Late to the Party - Kelly Quindlen Page 0,66

day and hung out on the swings afterward.”

“Natalie made you play third wheel?” I teased.

“Right?” She paused. “I mean, kind of. Cliff brought his cousin along and I kinda had to hang out with him. I think they were hoping it’d be a double date.”

I got a breathless, pinching feeling in my chest. “Oh,” I said, forcing a laugh. This was the first time I’d heard her mention a guy, and my stomach soured, worrying I’d gotten her wrong. As nonchalantly as I could, I asked, “Was it?”

Lydia tipped her head to the side, the way people do when they’re trying to land on an answer. “A little,” she said finally.

My heart plummeted. “Oh.”

“It didn’t turn into anything, though,” she added hastily. “I didn’t like him enough.”

I nodded. Lydia was looking at me hesitantly, like she was searching for something. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I kicked off the ground and started swinging. Lydia followed my lead, and we swung in silence for a minute, facing the sidewalk that wound toward the tennis courts.

“Have you ever dated anyone?” Lydia asked suddenly.

I felt my face get hot. “Um—no,” I said quickly. “Not yet.”

“You haven’t wanted to?”

“I just … um … haven’t found the right person.”

She didn’t reply. I wanted to look at her, wanted to see what she felt about that, but I was afraid. Our conversation was starting to feel a lot bigger and more meaningful than I could handle.

We pumped our legs faster and faster, kicking high into the air. The streetlamps came on, and over on the tennis courts, some people struck up a night game beneath the overhead lights.

I stopped pumping my legs and let the swing slow to a natural stop. Lydia followed suit, half a minute behind me.

“That was fun,” she said breathlessly, as if all thought of our conversation was forgotten. She twisted to look at me and broke into a big, bursting laugh. “Oh my god, your hair…”

Before I could process, she reached over and trailed her fingers through the strands. My scalp tingled at the touch.

“The curls are out of control,” she laughed.

I could barely breathe. My voice felt lodged in my stomach. “Does it look bad?”

“No, still really pretty.”

Her eyes twinkled in the moonlight. I felt myself smiling so hard that my cheeks ached, and her smile grew larger in response. The cicadas’ song seemed to swell around us, and my stomach skipped like a dance, and I remembered Maritza and JaKory swooning about roller coasters and poetry.

“You look really pretty, too,” I said, my voice shaking.

Lydia looked hard at me. Her expression grew serious, and her hand dropped to my knee. I felt it like a blast of heat.

Neither one of us moved; we just sat there looking at each other. I couldn’t stop looking at her mouth, and I knew she was looking at mine, too.

“Codi…” she said breathlessly.

It was happening. She liked me and she was going to kiss me. This girl whom I liked so, so much was going to kiss me …

And I had no idea what to do.

The realization crashed around me. I wasn’t like Natalie or Terrica, confident about making out in a moonlit river; I wasn’t even like Ricky, brazen enough to steal a kiss beneath the trees. In this moment, when everything was real, when everything hinged on the brave, reckless confidence of my new self, I realized I’d never become that person at all.

Lydia leaned toward me, her eyes flitting between my eyes and my mouth, but I sat frozen, too paralyzed to close the gap between us.

“Um,” I said, shifting my knee out from under her hand.

Lydia jerked back, and just like that, the moment was broken.

Silence.

Terrible, suffocating silence.

I sat there trying to grasp the moment I’d just squandered. My heart was drilling and my palms were soaking with sweat. The tennis court lights were too white and too bright and everything inside me felt like it was struggling to breathe. I’d just thrown away the one thing I’d been waiting for forever.

Finally, Lydia cleared her throat. “It’s late, huh?” she said, her voice overly hearty. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

* * *

Sometime later, I lay on the floor of my bedroom, staring at the ceiling and fighting the tears in my eyes.

My first instinct was to call Ricky and ask if we could go for a drive, but I imagined how he’d look at me when I confessed what had happened, and a dark mass of