Page 30 of What's in a Kiss?

“It’ll keep you from sweating.” He stops the scooter, looks at the top of my head. “And your hair will thank you for it.”

I board.

My arms around him, a memory rises. The last time I had an arm around Glasswell.

It was the Tuesday after prom, when we posed for yearbook, each of us representing our class for Most Likely to Succeed. We were light-years beyond awkward, but the photographer insisted: Glasswell’s arm around my shoulder, my arm around his waist. I could feel the heat of him, smell his eucalyptus skin, which made me wonder how my heat smelled to him.

That photograph exists in the multiverse somewhere. I’ve never seen it. By the time the yearbook was shipped to my house that summer, my dad had died, and I couldn’t see much of anything. I’d made the shift from Most Likely to Impossible to Succeed.

Maybe we’re all always one slight motion away from a different life.

“We’re here,” Glasswell says and leaps off the scooter.

I mentally reacclimate. Task at hand: find officiant.

Glasswell’s three paces ahead. I follow close behind, pushing into the quiet café with a sense of catastrophic terror.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says the security guard as he stands up behind a midcentury modern Danish desk. He waves his hand from high to low as if washing a window. “You need to chill thiswaythe fuck down.”

“Dan the man!” Glasswell says, smiling at what must be Yogi Dan, seated at an immaculate zinc bar. He looks like a cross between Bob Ross the PBS painter and Vincent Price inTheatre of Blood. He wears a white kurta and has tied a sand-colored headscarf around his Afro. In one hand he nurses an espresso in a small mug decorated with sky blue fleurs-de-lis. In his other hand he holds a joint the size of an andouille sausage.

“What the hell are you doing?” I yell at Yogi Dan, who doesn’t stir.

“Are you Jake Glasswell?” the security guard asks.

“Don’t you know how late you are?” I shout.

The security guard points a finger at me and looks at Glasswell. “Is she with you?”

“Withis a strong word,” Glasswell says, “but I’m willing to take the blame.”

“You can stay,” the guard says, then hulks toward me, “but Calamity Jane needs to take her talents outside.”

“I really hope,” Glasswell says to me as I turn grudgingly to go, “that these lessons start sinking in.”

Outside is like a dream, a slow-motion beach town in a late spring heat wave, while I’m trying to deliver the wedding-equivalent of a vital organ in a beer cooler.

The café door swings open and the two fools I’m waiting on stumble out, arm in arm.

“I’m so glad you made it,” Glasswell says to Yogi Dan, his glassy eyes suggesting he thought we had enough time for a toke before the wedding. I’m furious, and also a little bit jealous. I’d actually love to chill this way the fuck down. But Masha needs me.

“Yogi Dan hasn’t made ityet,” I correct Glasswell. “And the bride is freaking out, so if the two of you don’t mind...”

Glasswell puts a finger to his lips, opens my purse, and drops the remainder of Yogi Dan’s joint inside.

Yogi Dan turns to me, eyes kind and sparkling. “That is one bold lip.”

At first, I think he means my attitude. Then I remember my mouth was only partly painted when the Where’s Yogi Dan scandal exploded.

“She’s bold all over,” Glasswell says. “May I present Olivia Dusk, maid of honor. A beehive best left un-poked.”

••••••

“Friends and lovedones of Eli and Masha,” Yogi Dan says, a mere twenty minutes late, “we welcome you with gratitude.”

I’m standing at the altar, still out of breath from our dash on the scooter back to the wedding site—me chauffeuring Yogi Dan while Glasswell jogged beside us in his sand-buffed black oxfords.

By the time we made it, the guests were being seated, Masha was hyperventilating in a corner, and Babushka’s rabbi wascircling the altar. When she saw us, Masha’s eyes lit up, her shoulders relaxed, and she took her place with her dad. I cued the string quartet to start “The Ocean” by Led Zeppelin.

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