Status: Complete

Food, Cats, and Being Lazy

Fifteen

My lips were still tingling. I sat back down on the steps and stayed there with my fingers against my lips. For a moment, I allowed myself to pretend it wasn’t Vincent. It didn’t matter. Someone kissed me. He put his lips on mine, and he didn’t even seem repulsed. So I focused only on that for a moment.

But the other part was too big of a problem to ignore. That was something I never wanted to do to Paige. I never thought I would. But it happened anyway. And I’d liked it. Should I say something? Was this something I should tell her? Or should I just pretend it never happened and secretly hate Vincent for the rest of my life? He was the only person who’d ever been nice to me, and now I was angry at him too.

At least it took my mind off of Anton and Laura.

I stayed there until the door opened, and Vincent came back out. He looked at me like he wasn’t expecting me to still be there. Maybe he was just hoping I’d gone inside, so we didn’t have to talk about it. And I wanted to yell at him. But something on his expression told me not to. He looked like he’d been crying. His eyes were glassy and red. I almost asked if he was okay, but he just rushed past me and said, “I’ll talk to you later,” before hurrying down the path and narrowly missing stepping on the snail. I heard his car door shut, and then he zoomed off like he was racing.

I decided it was probably a good idea to go back inside. I walked in and looked at the living room where my mom was talking to her friends about what scents would be hot for summer. They were passing around cubes of wax to sniff like weirdos. I headed up the stairs with my heart pounding like a drum. Paige was going to burst out of her room and scream at me for kissing her boyfriend. He’d been crying because he told her. They must have broken up over it. She was going to hate me. And when I got to my room, I could hear her crying.

I ruined their relationship. I knew she heard me in the hallway, but she never came out. She was going to hate me for the rest of my life. I closed myself up in my room and sat down on my bed. I waited for her to come storming in, screaming at me for what happened on the front porch. But she never did. Eventually, she stopped crying, and I fell asleep to a rerun of Barefoot Contessa.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt sick. I was still worried about Paige leaving her room just to attack me, but she didn’t leave it at all. I went downstairs to have breakfast with my parents, and they were too busy to notice that Paige was still in her room. It was the one thing we were supposed to do as a family. But my dad just drank coffee and ate toast, and my mom was busy typing away at a calculator as she went over her sales from her party. Phillip was just too absorbed in his Gameboy to care about the drama of his older sisters.

She didn’t leave her room all day. I only heard her once when she went to the kitchen to get something to eat. Then she went back to her room and cried some more. I knew it was probably my sisterly duty to ask her how she was doing and try to comfort her. But I couldn’t face her if I was the reason she was crying. I’d broken her heart.

I never thought of Vincent as anything other than my sister’s boyfriend. Maybe once or twice, I played around with the idea that he could actually be my friend. But never anything beyond that. And even that friendship was built on pity and not actually because he liked me. It was one of the reasons why he was so easy to talk to. I never had to worry about anything else.

Did Vincent like me? How long had this been going on? Did I like him back?

No.

Definitely not.

I didn’t think I’d ever given him the impression that I liked him. I knew he was cute. But he knew I had a crush on Collin because Paige let everyone know. I didn’t act the same around him that I did around Collin. I didn’t freak out when he talked to me or devise scenarios about how he might secretly like me. Someone doesn’t go from sister’s boyfriend and occasional friend to secret crush overnight.

But then I remembered that I’d accidentally called him “perfect” right to his face. But I’d seen his reaction to that statement, and he didn’t look like he had any sudden romantic revelation that I was in love with him or anything. Instead, he just seemed to find it amusing.

He didn’t call or come by the house on Sunday. On Monday morning, I was so nervous getting ready for school that I could barely get my brush through my hair after my shower. Paige came into the kitchen when I was eating breakfast, but she didn’t say anything. She looked as perfect as ever as she grabbed a Pop-Tart from the box on the counter and then went out to meet her friends as if her weekend had been anything less than amazing. I looked out of the window just to see who she was leaving with. It kind of irritated me to see Vincent’s ugly gray car on the curb. I didn’t like how she hopped in beside him and kissed his cheek like everything was just fine.

So they didn’t break up because of me. It didn’t look like they’d broken up at all. And okay, it wasn’t that I was jealous. Vincent didn’t like me, and he never would. But I was angry. It was just like how it was with Laura. I thought he was my friend. Now I had a whole list of things and people who’d betrayed me. Laura, Collin, Anton, and Vincent. And okay, Collin didn’t actually betray me. But I did spend a great deal of time thinking he might actually like me. And it hurt just the same. My first kiss was with a boy who didn’t even like me. How perfectly—expected.

If anything, Vincent’s kiss just made the situation worse. I was already hurt, but his betrayal cut deeper than the others. Laura was never really my friend. Collin barely knew I existed. I didn’t know Anton outside of math class. But I did know Vincent. He knew me. He’d been in my house. He had a nickname for me. We watched Superstar together and laughed at all the same parts. I let him play with my cat. We had memories. He tried to comfort me when I was upset. He said he was really my friend. It wasn’t the same as the others. This one actually hurt worse.

I didn’t want him to know how badly he’d hurt my feelings. I wanted him to think I didn’t care. No, I wanted him to know I was mad. I didn’t want him to think it hurt me. Just that it made me angry. I only saw him once at school. I was going to the stairwell at lunch and passed him with Paige and all their friends.

She seemed so normal. She was smiling and laughing as if she hadn’t spent her entire weekend crying in her room. But Vincent didn’t look normal at all. He was staring at the tile mural on the floor and didn’t even seem to notice what his friends were talking about, let alone that I’d just come through the atrium.

He dropped Paige off after school, and she went right back to her room to cry. But other than that, nothing was different. They were always together. Still dating, apparently. And Paige treated me like she always did. If she’d known about that kiss, she would have killed me. If he hadn’t told her, I wasn’t going to do it.