Kiss And Blog by ALSON NOËL Page B

later.
    I just shrug, and dip a
frite
into my soup, determined not to make this any easier for him.
    He rests his forearms on the table, leans toward me, and says, “The way I see it, you got two choices.”
    Oh, great.
I gaze up at him.
    “One, you go back tomorrow, confront your demons, and get on with your life.” He looks right at me.
    “And two?” I ask, hoping for a better option, but fearing it could be even worse.
    “Two, you finish out the week with me, and head back this weekend, well rested and ready to confront your demons on Monday.”
    I let out a deep breath and smile. “You know, I haven’t actually told you this, but my demon has a name,” I say, looking right at him.
    But he just laughs. “Let me guess, Sloane?” He sips his wine and raises his eyebrows.
    “How’d you know?” I ask, my eyes going wide, wondering for a fleeting moment if maybe he’s psychic.
    But he just shrugs. “Lucky guess.”
     

     
    After just a few days in the city, I was so entrenched in my new life of leisure, no responsibility, and zero peer pressure, that I was starting to fantasize about making it permanent. I mean, if you think about it, why couldn’t it work? I loved my dad, he loved me, and it’s not like I had anything to miss back home. Okay, maybe I’d miss my mom, and maybe even Autumn if I were gone long enough. But since I hadn’t been gone long enough yet, it was kind of hard to imagine.
    It’s like, I was spending my days strolling through Central Park, going to museums and galleries with my dad, eating at some of the hippest restaurants in town, and had even done some mad shopping with a wad of cash he’d given me.
    “Go crazy,” he’d said, and believe me, I did. Buying up all kinds of cool stuff, like dark denim stovepipe jeans, this amazing black bubble hem dress, a black leather purse with fringe and silver studs stuck all over it, leggings, tunics, ankle boots, and all kinds of other hip stuff that, believe me, Sloane and her pastel posse would never go near. But now that I wasn’t going to be one of them, I was thinking that maybe I could just try to be me. Or at least the me that I wanted to be.
    Not to mention how despite the whole nose-smacking incident, I seemed to have this growing (and very promising) flirtation with Easton. I mean, I’d started dropping by the gallery whenever I knew he’d be there, and we’d hang out in the back office and laugh and talk and drink strong, bitter coffee out of those little blue paper cups with the Greek key design that just scream
New York!
And it is so cool to hang with him, and not just because he’s so amazingly cute (which he is!), but also because he’s just so much smarter and so much more interesting than all the guys who go to my school put together. Seriously. It’s like, he actually knows stuff about art, and literature, and theater, and film, and restaurants, and clubs, andworld travel, not to mention how he’s been a working actor ever since he was a little kid and scored his first diaper commercial.
    I mean, even though I know most kids think Laguna Beach is like the coolest place on the planet because of that MTV show and all, trust me, I’ve lived there my whole entire life, and the world they depict on that show has nothing to do with mine.
    So on Friday, I was on my way to the gallery for this bigdeal reception my dad was throwing for a “very promising young artist.” Some grad-school chick named Angley Hayes, who did a group of self-portraits that apparently people are already buzzing about. And even though I can’t really vouch for how “promising” she might be, I will say this: there’s nothing quite like staring at a row of wall-sized, full frontal, awkwardly posed, anatomically correct nudes with your dad on one side and the artist on the other.
    But by the time I get there, I can hardly believe how packed this place is. I mean, I wasn’t really sure what an art reception would actually be like, but it’s