Free A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend by Emily Horner Page B

when they’d first started dating, and this weird combination of feelings—how happy I was at her happiness, and how much I didn’t want her to go away and leave me by myself. How desperately I wanted what she had, and how I didn’t know if I really did after all, because she didn’t think clearly when it came to him, and how I could somehow just not imagine myself into her place.
    And I so wanted to, because it would have been much simpler.
    We’d been twelve years old together. We’d shared the convictions that only twelve-year-olds can share, that love is simple and powerful and easy and inevitable. And so much more inevitable when it’s three in the morning and you’re sheltering from a storm, with my hair still damp, and the rain drumming on the roof, and all of a sudden his hand was on my shoulder—
    And he kissed me.
    “Oh. Gosh.” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Um.”
    And then I started grinning to myself, without any thought behind it but a Wow! I have been kissed, for the very first time ever! There is a person somewhere in the world who actually considers me kissable!
    “What?” His fingers nestled in the tangles of my damp hair.
    “I want to tell all my friends, right now. I want to wake them up in the middle of the night just to say that I have had my first kiss and it was in a motel hallway with a bass player whose T-shirt I was wearing. And I really shouldn’t have said that, should I?”
    That last part was because he was looking at me all disconcerted. Of course he was, and I could hardly blame him for that. But there was something about being far away from my life and from everyone I knew. I could be anyone and it would never get back to them. And I didn’t have to care, and I didn’t have to be sensible.
    And I realized, almost at the same instant: I wanted to tell Julia. It threatened to knock all the elation out of me, and I chewed on the inside of my mouth to make it stop. I got up and went to the window, which was locked and mosquito-screened so that I couldn’t actually lean out of it the way I wanted to, but I looked up toward the corner of the sky that I could see and yelled, “Julia! You saw that, right? You totally saw that!”
    I laughed; I laughed, maybe for the first time since she died. Because I had been kissed, and because I was yelling up at no one in the sky like a lunatic, and because I knew or felt or imagined that Julia was right there with me, clapping her fingers together in that happy-excited way she had, and giggling, and swearing to embarrass me by calling everyone she knew.
    “I’m not actually insane,” I said, turning around. “I mean, I can understand why you might think that and it’s all right if you do think that, but I just wanted to say that for the record.”
    “Lots of people have an imaginary friend . . . I guess,” he said, in a certain it-takes-all-kinds voice that said he’d seen stranger things.
    “Well, more dead than imaginary.”
    The door creaked open and someone I assumed to be a band mate stumbled out, dressed only in boxer shorts. “Anybody want to explain what’s going on?”
    “Got locked out,” said Kris. “I was a little too eager not to see you having sex.” He bowed slightly to me. “Your shower awaits.”
    “Oh, I—I’m okay.” I felt intensely awkward. Like I wanted to get out of here fast before I had to poke at any more sensitive places. “Let me just camp outside your room tonight, and I’ll give you your shirt back in the morning.”
    He shrugged. “You can give it back next time you go see us play.”

NOW
    T he bakery was decorated in crayon-bright colors that almost reassured you that nothing bad could ever happen. We got a small, high table by the window and ordered cakes that were tiny and perfect, layered with chocolate and fruit.
    “Of course I had to be dumb enough to pick the place I always used to go with Gianna. But I’m not going to think about that now.”
    “It’s out of the way.”