The Last Best Kiss by Claire LaZebnik Page B

the same thing, but he has to go farther to find a free chair, so Wade starts talking before he’s settled. “We’re cousins—not close ones, obviously—third or fourth and probably a bunch of removeds. I think my grandmother was first cousins with your grandmother? They were both Latimers before they got married.”
    I stare at him, surprised. I thought he was joking at first. “Whoa—that’s totally right. But how’d you know I was her granddaughter?”
    “I applied to Sterling Woods for ninth grade, and we were looking at the roster of kids, and my mother pointed to your name and said, ‘Oh, look—Anna Eliot—she’s your cousin.’ Some relative had done a big family-tree thing a few years before that he sent around with everyone’s name on it and where they lived, and she had thought about getting in touch with your father because you lived so close and then chickened out. My mom’s like that,” he adds. “She’s kind of shy. But she did Google your dad.”
    “Googling,” I say. “The next best thing to a family reunion.”
    “I’m jealous,” Lucy says. “I want to discover a long lost relative.”
    “Which one of us is the long lost one?” I ask Wade.
    “I’ve always known where I was,” he says with a smile.
    We compare relatives. There are a couple of great-aunts and uncles we’ve both heard of, but other than that there’s not a lot of overlap.
    Lucy and Jackson break off into a separate conversation. I can hear her talking about the SATs. Seems like a bad choice of topics—sort of the opposite of fun and sexy—but at least she’s not being phony.
    I know I should be worrying about the AP biology notes in front of me—we have a huge test in two days—but I’m kind of liking both the idea and the reality of connecting with this distant cousin of mine, so I keep the conversation going. I nod toward the T-shirt he’s wearing. “So what’s the story with that? You get recruited at Harvard?”
    “Recruited? For what?”
    “Aren’t you a lacrosse player?” I’d assumed that was how he knew Jackson.
    “Nope. I play on my school’s tennis team, but—” He glances around like he doesn’t want anyone else to hear, then leans forward and whispers, “I’m not actually very good. I’m just hoping no one notices.” He leans back. “You play anything recruitable-ish?”
    I shake my head. “Not even close. Do you know where you want to go?”
    “Where I want to go? Sure. An Ivy would be nice, but Stanford’s my top choice. Now ask me where I think I can get in—sadly that’s probably a different list. What about you?”
    I tell him a little about my hopes for getting into an art school, then ask him how he knows Jackson (it turns out they met in preschool), and then Jackson glances over and says, “We should get going, dude,” and Wade nods and they both stand up.
    “It was cool meeting you, cuz,” he says to me.
    “Sure was, cuz,” I reply.
    And he has me send him a text so we’ll have each other’s phone numbers.
    After they leave, Lucy says, “Your long lost cousin is pretty cute.”
    “Too bad it could never work out between us. Our kids would have three heads.”
    She rolls her eyes. “That’s only when you’re like siblings. You guys are so distantly related, you’re probably as genetically similar to him as you are to me.”
    “Then why won’t you sleep with me?”
    “I do,” she says. “Practically every weekend.”
    “Oh, right.” I open my bio book. “That wasn’t exactly the kind of sleeping together I meant, you know.”
    “Well, it’s all you’re getting,” she says with mock primness. Then she stops goofing around and gets serious about biology, because Lucy hates getting anything less than an A on a test.
    “Homecoming after-party is always the best party of the year,” says Lily at lunch the following week. The plate in front of her is half filled with French fries, half with beets from the salad bar. She said those were the only