Kissing in America (14 page)

I
can't believe I have you the whole day!” Grace said to Annie over breakfast on the porch of the University Café the next morning. Nick sat beside us; he guzzled his iced coffee with a loud slurp. Janet had gone to Nashville to meet with a client, but Grace's parents assured her they'd keep track of us. Which apparently meant letting Grace do whatever she wanted.

I'd hoped we'd go to the Grand Ole Opry, and showed Grace the travel pages we'd printed out, but she rolled her eyes and said she had much better plans for us.

Now Nick and Grace stepped outside to smoke a cigarette while Annie was in the café's bathroom. Grace had told us she was trying to quit, but that didn't seem to be working so well. I watched them. Nick's tentacles entangled her like ivy, going places where no tentacles should go.

They returned to the table, and Grace's red nails disemboweled her cinnamon bun. “I hope you brought your bathing suits.” She grinned.

We hadn't. Grace lent a beige one-piece to me. She was
about five inches taller than me so it sagged everywhere, especially in the butt and the boobs, and she gave me flip-flops that were two sizes too big. I looked like I was wearing a grocery bag and a pair of flippers. She'd lent Annie a black bikini that fit perfectly.

At the local quarry the water was a fairy-tale blue. Annie and I couldn't swim, and Grace had only one kickboard. “You go first,” Annie said, handing the kickboard to me.

“That's okay.” I shook my head. “I'd rather sit on the shore and read for a while.”

I wrapped a towel around myself, hiding my body in the grocery bag. I held up the book I'd bought at Lammy's SpeedyMart:
American Amour
. “Don't worry about me. I've got this.” I turned to my dog-eared page in the middle.

While I sat on the rocks and read, Annie and Grace swam and Nick splashed them, making giant whoops. I ate an egg salad sandwich that Mrs. Young had packed for us, with eggs from her neighbors' chickens and dill from her garden. It was one of the best sandwiches I'd ever eaten, and I felt happy to be alone, reading, with thoughts of Will casting a brightness over everything, like the sun. There hadn't been a letter from him in Tennessee, but the doubts I'd had about him last night disappeared this morning.

Will put down his bowl of mutton stew. “Eva, never doubt my love for you,” he told her. “It is as strong as my belief that we
will become an independent nation.” He finished the last bite of her johnnycake and carried her to the hayloft.

Eventually, Annie, Grace, and Nick came back onshore to eat lunch and dry off. Grace blotted her hair with a towel and glared at my book's cover. “Can you please put your man titty away? It's giving me a headache.”

American Amour
had a particularly bad cover: pink foil lettering and a long-haired, bare-chested, glistening leviathan on a horse. His nipples were the size of dessert plates.

“I can't believe you read that crap,” Grace said.

“It's not crap,” I said.

“
Grace
,” Annie warned her. “Come on.”

Grace shrugged. “Sorry. I just never liked that stuff. I always thought it's not . . . decent.”

I didn't know how having your boyfriend's octopus tentacles up your hoo-hoo in public was considered decent either, but I didn't say anything. I didn't want to have a confrontation. We were leaving tomorrow, I reminded myself. I could endure Grace for one day. (And then maybe murder her when we got to California.)

They finished eating and drying off, and we packed up our things; we took turns changing out of our bathing suits behind a rock. We climbed back into Grace's car, and Nick drove us down rural back roads.

A small plane flew overhead. Whenever I heard one, I did
this thing where I pretended it wasn't happening; I didn't listen; I focused on a country music song on the radio and shut the world out until it passed.

We drove by an open field, and Grace touched Nick's arm and whispered to him. They turned a corner, and we drove for several miles until we reached a fence.

“Nick's brother works here,” Grace said. Nick drove us past the gate. There they were, in the distance: tiny brightly colored planes, lined up like toys, with a larger prop plane behind them.

A giant sign read:

MEYER'S SOARING—

THREE GLIDER RIDES, GET ONE FREE.

Cold seeped into my chest. I couldn't move.

“Ed started the business last summer,” Nick told us.

“We can go for free!” Grace trilled.

Ed stepped out of a wooden booth and greeted us. He had a mustache so thick, it looked like a mouse was napping on his lips.

“Y'all ready to glide?” Ed asked. He placed his hands on his hips.

Annie searched my face. She pulled Grace aside and they talked for a while. I watched Annie fold her arms and stare at the dirt.

Annie returned to me and said, “We're not doing this. We're going to go right home—”

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“I didn't say anything about your dad. I said you have a phobia.” She shook her head. “She doesn't get it.”

Grace came over to us. “A lot of people use glider rides as a way to get over their fear of flying,” she said. “Ed and Nick take tons of people out like that, and you wouldn't believe how much it helps them. They've cured them all.”

I didn't look at her. I was afraid if I did, I'd fall apart.

She walked back to Nick and Ed, whispered something to them, and shrugged.
That girl is so high-maintenance
, she probably said.
She's bringing everybody down. She won't let Annie have any fun.

Grace was the easier friend. She required less. Annie would rather take this trip with her.

“No, it's fine,” I told Annie. “I'll just wait. I'm right in the middle of my book, at a great part. . . . I'll stay here and read. You should go.”

“No. I'm not going,” Annie said.

“I'm serious. Really—you should go.”

She searched my face again, trying to see if I was lying.

I didn't want her to go. My insides screamed,
Don't do it—you could die!
But I couldn't say that. Grace already hated me and thought I was a crazy person. If I said how I really felt, Grace would laugh. Everyone would laugh.

“She's waiting for you.” I nodded at Grace, who was leaning
against the booth, talking to Nick and Ed, looking impatient.

“You ladies flying or not?” Ed called to us.

Annie glanced at me one more time.

“Go.” I nudged her toward them. Then I turned and walked toward Grace's car.

Annie looked back at me; Grace touched her arm and hurried her toward the glider.

I stood by the car alone. I should've said the truth. I should've said:
You're going to fly in a plane that looks like a toy, without a motor? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?

It was crazy. Grace was going to kill my best friend. And I was going to stand there and watch it. Why didn't I have the guts to say the truth?

They were in the glider already, with Ed in the leader plane. He kept checking his phone. He was probably Googling how to fly a plane. He looked like he hadn't washed his hands or brushed his teeth in years—I wouldn't trust him to fly a plane in a video game.

The motor started. Words caught in my throat: Don't do it
. Don't—

They took off.

I couldn't watch. To the left of me, a forest surrounded the field. I looked toward the car, but I couldn't sit and read. I had all this excess nervous energy. I needed to move. I turned and started running. Why had I said she should go? I was such a lying idiot. What was wrong with me?

I ran. Pine trees. Their needles covered the ground, a
brown carpet winding around the evergreens.

I stopped and leaned against a tree, panting. I heard the motor rumbling, and I tried to pretend it wasn't happening, but I couldn't—my skin started to lift off me as the sky shook. I pinched my thumbnail, watching it turn white.

I slumped down. Any new hurt dug up the old ones, unburied them. After my dad died, one of our neighbors shoved a card under our door in an orange envelope. Three kittens sleeping on a clock. It said:
Time heals all.

Aside from making a line of funny sympathy cards, someday I want to make ones that just tell the truth:

            
Sorry to hear he died.

            
Now you're going to feel miserable forever, pretty much.

            
GL with that!

I turned on my phone. I had service.

I checked the message board.

There were eighty-two new ones. Fran wrote the first. It was a link to a newspaper article. From this morning.

Bodies in Airplane Crash Are Recovered

from Ocean Floor

By HUMPHREY COLES

A recovery team removed the remains of four victims from the wreckage of Freedom Airlines Flight 472, which
crashed in the Atlantic two years ago, from a section of the fuselage that had been wedged in the ocean floor.

The bodies were brought to the surface from a depth of approximately a mile and a half, Frank Longbrown, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said. The remains will be rushed to a laboratory in New York, where an attempt will be made to identify the victims within two weeks. The genders of the victims were not yet certain.

Longbrown raised the possibility that more bodies might still be recovered. He said “much is unknown” about how many victims remain in the wreckage of the jet on the ocean floor. “The retrieval process is in an exploratory stage,” he said.

In the cold climate of the sea bottom, Longbrown said, the bodies may be intact but delicate.

The canopy of trees above me was so thick, I could barely see the sky. I was shivering. Freezing.

I ran. I kept running until I didn't feel my feet anymore.

Don't fall apart. Don't fall apart. Don't fall apart
.

It didn't change anything. First the wreckage. Then the flight recorders. Now they'd found bodies. It didn't matter. He was dead. So what if they finally found the rest of his body?
So what so what so what so what so what so what?

It mattered. It mattered more than anything in the whole entire world.

It mattered because I cared what he felt, whether he spent those last seconds screaming. It mattered because I didn't want the Greek myths to be true, to think that like the dead warriors in Hades, he was trapped forever with his body smashed beyond recognition. Or strapped into his seat. Forever.

I kept running through the forest, pounding the questions and fear into the ground, trying to shut the feelings off, close them down. I ran until I could barely breathe. Then I stood still and steeled myself. I did this literally, as I felt my insides crumbling—I pictured steel girding my body, pylons up my ribs, along my arms, bracing me, holding me up, metal around me.

I reached the airfield.

T
hey landed safely.

Grace said, “That was so much fun!”

Annie bit her lip, and I could feel her eyes on me, but I knew if I said anything, the slightest peep, the steel would collapse, dissolve in front of all of them.

“Nick and Grace want to have another ride,” Annie told me.

I nodded. I watched Grace and Nick get back into the glider.

Annie brushed her hair out of her eyes. “I'm sorry Grace is such a . . .”

She left the phrase hanging there. “She's just jealous of you,” she finally said.

“What?”

She gazed at her feet. “Because we're doing this. Having this trip she's not a part of.”

Then she moved closer to me, grasped my hand. “You'll always be my best friend,” she told me as we walked back to the car.

We never said that to each other anymore. We used to say it
all the time, in fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth grades, constantly,
You're my best friend
, and then for some reason we'd stopped. I guess because we felt we'd gotten too old for saying those kinds of things, too mature to need the reminder.

I squeezed her hand back.

Nick drove us back to Grace's house quickly, and after he parked the car, Annie and I hung behind in the garden. Grace and Nick disappeared inside.

I showed Annie the article once they were out of sight. I watched her read it on my phone, the corners of her mouth turning downward.

Hold it together. Stay calm. Try not to be so thin-skinned.

“‘Much is unknown.' Who writes this shit? Who
says
this shit? I'd like to shove his ‘unknown' up his goddamn ‘exploratory stage,'” she said.

I laughed. We both laughed. The sun hid behind the late- afternoon clouds.

She hugged me. “It will be okay. Whatever they find. I know it will be okay.”

I tried to believe her. It would be so wonderful to believe her. I felt like two different people again, the one standing here with my best friend and the other girl who had a black hole growing in her chest, hollowing out her stomach, sucking away everything good.

He was dead already. Why did it feel like he kept dying again and again?

Sweat ran down my neck.

“Let's walk,” Annie said. She took my arm, and we headed down the road. I tried to breathe. She kept my arm wound in hers. “It's so green here. Look at it.” She waved at a meadow filled with wildflowers. “You can actually step places where thousands of people haven't already stepped today. Imagine walking along every day and not smelling pee and garbage.”

I laughed and began to breathe again.

“I like the country,” Annie said. “At least I think I do. Maybe I even like it better than the city. Not that I want to move here, but—I like smelling flowers instead of garbage.”

“Me too,” I said.

We kept walking.

“It'll be okay,” she told me again.

I nodded. The farther we went, the better I began to feel.

We passed a stone wall and a dirt path alongside it. We took the path into the woods. I thought of how when I was a kid, I spent ages gazing at Edward Gorey's and Maurice Sendak's illustrations of trees and forests and felt this shiver of excitement and mystery. Earlier, as I ran through the forest near the airfield, I'd been too panicked to look around. Now it was different, being with Annie.

“Sometimes I feel like I'm always wanting something, you know?” she said as we stepped over a fallen log. “Good grades. Academic prizes. To win this show. Sometimes I feel like, What if I could just stop? Maybe I should just go to some
college in the middle of nowhere and chill out.”

I nodded. “I know.” I'd never heard her say that before, but I knew how hard the pressure was for her. I wished we could both stop all our endless yearning.

After we'd walked for a while, we came across a run-down, abandoned cabin in the woods. It was missing its roof.

“Look up there,” Annie said, pointing. There was an old, tattered treehouse. “Gurlag's house. He's followed you here. He's going to swing you up there on his vine and show you his meat sword.”

“I think in that series it's called a manroot.”

“Both sound so appealing. I picture a manroot as kind of looking like a long, crooked carrot.” She wrinkled her nose.

“We should move here and start our own vegetable farm specializing in organic manroots.”

“We'll make millions. Screw this scholarship. The TV show. It's our new plan.”

We kept walking along the path, and I started to feel like myself again. Then my phone rang.

“Where did you disappear to? We're worried sick!” It was Janet. “I see that you're far from the house. I have the Locate My Kids app on. What are you doing there?”

“We just went for a walk,” I said. “That's all.”

“Well, come back soon please. It's nearly dinnertime.”

I hung up and sighed. “Janet.”

“We can hire her to work on our farm with us. She can
keep the manroots and meat swords disease-free,” Annie said.

“Sounds idyllic,” I said.

When we returned to the house, everyone was drinking iced tea on the porch. Janet was dressed in pale beige from head to toe today, like a stalk of cauliflower.

“By the way, this came in the Youngs' mail this morning while you were out,” Janet said, and picked up an envelope beside her. She handed it to me.

His name, his handwriting. She hadn't opened it. My chest pounded.

“Another poem for the literary magazine?” Janet asked.