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Even with zero experience Matt was a much better kisser than icky Chris Grady could ever hope to be.
"Where'd you learn to kiss like that?" Matt asked. He looked adorably pink.
You wouldn't believe me even if I told you. Being thirty, she'd still felt like thirteen. Now she was thirteen again, but she felt ... well, not like thirty, obviously; she couldn't imagine ever feeling like thirty, not even in seventeen years when she'd actually be thirty.
It seemed those extra seventeen years had been in her head for long enough to stick around, though.
"Nowhere," she said smugly and then, recalling icky Alex, "this is okay, right?"
"Yeah." Matt tried to sound casual, like none of this was a big deal in any way. "Totally."
"Good," she said, and kissed him again. He seemed to have gotten better at it already. Give him seventeen years and he'd be - well, not getting married to someone other than Jenna, for one.
She hoped.
Tom-Tom's grades took a slight dip for a while, then went back up enough to make sure she'd pass. She stopped talking to Jenna for all of five weeks, after which attempts at reconciliation were made.
"You still want to be popular, right?" Matt looked resigned, rather than judgmental.
"I want to be me." Who was Jenna Rink, though? Not the girl who'd grow up to become editor-in-chief at Poise? Not the girl who'd become prom queen?
"You're always going to be you," Matt said, like he believed it completely.
He had no way to know how close she'd come to being someone else, of course. Nobody'd ever given him a package of magic wishing dust, or a dream house, for that matter.
"I could tell her to stop calling you 'Beaver'." Change Tom-Tom? Was that even possible?
Matt chuckled. "You might as well ask Rick Springfield to stop making stupid songs."
At least Matt knew his name wasn't Rick Springsteen. That alone made him a thousand times better than icky Chris Grady. "Matty! You know I love Rick Springfield!" Not the way she loved Matt, of course. She'd never love anyone the way she loved Matt.
Naturally, Matt would never love anyone the way he loved her, either. Wendy hadn't given him goosebumps or made him feel butterflies.
Wendy was going to find someone who made her feel those things now, surely. It would only be fair. Jenna wasn't going to ruin someone else's future simply by changing her own. Was she?
"I'm a way better singer than he is," Matt said. "And anyway, he's far too old for you."
"Are you jealous? I think you're jealous." Matt didn't have a jealous bone in his body.
"I think you still got a little crush on a guy who wants to steal his best friend's girlfriend. I mean, seriously, who does that? That's not something friends should do to one another. That's just not nice at all, is it?"
"It's romantic." Sad, too. Meeting the person you loved and discovering they were dating someone else would be bad enough already, but then finding out that the person they were dating was totally nice? Poor Rick. "He really loves this girl, Matty."
Matt looked at her. "Well, okay, I guess I can cut him a bit of slack. This time. Love, huh?"
"He's in agony." He didn't explicitly say so in the song, true, but it was obvious from his face. It was the reason Rick Springfield was always going to be her first kiss - even if, of course, it had only been on TV. She didn't think she'd actually want to kiss the real Rick. What if he was secretly icky?
Much better to just watch him on TV.
"Oh, I know how that feels." Matt grinned. "Watching you make moon eyes at Chris Grady."
"Watching you make moon eyes at some flashy new camera." Big, though. Seventeen years from now, they'd be much smaller. Easier to carry around. Matt'd like that.
Matt chuckled and shook his head.
"You don't think I can be both original and popular?"
"Jenna. Look around. This is high school."
She didn't think she'd ever heard Matt sound quite so much like his thirty-year-old other self.
Icky Chris Grady ended up prom king after all, which was fine. He was a pretty good football player, apparently. People were saying he might go pro, if he was lucky, and if he applied to the right college.
He wouldn't be lucky, of course. That, or he would apply to the wrong college.
He wasn't the only one who needed to worry about that last one.
"We'll write," Matt said. He looked like it was no big deal. "We'll call."
We'll both move to New York and meet again there. Would they, though? She wasn't best friends with Tom-Tom, who was going to the same college Jenna had gone to before. Or later. Or however you referred to things that had happened once but weren't going to happen now.
She didn't know if Matt was. The other Matt had never said where he'd gone, only that it hadn't been the same college she and Tom-Tom had gone to.
"We'll see each other at Christmas." Christmas was a long time from now.
"Definitely." Matt sounded very sure. He'd probably have mentioned it if he'd met Wendy in college. "We're definitely going to see each other at Christmas."
It was unfair, really. Matt didn't know the future. Matt hadn't seen where they might have ended up a dozen years from now.
Matt had nothing to worry about. Why should he? The girl who'd given him goosebumps and butterflies had kissed him on her thirteenth birthday, instead of breaking his heart and hitting him with the present he'd spent three weeks putting together.
"I'm still going to miss you so much." He must have expected that she might hug him; this once, there was no camera around his neck to get out of the way first.
"Hey," he said. "Hey. It's going to be just fine. I'll miss you, too."
"At least you'll have pictures." The only pictures she had of Matt were the ones made by Dad. Matt was wearing a tux. It didn't quite fit - they'd been out of tuxes his size at the rental place, so he'd gotten one that was at least two sizes too big. (Stupid! She should have known he'd put it off far too long.)
"Like I need pictures to remind me what you look like."
Probably not, but he might need them to remind him what she used to look like.
This was new. All of this. College, saying goodbye to Matt ... how did people deal with it? How had Matt dealt with it, in that other timeline?
"Penny for your thoughts," Matt said. He'd packed three cameras - only three, as he'd put it.
Matt was going to own a lot more than three cameras one day. "You don't have any pennies."
"No. I'm all out of razzles, too."
"Razzles are for kids."
He smiled. Once he'd have pulled out a fresh package of razzles. They weren't kids anymore now, though - the razzles would have to wait until New York. Hopefully, she'd still be able to find that store.
"You got my address, right?"
"And your number."
"Great." He had hers, too. He'd probably send her lots of pictures. "Well. Goodbye. And don't forget, definitely Christmas."
"Arriverdeci."
"Aur revoir."
Goodbye, farewell, until we meet again.