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  “Whoa,” Ben said. “We have our own plans tonight. You know.”

  “We’ll have time for both.”

  “I think I’m going to hurl,” I said, frantically trying not to imagine what Ben and Coop were going to be doing in a dark room at the party.

  “As I was saying,” Coop said. “If you want to make some final play for Cassie, then I’m Team Simon.” Coop paused and took a deep, meaningful breath. “But there’s a girl over there who might actually like you.” Coop nodded in Natalie’s direction. She and her friends were still giggling. When I glanced at her this time, she waved before looking away. I waved back. “A girl who might like you for who you are. A girl who might even be willing to kiss you, though the thought makes me want to regurgitate my veggie burger.”

  Ben was nodding along with everything Coop said. “And ketchup girl’s got small hands, so that’s a bonus.”

  “How exactly?”

  “They’ll make even your teeny weenie look like a foot-long.”

  Coop punched Ben’s arm. “I’m trying to be serious.”

  “So am I. Did you see those tiny little baby hands?” The boys started bickering, and I zoned out again.

  It wasn’t like the thought of kissing other girls had never occurred to me. I’d gone out on some dates but they’d all been catastrophes. There was the Aja Bourne incident of which we never, ever spoke. Then there was Naomi Cutter, a ballet dancer who was great except for the fact that she’d refused to let me eat in front of her. We dated for three weeks and I lost eight pounds. Before that was Kirsten Gallows, who turned out to be as obsessed with Cassie as I was. There were other girls, but it always came back to Cassie.

  Look what she’d done to Eli Fucking Horowitz. The guy had everything. He had more play in his pinkie than I had in my entire body. It would take fifty of me to equal one of him. Yet there he was. Broken. Defeated. A gutted man sitting alone, probably trying to decide whether or not he could stomach going to the party.

  If I did manage to find something Cassie wanted, barter for it, kiss Cassie, and finally tell her that I loved her, I’d probably end up like that one day. Like Eli.

  “If it makes you feel better,” Ben said. “Cassie’s got a raging case of herpes.”

  “You totally just made that up,” I said. “And how would that possibly make me feel better?”

  Coop checked the time on his phone. He was probably getting antsy to leave. He likes to get to parties early so he can score a good parking spot.

  “You’ve got to make a choice,” Coop said.

  I looked at Natalie. She was pretty and sincere. She had a killer smile, and she really did seem to like me, lame jokes and all. When she leaned forward, I could see the line of her panties sticking out of her jean shorts, and her slender shoulders outlined under her floral cami. I didn’t know much about her except that she was terrible at geometry. And I suppose that was the exciting part. I didn’t know anything about her and she didn’t know anything about me. We were enigmas to each other. She could turn out to be everything I wanted her to be.

  Only she’d never be Cassie.

  Then again, Cassie might never be Cassie. I might have spent years in love with an illusion.

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything except that I had two choices. I could go to the party with Coop and Ben and try to barter a kiss from Cassie. I could try to make my dreams come true. Or I could embrace reality and move on with my life.

  Cassie isn’t the only girl on planet Earth. Right?

  Ben patted my cheek. It still smarted from where he’d slapped me earlier. “What’s it going to be, dude? You going to keep pining for Princess Cassie, or are you going to talk to the perfectly nice, heterosexual girl who might not laugh at you if she saw you naked with the lights on?”

  I looked over at Natalie. I looked at Eli. I looked at my two possible futures. “Fuck it. I think . . .”

  The Party

  Living the Dream

  “. . . We should go to the party.”

  Coop and Ben were disappointed. It was written all over their faces. Especially Coop’s. But he didn’t get it. Natalie’s laugh would never be Cassie’s laugh. Her smile, her mouth, her eyes, and pale long legs. The sum of those parts would never equal Cassie. And while part of me wanted to forget about Cassandra Castillo and move on with my life, the other part of me knew that, until I told Cassie how I felt, until I tried to barter for one goddamn kiss, I’d never be able to let her go.

  As we funneled out of Gobbler’s with some of the other kids who’d decided to take off, Natalie waved at me.

  I didn’t wave back.

  Coop pulled his mom’s Kia up to Cassie’s house at 9 p.m. on the nose. We didn’t talk the whole drive. I could tell by the way he was fidgeting that Coop was composing a speech in his head, working up the nerve to say something to me that he thought I wouldn’t want to hear.

  “Whatever you’re going to preach at me,” I said as Coop put the car in park, “I’ve probably already said it to myself a thousand times. I’m not good enough, Cassie’s too pretty, I’ve got a better chance of sprouting an extra pair of arms than I do of getting her to kiss me. Trust me. If you’ve thought it, so have I.”

  And I had. I’d thought it all. I knew all the variables and still didn’t care. There was something different about tonight. Something in the air that made me feel like anything was possible.

  I was going to turn a paper clip into a kiss, and no one, not even Fate, was going to stop me.

  “You’re still determined to do this?” Coop asked. “Because I’m sure Natalie will be here soon and . . .” Coop leaned over the back of his seat, wrapping his arms around the headrest.

  I nodded. “It’s all ending, guys. High school, I mean. Only prom’s left, then graduation. You guys are gonna take off to Boston, while I’ll be stuck at the world’s lamest community college. I’m not sure where’s Cassie’s going, but I’m sure it’s somewhere far.”

  “Yale,” Ben said. “With Eli.”

  “Well, that’ll be awkward,” I said. “Anyway, my point is that regrets are built out of the shit we don’t do. And if I don’t do this now, I’ll regret it for the rest of my pathetic life.” I grabbed the backpack that held all the things I’d brought to barter and headed up the lawn toward Cassie’s front door.

  Other kids were beginning to show up, attracted like flies to the intoxicating lure of a parentless house. Music rocked the walls, and I knew without needing to see it that Leo Cartenzo had already set up his turntables in a dark corner and was playing the sound track to our lives. There was a cluster of girls by the garage, performing last-minute makeup checks.

  “Wait up,” Ben said. He and Coop caught up to me by the front door. The flowerpots, which had been filled with a crayon box’s worth of color the only other time I’d been here, were conspicuously absent. That night, Cassie had gone on and on about how much her mother loved flowers. I swept the memory into a dark corner. Tonight I was going to make new memories.

  “I’m doing this,” I said.

  Ben said, “Yeah, whatever. I just wanted to warn you that Cassie’s been acting a little off lately.”

  Coop elbowed Ben in the ribs. “Tell him.”

  “I was about to,” Ben said, his voice layered with irritation. I knew Ben. He wasn’t irritated with Coop but with me. Ben wasn’t the type to interfere in other people’s drama. He liked the rumor mill, true, but he would have happily let me run off and make an ass of myself, and his sum total involvement would have been recording my spectacular failure and posting it to Facebook before the end of the party. That he was trying to warn me off was owed solely to Coop’s influence.

  “Something’s up with Cass.” Ben paused. Whether it was for dramatic effect or what, I wasn’t biting, so he went on. “This whole idea to break up with Eli and throw a party, it came out of nowhere. It’s like she went to sleep as Cassie and woke up as a totally different girl.”

  “I get it,” I said. “C
assie’s changed, you and Coop have changed. We’ve all changed. It’s called growing up.” I heard the muffled sound of Cassie’s voice from somewhere inside. “Listen, if Cassie hates her life, if she’s bored and looking for a change, then I might just be the change she’s looking for.”

  Coop put his hand on my shoulder. “Good luck, Simon.” It was all he said. But I heard the words he didn’t say. I heard him wish me luck because I was going to need it. I was going to need more than luck. I was going to need every ounce of karma that I’d managed to earn over the course of my life; I was going to need the sympathy of saints, some divine miracle.

  Turning water into wine was a pathetic parlor trick compared to what I was going to attempt.

  But Cassie had liked me once. Liked me enough to go on a date with me. Now I only had to convince her that I was worthy of so much more.

  After I found a way to convince myself.

  Ben banged on the door, and Cassie opened it right away like she’d been waiting for us, watching for us through the peephole. “Ben!” she squealed, and threw her arms around his neck. I was so close to them both that I could smell her mango shampoo and the bright scent of limes that clung to her skin. She wore a thigh-length black dress that exposed a dangerous amount of her frontal assets and moved at the bottom like she carried her own breeze wherever she went.

  Cassie wasn’t a ten. They hadn’t invented a scale that could rate how beautiful she was. She was an eclipse, the dark shadow of the moon blotting out the sun, and I couldn’t stop staring at her, even it if meant burning out my retinas.

  “Have you started drinking already, Sy?” Cassie asked, using my nickname. Her voice made me melt. Every time.

  “What? Yeah.” Then I shook my head. “I mean, no. What’s up? Awesome party.” I heard the words coming out of my mouth and begged my brain to stop them. Stupid tongue and its infernal word diarrhea.

  Cassie laughed. She has this monster laugh that surprises me every time I hear it. You’d look at Cassie and expect a china doll giggle, but she inherited her rowdy laugh from her father. He’s Cuban and her mother is black. Cassie calls herself Cubrican. I call her perfect.

  “You’re such a goof, Sy.”

  Ben rolled his eyes. “You gonna let us in or what, Castillo?”

  Cassie crossed her arms over her chest and jutted her hip out to the left, blocking the doorway with her body. There were some other guys starting to crowd behind us, but I didn’t give a shit about them. They could wait. “It’s a barter party, boys. Nothing’s free tonight.”

  Coop dug into his pocket and pulled out a ratty sheet of paper. “I have the answers to Keating’s killer chemistry final.” He dangled the paper in Cassie’s face.

  “Tempting, Super Cooper, but I’m exempt from the final due to my utterly perfect attendance.” Cassie smiled. “But hold on to that, because I’m pretty certain you could trade the underwear off half the soccer team for it.”

  Ben snatched the cheat sheet out of Coop’s hand. “I’ll take that.”

  I started rummaging around in my backpack, but before I could find anything that I thought Cassie would want, she said, “I’ll let you in if you do shots with me.” Without waiting for us to accept her offer, Cassie took off down the hallway toward the back of the house.

  Cassie’s parents had done some redecorating since the last time I’d been there. The house was bare, stripped down. I hadn’t been given the grand tour the night I’d picked Cassie up for our date, but I remember that the hallway was lined with pictures and paintings and these African masks that Cassie’s mother loved nearly as much as her flowers. Cassie had probably taken them all down and stashed them to keep them from being broken, but it made the house feel empty.

  The party was in its infancy, but DJ Leo was already in the groove, punishing our ears with remixes of songs I hadn’t liked in their original incarnations.

  Coop and Ben and I chased Cassie down the hall, past a spiral staircase in the foyer that led upstairs, something to the left that might have been a library, and a room to the right that looked like the kind of fancy sitting room that no one actually sits in. Cassie was already in the kitchen when we got there, lining up four shot glasses into which she sloshed a generous amount of clear, thick tequila. She was chattering about who she thought was going to show, and how Sia Marcus, queen bee of the drama club, was hanging out around the pool doing something dodgy, and how she’d put her mom’s favorite couch out on the patio so that people could use the living room for beer pong.

  “I’m not really a tequila man,” I said when Cassie stopped talking long enough for someone to wedge a word in.

  “Then you’re not really a man,” Cassie said.

  Coop said, “Ouch,” while Ben cracked up so hard that I thought he was going to suffocate. I could only hope.

  There was nothing I could say. No witty comeback that would suffice. Without waiting for my supposed best friends or the girl I was insanely infatuated with, I slugged back that shot, slammed the glass down, and said, “My man parts and I agree: That tastes like ass.”

  I fully expected Ben to fire off a smartass comment that would make me want to clobber him. Instead he and Cassie drained their shots.

  Coop held out his hands. “I’m the DD. No liquor shall pass these lips tonight.”

  Cassie shrugged and gulped his shot too.

  “Isn’t it customary for the hostess to at least maintain the illusion of sobriety?” Ben asked. He was trying to make it sound like a joke, but I heard the concern.

  “Isn’t it customary for guests to keep their opinions to themselves?” Cassie said. I thought we were going to spend the rest of the night suspended in that awkward moment, but Cassie clapped her hands and said, “I love this song! Let’s dance!” Ben shot me an “I told you she was nuts” look that I ignored.

  I assumed that Cassie’s dance invitation was directed at Coop or Ben. On the rare occasions in the past that she’d uncoupled from Eli long enough to dance, it had always been with one of her gays. But neither Coop nor Ben made a move to join Cassie, and I realized that they were both staring at me.

  Duh.

  This was the ideal opportunity. I was so perfectly conditioned to expect that Cassie didn’t want anything to do with me that when she flat out invited me to dance, it hadn’t registered.

  “If I dance with you,” I said, “what’re you going to trade me?” I tried to keep my voice loose and easy. It was more difficult than the time I’d tried to eat an entire box of jelly-filled doughnuts in one sitting.

  “Trade you?” Cassie asked.

  “It is a barter party, Cass. Nothing’s free tonight.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes when I used her own words against her. Her every gesture was overly dramatic and I couldn’t decide whether she was playing or intoxicated. The shot of tequila I’d taken was warm pancake syrup, coating my insides and making me feel good. In fact, I was certain that I owed my burst of confidence to Jose Cuervo. If I got out of this party alive, I made a mental note to send the company a nice thank-you letter. But it certainly wasn’t enough to make me drunk.

  “You should be giving me something, mister,” Cassie said. She absently put her tongue behind the gap between her teeth, toying with the space, making me lose all sense of time or place.

  “You’re right,” I said, still trying to play it cool. I glanced at Coop for help, but he was watching me with a bemused expression that would have fit Ben’s face better. I dug around in my backpack, looking for something I could trade Cassie for two sweaty minutes in her presence, but I didn’t have anything worthy. I panicked. If I didn’t have anything worth trading for a dance, what the hell was I going to give her for a kiss?

  I pulled a small velvet sack out of my bag. “I have these dice my mom brought me from Vegas.” When Cassie didn’t look impressed, I said, “No, huh?” and dropped the dice into my backpack. “What do you want, then?”

  Cassie tapped her chin with the tip of her finger. “Find me a p
air of Muet Chaüssures, size eight, and I’ll do more than dance.” She punctuated the end of that sentence with the most indecent wink I’d ever seen outside of a porno, obliterating the last vestiges of control I’d managed to maintain over my spastic hormones.

  “Let’s dance,” Coop said, clearly disgusted. Not that I cared. I was floating on air. I was a delicate butterfly flapping my wings on winds made of Cassie’s sweet breath. Briefly, I worried that the Cassie who had just brazenly and openly flirted with me was some imposter, an alien wearing Cassie’s perfect skin, but I let those fears go, because I was on fire. I was in the zone. The Cassie zone. And not even Coop could bring me down.

  Ben elbowed Coop in the side. “We have other plans,” he said as tactfully as Ben was able.

  “Gross!” Cassie said. Then she grabbed my sweaty hand and Ben’s hand and pulled us into the family room, a large, friendly space that looked out onto the patio. All the furniture had been pushed against the walls, creating an open area where people who had shown up even earlier than us were already dancing. There weren’t many people yet, but the house was filling rapidly, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I wouldn’t be able to move without disturbing someone else’s air. But it could have been wall-to-wall and I wouldn’t have cared. Hanging with my best buds, dancing with Cassie—I was right where I wanted to be.

  Normally, I’m not a dancing fool. My mom had forced me to take ballroom dancing lessons when I was in the eighth grade. I’d stepped on Margie Bondar’s foot so hard that I broke three of her toes, and our instructor—a British eccentric who twirled around and rambled on like he was the product of an unholy union between Nathan Lane and Robin Williams—branded me unteachable and refunded my fee.

  Except, with Cassie and my friends, I danced. Expelling all the fear and anxiety that had lain dusty in my lungs for so long that it felt like the first time I’d been able to breathe in years. Cassie smiled at me and laughed at nothing in particular, and I laughed back. Coop and Ben had their arms around each other, and soon we were all sweaty, lost in the music, all but Coop fueled by the tequila that had been our price of admission. We were all blissfully tangled up in this perfect moment.