been weird for me. It had felt like—finally. It had put me into my body, in control of it, my hips pressed into hers and my hand on her waist. The few times I’d kissed boys, in hallway enclaves outside middle school dances when the chaperones weren’t looking, I’d felt so far away from myself. Even with Brian, the eighth-grade boyfriend who was so cute and so nice and so patient with me, kissing had felt like the warm-up to a game I’d never get good at. There was such an enormous gap between what my friends described kissing boys to be like and what I actually felt when I did it, I wondered for a while if some key sensory ending was missing from my mouth. Even when I knew for sure that I liked girls more than I’d ever like boys, I worried.
Then I kissed Jamie.
And then Jamie told me kissing me was too weird. We hardly spoke that whole summer, and it wasn’t until three months later that I got to kiss her again. But then I got to kiss her for eleven months straight. Even after we started sleeping together, kissing her was still my favorite part. It would have been enough for me if that was all there was. Maybe I knew, from the start, that our time was limited, and that’s why I kissed her every chance I got. It all felt too lucky to last.
It was annoying to me now, how grateful I’d felt. Three months was nothing. I would’ve waited for her forever.
I didn’t say any of this when Jamie came over to my house and broke up with me. I said, Okay. I said, If that’s what you want. I said, If you’re done, I should really go study. She cried and, for once in my blubbery life, I didn’t. Not until she was gone and I was upstairs, knocking on my mom’s bedroom door because I realized I didn’t know what else to do. The only person I really wanted to talk to about something as monumental as being dumped by Jamie was Jamie.
I needed to be stronger, and thicker-skinned. I remembered the letter from my dad, now stacked atop its predecessors in my old soccer bag in the closet, and I knew what he’d tell me if I saw him next month, when I told him I didn’t have a girlfriend anymore—the same thing he’d said to me anytime I told him I was sick, or had done badly on a test, or lost a soccer game: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.” Then he’d tell me the same long story about his war-hero grandfather, my great-grandfather, who, in his telling, was the tallest, strongest man who ever lived to be two hundred years old. (In my mom’s telling, he was just “a grade-A asshole.”) He died well before I was born, but I’d seen pictures of him looking handsome in his uniform, and on my thirteenth birthday my dad gave me his worn silver army bracelet.
I went to my dresser and pulled the bracelet from the velvet-lined box I stored it in, and slipped it onto my wrist. I didn’t know if it was good luck or not, because I’d always been too afraid to wear it out of the house. Today seemed like a good day to change that.
* * *
—
I knew Ruby’s family had money because she’d gone to the most expensive K-8 in the county and had the kind of smooth, shiny hair even good genes can’t account for. But I hadn’t given the amount of money a lot of thought until I found myself on the way to La Jolla to pick her up—and not just La Jolla, but prime, multimillion, oceanfront La Jolla. Like, the part of the neighborhood where there was a house on the bluff with an elevator that descended to the person’s private beach. Where Bruce Wayne would live, if he lived in San Diego.
I took the curving streets slowly the closer I got, not wanting to be too exactly on time, but when I pulled up to Ruby’s house she was sitting on the front step already, waiting. I waved, and she started the long journey down the driveway