The Shippers(17)

“Please don’t say that word,” I’d said, and then I lowered my voice to a whisper for the benefit of my mother, sitting right next to me, “in front of Grandma Dodie.”

“What word?” Ashley asked. Then, louder, just to mess with me: “Sexual?”

“Ashley!” I said, like Hush!

“It’s a medical term,” Ashley went on, totally unimpressed with my squeamishness. “Don’t be weird about it.”

Before I could declare my natural-born right to be weird about anything I chose, my mother took an interest in this new theory. “Is it like how ducklings imprint on their mothers?”

“Yes,” Ashley said, “except that’s for a maternal figure, and this is for a mate.”

“You think JoJo imprinted on your disinterested father and now only wants a disinterested mate of her own?”

They both turned to regard me.

“I mean,” Ashley said, “it tracks.”

It didn’t not track. I’d give her that.

Or maybe I was just cursed.

“But what about you?” I protested to Ashley. “You grew up with the same absentee dad, and you’ve had one nice boyfriend after another since the seventh grade.”

“People are complicated,” Ashley said with an apologetic shrug. “I probably imprinted on the good stuff.”

All to say: This theory had gone unchallenged for so long that we all just accepted it now as a simple fact about who I was.

Even me.

But then tonight, very casually, almost as an aside, Ashley took that unchangeable fact and just … changed it.

“I just read a new study on imprinting, by the way,” she said.

This topic needed no introduction. My mom and I looked up and waited.

“Apparently,” Ashley went on, “you can imprint on a first kiss.”

Well, that was news.

Ashley kept going. “It’s because first kisses are so emotionally charged. In certain cases, they can become more.”

“What does ‘more’ mean?”

“More than just memories,” Ashley said. “They can become pivot points in our lives.”

“Like—you never get over the person you kissed?”

Ashley nodded. “Pretty much.”

My mother and Ashley both turned to study me, like this felt promising.

“Who was your first kiss?” Ashley asked then.

I shrugged, like Duh. “Finn Turner.”

“What!” Ashley shrieked.

“Our Finn?” my mom asked, pointing in the direction of the Turner house down the street.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was a neighborhood kids’ game of truth or dare. He had to kiss me—blindfolded—out behind the sports shed at school.”

“He was blindfolded?” Grandma Dodie asked.

“I was blindfolded,” I said.

“How old were you?”

“Ten.”

“And he was—”

“Thirteen, I guess.”

“Bit of an age difference,” Ashley said.

But I wasn’t having it. “Harrison Ford has twenty-two years on his wife, and they’re doing fine.”

Ashley was already pulling out a yellow legal pad to take notes. “Was it a good kiss?”

“It was.”

“Good enough to imprint on?”

I shrugged. “Good enough to spark a massive crush that lasted six years.”

“That’s how that crush of yours started?” Grandma Dodie asked.

“Yep. It started with that kiss, and it didn’t fade until after he went off to college. Even that took a year.”

Totally unrequited, by the way.

“Oh, my god,” Ashley said. “Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?”

I lifted my shoulders. “Because I didn’t know it was relevant?”

“It’s not relevant,” Ashley said. “It’s everything!”

The rest of us took that in. Then I said, “It is?”

And Ashley said, “Yes. Because we just solved all your problems.”

“All of them?” I challenged—just as my mom, delighted, said, “We did?”

“Yes,” Ashley answered us both. Then she tapped on the stack of RSVP cards she’d been sorting and said, “Because that very same Finn—that very same newly divorced Finn—just RSVPed yes to the wedding.”





Seven


OKAY. THIS WAS big.

We all looked around at each other, like Are we all thinking what we’re all thinking?

Finally, Grandma Dodie patted my hand and said, “Well, that’s a nice distraction for you, sweetheart.”

Boy, was it.

Finn, just so you know, grew up across the street from us—the oldest, tallest, and handsomest of three brothers—and he had been class president, the captain of the baseball team, and an actual, literal Prom King.

He was the reason I broke my arm—falling out of the tree near his bedroom while trying to spy on him. He took up 80 percent of the pages in my middle and high school diaries. And yes—he was definitely responsible for giving me a very memorable first kiss.

A first kiss I’d never forgotten.