Chapter 7
Once the event is over and we’re both home, Mom plops her purse on the kitchen counter, next to where I’m sitting and eating
a bowl of cereal. As soon as I got back down to the kitchen at the event, I complained of a stomachache and took the bus back
home. This is the first time we’ve been alone together.
“What was that all about?” Johnny had asked while I was gathering up my things.
“Nothing. He just wanted the oat milk warmed up.”
Mom didn’t say anything, but I could feel her listening in. I don’t think Johnny fully believed me, but he let it slide.
“I’m sorry,” Mom says now. “I truly didn’t think he was going to be there.”
I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it anymore. “I know. Me either. But like you said earlier,
it was nice to see him. I mentioned I’ve got a more private life going on here and he promised not to say anything. So it’s
fine. I’m going to go get some homework done.”
I load my bowl and spoon in the dishwasher and head upstairs before she can ask any more questions.
I change into pajama pants and a big sweatshirt and put my hair up, but I can’t focus. So I switch over from homework to googling “Lucas Cordova.”
There are millions of results, and all the pictures at the top of the browser are recent. There isn’t a single one of young
me anywhere on the first six pages of image results.
I click through article upon article. Magazine covers, gossip pieces screaming about his rumored flings, an Architectural Digest tour of his place in Brentwood.
Luke is only a year and a half older than me, and he already owns his own house. I don’t even know the steps one would have
to take to furnish a house, let alone buy one. I can barely even drive a car. He’s like a full-fledged person. I’ve never
felt younger or dumber.
I push away the computer. It feels impossible how far our lives have diverged. If I’d told my younger self that Luke and I
had gone no-contact for years, and that we’d had an awkward run-in as strangers, younger me would have cried.
But that was then, back when we were friends. Before our kiss. Or should I say, before the dare.
Our characters were supposed to kiss on the show. It was the last season, but we didn’t know that yet; I’d just turned thirteen
and he was fourteen. In the episode, the script went that Luke’s character was waiting in a dark closet for a popular girl
from his school, but then I come in to get a coat, and he tugs me in—thinking I’m her—and kisses me. It was supposed to get
a laugh.
The day before we were due to shoot the scene, we were joking about the kiss, and Luke said to me, “We practice everything else. Maybe we should practice this, too.”
“Kissing?” I asked, as shocked as I was thrilled.
“Yeah.”
And I remember thinking that he looked nervous about what I was going to say.
“Okay,” I said, trying to play it off like this wasn’t something I had spent the past few years dreaming about. “Sure.”
So we did. He took my face gently in his hands and he kissed me. His lips were soft and his breath was minty. When we finished,
he grinned his loose, goofy grin at me.
“Cool,” he said. “Now we know. And we’ll be comfortable doing it again.”
The way he said it was confusing and exciting. Again, like on camera? Or in private?
But then I heard the truth. Two of the other child actors on set, Matthew Gunn and someone else, I can’t remember his name,
were joking about it.
“No, I swear, he kissed her,” Matthew was saying. “I dared him to, for like a hundred bucks. It’s obvious she’s obsessed with
him. I thought he should throw her a bone, you know?”
Then they laughed, and my heart broke.
The next day, the day of the actual scripted kiss, I got so locked up on camera that Brett made us reshoot it a dozen times.
Luke kept asking if I was okay. I still remember the sound of Brett’s feet slapping around set in his Havaianas, the sound
getting more aggressive the more frustrated he got.
“CeCe!” Brett screamed. “Get your head on straight and kiss him like you mean it!”
But I couldn’t. I did such a bad job that they had to cut the storyline from the episode. It still makes me want to shrink
in on myself to think how furious Brett was with me.
It was right around then that Luke booked his first feature, too, and it was the only thing he wanted to talk about. That
was when things really began to shift between us, like sand beneath my feet. It wasn’t long afterward that we wrapped the
season, the show was canceled, and—on top of everything else going on in my life—I didn’t know how to continue with our friendship
after the humiliation that my best friend only kissed me because someone dared him to.
Suddenly, somehow, it’s almost eight p.m., and I still have two subjects’ worth of work to do before school tomorrow.
I go into the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face.
The further I am away from our conversation, the more I feel like a fool.
I let the faucet run and stare at myself in the mirror. “‘In the flesh!’” I say, before splashing my face. “‘Oat milk, coming
right up! Freshly milked!’”
I splash my face a few times before I look back in the mirror. “You are a spectacular fool.”
I splash my face again. “Why do you even care? You aren’t friends. You haven’t been friends for a long time.”
“Hey, sweetheart? Everything okay in there?”
“Yeah!” I call back. I didn’t realize Mom was upstairs. “Fine!”
“It’s just . . . you’re talking to yourself.
” She sounds worried, which makes me feel like the most unhinged person on the planet.
I used to talk to myself like this toward the end of Bricks.
And then even more after the divorce. It was one of the “stress signals” Mom referenced when she first started getting on
my case about therapy.
It occurs to me that I haven’t told her I canceled all future sessions with Dr. Z. Now is certainly not the time, though.
I make a mental note to do that at a future date. I dry my face and pull open the door to show her I’m okay. “Just something
annoying with my homework. It’s no big deal.”
“Okay . . . well . . . you have a visitor.”
Mom always tells me I have a “visitor” whenever Evie drops by unannounced, like she knows it’s a treat.
But dropping by at eight on a Sunday night is unusual, even for Evie.
Mom is saying my name and telling me to wait, but I’m already taking the stairs two at a time. “So to what do I owe the—”
Except it’s not Evie.
It’s Luke.