The Last Best Kiss (24 page)

No dangling silver bracelets and necklaces tonight—she’s wearing yoga pants and a hooded jacket over a tank top. No makeup either, and under the artfully cut black hair, her face looks haggard.

Hilary runs to her, and her mother manages to crush her to her chest despite the fact that Hilary is a few inches taller.

“They’re doing a scan now,” her husband says. “They’ll come get us as soon as she’s done.”

She glares at her husband above Hilary’s bent head. “I can’t believe I let you take them here. I blame myself. I know better than to trust you to be responsible.”

He flushes a dark red under his baseball cap. “I wasn’t even there.”

She practically spits her response. “Of course you weren’t.”

“The girls are seventeen! And they were together. Was I supposed to push them around in a stroller?”

“All I know,” says Yuri Lee, “is that my daughter left town with her father, and now I’m visiting her in the emergency room, where we still don’t know the extent of the damage. That’s all I know.”

He stares at her a moment, then turns and walks to the far side of the waiting room and throws himself in a chair.

Lucy touches my arm. “We should go,” she murmurs, and I nod.

Lucy, Phoebe, and I all slip over to Hilary and give her quick hugs. Poor Hil—her face is swollen, her eyes are red, and terror radiates off her in waves. I wish I could do more than just hug her and tell her I love her, but that’s all any of us can do.

We leave the waiting room and stand in front of the hospital entrance. Oscar’s the only one who remembers the cab company’s name, so he calls and they promise to send out a car. It’s dark and cold, and we all huddle together—as much for comfort as warmth.

“I can’t believe it’s still the same night,” says Phoebe. She’s pressed against Eric’s side, his arm slung around her neck like a scarf. “It feels like days have gone by since the sun went down.”

“Weeks,” Oscar says.

I’m standing near Finn, who’s still very quiet. I nudge his arm gently with mine, and he flashes me a wan smile.

It’s funny: I’ve felt so far away from him this year, and just a few hours ago, I thought maybe we weren’t even friends, but now it feels right to slip my hand into his and give his fingers a comforting squeeze. “It wasn’t your fault at all,” I say. “Her father was wrong. He wasn’t there. He didn’t see what happened.”

He curls his fingers around mine. “I just want her to be okay.”

“Me too.”

An ambulance comes roaring up and pulls into the driveway that ends at the ER entrance. From where we’re standing on the curb, I can’t see the person they take out on the stretcher, but I can hear one EMT’s grim comment to the other: “Second teenager of the night. That music festival’s going to be the gift that keeps on giving.” They disappear into the hospital.

I wonder who’s on the stretcher.
Please don’t let it be anyone we know. Please let whoever it is be okay. Please let Lily be okay. Please please please.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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nineteen

B
ack at the hotel, we leave the connecting doors open. Phoebe and Eric curl up together in a double bed in the boys’ room, and Oscar, Lucy, and I all squish together in one bed in the girls’ room. Finn ends up by himself in the bed next to ours. I feel bad he’s alone, but it would be too weird for me to crawl in next to him. Instead I lie on my side and surreptitiously watch him as he stares up at the ceiling in the dim light. The sun is just starting to come up.

I guess I doze a little, because bright daylight is leaking around the edges of the curtains when I open my eyes again, and I can easily see that Finn is sitting up in bed, reading a text. “Who is it?” I ask, propping myself up on an elbow. “What is it? Is it news?”

“It’s Hilary. Good news. Really good news. Lily’s conscious.”

“Oh my god.” I sit up, and that wakes Lucy, who’s next to me.

“What’s going on?” she says groggily. Oscar pops up next to her, instantly alert. “How’s Lily?”

I tell them. “What else does Hilary say?” I ask Finn, who’s thumbing a response into the phone.

“Not a lot. Lily’s still pretty confused, but at least she knew who they were. She doesn’t remember anything about last night.”

“But she’s okay?” Lucy says.

“The scan was clean, and she’s conscious—”

“Thank god.”

“—but they still have to keep her there a while longer just to be safe, make sure they haven’t missed anything.”

“Still,” I say. “It’s
good
.”

He lets his head sag back against the pillow and closes his eyes. It occurs to me that he probably didn’t sleep at all. “Yeah” is all he says.

We all snuggle back down into the beds.

Lucy whispers to me, “I want to go home.”

“Me too,” I say. “Unless the twins need us here.”

“Right,” she says sleepily. “Unless they need us here.”

We all get a chance to talk to Hilary on the phone later that morning. She says that Lily’s still very shaky and incoherent; her short-term memory is all wonky, and she can’t say more than a few words at a time. She’s very emotional and keeps bursting into tears. But she’s okay. That’s what Hilary keeps repeating over and over to each of us: “She’s okay.”

“They said she’s had a severe concussion, and that takes time to recover from,” Hilary tells me when I’m on with her. “So they want her to stay in the hospital for another forty-eight hours. But Anna, she’s going to be all right! The nurse started telling us stories of patients they’ve seen who broke their necks in shallow swimming pools. . . . I wish she hadn’t. I feel queasy just thinking about it. And grateful that nothing like that happened to Lucy.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Except now that it looks like she’s going to be fine, I sort of want to kill her. You get that, right?”

“Totally,” I say. “I sort of want to kill her too. Let’s both kill her once she’s all better.”

When it’s Lucy’s turn to talk to Hilary, she tells her that we’re over the music festival. “We just want to see you guys and go home.”

In the end we just go home without seeing them. Hilary’s parents don’t want us to come by the hospital and they tell Hilary to tell us that Lily needs absolute quiet.

Her father sends the van to pick us up.

Finn takes the seat next to me. He doesn’t talk much at first, just sticks in his earbuds as the van drives away from the hotel and listens to music with his eyes closed. Lucy and Oscar are together in front of us, Phoebe and Eric behind us.

Too many empty seats.

We’re pretty subdued. No one talks much. Mostly we doze.

At one point Finn checks a text and nudges my arm, then angles the phone toward me so I can see. It’s a photo from Hilary of Lily sitting up in bed smiling, which makes it pretty much the most wonderful photo I’ve ever seen. I look at Finn and see the relief in his face. And something else too. Something that makes him look away from me before I can figure out what it is. Confusion maybe? He turns back to the window and curls up with his phone again.

I sit for a few minutes, which turns into dozing for a few minutes, which turns into groggy waking up for a few minutes, and then I decide I should do something more useful with this time. I reach down and pull out the sketch pad from the bag at my feet.

“Hey,” Finn says, taking out his earbuds. “What happened with those sketches you were doing on the drive down? The ones of all of us. How did those come out? Can I see them?”

I quickly leaf through the pages, checking to see if my drawings are better than I remembered. But they’re not.

I close the pad. “No—they suck. I don’t like any of them.”

“I doubt they suck.”

“Thanks. I don’t feel very talented at the moment.” I touch the sketch pad. “None of these feel right to me. Sometimes when I work on something, it just feels right in a way I can’t explain. Even if it’s only partially done or I know there’s stuff I have to fix . . . I just get a feeling that it’s working. It feels satisfying. And none of these give me that feeling. They just sit on the page. They don’t have any soul.”

“You said you needed to do a portrait? Why’s that?”

“I can put together a portfolio for my applications without one, but it’s better to show some range.” I keep folding and unfolding a tiny triangle at the corner of the sketch-pad cover. “I guess my choice is to include a technically decent but emotionally soulless portrait or to not include it and hope they appreciate what I
can
do without worrying about what I can’t.”

“What does your gut say?”

“My gut?” I think for a moment. “I guess my gut says to not submit anything I’m not really proud of. But Oresco’s been through the application process a lot more times than my gut.”

“You want to hear my completely ignorant and therefore entirely discountable opinion?” Finn asks.

“Always,” I say, and mean it.

“Put in only what you love, and if they ask you why all your work has a similar feel to it, tell them it’s because that’s the work that excites and interests you right now as an artist. Tell them it might change someday, but for now this is the art you’re making.” He shrugs. “Maybe some admissions people will worry you can’t do anything else, but I bet most of them will admire you for having a vision.”

“Huh.” I think about it. “I can’t tell if I actually think you’re right or if I’m just so relieved at the thought of not having to do a decent sketch that I’m convincing myself I think you’re right.”

“In either case . . . can I please see the sketches?”

“Only if you promise to agree that they suck.” He reaches for the pad, but I move it away from him. “I’m serious, Finn. Don’t tell me they’re good—I hate phony praise.”

“I promise to adequately convey any disgust I feel,” he says. He takes the sketchbook out of my hands and leafs through it, flipping the pages up and over as he finishes with them. He doesn’t say anything, just studies them thoughtfully. He lingers for a while on the one of Lily. I drew her with her head leaning back against the van headrest—she’s smiling up at nothing in particular. To me, there’s something too static about it. It looks like her, but I didn’t capture her energy and restlessness.

The last one is of him. I drew him turning to show Lily a photo on his phone. (She’s not actually in the drawing, though, and neither is the phone.) I made him look too young in the drawing, more like a fourteen-year-old than a seventeen-year-old.

I didn’t do it on purpose.

Finn gazes at that one for a little while without saying anything, then closes the sketchbook and holds it out. “Please don’t make me say they suck.”

I snatch it away from him. “Is that how you keep your promises?”

“It’s either break a promise or lie. Which is more dishonorable?”

I glare at him.

“Fine.” He holds up his hands in mock surrender. “The one of Hilary—that wasn’t as good as the others.”

“That’s better. A tiny scrap of honesty.”

“But that’s all I’m saying. Unless I’m allowed to compliment you.”

I shake my head.

He taps the sketchbook. “Seriously, Anna, I think any art school is going to want you, whether you include one of these or not. You’re really talented.”

I feel a kind of warm glow in my face and chest. “Thanks.”

“I mean it.” There’s a pause. He and I are just sitting there, looking at each other. And then he leans back suddenly. “Text,” he says, and pulls out his phone. I’m so close to him right now, I can read what’s on the screen.

Lily wants you to come visit as soon as we get home.

I can also read Finn’s response, which he quickly punches in:

I’ll drive back to the hospital tonight if your dad will let me.

I stare at the seat in front of me and start thinking about how, one night before my parents got divorced, I woke up to the sound of my mother going downstairs at two in the morning. I could hear her pacing around down there, so I came down to see what was wrong, and she said, “Your father’s not home, and he’s not answering his phone.” I asked her if she was worried that he’d been in an accident, and she snarled, “Terrified. Because if that son of a bitch cripples himself, I’ll be stuck taking care of him for the rest of my life, like Ethan Frome’s wife.” I didn’t know who Ethan Frome was, and I didn’t want to think too much about the point she was making, but when I was older, I figured it all out: Mom was already thinking about leaving him and knew that her conscience and the world’s opinion wouldn’t let her walk away if Dad got badly injured. (He was fine, by the way—just on a work trip. There had been a breakdown in communication between the two of them. There was always a breakdown in communication.)

If my mother—who ultimately had no problem walking out on her husband and kids—felt that an injury changes everything, forces you to be loyal and present, that means Finn must be feeling completely committed to Lily after last night. Maybe he was feeling that way, anyway (but
was
he? He had seemed so fed up with her last night before the accident—even before this trip, come to think of it), but now their attachment is written in stone.

I move over in my seat, shifting away from him. I rest my head against the window, close my eyes, and pretend I’m going back to sleep.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

twenty

I
get dropped off with Lucy at her house. Neither of us wants to be alone—we’re still pretty shaken up. And I know her parents will make me feel more like I’ve come home than my own father will. Sure enough, they give us both warm, reassuring hugs, ask lots of concerned questions about Lily, and insist on plying us with tons of food. I realize I’m starving—we haven’t eaten since the night before, and now that all of Hilary’s texts are reassuring, I don’t feel sick to my stomach anymore.

We go up to Lucy’s room to do homework but make the mistake of working on her bed, and at some point we both drift off to sleep.