sure,” I said, trying to sound uninterested. I didn’t want any part of their fantasizing; it embarrassed me almost as much as my lack of experience did.
“You’ve never thought about it?” Maritza pressed.
I waited a beat. Maritza and JaKory were silent. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I guess it’s like … I don’t want to overthink it, because I want it to surprise me when it happens.”
They remained silent. Then Maritza said, “Doesn’t that take the agency out of it?”
I craned my neck to look at her. “What?”
“I just mean, like … you can’t just expect to be surprised with your first kiss. Some part of you has to go for it. I mean, if I hadn’t dropped those hints to E.J., or made an effort to see him, we never would have kissed.”
I felt my heart rate pick up. It was typical of Maritza to think she had everything figured out already, but I knew she was right, and I didn’t want to admit it. The problem was, I didn’t know how to “go for it.” I didn’t even know where to start.
Maritza’s point seemed to suck the energy out of the room. None of us were looking at each other; we were all lost in our own thoughts. Then JaKory said, with his eyes on the floor, “My mom and Philip broke up.”
Maritza and I looked up. JaKory’s mom had been dating Philip for a full year, and JaKory often gushed that he’d never seen her so happy.
“What?” Maritza gasped. “When?”
“Last week, during finals,” JaKory mumbled. “I didn’t feel like talking about it. It was easier just to focus on studying.”
Maritza and I exchanged looks. JaKory worried about his mom a lot. She’d divorced JaKory’s dad years ago, and JaKory was always fretting about her being lonely.
“What happened?” I asked gently.
“She said she and Philip weren’t on the same page, that they had the whirlwind but not the calm blue sky.”
“Your mom’s a fucking poet,” Maritza said.
“What if loneliness runs in my genes?” JaKory asked in a low voice. “What if I’ll never experience love because I’m just not compatible with anyone else, like my parents?”
“Oh, ’Kory, of course you will,” Maritza said.
“You’ll definitely find someone,” I said, holding his eyes. “You’re too wonderful not to.”
Even as I said it, I felt a flickering of doubt in the pit of my stomach. If I believed so certainly that JaKory was destined to find someone, didn’t that mean I could believe it of myself, too? And yet I couldn’t fathom how or when that might happen.
Maritza must have been thinking along the same lines, because she gripped her head in her hands and said, “We’ll all find someone. I just need to figure out how.”
It sounded more like a wish than a certainty. For the second time that day, I found myself yearning for something that seemed far outside my reach.
Just then, we heard the upstairs door creak open, followed by footsteps pounding down the stairs. I sat up as JaKory pressed pause on our gay movie; luckily, the frame was only showing the interior view of the main character’s apartment.
My little brother, Grant, zipped around the corner, sweeping his hair out of his eyes. He looked sweaty the way all fourteen-year-old boys look sweaty, even when they’re not. His legs had gotten long but were still so skinny that it almost looked like he was running around on stilts.
“Can you take me to the movies tonight?” he asked breathlessly.
I stared at him for a moment, caught off guard by the request. He hadn’t asked me for anything in months, not since he’d hit his growth spurt and started “feeling himself,” as my dad put it. Grant and I had been pretty close when we were younger—he’d even danced along to some of the Celine Dion choreography that one time—but over the last year, as he’d started to excel in sports and spend more time with his friends, it had become pretty obvious that he saw me as nothing more than his boring older sister.
“Why can’t Mom or Dad take you?” I asked.
“They have that gala to go to for Mom’s job,” Grant said, rolling his eyes. “They said to ask you. Mom said they give you gas money for a reason. So can you take me?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Ask me later.”
He dropped his head back like I was impossible. “Come on, Codi, all my friends are gonna be there!”