Once Upon a Kiss Read online

  “I said—hey, guys,” she repeated more forcefully.

  “Hey, Andrea!” everyone in the crowd except for me and Jonah yelled back. Including the Dirtbags.

  “So I know you’re all probably real sick of sitting here by now, so I’m just going to get right to the point. If you reelect me, I think I’m just going to keep doing what I was doing, because—and correct me if I’m wrong—that seemed to be working pretty well.”

  All the applause I thought I would be getting for my Ramp-demolition idea filled the room. My shoulders slumped as Andrea flashed a huge nothing-in-her-teeth smile. “That’s what I thought. Okay. Well, bye!” she said as she flounced off the stage as Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T.” played, leaving me standing alone on the stage like a total dork.

  And just like that, my political career was over as quickly as it had started.

  IT WAS SO CLEAR WHO THE WINNER WAS that after Andrea’s speech, Mrs. Carlson announced that instead of waiting until the following week to vote, we’d do it when we got back to homeroom and that the results would be announced before the last bell. It was pathetic enough to lose an election by 237 votes when your class had 239 students in it. But to then have to put on cherry-red polyester pants and a red, white, yellow, and blue top made me feel like I had a big L tattooed on my forehead.

  Unlike having a cool after-school job, like Jonah (he worked at Vinnie’s Vinyl), the only one I had been able to get was at Hot Dog on a Stick at the Galleria mall. Every time I itched at my skin under my uniform, I silently cursed myself for spilling an Orange Julius all over my Spencer Gifts application before I could hand it in, which meant that Toby McCall got the job instead. (Ethan was even more disappointed than I was, seeing that Spencer’s, with its wide variety of fart machines and lava lamps, was the store of choice for fourteen-year-old boys all across America.)

  “Is it straight?” I asked Jonah, balancing my hat on my head as we stood in front of the escalator. The striped hat that went along with my Hot Dog on a Stick uniform was big and bulky, like something you’d see on a drum majorette, which meant that if it wasn’t perfectly balanced, it fell off.

  He reached up and adjusted it. “Now it is. Okay, I’ve gotta get to work. I’ll come by during my break.” Lucky for us, Vinnie’s was also in the mall, which meant that we got to spend our breaks together.

  “Okay.”

  He started to turn to go, but stopped and looked at me. Like really looked at me in a way that made me feel both grateful and completely uncomfortable at the same time.

  “You’re still upset about today.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said as I looked away and started to pick at my cuticles. “I told you before—I only decided to run because you wanted me to. It’s not like I actually wanted to win,” I scoffed. “I mean, me as the president of the junior class? As if!”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I am not.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re picking at your cuticles. That’s the number two telltale sign that you’re lying.”

  “What’s number one?”

  “You twirl your hair,” he replied. “But since your haircut you can’t do that anymore, except for that one long piece in the front.”

  Okay, Jonah was my best friend, but at that moment I really couldn’t stand him. How dare he know me so well without my permission?

  “You’re allowed to be upset,” he said. “I mean, you wouldn’t be human if you weren’t. You’d be . . . I don’t know . . . a sociopath or something.” He thought about it. “Or is it a psychopath? I can never remember. At any rate, the ideas you had were awesome. Because you’re awesome.”

  I shook my head.

  “You are! You think I would be best friends with someone who wasn’t totally awesome? I have a reputation to protect. Maybe that reputation is not yet world-known and still only within the walls of the radio station, but still.”

  I could feel a smile starting to creep across my face.

  “I keep telling you—Andrea Manson and those guys? When we come back for our twentieth reunion from wherever we’re living—New York, London, Berlin—”

  “I thought we had nixed the Berlin thing. Because German food gives you gas,” I said.

  “Right. Forget I said that. Anyways, the point is, what’s going to happen is that we’re gonna see that they peaked here in high school. But us? We’ve barely even sprouted yet, let alone bloomed.” He cocked his head. “That sounds like the inside of a greeting card, huh?”

  My smile got bigger. “It does,” I agreed. “But a good one. Not a cheesy one with sparkles on the front that you can never get off your hands.”

  “Zoe Brenner, you will always have my vote for the coolest, funniest, smartest person at Castle Heights.”

  I swiped at my face. “Okay, you’re going to have to stop because you’re totally making me cry right now, and I never ended up taking off that mascara my mom forced me to put on this morning because it was a special occasion.”

  “Fine. Pep talk aborted.” He looked at his watch. “I gotta go.”

  “Okay. But one thing—anything cool about me I got from being friends with you,” I said. “I know we hate when we get all mushy and stuff, but you are literally the best friend anyone could ever have.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said with a smile as he started to walk away. He was about as comfortable receiving compliments as I was. “It’s tough, but someone’s got to do it. Now go sell some dogs!”

  “Welcome to Hot Dog on a Stick,” I said pleasantly to a frazzled-looking mom and her three small children about an hour into my shift. Well, as pleasantly as possible for someone who had a neck ache from holding her head still for so long. The early-evening shift was bananas due to the fact that a lot of mothers in the area considered corn dogs to be a completely nutritious dinner for their kids, seeing that it was both a protein and a vegetable. If cornmeal was a vegetable, which I was pretty sure it was not. “What can I get you?”

  “Three corn dogs,” the woman snapped as one of her kids wiped his nose on her jeans while another kept trying to climb up on the glass wall that stopped small children like himself from falling down three levels to their deaths.

  “Actually, ma’am, these are not corn dogs,” I corrected in what I hoped was still my pleasant voice.

  “Whatta you talking about, they’re not corn dogs?” she barked. She pointed to one. “See? There’s the corn right there.”

  I turned to see if Wally, my manager, was hanging around eavesdropping. He was. Wally took his job—and all the other employees’ jobs—very seriously. In fact, on my first day, he had admitted to me that he had chosen not to go to college so that he could pursue a career with Hot Dog on a Stick, with the plan to move up through the ranks and one day join their corporate office, where he would get business cards and an engraved nameplate.

  “Actually, corn dogs are frozen and reheated,” I explained. “These Hot Dogs on a Stick, however, are made fresh to order, so you and your loved ones can be sure that not only are you enjoying something delicious but also nutritious.” The whole thing sounded canned because it was. It was straight from the employee manual, verbatim. As I glanced over at Wally he gave what seemed to be an approving nod. Although the fact that he was three inches shorter than me with a very small head that got swallowed up by his hat made it difficult to tell for sure.

  By this time, the third kid—who a moment earlier had been sleeping in her stroller—was now screaming at the top of her lungs, thanks to a few bops on the head courtesy of her brother’s Star Wars lightsaber. “Listen, missy,” the woman yelled over the noise, “I don’t care what they’re made of. Just give me three, okay?”

  “Of course,” I said politely as I reached for them.

  “You didn’t ask her if she wanted lemonade,” Wally hissed.

  “Right.” I always forgot that part. As the woman
went to grab for whatever everyone knew was a corn dog, I held them back. “Can I interest you in some fresh lemonade? We have four delicious flavors—original, cherry, lime, and blue raspberry—which you can have regular or frozen. Not only does it quench your thirst, but it’s made every two hours right here on the premises.”

  “Just because you don’t have a life doesn’t mean you have to stop the rest of us from getting on with ours. Now just give me the corn dogs!” she ordered, reaching over the counter to grab them.

  “I’d be happy to give you your Hot Dogs on Sticks, ma’am,” I said, holding them away from her, “as soon as you pay me for them.” Due to a recent string of dine-and-ditch incidents in the food court, Wally was very firm that we not hand anything over to the customer before getting the money.

  “I’ll pay you as soon as you give them to me!” she snapped as she lunged for them.

  The next few moments were a blur. As we struggled, one of the corn dogs fell in the vat of blue raspberry lemonade; which splashed up into my eye and made me throw my head back, causing my hat to go flying off and into Wally’s nose. This resulted in some screaming along the lines of “Oh, my nose!” à la Marcia Brady from the Brady Bunch episode where she gets hit with the football, tipping me off to the fact that I had probably just lost my job. After that, one of the corn dogs then flew out of my hand and soared through the air before landing in the back of some blonde girl’s hair and remaining stuck there.

  “Oh, my hair!” I heard the girl cry as she tried, unsuccessfully, to fish it out.

  Even though I couldn’t see because of the lemonade in my eyes, I knew that voice. I quickly put my hat back on in hopes of hiding under it.

  “Hey, I think that’s a corn dog,” said the guy next to her.

  “What?!” the girl cried. “Well, don’t just stand there—get it out!”

  “It’s not a corn dog!” Wally yelled with his hands cupped around his nose. I cringed as a few drops of blood dripped through them. “It’s a Hot Dog on a Stick—there’s a difference!”

  As the couple turned around, I saw that I was right. It was none other than Andrea Manson and Brad Bundy. I pulled my hat down even farther.

  “You do realize you’re fired, right?” I heard Wally say.

  “Yeah, that’s kind of the least of my problems at the moment,” I said as I watched Andrea march toward me.

  “It’s you!” she cried. “I should have known. Do you know how long it took me to get my hair just right this morning?!” she shrieked when she got there.

  I shrugged. “A half hour?”

  “An hour!” she corrected. “And it was totally perfect. At least until you decided to throw a corn dog at me and ruin it because you totally humiliated yourself today thinking you had the slightest chance of getting anyone to vote for you other than your weird boyfriend—”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I corrected her again. “He’s my best friend.”

  “Of course he’s not your boyfriend,” she said. “What was I thinking? You don’t have a boyfriend! All you have is a job at this stupid place with a stupid hat covering your stupid hair that looks like it was cut with a chain saw!”

  “Okay, first of all,” I said as I reached up and took off the hat and placed it on the counter, “I no longer have this job because I was just fired.” As I reached up to touch my hair, I realized the ends were all sticky with blue raspberry lemonade.

  “What’s the second of all?” Brad asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You said first of all,” he replied. “Usually when people say first of all, there’s a second of all that comes after that.” He turned to Andrea. “Isn’t there? Or did I just dream that?”

  It was amazing to me that Brad had been held back in school only once. It was a good thing he and Andrea spent so much time lip-locked, because conversation with him would have been impossible.

  “What does it matter what the second of all is when I’m having a hair emergency?!” cried Andrea.

  “Okay, okay.” He leaned in toward me. “Hey, do you think I can have that corn dog for free?” he whispered, pointing to the blue one that Wally had fished out of the lemonade vat. “Seeing that it’s got lemonade on it, no one’s going to want it, right?”

  “I can’t believe you’re talking about food right now!” Andrea yelled.

  “You heard that? I thought I was using my inside whisper.”

  “You don’t have an inside voice, let alone an inside whisper!” She turned to me, eyes narrowed. “I know what this is about,” she said as a small crowd started to gather. “This is about you being so jealous of me you couldn’t stand it anymore, which caused you to hurt the most important thing in the world to me.”

  “Whoa, babe, I’m fine,” Brad said, squeezing her arm. “The corn dog didn’t even come near me.”

  “Not you. I’m talking about my hair!” She turned back to me. “You’re jealous of me because you’re a total loser and you always have been and you always will be,” she said as she turned on her heel and stomped off.

  Andrea had a reputation for exaggerating. But at that moment, with a crowd of people staring at me and my blue-tinged hair, I sure felt like she was right.

  Being considered “the girl with the weird haircut” at Castle Heights had been bad enough. But becoming known as “the girl who was dumb enough to run for office against Andrea Manson and throws corn dogs at people for no reason other than she’s bitter” definitely didn’t help my social life.

  “Hey, Zoe,” Tommy Melhado called out as he passed our lunch table the next day. “You wanna buy some ammo from me?” he said as he held up a hot dog before cracking himself up.

  I put my head down on the table. Great. I had gotten to the point where the most unpopular of the unpopular kids was now teasing me.

  “Watch out—your hair is going to get in your chili,” Jonah said as he went to move the bowl away from my head.

  “What does it matter? It’s already blue,” I replied. I had washed it twice and the color still hadn’t come out.

  “That’s kind of an upside to all this, right?” Jonah said. “Now you don’t have to try to convince your parents to let you dye your hair!”

  I smiled at him. I was grateful that he was such a glass-half-full kind of person. Especially since my glass had about only two drops left in it.

  “Hey, Zoe.”

  I turned around to see Matt Wychowski standing in back of me. Actually, Matt was the most unpopular of the unpopular kids. Which may have had something to do with the fact that he was a klepto- and pyromaniac and had spent some time in a special school where they confiscated your shoelaces.

  “Yeah, Matt?” I said warily.

  “So now that you’re, like, a social pariah like me, you wanna hang out some time?”

  Seriously? This was where it was at now? “Thanks, but I can’t.”

  “’Cause you guys are together?”

  “No. Just friends,” Jonah and I said in stereo.

  “Then how come?”

  Not like I had ever been asked before, but it was hard to believe that guys actually asked why you were saying no. “Because . . . I’m one of those pariahs who likes to really embrace the whole pariahness of it all, if you get what I’m saying.”

  He cocked his head and thought about it. “Not really, but okay,” he replied as he wandered off.

  “Nice save,” Jonah said.

  “Thanks,” I replied. I started to open my mouth to speak before closing it again.

  “What?” Jonah asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, it’s definitely something. It’s always something when you do that guppy thing.”

  I sighed. Would this being known really well stuff ever feel comfortable? “I don’t know,” I said as I reached for some fries. “I was just thinking about whether I’ll ever be
asked out by someone who’s not, you know, a criminal.”

  “Sure you will,” he said, taking his own handful. “Why wouldn’t you be? I told you the other day—you’re awesome.” He reached for more fries. “In fact, I think the problem is that, actually, you’re too awesome. You’re intimidating.”

  At that I snorted. “Yeah right.”

  “You are. I mean, if we weren’t best friends, I’d be intimidated by you.”

  I shook my head. “That’s crazy.”

  “It’s true. You’re smart. Funny. You have excellent taste in music. Because of me, of course.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “And, you’re, you know . . . pretty.”

  It was weird to hear him say something like that.

  “I can say that because we’re best friends,” he quickly added. “Not because you’re my type or anything.”

  “Well, right, of course.” I cocked my head. “What is your type?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone with good taste in music.”

  “Obviously.”

  “And funny.”

  “Of course.”

  “Smart.”

  “Sure.”

  “Can we talk about something else?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said quickly.

  Luckily we never ran out of things to say. Pretty much the only thing wrong with Jonah was that he didn’t like shopping, which meant I was on my own that afternoon at Terri’s Totally Bitchin’ Treasures, my favorite clothing store in town. It was on Fairfax Avenue, a bit away from the shops on Melrose, but that was how Terri was—just a little bit off the beaten path with everything.

  “What’s the story, my favorite mini New Waver?” Terri asked, looking up from pressing on a purple Lee Press-On Nail. Terri was my dream version of an older sister. With her long hair that changed styles and colors weekly, and a wardrobe that came exclusively from thrift stores, she was like a human paper doll.

  “Where should I start?” I replied as I started going through the sale rack. “The part where I only got two votes for president? Or should I just skip to the part at the Galleria when I threw a Hot Dog on a Stick into Andrea Manson’s hair?”