Kiss Her Once for Me (72)

Meredith juts out her jaw. “Look. The last year has been absolute shit. You got fired from your dream job, your mom has been particularly leechlike, and you’ve stagnated. So when this opportunity fell into your lap, I thought, here’s a chance for you to make some money, and maybe Andrew can finally help you forget about the girl who broke your heart last Christmas. But what happened instead?”

Meredith pauses meaningfully.

“Do you want me to answer, or—?”

“It turns out the girl who broke your heart last Christmas is his fucking sister.” Meredith pounds one fist into her closed palm. “What are the odds? I mean, I don’t know, Ellie…. it kind of feels like fate.”

“You don’t believe in fate.”

“I don’t believe that we should surrender our agency because we think things are meant to be,” she clarifies. “But I do believe some people belong in our lives. Do you remember how we met?”

“Duh. Thwarting girl-on-girl crime.” Meredith and I were neighbors in the dorms our freshman year. We both had roommates named Ashley who thought they were too cool for us, but we didn’t hang out those first few months. We were both too busy studying and working thirty hours a week to bother making friends. Meredith had been dating this absolute tool of a mechanical engineering major named Spencer Yang from high school, and right before winter break, she’d come back to her dorm after a Business Law Society meeting to find her boyfriend and her Ashley in a rather shocking sexual position by our eighteen-year-old standards.

I caught her in the bathroom in the midst of an Aries chaos rage, about to inflict some misguided girl-on-girl crime by pouring bleach into Ashley’s shampoo bottle.

Instead, inspired by Gilmore Girls, we decided to deviled-egg Spencer’s beloved Miata, but we never actually made it past our dorm kitchen. We spent hours drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonades and laughing wildly as we attempted—and failed miserably—to make deviled eggs, and Meredith forgot her anger somewhere around the fourteenth consecutive listen to “I Knew You Were Trouble.” And that was it.

I saw her at her absolute lowest, her absolute messiest, and somehow, she became the one person I could show my messy self to in return.

“You’re my platonic soul mate,” Meredith says. I stare at my best friend on the phone screen. Awake at five her time to talk me through an anxiety spiral, her wild red hair held in place by a single pencil. She’s the bold oil paint to my watercolor timidity, the fire to my water, the Aries to my Pisces. “You’re my platonic soul mate, too,” I say.

“Maybe Jack is your romantic soul mate….”

I scoff, but I’m thinking about the Jack-size cookie-cutter inside of me. About the people who’ve seen my messiest self and loved me anyway.

“The fact that this woman came back into your life after a year… I don’t know. It feels like magic to me.”

“You don’t believe in magic, Mere.”

“No.” Meredith sighs. “But you do. Or, at least, some version of you used to.”

I stare down at the panels sketched out in Clip Studio on my iPad. None of this feels like magic.



* * *



“Family Ski Trip: ten hours.”

It’s plainly written on the schedule, in a size-twelve serif font, black ink, neatly laminated. Christmas Eve eve is the day the Kim-Prescotts pile into two cars to drive up the dangerous, snow-covered roads to spend an entire day at the Timberline Lodge ski area. There is truly nothing I would rather do less than this family ski trip.

This core belief is verified when I walk into the kitchen at six in the morning after no sleep and find the entire family is not only awake but energized. Meemaw’s got her snowboard over her shoulder, Lovey is doing quad stretches, and Dylan and Andrew are poring over a map of the Timberline runs as if everything between them is perfectly normal. The assholes don’t even seem hungover. Jack is dressed in her ski clothes, making breakfast sandwiches that she wraps in parchment paper. She refuses to look at me when I enter the room.

Palpable shame rolls up and down my limbs. I kissed her. I let her kiss me. And when she asked me if I was still going to marry her brother, I said nothing.

I’m too tired to spend a day at Timberline trying to avoid Jack and my guilt. Plus, I haven’t got the faintest idea how to ski. I’m about to tell everyone I’m too sick to go when Jack looks up from behind the stove. “Where’s Dad? Am I making him a sandwich?”

Katherine, who is packing up her own gear on the kitchen island, pauses. “Your father isn’t joining us today,” she says with passable indifference. I wonder if that’s where Jack learned it. “He’ll be here when we get home. He said he’s going to make us meatloaf for dinner.”

The house goes silent. And shit. I can’t bail on today, not when Alan is disappointing Katherine yet again. These traditions mean the whole world to her.

Mom-guilt, of course, is the reason I end up in a borrowed snowsuit, smooshed between the grandmas in the backseat of the Lincoln Navigator, eating my breakfast sandwich. Timberline Lodge is an actual ski chalet—a beautiful mountain lodge amidst snowcapped peaks, pretty enough to make you forget it was used in the exterior shots of The Shining. For a moment, the sight of the sweeping white landscape makes me forget all my own shit, too.