If We Kiss, page 3
“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.
seven
“SO HERE’S THE thing and tell me the truth,” Tess said as we were walking to the lockers. “Promise?”
“Sure.” When people say “Tell me the truth,” I usually lie. It is because, well, it is because I am not a truthful person for one thing, but it is also because they are usually asking me something about which it will be in some way hard to tell the truth. You wouldn’t say, for instance, “Tell me the truth: Do you have math third block?” You would just say, “Do you have math third block?” Because whether you do or don’t have math third block is not a difficult truth to reveal.
“Okay.” Tess took a dramatic breath. “Do you hate Kevin Lazarus?”
The truth? Do I hate Kevin?
“I don’t hate him,” I answered truthfully.
“But do you like him?”
I could twist it around and say I was sort of being truthful in that I don’t like him; I am in love with him. I don’t like him; I am totally, paralyzingly obsessed with him. But in the privacy of my own head, I have to admit that I knew that what she was asking was not, do you have mildly positive as opposed to chart-bustingly positive feelings for Kevin. My best friend was asking if I liked him the way I actually did very much and at every waking moment like him.
“No,” I said. “Definitely not.” What could be worse than admitting you like someone who obviously doesn’t like you?
“I think,” she said. “I think I do, maybe.”
Okay, that answered my what could be worse question. In response, I very articulately dropped my books.
It would have been bad enough if I had simply dumped all my books out of my arms, scattering them across the hall, but no. In case that remarkably low level of coordination looked too suave, I tripped over them. Well, I stepped on my social studies notebook while trying to catch my bio text in midair, not realizing how hard it is to catch a book that weighs more than a toddler as it speeds toward the ground. It smashed me in the wrist, and, off-balance as I was from standing not on firm ground but on shaky history (notes), I slid. The only positive thing is that I didn’t smash into the Hair-Man himself, because between me, figure skating on my books, and the head ninth grade teacher, sitting furrily at his desk, was—a wall. A wall that I crashed into, full-force, with my head.
Tess helped me up. “You okay?”
“Mild concussion.” I avoided making eye contact by gathering up my stuff as hordes of kids stomped over us. Tess helped, too. She really is a good friend.
She’s the one who managed to get most of my stuff and restore it to some semblance of order, actually. “Thanks,” I said, taking it from her.
“No problem.”
We walked toward our lockers.
“Why,” I had to ask. “Why did you think, what made you think I liked Kevin?”
“No,” she said. “I know you don’t like him. I just hoped, maybe, that you, like, didn’t think he was a complete jerk.”
“Oh,” I said. So she wasn’t asking at all what I’d thought she was asking. It wasn’t that she thought I secretly liked him. It was only about her. Oh. I wasn’t sure if I should feel relieved or insulted, or lonely. “No,” I said. “I think he’s an incomplete jerk.”
Tess laughed. She has a really wicked laugh.
I smiled, then pretended to focus on my combination lock. If Kevin liked me at all he wouldn’t have made out with my best friend in my basement less than a week after making out with me. Anyway, why would I like someone who would do that?
“Are you mad at me for something?” Tess asked. “Tell me the truth, Charlie, seriously.”
Tell me the truth.
“I’m not mad at you, Tess.”
“Promise? Because you seem pretty annoyed today.”
I dumped my books into my locker. “I just, if anything, I’m not sure why you would like him. Kevin Lazarus?” I really liked saying his name. How sick is that?
“You’re right,” Tess said. Then she banged her head against a locker. “I don’t know why either. But . . .”
“But you like him.”
Tess nodded.
I nodded back, in an understanding way. Of course, unfortunately, I did understand.
“I’m an idiot,” she said. “I know. So—but, do you think you could try to find out, from Kevin, if he . . .”
“I’ll ask him before bio,” I said, not needing any more information or inspiration for acrobatic routines.
“Okay,” she said, still scanning my face for the truth. “Thanks.”
I waited in the same spot he had been in the day he touched my hair and hurled me deep into the insanity of love. Why I had ever thought love might be a desirable thing to fall into, I could not begin to remember. Is anything a good thing to fall into?
“Kevin.” It felt romantic in my mouth.
He looked at me with those unbelievably blue eyes.
I took a breath, thinking, she is my best friend.
Kevin came closer, close to me like the day he twirled my hair. He could have touched that strand of hair again if he wanted to. He apparently didn’t want to. I twirled it myself, not hinting but, well, okay, hinting.
He looked right into my eyes. I looked back but only for a second, then looked down at my feet. What do you know? There they were, right at the bottoms of my ankles, same as last time. Still wearing one pink sock, one green.
I glanced up again, realizing he was probably getting impatient with me. I had called him over, after all.
He didn’t look impatient. He looked calm and intense at the same time, which is the thing about him. How does a person look calm and intense at the same time? He is the only one I’ve ever seen do that.
“Um,” I said.
He kept waiting.
“Do you, um, are you interested in . . .”
“In . . . ?” he prompted.
“Newspaper?”
“Newspaper?” he asked, just as I was thinking, Huh? Newspaper? Did I just say “newspaper”?
“Newspaper,” I said, twirling my hair so hard it was possibly yanking bits of my brain too far to the left. “Are you, you know, going to be on, um, the newspaper? Staff? Or whatever?”
“I already am,” he said. I already knew that, of course. What didn’t I know about him? Please, I have his schedule memorized, I am so pathetic. “Why? Are you interested?”
“Yeah,” I blurted. Sure. I was as interested in newspaper as I was in anything else lately that wasn’t Kevin—meaning, NOT. “I am. Interested. In, in newspaper, I mean. Of course. Reporting!” I startled myself with the volume and enthusiasm of that last word.
“You should come, then,” Kevin said, softly. “It’s today after school. You’re a good writer. You’d like it, I bet.”
A good writer, he said. He had noticed me, in a positive way. I bobbled my books again but managed not to pitch them at Kevin’s teeth. Any other person would be like, okay? Can we go into class before the bell rings? Or are you just going to stand there listing slightly to port all day? But Kevin just stood there in the doorway like he had no place else to go.
A good writer. What did that mean? Could that possibly really mean I am in love with you, Charlie, and all I do is think about you all day long?
Maybe. Unlikely, but maybe.
I lifted my eyes only, keeping my head down, and met his eyes. His head was bent, too, but he was looking at me. I didn’t want to wreck the moment, but I did this thing, then, because I could feel myself smiling and the intensity of our little staring match was making me turn to wobbles: I leaned slightly closer to him.
I thought he would probably back away but he didn’t. He tilted slightly closer to me, and I saw a little smile starting on his lips, too.
“Thanks,” I whispered. I less-than-whispered. Almost no sound came out but this is how close we were standing: He heard me. I heard him breathe in.
I looked down, away, for fear I might lose my head and kiss him, stick my tongue back in his mouth again, as disgusting as that is. Disgusting and yet, kind of wonderful. I was close enough to him to feel the heat of him, the change in the air temperature, near his head.
We’re flirting, I realized. I am flirting with him and I swear he is flirting right back with me.
I swallowed, squeezed my eyes shut, and forced myself to remember the actual reason I had called his name.
“One other thing,” I said, my voice creaky. She is my best friend, I reminded myself again. But I admit this: I tilted my chin up, to give him a view of my neck, in case it actually was my best feature.
He raised his eyebrows and waited.
Please say no, I prayed. Please say no.
“Do you, um,” I closed my eyes and finished fast: “Do you like Tess?”
He didn’t say anything so I had to open my eyes and look at him. It is so unfair that his eyes are that color, like the lake in June.
