Page 8 of What's in a Kiss?

Inside my bungalow, I grab my Catalina Wine Mixer trucker cap and tug it over my wet, blue head. I search in thirteen places for my keys. I stare for half a minute at my calming visual mantra: a framed poster of the balcony kiss from Zeffirelli’sRomeo and Juliet. Finally, at the door, I encounter Gram Parsons, who gives me side-eye and a disgruntled growl. I forgot I’d promised we’d hit the canyon dog park today.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” I say, giving him a scratch. “Mama’s gotta work.”

He changes tactics, to a mewling whine. I kneel to meet him at his level.

“Would you feel better if you came with me?”

He wags his crooked tail.

“Fine.” I swoop him up, praying none of my riders will be allergic.

We’re halfway out the door when I remember I’ve barely opened the book my mom’s reviewing on the podcast today.Since I always have extra time while I’m waiting for my Lyftees, I circle back to my bookshelf. But instead of reaching forGet Out of Your Inner Hero’s Way, my gaze travels up. To the top shelf.

There they are. My color-coded row of diaries, all fifteen of them.

If you don’t believe me...I hear Masha’s voice again.

I run my hand along their spines, tracing my life. A shiver passes through me as I let myself remember the girl I used to be, and the woman I used to dream I would become. She’s all there, in those pages.

I touch the first diary, a red one, given to me on my thirteenth birthday. It’s the book that documents my first period, the summer I got braces, the paranormal romance novels I used to be obsessed with, and basement rounds of Spin the Bottle.

Next to it is the spiral-bound salmon-colored notebook from freshman year of high school—the year when my life kicked into a higher gear, when I started to see my future like a path that I could pave myself and follow. My first of many report card 4.0s. And the year Mash and I made school history by being the only girls to have made Palisades’s varsity baseball team.

Orange diary for sophomore year, when Masha got her license. I remember writing nearly all the entries in the front seat of her car. I was starting catcher by then, and a rising star on the debate team. That book holds the summer my parents took me to New York and we saw a new, life-changing Broadway play every night for a week.

Junior year is glittery gold—college tours and my first lead in a school play. It’s the year I got serious about acting, the yearNew York started calling my name. I wore a Juilliard sweatshirt like it was my capsule collection.

When I reach the fifth book on the shelf—pale yellow, senior year—I smile. I’m an accidental genius. I need to make a toast tonight to Masha and Eli, but I’ve been blocked on what to say. Nothing I’ve come up with yet has felt momentous enough. For all of senior year’s many peaks and valleys, only one matters today. This book contains the story of the first night Masha and Eli got together. Senior prom.

Call it instant inspiration. Call it a sentimental miracle.

I pull the journal from the shelf and slip it in my bag.

Chapter Four

Near the bottom of Coldwater Canyon, just before I reach the smooth, flat streets of Beverly Hills, there’s a 9:48 a.m. logjam Waze did not anticipate. I find myself sandwiched between a school bus and a party bus on a two-lane road. I can’t see in front of or behind me, but judging from the sustained honking up ahead, everyone stuck here should probably accept that this is where we live now.

On the bright side, I’ve got a passenger, so at least I’m being paid. I feel a little guilty about the traffic surcharges, but a glance at his suit in the rearview mirror tells me he’s probably expensing this ride anyway. And his soft snores say he could use the extra winks before I drop him at his office in Century City.

The sun glares through the window, threatening to burn his sleep-craned head if we’re stuck here much longer. This gnaws at me. Suddenly, this guy’s possible future sunburned scalp is all I can think of. I reach behind me, careful not to wake him so I can quietly tug down the sunshade.

Of course, because I’m me, I forget to put the car in park, and when my toe lifts off the brake, we creep forward until we almost fender bend the school bus up front. I slam on the brakes just in time. Thank God Gram Parsons was wearing his seat belt.

My heart pounds as I recover from the near-collision, but at least my passenger’s scalp has been spared.

Is there something very wrong with me?

Masha jokes that I can’t pass a stranger on the street without intuiting a need in them that only I can fill. Since we started our podcast, my mom has quoted from all manner of self-help books about how my compulsion to help others gets in the way of reaching my own goals. But I wasn’t always like this.

When my dad died at the end of my senior year of high school, my mom and I fell into a kind of grief that felt like drowning. A few weeks after we buried him, I was driving to baseball practice when I cut off a silver Audi on the 101. The driver changed lanes, caught up to my window, and then, for the next three miles, he rode alongside me, laying nonstop on his horn while flipping me the bird.

I lived ten lifetimes in those three miles. Anger turned to shame to resignation to bewilderment, and finally, I got there—to gratitude. Because yeah, dickheads gonna dickhead, but this one came swinging with a life lesson, writ large:

My suffering—blinding and radioactive to me—wasinvisibleto him. Audi Man didn’t have a clue my dad just died. Audi Man didn’t know that my future had disintegrated because my family could no longer afford tuition at Juilliard. That, moreover, there was no way I could leave my mom and move across the country to New York. That, suddenly, so much of what I’d envisioned for my life after high school... simply wasn’t going to be.

I’d looked around at the other cars on the highway that day, imagining the millions of people in my city.

And ever since then, I’ve proceeded as if everyone around me could use a little extra grace.

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