Once Upon a Kiss Read online

  Andrea had hated me since sixth grade, when I had beat her in the finals of the spelling bee (how she even got that far when she then went on to spell Pac-Man wrong was beyond me). But it felt like her disdain for me was about more than that. Maybe because with my neon-pink Lycra miniskirt, robin’s-egg-blue T-shirt, and fingerless lace gloves, I was anything but cookie-cutter. If anything, I would be the poster child for what not to wear in a Seventeen magazine article.

  “So what’s going on here?” Andrea asked.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I was just telling the Recyclers about what I’d do if I were elected president,” I replied icily.

  “You mean, what you will do when you are president,” Jonah corrected. “My mom says the whole positive-thinking thing really works,” he whispered.

  I smiled gratefully. I didn’t know what I would have done without Jonah. I mean, I would have been friendless, but besides that. We were the perfect balance to each other.

  Andrea snorted. “As if.”

  “Yeah. As if,” Cheryl repeated before trying to copy her snort, but missing the mark so that it sounded like a snore.

  Andrea’s equally popular boyfriend (but with fewer IQ points), Brad Bundy, walked up. Maybe if I had been a Barbie fan, I would have found him cute, seeing that he was a carbon copy of Ken, but the trauma of discovering my entire Barbie family had suffered third-degree burns after I left them next to the stove top when I was nine turned me off from Barbies. That, and the fact that even at that age I was well aware that being tall and good-looking with no zits and 0 percent body fat was not representative of the real world.

  “Oh. Hey, Brad,” Cheryl said hopefully. You’d have to be blind to not see the enormity of Cheryl’s crush on Brad. But even Tammy Morales—who was blind—knew about it, because I had overheard her in the bathroom talking about it the week before.

  Brad didn’t even acknowledge her. “Hey, babe,” he said as he snaked his arm around Andrea’s waist. “Wanna go get in some studying before our biology quiz?”

  “What are you talking about?” Andrea asked. “We took biology last year.”

  “I know,” he replied. “I was trying to be, you know . . . sexy. See, biology is the basis for—”

  “I get the connection, Brad,” Andrea interrupted.

  “I get it, too,” Cheryl said. “Omigod, that is so clever!”

  Andrea patted him on the cheek. “Babe, instead of making jokes, maybe think about sticking to things you’re good at.” She smiled. “Like wearing the clothes I pick out for you.”

  Jonah and I exchanged a look. As usual, Brad was wearing one of his many pastel Izods with an upturned collar—this one was lavender—making him look like a preppy Easter egg.

  “Excuse me, what was that?” Andrea asked.

  “Yeah. What was that?” said Cheryl. While she tried to sound as threatening as Andrea, she couldn’t quite match it.

  “Um, I didn’t say anything,” I replied.

  “Oh, I thought the look that you just gave your boyfriend meant you don’t approve of Brad’s fashion choices. Or rather, my choices for him.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “I’m not,” Jonah agreed. “And she’s not my girlfriend.”

  People were always mistaking us for boyfriend and girlfriend, a fact which we thought was a riot. I loved Jonah to death, and I knew he’d do anything for me, but the idea of kissing him was like the thought of kissing my cousin Aaron.

  Andrea glared at him. “Was I talking to you?”

  “Yeah,” Cheryl said. “Was she talking—”

  Andrea shot her a look.

  “Sorry,” Cheryl replied, chastised.

  Brad smiled at me. “Cool haircut, Zoe.”

  “Thanks, Brad.”

  Jonah nudged me with his arm and mouthed I told you so before I mouthed back You’re nuts. Jonah swore that Brad had some sort of crush on me, which was crazy. The only reason he knew my name was because we had been lab partners in chemistry, and he copied off me while I did the work. That being said, it was a little weird that whenever I saw him he went out of his way to say hi and compliment me on something. (Although, “I like how the green of your army surplus bag matches your eyes” when my eyes were actually blue was sort of a half compliment.) But he couldn’t actually like me—I mean, he was dating the most popular girl in school.

  “Okay, this conversation is over,” Andrea announced, clutching Brad’s arm. “And I really hope you haven’t spent a lot of money on campaign buttons, because there’s no way you’re winning,” she added as she began to stomp off.

  “See you around, Zoe!” Brad yelled over his shoulder as she dragged him along.

  It was kind of ironic that one of the few people who was nice to me all the time was him.

  “MAYBE WE SHOULD MAKE MIXTAPES and hand them out to voters,” Jonah said as we raided my kitchen for snacks after school later. “I heard Montana Russo telling Nick Shaffer that they have these double recorders now, so you can tape a tape.”

  Montana was a girl in our class who I had been meaning to get to know better. She had moved to town in the middle of the year before and sat by herself at lunch, but didn’t seem to mind it at all. I don’t know why I thought we’d hit it off as friends, but I did. “Love that,” I replied. I opened the pantry only to find it full of nothing but Tab soda and paint tarps. Yet again, my mother was remodeling the house. Instead of the Southwestern motif from the past few months, everything in our house was now white and Lucite. It made me feel like I was living in a spaceship.

  Jonah took a sip of some green juice he found in the fridge before immediately spitting it out in the sink. “What is this?!”

  I looked over from the Reese’s peanut butter cups I had pulled down from the top, top cupboard. My junk food stash was for emergencies, and the anxiety of running for office pretty much fit that bill. “Wheatgrass juice.”

  “We’re hanging out at my house from now on,” he said as he scraped at his tongue.

  “Okay with me.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled-up piece of notebook paper. “I worked on your speech during study hall,” he said as he handed it to me.

  “What’s all this brown stuff?”

  He peered at it. “Probably Milk Duds.”

  Just then my fourteen-year-old brother, Ethan, skidded into the kitchen à la Tom Cruise in Risky Business. He was obsessed with the movie. I had gotten used to him wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses at night, but I drew the line when he tried to walk around in his Jockey shorts. With his curly brown hair that looked like a perm (lucky—or unlucky—for him it was natural . . . unlike my parents’: my mom and my dad paid a lot of money for their perms) and a scrawny body, with what looked like pale white spaghetti for arms and legs, there was nothing Tom Cruise–ish about Ethan.

  “What’s that paper with doody flecks on it?” he demanded as he opened a cabinet.

  “It’s Milk Duds. And hello to you, too, dear brother,” I said. Ethan wasn’t big on hellos. He liked to get right to the point.

  “Hello is for people who aren’t on the move like I am,” he replied.

  Jonah and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. My brother was so dorky that he was almost funny.

  “And where are the dishes?” he asked.

  I pointed to the pantry. “In there.”

  “They’re redoing the kitchen again?”

  I shrugged. “It’s been three whole months.”

  “I only just got used to the family room being where the dining room used to be,” he grumbled as he reached for some banana chips I had found in a cupboard. Unlike Jonah and me, Ethan and I were not synchronized. Which in this case meant a hailstorm of chips rained down on the linoleum as we stuck our hands into the bag at the same time. “So what’s the paper?”

&nbs
p; “It’s my speech for the election.”

  Ethan rolled his eyes. “You’re still thinking of running?”

  “She’s not thinking about it—she’s doing it,” Jonah corrected. “Oh, and she’s going to win.” He closed his eyes. “In fact, I can see her right now, on the stage, hands in the air in victory as the crowd goes wild—”

  Ethan stared at him like he was nuts.

  Finally Jonah opened his eyes. “It’s positive visualization, which goes along with positive thinking. My mother swears by it.”

  “Yeah, well, if you ask me, I positively think that her running for office is not only a waste of time, but an embarrassment to me,” Ethan said. “Not to mention, if this gets out to the middle-school crowd, I can kiss my chances of becoming popular good-bye.”

  The only thing Ethan wanted more than to be rich was to be popular. I kept telling him that if he focused on the first one, then he could just buy the popularity, but he felt strongly about doing them separately.

  “Way to support your big sister,” I said as I yanked the banana chips back from him. I had found that one of the best ways to punish Ethan was by taking away food.

  “You don’t get it—I am supporting you. By keeping you from embarrassing yourself!” he said as he wrestled the bag from me and took another huge handful before going toward the dining room. Or what had been the dining room up until it became the family room.

  “She’s not just going to win—she’s going to win by a landslide!” Jonah called after him.

  “You know, denial is not just a river in Israel!” Ethan shot back.

  “I keep telling you—the Nile is in Egypt!” I called after him. Geography was not my brother’s strong suit. Neither was math, science, English, or history. Basically he excelled in lunch, and that was about it.

  “Why does everyone in this house always have to yell?” my mother yelled as she bounded into the kitchen, wearing one of her many Day-Glo leotards, this one hot pink. On top of her white tights were purple acrylic leg warmers. If all of that wasn’t bad enough (and it was), she wore a braided pastel headband around her brunette permed Afro.

  “Oh, you’re both here! Faaaaaantastic!” she exclaimed as she began to do some side bends, adding a disco-y clap and a shimmy in between each one for good measure. Ever since my parents had filmed their first Discocize video, they had taken to talking like they were on camera even when they weren’t. “Those two students we found at UCLA for the new video just dropped out because they didn’t realize the disco in Discocize meant disco disco.” She began walking backward in a Hustle-like move (“Only the most dynamite dance to come out of the disco era,” my father had explained to me when I once asked him what he was doing). “Apparently it goes against their core beliefs,” she explained. “But we really need young people so the audience sees that Discocize appeals to all ages.”

  Which would be false advertising, seeing that the average age of the students who had been in their class at the Jewish Community Center before they gave it up to make videos (this was their third) was fifty.

  My father came jogging in, wearing royal-blue satin biker shorts and a white tank top with a matching headband around his matching perm. Like Ethan, his arms and legs were on the scrawnier side, although thanks to the tanning bed they had recently installed in the guest room, he was orange rather than pale.

  “Look, Stan!” my mom said. “The kids are here—which means they can be in the video!”

  “Dyyyyynamite!” my dad said, reaching for a pick to fluff his Afro. Back before the perm, he had looked a lot like this singer Neil Diamond, but now he just looked . . . weird.

  My mother began doing squats. With a clap, of course. “It’ll only take about a half hour.” While they had shot their first one in our family room–slash–dining room, now they rented a studio whenever they filmed. It was actually a Sons of Italy banquet hall, but they always made sure to take down the Italian flags before the cameras started rolling. “Ooh, and I have the cutest leotard for you to wear—it’s got pink and white stripes, which will look just faaaaaaabulous with lavender leg warmers—”

  Jonah and I looked at each other. “I have to practice my speech for the election,” I said quickly.

  “And I have to watch her practice it and make sure she enunciates properly,” he added.

  My parents exchanged a look. “So you’re really going to go forward with this thing, huh?” my mother asked gently.

  “If, by this thing, you mean running for office and doing my part to try and effect change in the world, then yes. Yes, I am,” I said firmly.

  My father patted my hand. “Well, sweetie, then we think it’s dynamite that you’re tackling such a big challenge like that.” My father was very big on the word dynamite. “Maybe you can work this into your college essays. Admission boards love stories about brushing yourself off when you fail and continuing on.”

  “Thanks for the support,” I said.

  “Anytime,” my mother said as she Hustled backward out of the room. “You know we’re always here for you.”

  “Absolutely,” said my dad as he followed her. “That is, if we’re not off shooting a video.”

  Jonah reached into his pocket and pulled out a Peppermint Pattie. “Here. I was saving this as my snack for the radio show, but I think you need it more right now.”

  I smiled. While Jonah was super generous, when it came to Peppermint Patties—his favorite candy of all time—he tended to not only hoard them, but downright lie if asked if he had one. “Thanks,” I said as I took it. Granted it was mushy and melted after having been in his pocket for who knew how long, it was the thought that counted. “What would I do without you?”

  “Lucky for you, you won’t ever have to find out,” he replied.

  The days leading up to the election were a blur. Between campaigning and smiling and scouring the Galleria mall to find the perfect outfit that said “yes, I’m stylish, but I’m way more about substance over style” I was exhausted. Every time I thought I couldn’t go on—that maybe everyone was right, that I was just fooling myself and wasting my time—Jonah would dedicate a song to me during his radio show. “And now, for the girl most likely to be president next week, we have the Talking Heads’ ‘Burning Down the House.’” “Here’s another one to get you in the mood for the upcoming election: Devo’s ‘Whip It.’”

  Finally the day arrived.

  “You’re going to be great. You already are great,” Jonah said as he karate-chopped my shoulders while we stood backstage waiting for Mrs. Carlson, our principal, to introduce me.

  “Why are you hitting my shoulders?”

  “I’m massaging them. You know, like you see them do in movies about boxers.”

  “But I’m not a boxer.”

  “Zoe? As your campaign manager, I’m going to suggest that you loosen up in your thinking and not be so literal. Class presidents are supposed to be visionaries.”

  “Okay. Fine. Whatever,” I said.

  “It’s time!” he said, pushing me toward the curtain.

  “I can’t do this,” I said nervously.

  “You can,” he said, pushing me again. “And you will. Break a leg. But not literally. Only figuratively.”

  With one more push, I was out there, in front of what seemed like four high schools’ worth of students. I cleared my throat, and after a slight feedback issue with the microphone because, in my nervousness, I had forgotten you didn’t have to actually yell when you used a microphone, I was off and running. Well, off and walking (lots of and . . . ums in the beginning) but soon I was running, detailing the more brilliant of my campaign promises: Cultural Kidnapping; a promise to get better snacks in the vending machines; and—the shining jewel in my class president crown and the thing that I hoped my administration to be remembered for—my pledge to get rid of the Ramp.

  “I know that some
of you might consider the Ramp an institution, but think about what it really does,” I preached. “It separates the school into Haves and Have-nots. It’s like the caste system in India, but with air-conditioning.”

  I waited for the excited buzzing that Jonah and I had been sure this would prompt, but all I got was crickets.

  “Hello? Is this thing on?” I said into the microphone.

  Still nothing. Well, other than feedback.

  Panicked, I looked over at Jonah for help.

  “Don’t scream into the mike!” was all he offered.

  And then, one lone clap. I squinted to see who it was, surprised to see it was Brad.

  “What are you doing?” Andrea barked. “You sit on the Ramp.”

  “Yeah, I know, but that was kind of a funny line. You know, the India thing,” he said.

  I cleared my throat and stepped back. “So, uh, from your lack of enthusiasm to my idea, am I supposed to take it that absolutely no one in this entire school thinks getting rid of the Ramp is a good idea?”

  Alan Sharp’s hand went up. I smiled. The first one in school to get a Mohawk, Alan was all for bucking the establishment.

  “I knew I could count on you, Alan!” I said.

  “For what? I was just wondering whether you could repeat what you just said. I’ve got a ton of earwax and have been having a lot of problems with my hearing.”

  I sighed. Even if Alan did back me, three votes was not going to win me the election.

  Before I could even attempt to come up with some sort of save, Andrea Manson stood and click-clacked over to the microphone. “Okay, well, thanks for giving this a try, Zoe,” she said in the sickly sweet voice she used when teachers were around. “But I’m assuming from the complete lack of interest from our classmates in what you have to say that you’ve now realized that you’re not going to win the election and you’re now ready to hand the mike over to me?” she added as she pushed me out of the way.

  “Hey, guys,” she purred.

  Everyone looked at each other, unsure about whether they should respond. That’s how intimidated people were by her.