“I don’t even deserve to have you here right now. I’m so sorry for how I talked to you last week.”
I exhaled. I wasn’t prepared for her apology, and I didn’t know how to explain that the conversation we needed to have was much bigger than a single instance of “sorry.” I barely had the emotional bandwidth to deal with her Rona problem; there was no way I could work on fixing our entire relationship.
“Let’s worry about that later,” I said, pulling her over to the couch. “Just tell me about Rona.”
Maritza sighed and pulled her legs up, tucking herself into the corner of the couch. I spread out across from her, wrapping a cashmere blanket around my legs.
“My parents left yesterday morning,” she said, swallowing. “I told Rona she should come spend the night, and she seemed really, really into the idea; we talked about it all week at camp, and she kept saying how much fun we were going to have.”
I bit down the weird feeling inside me. It felt wrong that Maritza was telling me about these plans after they had happened, when in the past I would have known about them in real time.
“So last night she shows up,” Maritza went on, “and I was all spastic and excited, and we ordered Chinese food and watched a movie … and then she convinced me that we should drink some of my dad’s Puerto Rican rum.”
“Uh-oh,” I said, knowing how carefully Mr. Vargas guarded that rum.
“So, against my better judgment, we took a couple shots … and she started being all touchy-feely … and then…” Maritza inhaled. “We started making out.”
My stomach plummeted. It was a jarring feeling, watching your best friend beat you to the finish line and remembering that you’re not supposed to feel jealous of her for getting there first. All I managed to say was “Wow.”
“I can’t even explain how it happened, but suddenly she was kissing me and it felt … it felt so good, dude … I mean, I could have done that for hours.”
“Wow,” I said again.
“But then…” Maritza shook her head like she was trying to make sense of something impossible. There was a distant, defeated look in her eyes. “I don’t know, it was like she got bored or something. She stopped kissing me and started talking about how we should invite these guys over.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I guess she has some friends who live near me, so she texted them and told them to come over. And I was so confused that I didn’t even object to the idea. She was like this force of momentum that completely knocked me over. So these guys show up, and Rona was outright flirting with them, both of them, and she tells me we should give them some rum, too, and I told her my dad was going to notice that so much of it was gone, and she was like, ‘He can get more while he’s down there.’”
“Wait—what?”
“She thought Panama and Puerto Rico were the same thing.”
“Ugh, Maritza…”
“I know. And then, she told the guys that she and I had been ‘having fun’ before they got here.”
“No,” I groaned, actually covering my eyes with my hands. “Please tell me she didn’t—”
“Yes, she did. So of course they started being complete assholes and trying to get us to make out in front of them.”
I stared at her, worried about where this was going. I hoped Maritza wouldn’t be desperate enough to turn her sexuality into a show like that, but with the way she’d been obsessing about hookups lately, I couldn’t be so sure.
“Please tell me you didn’t…”
“Of course I didn’t!” Maritza shrieked. “Do you know me at all? God, Codi, I was freaking out. Rona kept telling me to relax, that there was no harm in kissing, but I lost my shit and screamed at the guys to get out of my house.”
“Good!” I said, my neck flushing with heat. “Did you kick her out, too?”
“I couldn’t; she was too drunk to drive. Neither one of those asshole guys offered to take her home, so I got stuck with her. We didn’t even speak the rest of the night. She was as pissed at me as I was at her. It’s like she thought I was just being a prude and a loser, like she had no idea that making out with her had actually meant something to me.”
Her voice cracked on the last word. I reached for her hand and