Free The Last Best Kiss by Claire LaZebnik

find her in the kitchen unwrapping plastic cups. “Oh, good,” she says. “Stay here a sec—I need help carrying stuff into the other room.” She’s wearing jeans and a shrunken T-shirt, with her light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I feel overdressed in my skirt and sweater. Phoebe isn’t exactly pretty, but she has a fresh-scrubbed, athletic kind of vibe. Makeup looks wrong on her face since she has big features, but when she keeps her clothing, face, and hair simple, she looks like the kind of girl who’d start off in the movie as the hero’s best friend and then he’d realize he’s in love with her. Speaking of which . . .
    “I didn’t know Eric was coming,” I say.
    “Yeah, we were talking at school today about something else, so I said he should come.” She sounds a little too casual about the whole thing. Like she’s trying hard to make it no big deal.
    “Cool. I like Eric.”
    “Grab the soda for me, will you?”
    I put my hands on the Coke bottles and then freeze, listening. “Wait—what is that sound?”
    “ That is the sound of a crazy dog whining in my parents’ bedroom.”
    “You don’t have a dog.”
    She sighs. “We do now. My mother was walking by a dog adoption fair in some parking lot and said he looked right at her and asked her to take him home.”
    “In so many words?”
    “My mother is cray-cray, in case you haven’t noticed.”
    Phoebe’s mother is a little nuts. I’ve only met her a few times, but she’s the kind of woman who takes your hand when she meets you and peers intently into your eyes and says things like, Thank you for being such a special friend to my daughter . Squirm-inducing. “Is he cute?”
    “Not even a little bit,” Phoebe says with disgust. “I’ve been asking for a pug for years, and Mom goes and picks up this weird pit-bull-mix thing with tiny, mean eyes. It loves her —follows her around and sleeps with her. But it growls at me and my dad, and he got so annoyed that he told Mom she was going to have to choose between him and the dog.”
    “The dog’s still here,” I point out. “Should I be concerned?”
    “Dad hasn’t left yet. But he is pretty pissed.”
    “Is it a boy or a girl?”
    “It’s a girl but looks like a boy.” Phoebe plucks at a stubborn bit of plastic wrap clinging to a cup. “Which is why I call it it .”
    “Does she always make that noise?” It’s an unpleasant cross between a howl and a moan.
    “It’s mad because I locked it up. Dad said I had to because it snapped at him this morning. He’s worried someone might get bitten tonight, and we’d get sued.”
    “Shouldn’t you just return her to the adoption place if she’s that dangerous?”
    “You try telling my mother that. She literally said, ‘You don’t give a child back because it misbehaves; you teach it not to.’” Phoebe picks up the plastic cups and a stack of paper plates. “Help me bring everything in, will you?”
    I pick up the soda bottles and say, “Uh, Phoebe? I just wanted to ask you—why’d you have Finn pick me up? Lucy said you were going to ask Lily to.”
    She looks over her shoulder from the threshold. “He called for my address right after you texted, so I asked him instead. Why? Was there a problem?”
    “No,” I say. “I was just surprised.”
    Sometimes crazy things happen at the VMAs—like the year Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift when she was accepting her award and said it should have gone to Beyoncé—but this year’s show is pretty dull, and we end up talking more than watching. Unfortunately I get stuck for a long time on the sofa between Phoebe and Lucy, who decide a party is a good time to discuss the upcoming SATs and proceed to dissect every question they struggled with the last time we all took them.
    I’m worried about the SATs too—my first scores were lower than I’d hoped, and I’ve been taking a class on Saturday mornings to try to get them up—but I don’t get why they want to