Page 4 of French Kiss

“Maybe you’ll meet the love of your life tonight,” Heidi said.

“I have a boyfriend,” I reminded her, and she immediately laughed, which came out as a snort.

“You have an excuse. A guy you’ve dated six times who lives three thousand miles away.”

“He could turn into the love of my life. We agreed to try.”

“He sounds safe and boring. That doesn’t sound like the love of anyone’s life, and I think you could do better,” she said, looking me over again. Then she shook her head. “But not looking like that.”

“If he’s really the right guy, he’ll love me anyway.” Before she could answer, I walked past her and started down the stairs.

“He might not know he’s the right guy because you look like a homeless person,” she called after me.

“Whatever.”

I didn’t entirely discount the idea that true love could be found over a pint of Guinness, but I clung to the idea that anyone who really understood me would appreciate the carefree way that I bucked convention. Or maybe I was justifying being too lazy to bother with mascara.

“I’m casting off the social construct that says I need to make myself look prettier in public,” I said when Heidi caught up to me.

“That’s a lovely, bohemian thought,” she said. “I just find that when I dress like I’m studying for finals, I get fucking depressed.”

“At least I’m not in sweatpants.”

“Bar. Too. Low.”

“I. Don’t. Care.”

“Hannah, I love you, but you’re destroying your chance at happiness with that hoodie.”

“If only happiness were so easy to control,” I said, stuffing my hands into the pocket of my hoodie and heading down the block.

Heidi and I had met when a mutual friend found out we’d both be residents in San Francisco and insisted that we get in touch. Or meet for dinner. Or look for an apartment together. By the time Heidi and I did finally meet, we felt a little like we were on a blind date arranged by meddling relatives.

At first glance, I assumed we had nothing in common other than our interest in the large field of medicine. She looked like an Asian badass with a tattoo on the back of her neck, a pierced cheek and lower lip, and short spiky hair with a white streak along the off-center part.

Next to me, a rule-follower from Minnesota whose biggest transgression was getting my ears pierced without asking my parents, Heidi looked like a gang member who could probably kill me with her stare. Instead, she turned out to be one of the most insightful, sensitive, kind people I’d ever met, and I quickly chastised myself for typecasting her based on looks.

Unlike my quiet upbringing as an only child, Heidi’s was a tangle of shouting and kitchen wars in a huge family—she was the youngest of five sisters and two brothers, and her Korean grandparents had moved to Indiana from Seoul to help her parents raise the kids.

“We basically had four parents, which worked out well because we were kind of a handful, especially me.” Within the first hour of meeting, Heidi had shown me her four tattoos—all of them different spider breeds—mentioned getting engaged and then calling it off before age sixteen, and told me about how she’d been arrested for stealing a car. “That ended the engagement, by the way.”

Since her teen years, she’d settled down, but only a little. “I still have a wild streak, and it needs to be met,” she said, as if that wasn’t clear by her camo-print faux-fur jacket, her nose piercing, and her tendency to use the word fuck for emphasis. “So if I’m in a stable relationship or a stable work situation, I need to rebel in some other fucking way.”

I considered academia and residency to be pretty stable, not to mention that Heidi had been dating her boyfriend, Karim, since early in medical school. I couldn’t imagine what kind of rebellion Heidi had planned for the other areas of her life as a result. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a part of it.

Or maybe I did. Maybe Heidi was just the kind of person I needed to befriend, since my own rebellious streak started and ended with going to a bar without any makeup.

We’d been tight ever since.

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