Authors: Rachel Vail
“HELLO?”
It was Kevin’s voice, but I was not about to make the same mistake twice. “Hello,” I said, all neutral, though my hand was shaking so much the phone clanked against my head.
“It’s Kevin,” the voice said.
“Who is it?” Tess whispered.
I gave her the “sh” sign and said, “Hi.”
“Did, um,” he said. “Is your . . . Did we get any homework in French for over the weekend?”
“No,” I said. How awkward that he would say the word
French
to me, given our history. I leaned against the wall for support.
“Who is it?” Tess demanded.
I stuck my finger in my exposed ear. “We never do on Fridays.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I forgot. I was looking in my assignment pad and I didn’t . . . um . . . that’s a lie, by the way. You knew that, right?”
I smiled. I closed my eyes. I wanted to make this last. “Yeah.”
Kevin.
“Who?” Tess tried to grab the phone.
I put my hand over the talkie part and whispered, “It’s Kevin. I bet he’s looking for you.
Sh.
”
Tess grinned wickedly at me and sat back down. She loves a scheme.
“That obvious?” Kevin asked.
“Yeah,” I said into the phone. “So why are you really calling?” I grinned back at Tess. Sometimes you have to feel sorry for boys. They do not know what they’re up against. I jutted my hips to the side. I was in this thing, this something, this teasing of a boy, with Tess. I was powerful and beyond him, up to something. We had done this to boys before, for years. At least it was familiar territory.
“Um, because,” said Kevin. “Is, I was wondering . . .”
I sank down, against the wall, to the floor. “Yeah?”
I heard him breathing. “Is your . . .”
I closed my eyes.
“What did he say?” Tess whispered. I looked up at her, her chin cupped in her hand, all excited and happy. “What does he want?”
I tried to smile back, and into the phone I said, “Did you call to talk to Tess?” My voice had lost some of its jauntiness, but I was trying.
Tess apparently failed to notice. She opened her mouth wide, still having fun, and flung her shoe at me. It just missed my head and left a mark on the wall.
“No,” said Kevin. “Why?”
I closed my eyes. The smile I was faking was wearing me out. “Well, you tracked her down.”
“Oh,” said Kevin.
“You want to talk to her?”
“Um,” he said, and I handed the phone up to Tess. I listened, sort of, with my head between my knees and my arms wrapped around them. Tess was laughing at something Kevin said. I love her wicked laugh. I didn’t lift my head again until she said bye and hung up.
“That was weird,” she said as we washed the dishes. “Want to see what’s on TV?”
I nodded and followed her into the living room. We flopped together onto the couch and watched TV, head to toe. With my feet burrowed under her, I thought about Tess’s boyfriend and wondered why he had called me. Any time I glanced at Tess I had to think, she has no idea what a bad friend I am, keeping secrets from her, flirting with her boyfriend. I decided right then and there to put a stop to it: no more flirting, no more liking him. If he wants to break up with Tess and then, many weeks later, ask me out, I’ll consider it. The double life is too horrible and stressful for me.
Good-bye, Kevin,
I thought.
This is the last hour I will ever spend imagining kissing you again.
The TV blared, Tess dozed, I imagined. We barely moved until Mom came home.
MOM WAS ALL fake-surprised to find us awake on the couch and, I noticed sadly, lip-gloss-free. She hustled us upstairs to bed. While we were brushing our teeth, Tess whispered, “She sure has F.K.G., huh?”
“Who has what?” I asked, thinking she was talking about fried chicken.
“Your mom,” Tess said. “F.K.G.—Freshly Kissed Glow.”
“Please don’t make me vomit in front of you,” I said, and sat on the rim of the bathtub. I had a mouthful of toothpaste but visions of my mother kissing Kevin’s father made me too woozy to stand, so I had to spit into the tub.
Tess rinsed her mouth the standard way.
“Charlie!” Tess said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “Yeah, I’m fine. I am. I just sometimes like to spit my toothpaste in the tub. For fun! And, but, with my mom? The thing is, she just is not great at, she doesn’t wear lip gloss, you know, enough to know you have to reapply it after you drink a cup of . . .”
“Oh, Charlie.” She sat down beside me on the rim, with her arm around me. I rested my head on her shoulder. “You know what we’re gonna do?”
I could so not handle a Tess scheme right then, especially if it related to my mother’s love life or, even worse, kissing life. “Tess . . .”
“What we’re going to do,” interrupted Tess, “is we are not going to talk about it. Discussing other people’s F.K.G. is gross, especially grown-ups’, and especially especially parents’. Right?”
“Right.” I wiped my nose on my sweatshirt sleeve exactly the way that drives my father nuts—up, so it gives me a crease in my nose. But right then I just didn’t care.
“I mean, I couldn’t discuss my parents getting F.K.G. They never have it,” Tess said. “I don’t think they’ve kissed since I was a baby. Their mouths are too busy screaming at us.”
“My mother was not on a date.”
“Okay,” Tess said.
“She was at a meeting.”
“I know.”
“So let’s not discuss what doesn’t even exist,” I said.
“Exactly.” Tess stood up. “Do you have a headband?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t worry,” Tess said.
If only my main worry was my lack of a headband.
Tess pulled off her underwear from under her huge nightshirt, yanked the band of it down around her ears, and tucked in her hair. She even looked pretty like that. Odd, for sure, but still pretty. She always does. I couldn’t help staring.
“What?” She turned and looked at me, all matter-of-fact. “Otherwise my hair will get wet when I wash my face. What do you do?”
What do I do?
It was too big a question. What I don’t do is stand in my bathroom with underwear on my head, two tufts of hair sprouting up from the leg holes, and water dripping off my face. Just when I thought nothing could seem funny to me, though, Tess does something like this. I shrugged.
“Let’s talk about
you
kissing instead,” she said, lathering up her face with her special face stuff from Filene’s.
“Me?”
“When are you going to put poor George out of his misery and kiss him?”
I groaned and splashed some water on my own face.
“Why are you so scared to kiss? It’s nice. You’ll like it, I think.”
I grabbed a towel.
“Aren’t you going to at least exfoliate?” she asked.
“That’s what it always comes down to in life, isn’t it? Kiss or exfoliate.” I shook my head. “I’m going to bed.”
“You just have to get your first kiss behind you, Charlie. Then you’ll see what I mean.”
When she got to my room (underpants mercifully back where they belong, I had to assume, or at least off her head) we talked for a while about why Kevin had called her at my house and if that was romantic or creepy. I said I thought it was just medium. I think she was hoping I’d vote for romantic. She has not been in love since last Memorial Day weekend, with Luke Sorenson, and that was really short-lived, didn’t even last through that Monday. Elliot Blumenfeld was her first love, last fall. Then in January it was Widge Wainwright, which I didn’t get at all; he is so beige. She had fallen out of love with him by February second but held out until the fourteenth, then broke up with him when he didn’t even give her a card, never mind candy, for Valentine’s Day.
While she was talking, I was thinking that I really should tell her I already had gotten my first kiss behind me, and that it changed nothing, really. But then she’d be so mad at me for not telling her earlier, maybe she’d never forgive me. And the last thing I needed right then was to lose my best friend. I had crossed a line, at some point, by not telling her already.
It never happened,
I reminded myself; if Kevin ever says it did, I can just say “you wish” or something mature like that.
“I think he might be the one,” Tess was saying.
“Who’s the one? The one what?”
“Kevin,” she said. “The real one for me, the one I’m destined to be with forever, or at least through high school.”
“Really?”
“The one I’ll tell my kids about someday. There’s real tragedy in his eyes, you know what I mean?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, staring at the ceiling from down on the air mattress. “Sort of. You mean how he looks calm and intense at the same time?”
She lifted her head and rested it on her hand, her elbow bobbing on the mattress. “Exactly! I can’t believe you just said that. Do you think it’s because his mom ran away from home to be a fighter pilot?”
“Is that really true?” I knew the rumor, of course; everybody did. I couldn’t help suspecting it was probably both simpler and more complicated—maybe Kevin’s parents, like my own, had at some point just stopped loving each other.
“Yes, it’s totally true,” Tess said. “She’s in the Middle East, I heard—Jennifer’s father is friends with Kevin’s father, and Jennifer told me, like, last week. Kevin’s mom is in, um, whatever—one of those countries that starts with an I, totally flying jets. Isn’t that cool, in a way? I mean, sucks for the kids, but still. If it’s her passion, what she dreamed of doing all her life, you know? Like when other little girls were pretending to be Cinderella, she was totally, like, bombing enemy aircraft in her backyard. Right? I have the whole story worked out in my head.”
“So I see,” I said. Tess always makes up a whole story for everything. It’s one of the best things about a sleepover with her. She has life stories worked out for all the cafeteria ladies, old men in the mall, everybody. “So then what happened?” I asked. “Why did she get married and have kids?”
“Oh, isn’t that so obvious and sad?” Tess sat up, psyched. “She felt all this pressure to conform, maybe from her mother or friends or an older sister—yes, I think it was an older sister, who was more traditional and already happily married—and then of course she met Kevin’s father. I mean, he is hot, right?”
My stomach actually made a noise.
“Your guts know it,” Tess said, pointing. “He’s old and he’s still a hottie, so you can imagine how hot he was when he was young. So she met him and they fell in love and you know she was all off balance, falling in love with someone like that. So she tried to be ordinary, make her parents proud and happy like her sister had, tried to forget flying and her own career and all and maybe he insisted on it, Kevin’s father—he wanted her to stay home and make three-things-on-a-plate dinners and go to PTA meetings. So she tried to be that person but all her dreams, when she fell into her insomniac sleep at night, were fighter pilot dreams and eventually she just couldn’t fake it anymore; she just couldn’t be someone she wasn’t, even for the man she loved. Did you know Kevin has a little sister? Amanda, I think.”
“Samantha,” I said accidentally. I was so caught up in the story of this woman’s life, I wanted to hear how it turned out.
“Right. Samantha. The mom supposedly left when the little girl was, like, two. Talk about messing a kid up. But maybe being abandoned by his mother is kind of what makes Kevin so passionate, you know?”
“Tess!”
“What?”
“She didn’t abandon . . . That didn’t even . . . You’re making it all up.”
“So?”
“So you can’t know what really happened between them. Besides, that is such a mean way to put it. Abandoned?”
“Okay, I wasn’t auditioning to be his therapist. He’s not even here. I was complimenting him anyway, Miss Protector of the Kevin.”
I hit her with my pillow.
Tess flipped over onto her stomach and stuffed my pillow under her arms. “Here’s the thing. I wish you’d kissed him, too.”
I froze.
What?
“You do?”
“So you’d know what I mean. Because he does this thing, when he kisses, or at least when he kissed me at your party.”
“What?”
“Promise you won’t mock me,” she said.
“I won’t,” I promised. “I swear. What did he do?”
“He kind of, like, almost groaned a little when he kissed me.”
His secret hum-sigh. No. That was only for me. I tried to swallow, unable to speak.
“You know what I mean?” Tess asked. “It’s hard to explain.” She imitated it, the sound Kevin made when he kissed me. He made it with her, too, I guess. So either he makes that private sound of longing with every girl he kisses or every boy does that. It was hard not to be overwhelmed with disappointment.
“Do you think that’s weird? Or good?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Oh, Charlie, you really have to start kissing so we can discuss this better.”
I closed my eyes.
“At Kevin’s party.” Tess sat up and leaned toward me. “Kiss George next week at Kevin’s party.”
“Tess . . .”
“Come on,” Tess prodded. “I’ll kiss Kevin and you kiss George. Let’s make a pact.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m just not that into kissing, maybe.”
“You are crazy,” Tess said, grabbing me by the shoulders. Her face was maybe three millimeters from mine. “Listen to me. Kissing is the best thing ever invented.”
She had a look of total seriousness on her face. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. I stayed very still.
She clonked her forehead against mine and cracked a smile. “With the possible exception of gummy bears,” she added.
She scrunched her nose, then flipped over and snuggled down into her pillow. “So it’s a pact then. We kiss them on Halloween. No backing out.”
She closed her eyes. In a minute I heard her breathing slow into sleep. I stared at the ceiling and thought about her boyfriend again, despite my recent and sacred personal vow not to.