met each other now, we wouldn’t be friends. We’re as different as different can be. But it wasn’t always this way. In sixth grade Chris liked stationery and sleepovers and staying up all night watching John Hughes movies, just like me. But by eighth grade she was sneaking out after my dad fell asleep to meet boys she met at the mall. They’d drop her back off before it got light outside. I’d stay up until she came back, terrified she wouldn’t make it home before my dad woke up. She always made it back in time though.
Chris isn’t the kind of friend you call every night or have lunch with every day. She is like a street cat, she comes and goes as she pleases. She can’t be tied down to a place or a person. Sometimes I won’t see Chris for days and then in the middle of the night there will be a knock at my bedroom window and it’ll be Chris, crouched in the magnolia tree. I keep my window unlocked for her in case. Chris and Margot can’t stand each other. Chris thinks Margot is uptight, and Margot thinks Chris is bipolar. She thinks Chris uses me; Chris thinks Margot controls me. I think maybe they’re both a little bit right. But the important thing, the real thing, is Chris and I understand each other, which I think counts for a lot more than people realize.
* * *
Chris calls me on the way over to our house; she says her mom’s being a beotch and she’s coming over for a couple hours and do we have any food?
Chris and I are sharing a bowl of leftover gnocchi in the living room when Margot comes home from dropping Kitty off at her swim team’s end-of-season barbecue. “Oh, hey,” she says. Then she spots Chris’s glass of Diet Coke on the coffee table, sans coaster. “Can you please use a coaster?”
As soon as Margot’s up the stairs, Chris says, “Gawd! Why is your sister such a beotch?”
I slide a coaster under her glass. “You think everyone’s a beotch today.”
“That’s because everyone is.” Chris rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. Loudly, she says, “She needs to pull that stick out of her ass.”
From her room Margot yells, “I heard that!”
“I meant for you to!” Chris yells back, scraping up the last piece of gnocchi for herself.
I sigh. “She’s leaving so soon.”
Snickering, Chris says, “So is Joshy, like, going to light a candle for her every night until she comes back home?”
I hesitate. While I’m not sure if it’s still supposed to be a secret, I am sure that Margot wouldn’t want Chris knowing any of her personal business. All I say is, “I’m not sure.”
“Wait a minute. Did she dump him?” Chris demands.
Reluctantly I nod. “Don’t say anything to her, though,” I warn. “She’s still really sad about it.”
“Margot? Sad?” Chris picks at her nails. “Margot doesn’t have normal human emotions like the rest of us.”
“You just don’t know her,” I say. “Besides, we can’t all be like you.”
She grins a toothy grin. She has sharp incisors, which make her look always a little bit hungry. “True.”
Chris is pure emotion. She screams at the drop of a hat. She says sometimes you have to scream out emotions; if you don’t, they’ll fester. The other day she screamed at a lady at the grocery store for accidentally stepping on her toes. I don’t think she’s in any danger of her emotions festering.
“I just can’t believe that in a few days she’ll be gone,” I say, feeling sniffly all of a sudden.
“She’s not dying, Lara Jean. There’s nothing to get all boo-hoo about.” Chris pulls at a loose string on her red shorts. They’re so short that when she’s sitting, you can see her underwear. Which are red to match her shorts. “In fact, I think this is good for you. It’s about time you did your own thing and stopped just listening to whatever Queen Margot says. This is your junior year, beotch. This is when it’s supposed to get good. French some guys, live a little, you know?”
“I live plenty,” I say.
“Yeah, at the nursing home.” Chris snickers and I glare at her.
Margot started volunteering at the Belleview Retirement Community when she got her driver’s license; it was her job to help host cocktail hour for the residents. I’d help sometimes. We’d set out peanuts and pour drinks and sometimes Margot would play the piano, but usually Stormy hogged that. Stormy is the Belleview diva. She rules the roost. I like listening to her stories. And Miss Mary, she might not be so good at conversation due to her dementia, but she taught me how to knit.
They have a new volunteer there now, but I know that at Belleview it really is the more the merrier, because most of the residents get so few visitors. I should go back soon; I miss going there. And I for sure don’t appreciate Chris making fun of it.
“Those people at Belleview have lived more life than everyone we know c
ombined,” I tell her. “There’s this one lady, Stormy, she was a USO girl! She used to get a hundred letters a day from soldiers who were in love with her. And there was this one veteran who lost his leg—he sent her a diamond ring!”
Chris looks interested all of a sudden. “Did she keep it?”
“She did,” I admit. I think it was wrong of her to keep the ring since she had no intention of marrying him, but she showed it to me, and it was beautiful. It was a pink diamond, very rare. I bet it’s worth so much money now.
“I guess Stormy sounds kind of like a badass,” Chris says begrudgingly.
“Maybe you could come with me to Belleview sometime,” I suggest. “We could go to their cocktail hour. Mr. Perelli loves to dance with new girls. He’ll teach you how to fox-trot.”
Chris makes a horrible face like I suggested we go hang out at the town dump. “No, thanks. How about I take you dancing?” She nudges her chin toward upstairs. “Now that your sister’s leaving, we can have some real fun. You know I always have fun.”
It’s true, Chris does always have fun. Sometimes a little too much fun, but fun nonetheless.
5
THE NIGHT BEFORE MARGOT LEAVES, all three of us are in her room helping pack up the last little things. Kitty is organizing Margot’s bath stuff, packing it nice and neat in the clear shower caddy. Margot is trying to decide which coat to bring.
“Should I bring my peacoat and my puffy coat or just my peacoat?” she asks me.
“Just the peacoat,” I say. “You can dress that up or down.” I’m lying on her bed directing the packing process. “Kitty, make sure the lotion cap is on tight.”
“It’s brand-new—course it’s on tight!” Kitty growls, but she double-checks.
“It gets cold in Scotland sooner than it does here,” Margot said, folding the coat and setting it on top of her suitcase. “I think I’ll just bring both.”
“I don’t know why you asked if you already knew what you were going to do,” I say. “Also, I thought you said you were coming home for Christmas. You’re still coming home for Christmas, right?”
“Yes, if you’ll stop being a brat,” Margot says.
Honestly, Margot isn’t even packing that much. She doesn’t need a lot. If it was me, I’d have packed up my whole room, but not Margot. Her room looks the same, almost.
Margot sits down next to me, and Kitty climbs up and sits at the foot of the bed. “Everything’s changing,” I say, sighing.
Margot makes a face and puts her arm around me. “Nothing’s changing, not really. We’re the Song girls forever, remember?”
Our father stands in the doorway. He knocks, even though the door is open and we can clearly see it is him. “I’m going to start packing up the car now,” he announces. We watch from the bed as he lugs one of the suitcases downstairs, and then he comes up for the other one. Drily he says, “Oh no, don’t get up. Don’t trouble yourselves.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t,” we sing out.
For the past week our father has been in spring-cleaning mode, even though it isn’t spring. He’s getting rid of everything—the bread machine we never used, CDs, old blankets, our mother’s old typewriter. It’s all going to Goodwill. A psychiatrist or someone could probably connect it to Margot’s leaving for college, but I can’t explain the exact significance of it. Whatever it is, it’s annoying. I had to shoo him away from my glass-unicorn collection twice.
I lay down my head in Margot’s lap. “So you really are coming home for Christmas, right?”
“Right.”
“I wish I could come with you.” Kitty pouts. “You’re nicer than Lara Jean.”
I give her a pinch.
“See?” she crows.
“Lara Jean will be nice,” Margot says, “as long as you behave. And you both have to take care of Daddy. Make sure he doesn’t work too many Saturdays. Make sure he takes the car in for inspection next month. And make sure you buy coffee filters—you’re always forgetting to buy coffee filters.”
“Yes, drill sergeant,” Kitty and I chorus. I search Margot’s face for sadness or fear or worry, for some sign that she is scared to go so far away, that she will miss us as much as we will miss her. I don’t see it, though.
The three of us sleep in Margot’s room that night.
Kitty falls asleep first, as always. I lie in the dark beside her with my eyes open. I can’t sleep. The thought that tomorrow night Margot won’t be in this room—it makes me so sad I can hardly bear it. I hate change more than almost anything.
In the dark next to me Margot asks, “Lara Jean . . . do you think you’ve ever been in love before? Real love?”
She catches me off guard; I don’t have an answer ready for her. I’m trying to think of one, but she’s already talking again.
Wistfully, she says, “I wish I’d been in love more than once. I think you should fall in love at least twice in high school.” Then she lets out a little sigh and falls asleep. Margot falls asleep like that—one dreamy sigh and she’s off to never-never land, just like that.
* * *
I wake up in the middle of the night and Margot’s not there. Kitty’s curled up on her side next to me, but no Margot. It’s pitch dark; only the moonlight filters through the curtains. I crawl out of bed and move to the window. My breath catches. There they are: Josh and Margot standing in the driveway. Margot’s face is turned away from him, toward the moon. Josh is crying. They aren’t touching. There’s enough space between them for me to know that Margot hasn’t changed her mind.
I drop the curtain and find my way back to the bed, where Kitty has rolled farther into the center. I push her back a few inches so there will be room for Margot. I wish I hadn’t seen that. It was too personal. Too real. It was supposed to be just for them. If there was a way for me to unsee it, I would.
I turn on my side and close my eyes. What must it be like, to have a boy like you so much he cries for you? And not just any boy. Josh. Our Josh.
To answer her question: yes, I think I have been in real love. Just once, though. With Josh. Our Josh.
6
THIS IS HOW MARGOT AND josh got together. In a way I heard about it from Josh first.
It was two years ago. We were sitting in the library during our free. I was doing math homework; Josh was helping because he’s good at math. We had our heads bent over my page, so close I could smell the soap he’d used that morning. Irish Spring.
And then he said, “I need your advice on something. I like someone.”
For a split second I thought it was me. I thought he was going to say me. I hoped. It was the start of the school year. We’d hung out nearly every day that August, sometimes with Margot but mostly just by ourselves, because Margot had her internship at the Montpelier plantation three days a week. We swam a lot. I had a great tan from all the swimming. So for that split second I thought he was going to say my name.
But then I saw the way he blushed, the way he looked off into space, and I knew it wasn’t for me.
Mentally, I ran through the list of girls it could be. It was a short list. Josh didn’t hang out with a ton of girls; he had his best friend Jersey Mike, who had moved from New Jersey in middle school, and his other best friend, Ben, and that was it.
It could have been Ashley, a junior on the volleyball team. He’d once pointed her out as the cutest of all the junior girls. In Josh’s defense, I’d made him do it: I asked him who was the prettiest girl in each grade. For prettiest freshman, my grade, he said Genevieve. Not that I was surprised, but it still gave me a little pinch in my heart.
It could have been Jodie, the college girl from the bookstore. Josh often talked about how smart Jodie was, how she was so cultured because she’d studied abroad in India and was now Buddhist. Ha! I was the one who was half-Korean; I was the one who’d taught Josh how to eat with chopsticks. He’d had kimchi for the first time at my house.
I was about to ask him who when the librarian came over to shush us, and then we
went back to doing work and Josh didn’t bring it up again and I didn’t ask. Honestly, I didn’t want to know. It wasn’t me, and that was all I cared about.
I didn’t think for one second that the girl he liked was Margot. Not that I didn’t see her as a girl who could be liked. She’d been asked out before, by a certain type of guy. Smart guys who would partner up with her in chemistry and run against her for student government. In retrospect, it wasn’t so surprising that Josh would like Margot, since he’s that kind of guy too.
If someone were to ask me what Josh looks like, I would say he’s just ordinary. He looks like the kind of guy you’d expect would be good at computers, the kind of guy who calls comic books graphic novels. Brown hair. Not a special brown, just regular brown. Green eyes that go muddy in the center. He’s on the skinny side, but he’s strong. I know because I sprained my ankle once by the old baseball field and he piggybacked me all the way home. He has freckles, which make him look younger than his age. And a dimple on his left check. I’ve always liked that dimple. He has such a serious face otherwise.
What was surprising, what was shocking, was that Margot would like him back. Not because of who Josh was, but because of who Margot was. I’d never heard her talk about liking a boy before, not even once. I was the flighty one, the flibbertigibbet, as my white grandma would say. Not Margot. Margot was above all that. She existed on some higher plane where those things—boys, makeup, clothes—didn’t really matter.
The way it happened was sudden. Margot came home from school late that day in October; her cheeks were pink from the cold mountainy air and she had her hair in a braid and a scarf around her neck. She’d been working on a project at school, it was dinnertime, and I’d cooked chicken parmesan with thin spaghetti in watery tomato sauce.