Once Upon a Kiss Read online

  Books by Robin Palmer:

  Cindy Ella

  Geek Charming

  Little Miss Red

  Once Upon a Kiss

  Wicked Jealous

  SPEAK

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

  Copyright © 2016 by Robin Palmer Blanche

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62850-8

  Version_1

  For Eileen Kreit,

  who not only came up with the title, but gave me the chance of a lifetime

  Contents

  Also by Robin Palmer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One 1986

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Special Excerpt from Geek Charming

  YOU KNOW THAT SESAME STREET SONG “One of These Things,” where they show a bunch of stuff that’s alike and then one thing that’s “not like the others”?

  Well, when it came to the Brenner household of Beverly Hills, California, I—Zoe Michelle Brenner—was not like the others. Not like my parents, Judy and Stan, founders of Discocize, which, according to the past week’s People magazine, was the “hottest fitness fad not just of 1986 but the entire decade.” And certainly not like my fourteen-year-old brother, Ethan, whose three goals in life were to be popular, be rich, and get into The Guinness Book of Records for the highest score on Super Mario Bros. He played it so often that in my dream the night before (the recurring one, where I’m just about to kiss Judd Nelson, who ever since I saw The Breakfast Club had replaced Jake from Sixteen Candles as my ideal boyfriend), the Super Mario Bros. music started up and totally killed the moment. According to Judd, at least the dream version of him, he was very sensitive, which meant the soundtrack when kissing had to be just right.

  “Judd Nelson told you that the make-out soundtrack has to be just right,” my best friend, Jonah, said doubtfully as we sat at lunch in the Castle Heights High cafeteria that April afternoon.

  “Uh-huh,” I said as I tore off a piece of his Twinkie and popped it in my mouth. I wasn’t a huge Twinkie fan—the aftertaste reminded me of dishwashing liquid—but when you lived in a house like I did, where the snack choices were sunflower seeds or Wasa bread (think sand mixed with pebbles), you didn’t miss a chance to eat sugar.

  His right eyebrow shot up as he tore off a piece of Twinkie as well. As always, our snacking rhythms were synchronized. Which was a good thing, especially when we were eating popcorn or Cheez-Its. Otherwise, things would’ve gotten pretty messy.

  “What?” I said.

  “You really think that Judd Nelson would care what kind of music was playing as he kissed a girl.”

  I cocked my head as I thought about it. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I sighed. I, on the other hand, definitely cared about what kind of music was playing when I made out with a guy. Not like that happened on a regular basis. “He’s not going to work as my crush anymore,” I announced. “Good music is imperative for the whole make-out experience.”

  “I agree,” Jonah said, even though he had about as much experience with girls as I had with guys. In my sixteen years on the planet I had kissed only three guys: Stephen Roskoff, who I got stuck in the closet with at Heather Greene’s house during Seven Minutes in Heaven, when I was thirteen. Ross Sherman, who gnawed at my botton lip so hard that he drew blood, at camp when I was fourteen. And my coworker Matt McDonald, during the Hot Dog on a Stick holiday party, who drooled so much, it looked like I had made out with a Great Dane. (I blamed my poor judgment on all the frozen blue raspberry lemonade I had consumed.)

  “I’m thinking next time I make out with someone there’s going to be some Psychedelic Furs playing.”

  His eyebrow went up again.

  “What?” I asked, reaching for more Twinkie. Realizing it was the last bite, I drew my hand back.

  Jonah pushed the cake toward me. “No one likes New Wave as much as me,” he said. That was true. A total music freak, Jonah had a show on the school-run radio station called New Wave for Numbskulls. “But when it comes to swapping spit, it doesn’t work. That’s what Marvin Gaye is for.”

  “I bet Molly Ringwald listens to New Wave when she makes out,” I said. Molly Ringwald was one of my idols. I kind of looked like her. Well, if Molly Ringwald had dirty blonde hair and blue eyes and a semi-big nose that her mother had offered to get made smaller as her sweet sixteen gift a few months earlier. (I turned it down.) Jonah, on the other hand, resembled Matthew Broderick: dark hair, blue eyes that looked a little buggy if he wasn’t wearing his glasses (because he thought they made him look like a nerd, even though he really needed them to see).

  “Okay, enough about make-out music. We need to get back to work,” Jonah said as he picked up a notebook titled “Campaign Stuff.”

  “Right. Who do we have today?”

  He flipped through the pages until he got to a very crooked homemade calendar that I had made. “Today is . . . the Dirtbags.”

  “Oh good. I’ve been looking forward to this one.” I reached up and ran my hand through the long side of my asymmetrical haircut before looking down at my shirt to make sure none of my taco had ended up there.

  “Food check,” Jonah said before I stood up.

  I leaned toward him and opened my mouth in a wide smile. “Anything?” I asked between gritted teeth.

  He waved his hand in front of his nose. “No. But . . .” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of breath mints. “You might want to try one of these.”

  I took one and popped it in my mouth. Only a best friend could tell you you had bad breath and not hurt your feelings. “Okay, food check on you now,” I said.

  “Why? I’m not the one running for class president. I’m just the campaign manager.”

  “But we’re a team.”

  He opened his mouth to reveal braces flecked with all sorts of I didn’t even want to know what. I cringed. “When was the last time you actually brushed?” I demanded.

  “This morning!” he cried. “Or maybe it was last night,” he sheepishly said.

  “As difficult as it is for you, just try to keep your mouth closed,” I teased as we got up.

  Me running for class president had actually been Jonah’s idea. Not because I had a gift for making people feel safe, or was particularly good at public speaking, or could tell believable lies. It was because, he explained, he was sick and tired of hearing me complain about how Andrea Manson—the current president—did nothing to try to bring all the various cliques in Castle Heights toget
her, and everything to keep them apart. Or, more specifically, everything to keep them away from her so that the rarified air she breathed as the most popular and feared person in school would not be contaminated. And from her perch on the Ramp—the raised partition at the head of the cafeteria, where all the popular people sat—she was pretty successful at it.

  “But class presidents are always popular kids,” I had replied when he first brought it up.

  “So you’ll do it the other way around.” He shrugged. “You’ll become class president first, and then you’ll become popular.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Why would I want that? We hate people who are popular. They totally put people in boxes and judge them without knowing them.”

  “Kind of like you just did right there with that statement?” he retorted.

  “That’s not true. Because we’re on the outside, I get a better view than they do, so I know that’s what they’re doing. They can’t see it because they’re so high up.”

  “So change it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re always going on about all these ideas you have to bring the school together,” he said. “You know . . . getting rid of the Ramp; Cultural Kidnapping—”

  “Not to sound full of myself, but I do think that Cultural Kidnapping one is a good one,” I said. The idea had been that everyone would draw a name from a hat and would have to spend the day with that person, doing whatever it was they did as part of a normal day. “Who wouldn’t want to spend the day with someone from a completely different social group?” I asked. “It would be like being an exchange student but without having to look in a pocket dictionary to figure out how to say ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ in their language.”

  “So instead of talking my ear off about them, why don’t you actually try to do something about it?”

  He may as well have suggested I get into a time machine and fast-forward to the year 2000. “I don’t know. I mean . . . it’s just . . . I don’t have time to be class president. I’m a very busy person,” I said defensively.

  “And by ‘busy’ do you mean calling the radio station and bothering me with song requests every five minutes?”

  Okay, so maybe my social life hadn’t been exactly heavy on the “social” part. Jonah was pretty much my only friend. We had met in eighth grade in a ballroom dancing class, which, it turned out, both of us had been bribed by our parents to take. Because my name followed his alphabetically (Brennan and Brenner), we were assigned each other as partners. We spent the next eight Friday evenings stepping on each other’s feet and discovered we had a ton of stuff in common, such as a shared love of Brady Bunch reruns and apple slices smeared with peanut butter and honey. We were at different junior high schools then, but that didn’t stop us from tying up the phone line almost every night. My dad was always complaining that every time he called from the health club to see if my mom wanted him to pick up dinner from Inaka, a macrobiotic restaurant that only served vegetarian food, there was a busy signal.

  The fact that we both ended up at Castle Heights was a total score for me. Especially since the brains of all the girls I used to hang out with had gotten sun damaged over the summer. The minute high school started, all they wanted to talk about was how to get popular enough so we could sit up on the Ramp and which tanning salon in town was the least likely to give you any sort of gross disease. Soon enough I was spending not just every lunch period with Jonah, but my weekends as well. You’d think you’d get sick of spending all your time with one person, but Jonah and I never ran out of things to talk about.

  But the truth was even though I may have had a weird haircut, and favored neon-colored Lycra miniskirts and gold sunglasses, I wasn’t all that comfortable being seen. I complained about being on the sidelines, but I kind of liked being invisible. When you were invisible, you weren’t a target for people to talk about. And yet, over the past few months, I had to admit I’d been getting antsy for something to change. I just didn’t (a) know what or (b) have the guts to do something about it.

  “You’re doing it. You’re running,” Jonah had announced before I could come up with another excuse. “Here—we’ll vote on it. All in favor of Zoe running for president?” His arm flew up. “Aye!” he said, before reaching for my arm and hoisting it up. “Aye, too,” he said in a high-pitched voice, imitating me, before he let it drop. He smiled. “That was easy enough.”

  That had been a month earlier. The most common reaction to my entrance into the race was “Zoe Brenner? Who’s that?”—which meant that I had to work extra hard to get in touch with voters, which is why every lunch period for the past week had been spent visiting with different cliques.

  “Hey, guys,” I said nervously as we stood in front of the Dirtbags’ table. Finally being up close to them (they usually hung out outside, smoking), I saw that the name wasn’t fair, as there was nothing dirty about them. Angela Brancusi, however, could have benefited from wiping a Stridex pad over her nose.

  Barely a mumble in response. Maybe they were stoned.

  I looked over at Jonah for help and mouthed, Help!

  He sighed. “I’m Jonah Brennan, and this is my friend Zoe Brenner. You may have heard that she’s running for class president?”

  This didn’t even get a response. Maybe because they were too busy examining an onion ring in the shape of a pair of devil’s horns and wondering whether it was a sign of something.

  “And maybe you haven’t. Well, she is, and she’s awesome, and if you elect her, I can personally promise you that she will do her best to address whatever concerns you might have about how things are being run around here.”

  Still nothing.

  “So . . . what might those concerns be?” Jonah asked.

  Carl Nichols looked up. “How about better munchies in the vending machines?” His eyes were so red, he looked like the devil.

  “I can absolutely, positively look into that!” I exclaimed.

  Jonah nudged me and shook his head.

  “What? I shouldn’t look into that?” I hissed.

  “No, you should. But you should also bring it down a notch so you don’t sound like a game show host,” he hissed back.

  “Okay, okay.” I took a deep breath. “So, uh, anything else?”

  “Yeah,” said Laura Preston as she put Visine in her eyes. “Do you think you guys can leave? You’re really squashing my mellow.”

  Jonah and I looked at each other. “Sure. We can do that,” Jonah replied. “If we can be sure to get your vote next week.”

  The table looked at each other and shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” Andy Faxson said.

  “Cool. Thanks,” I said, trying to not jump up and down and growl a big “Yeeeeeaaaaaahhhh!” like I wanted to. Instead I grabbed Jonah’s arm and spun him around and tried to walk away in the most presidential manner possible.

  “We got some votes!” I cried when we were far enough away for me to act non-presidential and not be seen. “Who can we go to next?” I asked excitedly. Now that I had gotten a taste of real power, I wanted more.

  We hit the French Clubbers. Because they were so big on seeming French, they all looked pained when I talked to them, like they had just sucked on a lemon. But I think they really liked the Cultural Kidnapping idea. And the Computer Club. Jonah’s friend Nerdy Wayne, who was the sound engineer at the radio station, was the president, and he was more than happy to promise me his vote, as was Michael Reston, even without me letting him take me to the Star Wars/The Empire Strikes Back double feature that was playing at the movie theater on Beverly Boulevard.

  “Hey, Zoe—I’ve been thinking more about Socialize,” Nerdy Wayne said. “Want me to tell you about it?”

  Oh no. I couldn’t listen to more about Socialize, even if it meant I wouldn’t get his vote. Basically the idea was that once you signed up for it on the computer (“I’m telling you—in
ten years or so, everyone’s going to have one,” he liked to say, “and not only that, but they’re going to be portable, so you can take them with you instead of having to sit at your desk”), it would be like this giant bulletin board where you’d be able to write messages to other people and post photographs for everyone to see. (The idea that you’d be able to see your own pictures on the computer sounded nuts, but Wayne swore it would happen.) “I would love to hear about it—” I began.

  Wayne’s face lit up.

  “—but I have to finish campaigning. Can I take a rain check?”

  He nodded, and we started moving away. I was just about to tell the Recyclers about my promise to make sure not a single soda can was left behind—a promise that Andrea Manson had made but totally reneged on—when my nostrils were invaded by the powdery smell of Love’s Baby Soft perfume.

  “Poor Zoe,” a high-pitched nasal voice sighed. “I see you still haven’t been able to afford to get a whole haircut.”

  I turned. Standing there in a purple miniskirt, white puffy shirt with a big bow, and black patent leather pumps was Andrea herself. As usual, she had one of her favorite accessories with her: Cheryl Mancini, her best friend, who served as a combination lady-in-waiting and pet parrot.

  “Omigod, that is so funny, Andrea!” Cheryl said. She was wearing the discount version of Andrea’s outfit.

  Andrea glanced at her. “I know. That’s why I said it.”

  “That is pretty funny, Andrea,” offered Lindsy Rauch, one of the Recyclers.

  My mouth did the O thing it did when I was too stunned to talk. Lindsy had told me just the day before in the locker room as we got changed after gym that she liked my haircut. As we locked eyes, she sheepishly shrugged. Nothing drove me nuts more than people who talked out of both sides of their mouth. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Not only did no one want to risk pissing Andrea off, they all secretly wanted to be her friend.

  “Actually, my hair’s supposed to be like this, Andrea. It’s called an asymmetrical cut,” I replied.