Touch (5 page)

The first ten minutes of the bus ride were my favorite part of the entire day. I liked sitting there in the early morning quiet, next to Shakes, riding past the forests and over the bridge across the reservoir, the bowl of clear water surrounded by mountains. I liked dozing, dropping off to sleep, and waking up a few miles down the road, with my head on Shakes’s shoulder and his head pressed against mine.

At first, it happened by accident, our falling asleep like that. It was so early, we were so tired. I used to get dressed with my eyes closed, opening them only when I had to. I’d stay in bed till the very last minute so I could skip the Joan-inspection of my clothes and my general attitude, and miss her lecture about the importance of the nutritious breakfast that I wasn’t eating.

Usually, Shakes and I talked awhile, but pretty soon, we couldn’t keep our eyes open. Our heads felt heavy, and drooped. Shakes’s shoulder was as good as a pillow. I woke up and realized where I was and went back to sleep again. It was comfortable, we were friends, we’d known each other forever. Shakes must also have woken from time to time, and realized I was there, and drifted off to sleep again, his cheek against my hair.

It wasn’t romantic, at least not at first. It was just comfortable, easy. It made me feel as if I had a brother, a real brother, instead of Darling Josh. Shakes and I were like siblings, puppies in a litter. Shakes had a wheezy snore that I totally adored. It had a funny catch in the middle, as if, when he slept, his breath was doing what his body did when he was awake.

We only had those ten minutes of peace, fifteen when the weather was bad and Maureen was too nervous even to drive at her normal slo-mo crawl. We both developed inner alarm clocks that woke us up before anyone else got on the bus. When we slept like that, leaning against each other, we were back in Innocent Little-Kid Land, where you still could do things like hug your friends, regardless of whether you happened to be a girl or a boy. But as soon as anyone else got on the bus, we were in High School Bus Land, where if you rested your head on somebody’s shoulder, it meant that you were dating. Two girls could sit like that or walk arm in arm without it meaning they were gay. But I didn’t have any friends who were girls. Shakes and Chris and Kevin were still the only pals I had. And now it was mostly Shakes. Already Kevin and Chris were acting a little cool to me, and sometimes it crossed my mind that they felt I’d chosen Shakes over them. Maybe everyone was capable of feeling jealous that way, not just Dad and Joan competing in their minds with Geoff and Mom. Maybe everyone wants to feel that they’re the special one who’s been chosen.

I liked the feeling of being near Shakes, of just being physically close. If I told Doctor Atwood that, she’d probably point out that I wasn’t exactly getting a lot of physical affection at home. And it
was
true that right in the middle of some hellish dinner with Joan, I would escape by looking forward to the next morning, when I would sit next to Shakes.

It was an especially beautiful fall. Everybody said so. The sky was never bluer, the leaves were never more brilliant. And sometimes, half asleep next to Shakes, I’d open my eyes and a dazzling sliver of orange or red would squeeze between my eyelids. Then the slice of brightness would disappear and I’d fall back asleep. Sometimes, I couldn’t fall asleep again, but I’d
pretend
to be asleep because it felt so good to sit like that, with my head tucked into the space between Shakes’s head and his shoulder. And sometimes I couldn’t help noticing that sometimes Shakes wasn’t really sleeping, either.

It was a little nervous-making, both pretending like that. It was ever so slightly sexy, though part of me thought it was pathetic. How backward that sitting close to a boy should have seemed like a big deal when
there were kids in our grade who, everyone knew, were already having sex. But it
was
a big deal for me. I guess I was socially retarded, and Shakes
was
disabled. So maybe that explained it.

The leaves began to fall off the trees, and, as always, it was sad. It reminded me of how much you can lose overnight. Your family, for example. Even though you thought that everyone was getting along. Your mom could leave as lightly as a leaf falling off a tree. You might not even notice until she was already gone.

The days got rainy and cold, and it felt even better to have Shakes’s warm shoulder next to mine.

Every so often, he’d miss a few days of school. Whenever Big Maureen waited outside his house and no one came out and she honked and pulled away, I’d feel something drop down inside me, like some kind of inner parachute. Even when it was sunny, the weather seemed bleak and depressing on those days. Alone in the backseat, I shivered even though the bus was always overheated. And I knew that because Shakes wouldn’t be getting on—with his special handicapped backseat privileges—I’d have to find somewhere else to sit by the
time the first senior appeared. On those days, I’d save seats for Chris and Kevin, but they always sat together, across the aisle or in front of me, and we didn’t talk that much. We all knew I was only sitting with them because Shakes wasn’t there.

For the first time, I
seriously
worried about Shakes. What if his health problems were worse than he’d let us think? But then he was back, hopping down his driveway and onto the bus. I knew not to ask him how he was feeling, or why he had been absent.

At first, I thought I was imagining it when things between me and Shakes got more intense. Shakes would be sleeping, or pretending to sleep. He’d turn his head and his lips would graze the side of my neck. Or our heads would both turn at once, and we would be practically kissing. It was strange how, when we were like that, it was almost as if Shakes experienced a miracle cure. He didn’t twitch or stutter or spaz. He was completely steady and calm.

By now, those first few minutes on the bus were
really
the best thing about my day. It was better than
school, better than after school, when I was mostly home by myself. I’d find myself daydreaming about being on the bus with Shakes. Then I’d snap awake, the way we snapped to attention when anyone else got on the bus.

It was strange, how thinking about Shakes made me feel less lonely, even though I was spending so much time alone that it began to seem a little like my life in Wisconsin, minus Mom and Geoff, plus Dad and Joan and Josh Darling. On weekends, I didn’t see my friends that much—not half as much as I used to. Chris was hanging out with Daria Wells.

Most Saturdays, somebody’s mom would drive the three guys to the mall. And Daria’s stupid girlfriends, with their Minnie Mouse voices, would often come along. It was like some group date with Chris and Daria at the center. Every so often, Shakes would call and ask me to go with them, but I always said no. It made me uncomfortable to be with my friends when the girls were there. It was almost like I didn’t know what to be—I wasn’t really anyone’s friend, and I certain wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend. It hurt my feelings when
I heard they’d all gone somewhere without me, but I told myself it would be better for everyone—especially me—if I pretended I didn’t care.

Monday mornings, on the bus with Shakes, I’d say, “Did you have fun over the weekend?”

And Shakes would say, “I don’t know. Sort of, I guess.” It left me feeling disappointed. Did I expect him to say he’d missed me? That he couldn’t have fun without me?

Sometimes, Shakes and I would
really
fall asleep, which meant we dozed through the little time we got to be together. But that was okay, too. I liked having someone I trusted so much that we could leave the conscious everyday world and be back before anyone noticed.

We should have known that nothing that cool and innocent could last. We should have expected the big bust, the scene like the one in the cheesy drama where the couple wakes up in bed and sees the parents or the respective spouses, someone who definitely doesn’t want to see them there together.

Sooner or later, we were doomed to be rudely awoken from our happy little backseat dream.

It was the first of November. I remember because Daria had had a Halloween party the night before, and I hadn’t been invited. Shakes was tired from the party, and I was tired because I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d lain awake thinking about everyone having fun without me. Anyway, we were both so exhausted that we sort of passed out. We were all scrunched up against each other, and I guess it must have looked as if we were
really making out, our limbs all twisted together in some supertight clinch. And for the first time, we didn’t wake up before the others got on the bus.

We awoke surrounded by faces. We opened our eyes just in time to see Beef and Lamb and all their friends looking down at us and making remarks. I felt my own face turn stoplight red. Shakes must have looked as guilty as I did. From the way everyone was acting, you’d have thought they’d caught us having sex in the backseat of the bus.

Gradually, I remembered where I was and figured out what had happened. By now everyone had turned around and was looking at us. They must have been watching us for a long time. I saw a blur of smiling, smirking faces. Only two were in focus. Kevin and Chris were staring at us, as if we were strangers, or as if we were kids they knew and didn’t like. I felt as if we’d been taking little baby steps away from each other ever since I got back from Wisconsin, and now we’d each taken a giant step back and nothing could ever fix that.

Chris and Kevin were waiting for us when we got off the bus at school. Daria gave me a huffy disapproving
look, as if she’d caught me being a total ho, when the truth is that Shakes and I had done nothing,
nothing
, compared to what people were saying she did with Chris.

“So…are you two, like…hooking up?” Kevin asked me and Shakes. “Are you guys, like…dating? And you didn’t bother to tell us?”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “That would be like dating your brother!”

Now Shakes was looking at me weirdly, too, and I knew I’d hurt his feelings. I wondered if he’d been thinking about me the way I’d been thinking about him. And now I’d gone and ruined it.

“Come on,” said Chris. “Don’t lie. Everybody saw the two of you making out in the back of the bus.”

“Man,” said Shakes, “I feel sorry for Daria if you don’t know the difference between sleeping and making out.”

What a brilliant answer! It shut them up for a moment, during which I started to wonder why Chris and Kevin cared so much about what Shakes and I were doing, even if there
was
something going on. Which
there wasn’t. Chris had Daria, wasn’t that enough? But it was as if they thought we’d done something to
them
. As if we’d cheated on
them
with each other. As if
I’d
broken up the four-person gang we’d had since we were little. As if I’d chosen Shakes over them, and they would never forgive me.

Nothing was ever the same after Kevin and Chris saw me and Shakes sleeping—or making out or whatever they thought we were doing—on the bus. The divide that had separated us when I came home from my year in Wisconsin had widened into the Grand Canyon.

Chris and Kevin acted as if I’d stolen their best friend. That didn’t seem right. Another unfair thing was that they seemed to blame me more than they blamed
Shakes. I guess that was sort of like everyone blaming Eve instead of Adam for eating the apple and getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden. I never understood that part of the Bible. Wasn’t it Adam’s fault, too? But she was the temptress, the evil woman who’d led the fool astray.

I knew it must have been hard for Shakes to be leading a double life. The sweet, tender guy he was with me when we were alone on the bus, and the silent kid who went along with his friends when they acted as if they hardly knew me. Every time I’d go up to Chris or Kevin at school, they’d turn and walk away. Or they’d look at me as if I’d just said the stupidest thing in the world, and then they’d act as if I wasn’t there. At first Shakes would seem as if he didn’t know what to do, and then he would do what they did. You’d think I would have got used to it after it happened often enough, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I kept trying to understand: Why couldn’t they handle it if Shakes and I fell asleep on each other’s shoulders? Sometimes I felt as if they blamed me personally for the fact that we all had to grow up and turn into men and women. That we couldn’t be little kids anymore. Which didn’t seem right, either. I mean, Peter Pan didn’t
blame Wendy or Tinker Bell for the fact that most kids (except for him) wound up becoming grown-ups.

Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I told Shakes that he had to choose between them and me. Choose between what and what? We never talked about what we did on the bus, and we certainly didn’t talk about the freeze-out I was getting from Chris and Kevin. Or about the fact that Shakes ignored me when he was with them.

So of course I didn’t tell Shakes that he had to choose.

Which turned out to be the right move. I guess Shakes must have forgiven me for saying that dating him would be like dating my brother. Because our thing in the back of the bus—I still didn’t know what to call it—was getting more intense. A
lot
more intense.

Now, instead of just letting his head droop on my shoulder, he’d kind of scrunch up against me with his hands clasped in front of him, almost like paws. I never stopped being surprised by how calm he got when we were sitting like that, how all his tics and twitches disappeared.

On the morning when he first brushed against my chest—when, for the first time, the tips of his knuckles just lightly grazed the side of my breast—he pretended he’d had a spasm.

He said, “I’m sorry, Maisie. Sometimes it’s like, I don’t know, my hands do what
they
want without asking
me
.”

“That’s okay,” I said. I knew what it was like to feel as if your body were leading you in a direction you weren’t sure you wanted to follow. The truth was, I’d liked him touching me. It had felt really good. I knew it was sort of retarded. I mean, lots of kids my age had sex—on TV, and in my school—and here I was going nuts about some guy pretending not to know he was ever so lightly touching one of my boobs. Still, that first time, each of Shakes’s knuckles felt like separate electric shocks running down through my whole body. We were still pretending it was an accident, that we didn’t know what we were doing.

The second time, he let his hand linger and slightly rotated his wrist so that now it wasn’t his knuckles but rather the base of his palm touching my breast. It still could have been accidental.

I guess it was right on the edge between accidental and on purpose. That light touch, that brief contact—who knew? And yet that touch, if it
was
a touch, felt as if it were magically rearranging the molecules, the flow of atoms and particles between his hand and my skin.

Pretty soon, there was no way of even pretending that it was accidental. We were kissing and making out for real, and Shakes was touching my breasts. All that time that he and I were making out in the back of the bus, Shakes must have been under pressure from the other guys because he was still sitting with me and not with them.

I kept trying to imagine what that was like for Shakes, being caught between the guys and me. Later I would realize I hadn’t known him as well as I’d thought. But for the moment I really believed that I understood him because we’d grown up together, and then because we took those bus rides together, his head pressed against mine. I must have imagined that personal thoughts were flowing back and forth from one of us to the other. But we didn’t know each other at all. I couldn’t have
imagined what it was like to live inside his body.

It was hard for all of us, figuring out all the weird new stuff our bodies were doing. But it must have been harder for Shakes, since his body wasn’t like anyone else’s—or anyway, like no one else we knew. His body had always done what it wanted, regardless of what he might have liked. And now he had to get used to it telling him to do even more things he wasn’t sure he wanted to do.

For example, touching me. Probably, it would have been easier for him not to. Chris and Kevin wouldn’t have resented him, they wouldn’t have been so amazed that a kid they’d grown up with—me!—was now a girl who preferred messed-up, twitchy Shakes over perfect, healthy them. I couldn’t explain it, myself. Not that they asked. No one could talk about it.

Anyway, Shakes and I thought—or at least
I
thought—that we were safe. After that one time we got caught, we never slipped up. By the time one other kid got on the bus, Shakes and I were sitting bolt upright, and as far from each other as the narrow seat would allow. We were so silent, we sat so straight, we could have been at church.

What we did on that bus was our secret. A secret
that, I guess, we shared with Big Maureen, who must have seen us in her rearview mirror. But, as everyone knew, Maureen was a widow with five kids. She was too overwhelmed and depressed to want to look for trouble. And it wasn’t as if we were having sex or smoking or doing something illegal. One of her kids had been born handicapped, too, so maybe she secretly liked to see Shakes getting some low-level action.

On those mornings, with my head next to Shakes’s, I felt less like a girl or a boy, and more like…well, more like a
person
. That’s how close it sometimes felt we were—like two halves of the same creature. Together we made up one normal human being: I was in pretty good physical shape, if you didn’t count the oversized boobs. Shakes had the physical problems, but he also had something I wanted and needed, which was a way of looking at the world that was cool and smart and courageous.

I was glad to be his friend, and glad we made out on the bus, and glad for how good it felt when he touched my breasts and we stopped pretending it was accidental.

And then all that ended in one day—one morning, to be exact. I can tell you exactly when. It’s all recorded in the papers Joan’s lawyer, Cynthia, filed. But even if
I forget it, I could just look up the date of the January senior class trip to Washington.

It was a gray, sleepy morning. A frozen mist rose off the dirty snow, but it was jungly and hot on the bus. Shakes and I dozed off and kissed, dozed off and kissed some more.

After a while, I began to notice that Maureen was driving past the houses where the seniors lived, and she wasn’t stopping. And then I remembered they were in Washington for the week, along with the junior honors group that was down in D.C. pretending to be the United Nations. Shakes and I had more time than usual, but even so, it was sad when the bus slowed down and we had to separate and sit up straight.

When the ninth and tenth and eleventh graders got on, they seemed confused. How come the bus was so empty? Then they figured it out. Party time!

Having the older kids off the bus changed the entire mood. All the seats were up for grabs, everyone just sat where they wanted. A seating free-for-all. It was anarchy, I guess you could say, and we liked it. Because for one day, that day, on that bus, we were
free
.

Even though the normal rules were obviously
suspended, the younger kids still couldn’t get up the nerve to go for the very last rows. So Shakes and I had the back to ourselves for a while. The seat in front of us stayed empty, and the seat in front of that.

When Chris and Kevin got on the bus, Shakes and I waved and yelled out to them to come back and sit with us.

What an idiot I was! When I think of it now, I feel like some fool saying something friendly and nice and then someone insults her, and she’s left standing there with a big friendly smile on her stupid, innocent face.

Chris and Kevin took the seat in front of us. I was so happy, at first. All four of us were together again. It was as if they hadn’t decided I was a different person because I had breasts. As if they hadn’t made up their minds that they had to stop being friends with me because they’d seen me with my head on Shakes’s shoulder. I remembered how it felt in sixth grade when we were the kings of the grade-school bus! It had been so much fun. I was always sorry when the bus rides were over—first when we got to school, and then when we got home in the afternoon.

But it wasn’t like that now. It couldn’t be. I was
crazy to think we could just travel back in time to the way things were before.

Chris and Kevin sat down. They turned and lightly high-fived Shakes.

Chris and Kevin said hi to me. Not warm or friendly in the least. They were just being polite.

When Daria Wells got on, she runway-walked straight to the back and took the seat in front of them. Chris half stood and leaned over to talk to her. I don’t think he consciously knew that he was sort of squirming around, humping the back of the seat. I thought,
He wouldn’t do that if he knew how he looked from behind.

Big Maureen crawled the bus between banks of steaming snow. Chris and Kevin settled down, and after a while they started whispering. I was really curious about what they were saying, because I could watch their shoulders and the backs of their heads get all jumpy and tense and buzzed. They seemed as if they were plotting something, and from the way they kept nodding their heads, I sensed that it was a plot they’d been thinking about for a while.

Chris and Kevin turned around and leaned back over the seat so they were facing me and Shakes. They kept
giving each other funny looks, as if they had something to say, something they’d known they were going to say even before they got on the bus.

Maybe they hadn’t known that it would happen today, that the bus ride and the seniors’ absence would give them the perfect chance. But they’d had it in mind. Motive and opportunity, as they say on the crime shows. They’d been planning to do it sooner or later, and now they were both figuring out it could be sooner. Right now.

Kevin said, “So how about it, Maisie? Can we do it, too?”

“Keep your voice down,” Chris said. He didn’t want Daria hearing.

“Do what?” I asked.

They laughed. They both looked high. But they weren’t.

Kevin looked at Chris. Chris nodded.

“Come on, Maisie. Be fair,” Kevin said. “Aren’t the four of us old friends, didn’t we always divide everything up equally between us?”

“We used to be friends,” I was mortified to hear myself say.

“Share and share alike,” Kevin said.

I said, “What are you two guys saying? Would you please
make sense
? I don’t get it.”

Kevin said, “Don’t
we
get to touch your boobs? Like Shakes does, every morning?”

Well,
that
wiped the smile off my face.

I looked at Shakes, but he wouldn’t look at me. I could feel him twitching like mad. I couldn’t believe he’d told them, and even if he had, I couldn’t believe he wasn’t sticking up for me now. I couldn’t believe he was letting the guys talk like that to me. There was so much I couldn’t believe, it was hard to breathe, for a second. I probably should have lost it and gone off on them—especially Shakes—right then and there. I should have yelled at them, especially Shakes,
How can you do this?
I could have saved myself a lot of future problems if I’d confronted them right there.

But I was just too shocked, too freaked out.

I looked from Chris to Kevin to Shakes. I told myself: Be cool. Total coolness was never as important as it was at that moment.

“What about it, Maisie?” said Chris.

“Gee, guys,” I said. “That’s an interesting question. Can I think about it for a minute?”