Chapter 22
WE SIT IN SILENCE, staring at the evidence splayed out before us. All my favorite foods, ordered and picked up by Wilson and brought here for me .
“The evidence doesn’t lie,” I say. Wilson is taking so long to process this revelation that my stomach is in knots. “You’re being very quiet. It’s scaring me.”
“I don’t know what to say.” He turns to me with a look of utter shock on his face.
I can’t help but laugh. And that laughter helps ease the tension, take away of some of the scariness, the uncertainty.
“Say you have a tiny crush on me,” I blurt out. I can’t seem to stop smiling.
“I don’t .”
I pick up a fry and use it to point to the food. “The evidence doesn’t lie.”
Wilson’s eyes narrow. “The evidence is a coincidence.”
“Oh sure, Wilson. It’s just a coincidence that you ordered all my favorite foods, my favorite desserts, my favorite drinks, and planned the perfect date that I explicitly told you about a month ago. Geez, what a crazy coincidence!”
He blinks, like my words are finally sinking through his thick head. “You’ve infiltrated my mind like a parasite.”
My mouth drops open before my shock turns into laughter. “That is the last thing I ever expected you to say.”
And then Wilson smiles, and relief floods through my chest. I’m not crazy. I’m not imagining it. He knows it, too. “I’m not going to say I have a crush on you,” he tells me.
“So you’re going to lie? Deny your feelings? Not listen to your heart? Wow .”
He shakes his head. But as he does so, he inches closer. “In my defense, your favorite foods are quite generic. I think everyone in this park would be happy with this meal. In fact, I’m pretty sure fries and nuggets are called a Happy Meal .”
“Yes, but you planned it specifically for me. Because you like me. Remember?”
“Be quiet and eat your chicken nuggets.”
I do just that.
All the food has gone a bit cold, but I’m so giddy, nothing can upset me.
All the pining. All the wishing that this date was for me, and here we are—with a date that Wilson did plan for me. Sure, he did so unknowingly. But it still counts!
“The other night at SmartMart—”
I interject. “When you almost kissed me in the parking lot.”
Now his mouth drops open. “ You almost kissed me .”
“Wilson, be so serious. You were moving your face down to my face!”
“Because you were moving your face up to my face!”
We are both smiling so wide our words come out funny.
Somewhere between the banter and the insults, something else grew. Something we were both desperately trying to ignore. Which ended up being a bit counterproductive. By ignoring this for so long, it grew out of hand. Now it’s too big to ignore.
“You were only supposed to help me win Kenzie back,” he teases.
I bite into another nugget. “Well, that ship has sailed. Wait—I still get my promotion. Right?”
He chuckles. “The promotion is yours.”
I sigh happily, thinking of a frogless future. “I could kiss you right now.”
The words are out before I can tell myself to slam my mouth shut and keep them trapped firmly inside.
“Could you?” he asks, his brown eyes turning to quicksand, pulling me right in.
“I could,” I say. “But I don’t know if you want that. Considering you dislike me so much.”
His face is close enough to mine that if I move even the slightest, our noses will touch.
“Don’t get it wrong, Jackie. I still dislike you very much,” he says. “But maybe now I dislike you a little less.”
My heart triples in size.
“What a coincidence,” I say. “I think I dislike you a little less, too.”
Wilson’s face has gotten so close to mine that his brown eyes are all I see. I wait for him to pull back, to yell the punch line to the joke that always seems to come. But this time, it never does. This is real. This fluttering in my chest must mimic the fluttering in his chest; I’m not the only person leaning in— He leans in, too.
Now my only thought is how badly I want to kiss Wilson Monroe.
And just like that, Wilson’s lips find mine. I once hated so many things about him, but what I now hate the most is that I ever hated him at all.
He’s gentle and sweet, all the things I thought he never was. I feel it now in the way his fingers graze my cheeks, the way he cups my face and holds me close to him. He takes over all my senses—I smell his peppery cologne; I hear the steady hum of his breath; I touch the soft strands of his hair; all I see is him. When he pulls away, I’ve never been left so breathless. We stare at each other in silence, searching one another’s faces and coming to the same answer.
Then, we begin to laugh.
“ I’m sorry ,” I say, giggling uncontrollably. “I just never thought I’d be kissing you.”
There is a permanent blush on his cheeks. “Thanks, Jackie. That’s exactly what a guy wants to hear.”
I grab a fistful of his shirt and pull him to me. “Come back here, you big baby.”
We kiss again. In fact, we don’t stop kissing. At some point, the sun dips below the horizon and the sky turns a midnight blue. The food has gone cold, the dessert is probably stale, and I could not care any less. Wilson and I are lying on the blanket, a tangle of limbs, and my lips are swollen from his. It’s the last possible way I thought this evening would end, the exact way I hoped it would.
When we are nearly the only people left at the park and it’s late enough that I have three missed calls from Julie, we begin to pack up.
Rather Wilson begins to pack up. I lie on my stomach, kick my feet in the air, and study his face. The slant of his jawline, the curve of his nose. Those full lips that are the prettiest shade of pink. All the tiny details I spent so long overlooking.
“You really had no idea you were planning this date for me?” I ask.
Wilson is repacking the food. “No idea,” he says. “I didn’t do it on purpose, at least. Or—I don’t know. Maybe a part of me knew? But I wasn’t ready to accept it yet.”
“I always knew you had a thing for frogs. You freak.”
A laugh bursts out of him so forcefully he drops the container of fries. “You’ll really say anything, huh?”
I pick up the cold fries while he packs up the rest of the food. “On a scale of one to ten, how badly are you going to miss me in costume?”
“That’s an easy ten,” Wilson says. “Making fun of you was the highlight of my day.”
I throw a fry at his face. “Just so we’re clear, don’t think this means I forgive you for putting me in that costume to begin with.”
He picks up the fry and throws it right back at me. It thwacks me in the eyebrow. “Don’t think I’ve forgiven you for watching TV during working hours.”
“So we’re both still harboring resentment?”
I scrunch my face up when he kisses the tip of my nose. “Yes,” he says, “but maybe a little less than before.”
We finish packing up, and I text Julie that I don’t need a ride home. I then promptly ignore the winky-face emoji she sends and walk to the car with Wilson. I desperately want to hold his hand, but I’m not sure if we’re in hand-holding territory yet. Instead, I opt to walking as close to him as possible without either of us tripping.
As he drives me home, I open all the car windows, lean back against the headrest, and shut my eyes. The scent of Wilson’s cologne is carried through the wind, and I have never, ever felt anything remotely close to this. The feeling of happiness—of possibility and excitement—creeps up on me so silently that when it hits, it hits me hard.
When I open my eyes to peek at Wilson, he’s smiling as he drives.
“What is it?” I ask.
He stops at a stop sign for three seconds, of course he does, then quickly takes his eyes off the road to meet mine. “I was thinking of that day I found you in the storage room, watching TV on your phone.”
I think it’s about time I tell him the truth. “About that... I wasn’t watching TV.”
“Then what were you doing?”
“I was FaceTiming my sister Julie, who had just gotten engaged.”
“Jackie.” I see him struggle between wanting to look at me and keep his eyes on the road like the law-abiding citizen he is. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“What? Like it would’ve made you not demote me?”
“Of course it would have,” he says.
I blink at him. “You mean to say if I had told you the truth, I never would have had to wear the frog costume? I wouldn’t have had to suffer all this time?”
He takes one hand off the wheel to grab mine. “I wouldn’t have told my uncle to demote you if I knew your sister had gotten engaged. I’m not a monster.”
“No. Just a bit of a tyrant.” Then I groan, smacking the back of my head against the headrest. “I can’t believe I could have avoided all this pain, Wilson!”
“It’s not my fault,” he says defensively. “No one told you to lie to me.”
I think back to the months I spent sweating away in that costume. Smiling through pictures. Having my feet stepped on by children, my cheeks pinched. That’s a lifetime’s worth of pain and humiliation I’m never getting back.
“I’m sending you my therapy bill.”
Wilson chuckles in the darkness. “I don’t think any amount of therapy can erase those memories, Froggy.”
I swat his arm. “That nickname dies tonight.”
“I can’t agree to those terms.”
“Wilson—promise me all frog-related jokes are off the table.”
He actually pouts. “But that’ll make me very un-hoppy.”
He is on a speaking ban for the rest of the drive. I accomplish this by pretending to zipper his mouth shut and throwing the imaginary key out the window. I take frog slander very seriously, and I will not be having it ever again.
I can’t stop smiling. Especially as Wilson keeps his mouth pressed shut, making strange humming noises like a ghost trying to communicate with the living world. “What was that?” I say, and he just murmurs some more nonsense.
When he pulls up in front of my house, I pretend to unzip his lips. “You may speak, Willy.”
He lets out a long breath. “Whew, thank God. I missed the sound of my own voice.”
“I didn’t.” No matter how many times we may kiss, I don’t think the urge to violently insult him will ever fade.
Then we sit in the silent, dark car, hanging in a moment that feels suspiciously like the end of a date. “Well,” I say, “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”
“Your first day back as a waitress.”
This quaint peacefulness fills me from head to toe. A waitress once again. The title I spent so long fighting to reclaim is finally mine. “I’m so excited,” I say.
“Three words I never thought I’d hear you say.”
I catch myself by surprise when I lean across and kiss him. “Thanks for giving me my old job back.”
We say good night and I get out of the car. But when Wilson rolls down his window, I stick my face in one last time for another kiss, feeling almost shy in revealing this new giddy side of myself—like all my sharp edges are beginning to dull.
When he drives off, honking twice, I stand at the end of the driveway and wave. Then I turn around, head toward the porch, and two steps later, I scream. Suzy is sitting on the front steps with her camera out, recording the entire thing.
I groan. She even got the kiss. Dammit. I won’t ever live that down.
“Suz, you scared the shit out of me.” I collapse on the steps beside her, realizing there is so much I want to tell her.
Suzy stops recording and places the camera on her lap. “Sorry,” she says.
In those two syllables alone, I sense that something is wrong. You don’t maintain a friendship with someone for eighteen years without being able to read into every sigh, every word, every glance.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. I can already feel that weightless happiness leaving my body.
“How long have you and Wilson been dating?”
I always thought that when the day came and we had a conversation like this, we’d be snickering, laughing, completely giddy. Now she only sounds mad.
“We’re not dating,” I say. “Well, I don’t really know what we are. It kind of happened tonight.”
“Tonight,” she repeats. “Right, when you were too busy to hang out with me.”
I remember her text asking to hang out. Then I realize what this probably looks like from her perspective.
“I went to help him set up the date for—”
“And on Sunday,” she continues in a tone that’s layered with hurt, “when you told me you couldn’t leave the house, and then I saw Wilson pick you up.”
I can see the situation spiraling out before me, and I try to reel it back in before I manage to blow up another relationship. “It’s not like that,” I explain. “Jillian and Julie got into a huge fight that night. Jillian straight up left—we haven’t seen her since. We were all so worried, and when you texted me, I couldn’t leave.”
She fidgets with her camera. “You left with Wilson.”
“He needed help planning his date with Kenzie.” My words are rushed, desperate. There must be something I can say to stop this train before it derails.
“Then why are you kissing him in his car?”
My breathing has gone ragged. “There’s a lot to explain, but they’re done. Like, officially now. And me and Wilson kind of... bonded, I guess?”
Suzy snorts. “You know it’s more than that, Jackie.”
I just want to be in my bed, tucked in, falling asleep, knowing that across the hall is Jillian in hers, and across the lawn is Suzy in hers.
This night was good. It was the beginning of something new. I don’t want to taint it. I want to live in that bubble a bit longer. Is that too much to ask?
“I don’t know what it is,” I confess. Suzy isn’t someone I lie to. She doesn’t get the sugarcoated version of me, ever. She’s the one person who sees everything and always chooses to stay.
“You like him,” she says. Hearing it out loud is jarring. “Can’t you see how messed up this whole situation is?”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
“You broke him and Kenzie up, Jackie. Do you know what this looks like? It looks like you did it on purpose to take him for yourself!”
The second she puts that out here, I can’t unsee it. But the hurt still bubbles up. Is that really what she thinks of me? “That’s not true. You know that’s not what happened.”
“And what do you think Wilson is going to say when he finds out?” She must see the look of shock on my face, because she adds, “Right. You haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
Her words are such a blow to the heart, it knocks the air from my lungs. She’s right—I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. This is the first time it dawns on me that if Wilson finds out about the blog, about what I did to his relationship, he’s going to hate me all over again. Now it’ll seem like I ruined his relationship twice.
I drop my head into my hands. “I’ll figure it out,” I say, not believing it myself. “He’ll understand.”
“And what if he doesn’t, Jackie? Because I won’t be here when the time comes. I won’t be here to help you. I’ll be thousands of miles away, with nothing but a documentary to remember you by.”
“You said that documentary was for class,” I say.
“I lied,” she says. “It’s not for class. It’s for me . So that when I’m in a new city with new people, I have this little piece of my best friend that I get to look back on. That’s why I’ve been filming you.”
That’s when the tears start. And I’m not crying over a boy. I’m crying over our friendship. The constant I’ve had in my life since the day I was born. A constant so present and steady I think I began to take it for granted. But now, threatened with the fact that it might be ending soon, I’m realizing how desperately I need to hold on to this. That I’ve spent the summer with a pinkie’s grip on Suzy, when what I really needed was to use both hands.
“This was supposed to be our summer together,” she says. Her voice cracks on the word our . “This was our last summer in Ridgewood before I’m thousands of miles away for four years. And you’ve managed to spend it with everyone but me.”
“That— That’s not true.”
“You’re working two jobs.”
“To afford a car so we can have the road trip we’ve always talked about, Suzy!”
“And when you’re not working,” she continues, “you’re running that blog or spending all your time driving around with Wilson. You ditched our movie night last week to see him, too. How many times am I going to come second to him?”
“Suzy—you’re leaving!” Just like that, all my bottled-up emotions spill out. “I’m sorry for focusing on my blog and on Wilson, but you have to understand that I’m trying to figure out what’s next. I’m trying to find out who I am and where I even manage to fit in here. So that the second you leave town, I’m not left alone. I’m trying to figure out how to exist without my best friend.”
“Jackie—”
“You’ve always been here,” I say, swallowing that feeling of my throat closing in. “Our entire lives, we have been separated by no more than ten feet. I look out my freaking window and I see your bedroom. I’ve realized that so much of my life and who I am is shaped by the people I love. You, Julie, Jillian. I’m like this freaking patchwork of the three of you. And now that you’re leaving, it feels like I’m losing part of myself. Like I don’t know who I am or who to be without you. Do you get that? I’m sorry for being absent. I guess I’ve just been trying to come to terms with a world without you, so that it hurts the slightest bit less when you’re actually gone.”
Tears sting my eyes, and I begin to shut down. This week has been a test of strength, and I’m failing drastically. So many things have been piled and piled and piled on top of me, and I’m nowhere near strong enough to carry all this weight around without collapsing beneath it.
“I can’t do this right now,” I whisper. My eyes are drooping closed, and I don’t want to open them anymore. “You don’t understand how long this week has been. Between the fight with Jillian, the constant worrying if she’s all right... I’ve been trying my best to balance everything, and I’m sorry if you managed to slip through the cracks, but I can’t do this right now, Suzy. I can’t handle this on top of everything else. Can we please talk about this tomorrow? Can we make this right?”
She fidgets with her camera. “I didn’t know you were going through all that.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t had time to share it with you,” I say genuinely.
“We can talk tomorrow,” she says. “But you promise it’ll be tomorrow? Nothing else will get in the way?”
“I promise.”
We both stand up. I feel unsteady on my own two feet. When Suzy hugs me, I nearly fall down. “I know you’re trying your best,” she says, “but I need my best friend back.”
“Tomorrow,” I promise her. “Tomorrow, I’m all yours.” I mean it this time, too. No matter what craziness ensues tomorrow, I will be there with Suzy. She’s a promise I will no longer break.
I watch Suzy walk home, then head inside myself. When the door shuts behind me, I’m tempted to collapse against it. Somehow, I drag myself up the stairs and into my room. The entire house is quiet, all the bedroom doors closed. Except Jillian’s, obviously. She still isn’t home.
Before I can snuggle into bed, I realize I haven’t checked iDiary all day. After what happened with Jill and her promotion, I don’t know if I ever want to open it again. But thinking about all those unanswered messages makes me feel guilty, so I go to grab my laptop off my desk and realize it’s not there. Right—I left it downstairs on the couch.
But when I head to the living room, it isn’t there either.
Panic creeps in. I tell myself to breathe, calm down. It’s here somewhere. It has to be.
I head to Julie’s room and knock on her bedroom door. When five seconds go by without an answer, I nudge it open and find her asleep. Luckily Julie is a light sleeper, so all it takes is a quick shoulder nudge to wake her up.
“What is it?” she says, rubbing at her eyes.
“Have you seen my laptop?”
She groans, rolling back over in bed and pulling the blanket up to her chin. “I don’t know. Ask Jillian.”
I must have misheard her. “Why would Jillian know?”
“Mom said she came by today to pick up some clothes and stuff. She probably thought your laptop was hers, like she always does, and took it by accident.”
No. No no no no no.
That can’t be possible.
I run out of Julie’s room and back to mine. I throw the blanket off my bed, the pillows, everything. I look in drawers, in the closet, check every nook and cranny.
My laptop is nowhere to be found.
I’m barely able to force out a breath.
If Jillian took my laptop, it’s only a matter of time before she tries to use it.
And when she does, the first thing she’ll see is my iDiary account.