If We Kiss (3 page)

five

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Tess and Jennifer and I decorated my basement. We had thought about a swim party but the Association wouldn’t let us use the Clubhouse pool in the evening. Apparently it is not for the “enjoyment of the community” on a Friday night.

No big deal. We changed it from a water theme to an Autumnal Equinox Harvest theme and hung up pictures of corn that Jennifer drew. We thought we were pretty witty with that, you know, corn, corny. Whatever. Nobody seemed to get it but us. I heard a few Pop-Tarts whispering that it felt like a seventh grade party. I was slightly tempted to tell them
that is the point you pseudosophisticated, don’t have your driver’s license yet either, stuck up, should go home if you don’t like it prigs,
but I restrained myself and smiled knowingly, hostessily. It is the depth of loserdom to stand at a party whispering that it is an uncool party. In my opinion. Hello—this party is
intentionally
corny. You are standing under a corn cob, for heaven’s sake.

Kevin finally showed up just after eight. His father brought him. We ignored each other. I wasn’t nervous. Plenty of time.

I went up to the kitchen at around quarter of nine to get more pretzels. My friends and I always used to laugh at the Pop-Tarts, which is what we call the flirty girls because they are both Pop(ular) and Tart(y). Pop-Tarts would never eat a thing at a party unless it was a mint. Bunch of doinks. I love pretzels and eat them at any opportunity, or did. I still had never actually flirted, but I decided I might, or more. So for the first time ever at a party I didn’t eat anything. I wanted to keep my breath minty, in case Kevin and I started to flirt and ended up kissing.

A few parents were hanging around the kitchen with my mother, including, I noticed, Kevin’s father. Mom took out a bag of pretzels for me and whispered, “You guys aren’t playing spin the bottle, are you?”

“Oh, please!” I took an Altoid from Mom’s tin on the counter. I was so hungry.

“It came up in conversation,” she whispered, opening the bag. She poured the pretzels into the bowl and flattened down the heap in the center. “Are you having fun?”

I nodded, wondering if she was going to quiz me on why I was having fun and who I liked. I’d noticed when Kevin walked in that my mother was watching him. I wondered if she knew that it was really him I had been kissing in the hall and that it was him I liked. I wondered if she thought he was the cutest boy at the party, the best one.

“Good,” she said. I could tell she was waiting for more information but I wasn’t about to hang around in the kitchen the whole party gossiping with my mother. Is that what she wanted? Too bad. Just because I got caught kissing once at school doesn’t give my mother the right to start supervising my life like I’m a ten-year-old. I was about to tell her she can trust me or not, I don’t care, and that it’s my life and my tongue and I can do whatever I want with both of them.

“Are you angry about something?” Mom asked.

“No!” I pulled the bottom of my shirt to stretch it and said, “I just don’t want to waste . . . I gotta go.”

“It seems like a good party,” Mom said. “Have fun.”

I gritted my teeth. Sometimes lately she is so incredibly annoying. She held out the box of Altoids. I took another one, said “Thanks,” and went back downstairs with the bowl of pretzels.

Kevin was making out with Tess.

Her arms were around him and her tongue was in his mouth. My wrists felt numb. I dropped the bowl of pretzels. It was plastic so it didn’t shatter, just rolled around a little on the tiles, making whirling sounds. I meant to run upstairs but I couldn’t get my legs working. Everybody was staring at me. Well, everybody except the kissers.

Darlene started picking up pretzels and putting them back in the bowl.

When Tess finally stopped kissing Kevin in the middle of my playroom, she saw my face and ran over to me. She dragged me to the downstairs bathroom.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just . . . I was startled. That’s all.” I couldn’t look at her. I started picking at the grouting from between the floor tiles. “I just, I came into the room, and you were making out with . . . I just . . .”

“You were startled? How do you think I felt? You threw a bowl of pretzels at me.”

“No, I didn’t.” I had to laugh. Her face was so shocked. “I just dropped it.”

“A pretzel hit me in the ankle.”

“Are you injured?”

“My lawyer will contact yours.”

“Okay. Fair enough.”

“Why were you so startled?” she asked. “That was really embarrassing, having you react like that.”

“Sorry.” I rested my chin on my knees. “I don’t know.”

“You think he’s a jerk, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “And a slut.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Though so am I.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Compared to you, I mean,” she said.

“Oh.”

“But can I tell you? Kevin kisses a little, I mean, not slobbery at all, but a little hard, like he presses against your chin a little too hard, and his tongue . . .”

I stood up. I did not want to talk about Kevin’s tongue.

“What?”

“I’m thirsty,” I said.

“Okay.” She stood up, too. “You sure get twitchy talking about kissing. I think deep down you really want to, if you’d just ever let yourself.”

“Let’s continue my analysis later, okay, Dr. Freud?” I suggested. “After we find some sodas.”

No cans were left in the basement, and Kevin wasn’t there anymore, either. I was clenching my teeth to keep from asking Tess if by any chance she thought his mouth tasted mildewy at all, and if that was usual with boys’ mouths. We went up the stairs, me staying behind her, my jaw clenched tight.

Kevin was at the back door with his father, who was still talking to my mother. I wanted to be a good host but I knew that if my mother saw me she would call me over to say thank you for coming or some horrendous thing like that, so I whispered quickly to Tess that I had a headache and went around the other way, through the kitchen to the front stairs.

I did have a headache, actually, but when Mom came up a little later I told her I could handle it, please leave me alone, I am fourteen years old, I know how to cope with a headache by myself, believe it or not. I got in bed and pretended to read, wondering if my best friend or at least my mother was planning to come in and check on me at all, see if I had a fever. Nobody did.

I didn’t go down to help clean up, despite Mom’s suggestion through my closed door. Tess and Jennifer were sleeping over anyway; from their laughter I could tell they were very obviously enjoying themselves so they didn’t need my assistance. At midnight, they tiptoed in and inflated the air mattresses. Usually when they sleep over all three of us sleep down on the floor, but I stayed in my bed, alone, throwing myself my own private little pity party.

six

I SPENT THE whole week thinking about him all the time, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin—even though in gym on Wednesday he was running in this really peculiar way, all uncoordinated and doofy, his feet circling out to the sides. Even that didn’t shut me down on him. It was very strange, especially when I started thinking that I shouldn’t think about him so much and I didn’t know how not to, anymore.

So what I did was this: I asked George out. Online. He said yes.

I thought it might help set me right again but so far, no. I just feel worse about myself, treacherous in so many ways. Tess is all happy for me, and George has started meeting me after each class to walk me to my next one. Good old George, such a gentleman. It would be so much easier if I could get myself to love him instead.

I was also really wishing I had told Tess about the Kevin kiss. Now too much time had passed so I would have to carry this secret to my grave. All my other take-it-to-the-grave secrets are
with
somebody, mostly with Tess. I never kept one to myself before, which I used to worry made me shallow and transparent. But actually an alone-secret is mostly (though not completely) a stressful and isolating thing to have, it turns out.

The regular phone rang last night. When I picked it up and said, “Hello?” the voice that said “Hi” back was Kevin’s.

“Hi,” I said.

Kevin.

Finally, I thought. Finally he’s calling me, after all my wishing. After I asked out George. Uh-oh. Why was he calling me? Maybe it just took making him jealous? Is that what I had to do all this time? Use George? Is Kevin really that shallow? My heart was pounding.
He likes me after all,
I thought. He does, he must, or why would he be calling? Why would he make out with Tess, though, if he likes me? Maybe he was trying to make
me
jealous? Am I that shallow? What if he’s calling to ask me out and I say I can’t, I’m going out with George and he says oh, okay, forget it then? And I’ve missed my chance forever? Oh, my head was spinning.

“So how did it go?” he asked.

It? How did what go? I had no idea what he was talking about. I tried to remember if anything other than brooding about him and checking my computer to see if he had by any chance written to me was happening in my life. He sounded so confident that he was asking a reasonable question that I thought maybe there was something momentous that I was supposed to have done that day, something maybe I had forgotten because thoughts about Kevin himself had just crowded the important thing right out of my mind. I didn’t want to seem like the idiot I felt like and say what are you talking about? So instead I said, casually, “Fine.”

“Great,” he said. “Blumstein liked it?”

Blumstein is my mother’s boss.

“Huh?” I said.

“Elizabeth?”

Elizabeth is my mother. So I said, “Kevin?”

“No,” said—I swear—Kevin.

“Hold on,” I said. “Mom!”

She picked up. My heart was still thumping a few minutes later when Mom yelled from the kitchen, “Charlie, it’s George!”

“No, it’s not,” I yelled back.

“Yes it is,” she yelled back.

An impasse. I didn’t know who that was, that person who sounded exactly like Kevin, but it definitely was not George. “No, it is not,” I said.

“He called on call-waiting!”

“I’ll call him back,” I yelled. “You can finish. Who are you talking to?”

“I’m done,” she said, coming up the stairs with the portable. She thrust it toward me and whispered, “He’s so cute.”

“Who?”

She pointed at the phone.

“Kevin?”

“George!” She made a face like why was I being so thick, and left.

I looked at the phone and thought about that for a second, if George was cute or not. I realized I didn’t know if he was or wasn’t. It seemed beside the point.

“Hello?” I was not sure who would answer.

It was George, just George, just calling to say hi. I told him some guy had called before and thought I was my mom. George said, “Yeah, you do sound alike, actually. Probably the structure of your larynx, don’t you think?”

I said, “You want to watch TV over the phone?”

He said, “Sure,” so we did for a while.

“It’s all so fleeting,” I said, as the TV announcer promised to be right back after a short break.

He didn’t say anything right away so I wasn’t sure if maybe I had just imagined blurting such a random thing out loud. A commercial for particularly greasy-looking hamburgers came on. I had to look away.

“Yeah,” George said. “You’re right. It is all so fleeting.” So I guess he’d heard me.

I wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or mortified. “You know what I mean?” I asked him.

“Not really,” he answered. “Fleeting?”

“Forget it.”

“I won’t,” he said. “Tell me.”

I wasn’t even sure what I meant myself. “I don’t know.” I picked up the newspaper I’d been sitting on and pointed at it. “Like this,” I said.

“Hamburgers?”

“No,” I said. “Not on the TV. The weather.”

“Well, yes,” he said. “Weather is definitely more fleeting than hamburgers. But . . . ”

“Never mind.” I watched a commercial for khaki pants, grateful the hamburger had gone away. The pants music was so annoying, I pressed mute. “The weather
report
.”

“The weather report is fleeting?” George asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It is. There it is, up on the top corner of the paper, and it’s like the only thing some people ever read of the news. Right?”

“That’s true,” said George. “My dad.”

“Right. Okay. It’s so vitally important, the only thing on people’s minds, and then the next day they don’t even care what the weather was before; they’re on to the vitally important question of what is the weather
today
. Unless there’s, like, a major hurricane or something, it is totally unimportant and unmemorable what the weather was like last Tuesday, or a year ago Thursday.”

Pause. “True.”

“Don’t you find that depressing? And, like, disconcerting?”

Pause. “You’re in a weird mood.”

I dropped the paper. “It’s a metaphor for my life,” I mumbled.

“The weather report?”

“I just . . . It’s like you can’t hold on . . .”

“The weather report is a metaphor for your life?”

“Fine. You’re right,” I told George. “I’m in a weird mood. I should go get my homework done before I . . . before I . . . I don’t know.”

“Before you scatter showers?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow,” said George.

“Yeah?” I asked, but he’d already hung up.

I do like George, I guess. There’s nothing not to like. I feel bad for him, though. He has this idea of me that he likes a whole lot more than he’d ever like the actual, secret, horrible me. He thinks I have values and standards and morals, that I’m “mature,” that I’m “deep.” But I’m not the person he and my mother think I am, or at least I’m not anymore.

Because the sad fact is, if that really had been Kevin on the phone earlier, calling to ask me out, I would’ve dumped George in one hot second.