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\f0\fs24 The candles were still smoking when Emma understood that she was, without question, the luckiest girl alive.\par
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She stood in the warm June dusk with the last of the Happy Birthday chorus dissolving into applause and laughter around her, her face wet in a way she hadn't anticipated and couldn't entirely explain, and thought: *this*. This exact second. This is the one she would keep.\par
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Thirty faces in the soft golden light of the tiki torches. The pool glowing turquoise behind them. The smell of chlorine and jasmine and sunscreen and birthday cake. Mai Lin whooping with both hands raised. Hannah Eliot holding up her Solo cup in a toast. Even Harrison Webb, who Emma had half-expected to be too senior, too cool, to actually show up, was clapping with what appeared to be genuine enthusiasm. The music was going. The yard smelled like summer.\par
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Her mother had been so worried. Emma had watched her worry all day from across the kitchen counter, seen the logistics and the phone calls and the chair situation and whatever the thing with the tiki torches had been, and now here was the yard full and the night beginning and her mother standing at the back edge of the crowd next to Susan Carpenter and smiling, actually smiling, and Emma thought: I should remember to tell her. Later. I should tell her she did it perfectly.\par
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But not yet. Right now there was cake.\par
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The flash hit her before she expected it and the whole world became white for two seconds and she stood there blinking stars out of her vision while everyone laughed and someone\u8212?Mai Lin, it had to be Mai Lin\u8212?said something about her face and Emma laughed too because she couldn't help it and then she could see again and there was the cake.\par
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Two tiers. Pink and white buttercream. Sixteen candles still tracing the last of their smoke upward into the darkening air.\par
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She closed her eyes.\par
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She thought: I want this to last. Not just tonight. All of it. I want this whole summer to last the way this moment is lasting right now, every person I love in a backyard with cake and music and the pool going and my mother happy and my father\u8212?she could feel her father somewhere behind her left shoulder, that specific gravity she had always been able to locate without looking\u8212?my father watching.\par
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She blew.\par
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The applause came up like a wave and she opened her eyes to smoke and dark wicks and thirty people who had come to her yard on a Friday night because they wanted to, because she had asked, because they were hers, and she was theirs, and Emma Hayes pressed both hands to her face and cried with the absolute unselfconscious ease of a girl who has never once been afraid of being seen.\par
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"Oh my God," Mai Lin said, arriving at her elbow immediately. "You're *crying*."\par
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"I'm not," Emma said, which was completely false.\par
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"You are literally\u8212?"\par
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"Shut up and give me a piece of cake."\par
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Her mother appeared with the knife and pressed it into her hand, and Emma understood she was meant to do the ceremonial first cut, the way she'd seen in wedding pictures, and she felt a small peculiar dignity about that, about being the center of a ritual that had rules and a shape, and she pressed the knife through the bottom tier and everyone said *ooh* because of course they did and then her mother, with the smooth efficiency Emma had watched all her life, extracted the knife, patted her hand once, and pivoted toward Susan Carpenter, and the two of them were cutting and plating before Emma had fully registered that the ceremony portion was complete.\par
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It was, she thought, accepting the first plate back from Susan's capable hands, an absolutely perfect cake.\par
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Chocolate. The buttercream was the real kind, not the sugary thick kind that sat wrong in your stomach. There was a layer of something\u8212?raspberry, maybe\u8212?in the middle that she hadn't known about, and the first bite hit her with the clean force of something genuinely unexpected, and she thought: *Mom*.\par
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She looked across the yard and found her mother's face. Elikapeka met her eyes and smiled, a small private smile, and Emma held up her fork in a salute that meant *I see you* and *thank you* and *you knew about the raspberry* and her mother gave one tiny nod that meant *of course I did*.\par
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Emma turned back to her party.\par
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Thirty people, cake plates, the pool, the music, the tiki torches throwing orange warmth against the deep blue of the early summer sky. She let herself have a single slow moment of it, panoramic and grateful, like taking a photograph with her eyes.\par
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And then, because she was Emma Hayes and there was a persistent item still outstanding on the evening's agenda, she let herself consider the question of the boys.\par
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There were, she thought, tallying, approximately eleven viable candidates present. This was a high number. She had worked hard for this number. Harrison Webb was talking to someone near the cooler and had, objectively speaking, excellent arms. Daniel Park, whom Mai Lin had delivered on every promised count\u8212?interesting, extremely good-looking, both confirmed\u8212?was sitting on the steps of the pool with his feet in the water and had looked at Emma twice during the song. There were other possibilities. The evening was young.\par
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And yet.\par
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Her father was standing near the far edge of the patio.\par
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She watched him. He had his arms crossed and he was talking to Bobby Carpenter's father, the two of them in that easy men's conversation that involved long pauses and barely visible nods, and he was not obviously watching the party, but Emma Hayes had known her father for sixteen years and she understood at a molecular level that he was watching everything.\par
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She thought: I would have to be *very* sneaky.\par
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She thought: surely God has some kind of birthday exemption policy.\par
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She thought: one kiss. Just one. Just to mark the occasion. It was, she felt, genuinely sacramental.\par
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The air smelled like jasmine and chlorine and cake. Somewhere across the pool someone cannonballed and the splash made a dozen people shriek and laugh. The music shifted to something with a bass line that could be felt in the chest.\par
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Emma was mid-consideration\u8212?Harrison Webb's arms again, Daniel Park's attentiveness, a third option she was still evaluating\u8212?when she caught something out the very corner of her eye, near the shallow end.\par
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Her sister.\par
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Lizzie was standing with a boy whose name Emma was now reconstructing\u8212?*Will, Hannah brought him, she'd barely registered him at the time*\u8212?and they were talking the way you talk when you've forgotten the party around you exists. Standing close. Their body language had that specific unguarded quality that Emma, as a student of these things, recognized immediately and catalogued with some precision.\par
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Her sister reached out and touched the boy's hand.\par
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Emma stopped moving.\par
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Lizzie. Her *sister*. Her bookish, shy, perpetually reading, forever-in-her-own-world, had to be practically dragged to any social event within a five-mile radius sister. Lizzie, who had brought a book to the party. Lizzie, who had looked at Emma with that patient, tolerant expression approximately forty-five minutes ago that clearly meant *I love you but I am here under mild duress*.\par
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That Lizzie was touching a boy's hand and laughing.\par
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Emma stared.\par
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The boy\u8212?Will\u8212?said something and Lizzie shook her head and said something back and the boy's face did the thing that faces do when a person says something genuinely surprising and good, that involuntary bright opening, and he laughed, and Lizzie laughed, and they were still standing close and neither of them was looking anywhere else.\par
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Emma felt something move through her chest that took her a second to identify.\par
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It was not envy, exactly. It was more like wonder. Like watching something grow faster than you expected.\par
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She thought: *Lizzie.*\par
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She thought: my nerdy baby sister is doing better in the boy department than I am at my own party and I cannot even be angry about it.\par
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She thought: good for her. I mean it. *Good for her.*\par
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She turned back to her own side of the party, smiling with the full warmth of it, and found Mai Lin at her elbow again with two new plates of cake.\par
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"Second piece?" Mai Lin said.\par
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"Absolutely," Emma said.\par
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She took the plate. The night was warm and the pool was lit and her thirty closest friends were all around her and someone was taking another photo and the flash went off again and this time Emma was ready for it, was already grinning into it, was already mid-laugh when the white light bloomed across the yard.\par
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She thought: I still need a kiss.\par
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She thought: I have all night.\par
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She thought: this is the best birthday I have ever had.\par
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She took a bite of cake and let herself back into the party.
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