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I stopped gnawing on my lip and began drumming on my knee. Everything was backward. Dread settled in the pit of my stomach. I had a feeling things were about to go horribly wrong and I didn’t know why.
Alex and I were dating, yet we’d never kissed.
How’d that happen? I was the only loser who was capable of dating a guy without having the perks of getting some.
“How come you haven’t kissed me yet?” I blurted out. Heat spread across my cheeks, but I still chanced a look at him.
He smiled one of his devastating, lazy smiles. A smile that told me he’d been waiting for this question. Patiently so.
“Simple.” He clucked his tongue. “You told me not to.”
“Surely, you knew I was just being nervous.”
“I’m a literal kind of guy.”
“You’re a pain in the ass,” I countered.
“That, too.”
Silence.
He was going to make me sweat for it. No surprises here.
“Well, anyway, I changed my mind,” I announced, tilting my head up high. He was winning, and I knew it. It was a mind game. A harmless one, sure, but a mind game nonetheless.
I made a mental note not to let him win all of our little games. Because I suspected that with Alex, there were going to be many.
“Duly noted.” Alex offered a brief nod. “Hey,” he said when we rounded the park, which kissed the woods from the back and the sea from the front, and was actually really beautiful. “Question for you.”
I perked up. Alex was looking for a parking space. This was really happening. I was coming as Alex’s date. And Ryan was going to be there. He still hadn’t answered any of my calls or text messages.
“What do you wanna do? Like, when you grow up?” Alex asked.
Marry you, I thought.
Have your babies, my mind elaborated. Maybe just the one, though. I don’t know if I want more than one child. Which is fine because you’re an environmentally aware human, so you probably already know that the world suffers from overpopulation, and one is a very sustainable number for kids.
I know what you’re going to say, and I agree—I was a total joy of a teenager.
I gave it some thought. I wanted to do a bunch of things, ranging from becoming a vet, a doctor without borders, and an investigative journalist.
But deep down—and I mean really, incredibly deep—I knew I was going to be a writer.
Not wished, not thought, not suspected, knew.
I didn’t even write. Not on a regular basis, anyway. Sometimes—not often—I scribbled in the fancy diary Mom had gotten me for one of my birthdays. But I never committed to it. I preferred experiencing life, rather than writing about it.
And yet, the realization that I was going to do this for a living was something so absolute, so acute, it was in my bloodstream. In my DNA. I wanted to make people feel through my words. To make them feel like the world stopped at a strange, foreign bus station, and it was time to take an adventure. Unearth a new continent, a brand new kingdom that was uniquely mine.
“I think I’m going to become an author,” I said. “You?”
“Dentist.” Alex surprised me by saying.
It was pragmatic and—please excuse me, all dentists—a little uninspiring for a guy like Alex. I’d imagined him doing anything from being a contributing photographer for National Geographic, to a mountain climber, or maybe a top editor for the culture section of The Guardian. Something cutting edge and out of the ordinary. Not…look into people’s mouths all day and get paid really well for it.
“Really?” I tilted my head sideways. He nodded, his blond Mohawk bun bobbing along with him.
“That’s what my parents want me to do. Got the grades for it, too. It’s a reliable job. People always have cavities, right? Thanks to fucking junk food. Good hours. Nice pay.”
“It’s…” I trailed off, frowning. “Not very punk rock.”
“Yeah, well, this shit is not forever.” He chuckled, flashing me his wolfish white teeth. I knew what he meant. This careful rebellion. The free pass we gave ourselves to color out of the lines. The music. “You’re smart enough to know that. Plus, liberal art degrees translate to bullshit white privilege jobs with shit pay. I’m not going to find myself living in a rotten studio apartment in Brooklyn in two decades, freelancing for a failing magazine, feeding myself some bullshit that it’s by choice.”
“You sound like a grown-up.” I shuddered.
He smiled. “It’s okay to be ordinary. Not everyone grows up to be a rock star.”
He was sober, intelligent, and more grounded than most people I knew who were older than us. Alex becoming a dentist was also great news, because we were going to get married, and one of us had to make money, and presumably, aspiring to be a writer, that someone sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.
