What's in a Kiss?

Chapter One

"You know I hate this, right?" Masha says, riding shotgun in my Nissan LEAF as I squeeze into a parallel parking spot two sizes too small. It's a brilliant blue morning in Los Angeles, but Masha doesn't know that-she's blindfolded with the faded green bandanna my mom used to wear to weed her begonias.

"You've made your thoughts on bachelorette parties clear," I say, squinting to read the four different parking signs through the fronds of a palm tree-if there's a way to get towed in this town, I'll find it.

Damn. Thursday street sweeping.

"Luckily," I tell Masha as I throw my car into reverse, "twenty years of friendship has taught me to read between your lines. What you hate are penis-shaped plastic straws, male strippers, and Sex Position Bingo-"

Masha gags.

"Because," I continue, "you're still scarred from your sister-in-law's bachelorette."

"The stripper sat on my lap," Masha says. "And grinded."

"I know, babe-"

"Then my sister-in-law sat on his lap. And grinded."

I glance at my watch-three minutes to eleven-then boldly swerve into the marina's paid lot.

It's like there's a hole in my bank account.

But what's an additional thirty dollars for parking, compared with your best friend's happiness? When I tug off Masha's blindfold in a minute, the view of the Pacific will make a much better reveal than a side street dental office.

I park the car and reach into my back seat for the rusty green tackle box I stocked this morning with plastic lures and fishing line.

The cold nose of my terrier, Gram Parsons, nudges my hand. He loves to fish and is eager to get out of the car and consider the subtleness of the sea. Me too.

I place the tackle box on Masha's lap and take a breath.

"Here's what you don't hate," I say. "Intimate gatherings, Pabst Blue Ribbon, beef short ribs, nineties R & B . . . and fishing."

I reach for the cooler, borrowed from my friend Werner, who owns a Greek-fusion restaurant in West Hollywood. Since I'm perennially short on cash, sometimes Werner gives me lunch shifts at Mount Olympus, and recently . . . there may have been some lighthearted petting in the walk-in fridge. But that's neither here nor there. What's here-what's now-is my best friend on the eve of her wedding; my favorite pup, decked out in the turquoise life vest that makes him look like a doggie briefcase; my dad's old tackle box; and this cooler, complete with Bluetooth speaker.

I crank Toni Braxton's "Breathe Again" and undo Masha's blindfold.

"Mrs. Morsova," I say grandly, because I love how Masha and her fiancé are making a legal mash-up of their last names-come Saturday Eli Morgan and Masha Kuzsova will be Mr. and Mrs. Morsova. "Your deeply personalized, two-woman bachelorette party awaits. So, let's fucking throw down!"

Masha blinks in sudden sunlight-then screams like she won the Powerball. She lets fly her beautiful, massive smile and throws her arms around me.

"BBS, Liv," she says.

"BBS, Mash."

BBS is a code that calls back to the beginning of our friendship, to the day Masha and I met.

We were eight years old, in third grade, each of us the only girls on our respective Little League teams. It was the playoffs. I was catching for the Yankees. Mash was batting cleanup for the Braves.

In the bottom of the ninth, Masha drove the ball to the center field fence. She was rounding third when our shortstop threw the relay to me. Masha charged the plate. I held my ground. We collided-and by some thunderclap of destiny, both of us broke our left fibulas. The same orthopedist reset both our bones.

I was in agony, physical pain compounding my grief at having dropped the ball, at the memory of the umpire calling Masha safe. But when she signed my cast (red, like hers) with Broken Bone Sisters, a lifelong bond began.

Now we clamor down the dock at the port of Marina del Rey, tackle box, fishing poles, and boom box cooler in hand. We're laughing like we're eight again. It's a typical mid-May morning in Southern California, the kind of day that dazzles tourists, but here we take our midseventies, slight breeze, and periwinkle sky just a little bit for granted.

Even though I've spent my entire life in LA, the smell of sea air still makes me buzzy, primed for adventure. It's a feeling I realize I haven't had in a while. I've been wasting a lot of recent time stuck in other people's traffic, or holed up in my bungalow, doom-scrolling job boards on my phone.

I push all that aside today. Today's about being in the moment with Masha.

We head for the whitewashed tackle shack at the edge of the dock, where a couple of bored teenagers pass out paperwork and boat keys. While Masha slathers on sunscreen and checks out the boats, I slip two of the finest credit cards from my collection to the kid at the counter and suggest splitting the rental fee down the middle. I call this going Schizophrenic Dutch.

The kid sizes me up: cutoffs and flip-flops, no makeup, hoodie with a hole in one sleeve, long dark hair tossed into a messy bun. I've always looked young for my age, which my mom swears will someday be a blessing. But for now, at twenty-eight, it means that absolutely no one-not even this pimply stoner-takes me seriously.

He looks down at Gram Parsons in my arms. "There's a fifty-dollar pet fee."

"This isn't a pet," I say.

"What is it, then?"

"Haven't you read The Call of the Wild?" I say. "This dog is my equal. This dog is-"

"You didn't reserve a crew," the kid says. "Just the boat."

I look over his shoulder at our rig for the day. It's a modified forty-two-foot sportfisher, circa 1965. In tall black letters someone has hand-painted her name on the hull: Tongva. My kind of boat.

"We're the crew," I say, enjoying his incredulity. My dad taught me to helm a 120-footer when this punk was in utero, but I don't waste my breath bragging.

"The security deposit kicks in if you-"

"We'll be fine," I assure him, taking the boat keys.

"Where are you going to fish?" he asks, following me down the gangway to the boat.

"I was thinking we'd try the water," I say with a wink as I climb aboard. "Come on, Mash."

By eleven fifteen, I'm steering us out of the marina, standing at the wheel with the sun on my shoulders and a smile on my face. Gram Parsons pants in the captain's chair behind me, and Masha's got her feet dangling over the edge, wake kicking up and tickling her toes. Her floral sundress hugs her curves as she lays back and closes her eyes.

This peace is what I wanted for her today. Ever since she got engaged, it's been a struggle for Masha to stick to her vision of her dream wedding: tiny and personal. Both Eli's and her family have been pressing them to expand the guest list, to include cousins, colleagues, cat-sitters.

Masha's big and opinionated Ukrainian family knows only one way to host a wedding, with factory settings for the DJ, catering, and decor. I've attended three such parties for Masha's relatives in the past six months alone-and honestly, they're fun. But they're also the very last kind of celebration Mash would ever want for herself.

When she put her foot down at her bridal shower brunch-capping the reception at eighteen guests and trimming the rehearsal dinner to only the actual wedding party-Masha's family was horrified. Babushka stormed out of the Ivy so fast the restaurant rattled. Ever since then, quietly and on the cheap, Mash, Eli, and I have been planning a much smaller version of a wedding that's truer to their style.

I'm proud of the way my favorite introvert has held her boundary. Tomorrow's rehearsal dinner and Saturday's celebration are going to be precisely as the bride and groom want them, if I have anything to say about it. And, though Masha's still not convinced, my money's on her family showing up to the reception, taking one look at the happy couple, and putting all this pettiness aside.

I snap a picture of Masha in her sun hat, coastline receding behind her, her adult life zooming into view before her. I flip the camera to selfie mode and take a picture of my smiling self. Even though my own adult life may still be a little out of focus, it cannot blur how thrilled I am for Masha.

When you've been friends as long as we have, it's impossible not to see yourself-every aspect of your identity-in relation to each other. Drop us into any situation and it's a safe bet Masha's instinct will be the opposite of mine. While she's compassionate, contemplative, conscientious, and femininely curved, I'm impulsive and outspoken in my baggy boyfriend jeans. While she's known Eli was The One since high school, I remain open to all the infinite possibilities future romances shall bring. Masha is the Sophie to my Frances Ha, the Lenù to my Lila, the Constance Wu to my Awkwafina. We couldn't be more different, and there's no logical reason we should get along so well, but we do. Chalk it up to two decades of history, plus our enduring love of baseball and Korean BBQ, and of course, each other.

When Masha went to Pomona to get her art history degree, and I got my teaching credential at Cal State, we wrote snail mail letters to each other twice a week, even though we were only an hour's drive apart. When she landed the assistant docent job at the Getty Villa the week I started teaching drama at the local middle school, we surprised each other with congratulatory tickets to the same Dodgers game.

Three months ago, when I got furloughed from my teaching job, Masha actually cried. I held out the tissues, preferring the wineglass-half-full approach: if the school district hadn't gutted its arts program, I wouldn't be free on this fine Thursday morning to host her bachelorette.

I do miss my students. I miss that moment when I'd see it click in a kid's eyes that they could channel their own emotions into a character completely unlike themselves and bring a role to life. I'm bummed those awkward eighth graders only got through half of The Glass Menagerie before the school ran out of funding, but I'm also trying not to let the layoff get me down. Because what good would that do? I'll find another drama teaching job. If there's one thing this town is full of, it's parents who dream they're raising Hollywood's next big star.

I steer the boat toward the Star of Scotland, the sunken wreck of an illegal gambling boat that sank off the coast of Santa Monica eighty years ago. Now it's a diving and fishing paradise, a double down on a good time. By the time we've made it through TLC's first album, I'm dropping anchor and reaching for our poles.

"I haven't done this since your eighteenth birthday," Masha says. "Remember you caught that big blue fin? Then your dad dropped it back in . . ." Her smile fades as she locks eyes with me.

"The classic 'one that got away,'" I say, making sure my tone stays bright. It's not that my father's death is still raw-it's been ten years since his heart attack, and I've done my due diligence in therapy and broken dreams. The fact that losing my dad upended my one-time college and career plans isn't even something I think about anymore.

Most of the time.

I'm the kind of person who likes to believe things have a way of working out for the best. And the proof is in this moment, right now, sharing a brilliant boat-ride bachelorette with my oldest and best friend.

"I hope you're hungry for some galbi." I go low on the penultimate syllable to sound like Oprah. Mash loves Oprah.

I kept the ribs warm using the partition in Werner's luxury cooler, but I dressed the presentation down by tossing two of my mom's old heating pads on top.

"You didn't." Masha reaches for one of the hot, floppy sacks and gives me a thwack with it. "These bring back so many memories."

"PMS Eve," I say, referring to the once-a-month holiday my mom invented when I got my period. Throughout my teen years, Masha, my mother, and I were all on the same cycle. We were that close.

"Remember when Lorena used to make us those awful vegan nachos?" Masha says. "She'd insist we lay on the couch in your den with these heating pads over our laps, while she force-fed us the entire John Hughes catalog."

"For all our bitching and moaning," I say, "that was an important cinematic education."

"But we didn't understand any of it." Masha laughs. "We thought the Valium scene in Sixteen Candles was just what happened when a woman got married."

I laugh, then realize Masha's gone quiet. And a little pale. She slides her pole into one of the holders attached to the stern and pops open a can of PBR. "That's going to be me two days from now."

I feel the window narrowing before Masha wedding-spirals. I've got to make her laugh. I slump against her, impersonating Molly Ringwald's wasted on-screen sister walking down the aisle: "Looovve the teapot."

Masha cracks a smile, indulging me, but she's clearly on her way to the fetal position. Her eyes clamp shut as she hugs her knees. And she's rocking.

"What if it's a disaster? What if my mom makes a scene? What if I fall apart?"

I put my pole and beer down, take her shoulders gently, and look into her hazel eyes. "Masha. My love. I'll be at your side. No matter what. You can do this. You and Eli are beautiful together. Your future sparkles with enthusiastic, introverted love."

"But what if . . ." She trails off and we gaze at each other.

"Yeah," I say quietly. She means the rest of it, the life that comes after I Do.

Divorce, infidelity, sudden death, unemployment, depression-every wrecking ball in the book found our nuclear families at some point while we were growing up. There's no use pretending we'll escape adulthood unscathed. But where Masha can take to her bed on these subjects, I become defiant, like, Life, do your worst. I dare you to flatten me.

I know a huge portion of my strength comes from having Masha and my mom in my corner. Without them, a flat tire would lay me low. But with their support, I could navigate a four-tire-blowout on the Autobahn, backward and upside down. Lucking into having Lorena as my mother and Masha as my BBS are the great gifts of my life.