If We Kiss (17 page)

thirty-seven

THE NEXT MORNING, Mom drove me to school. It took all my engineering ability, such as it is, to work the karaoke machine into my locker. I was in a sweat before I even started taping up the flyers. Through all my morning classes, I had to wrap my feet around the chair legs to keep me in my seat. When the bell rang for lunch I was already up. I scarfed down my sandwich in about two seconds. “Are you coming?” I asked my friends.

They kind of looked at each other but not at me.

“You sure you want to go to the Bridge, Charlie?” Tess asked. “Those people are so skeevy.”

“I know,” I said. “But don’t you think this could be, like, a way to bring everybody together? Build a bridge, so to speak? They’re involved. They’re the ones who were silenced, and if we allow them to be silenced we’ll all be silenced.”

“A little silence would not be all bad,” said Jennifer, who was bent over her bio textbook. “I’m gonna fail this test if I don’t study.”

“I quit smoking again,” Darlene said. “But all I have to do is look at the Bridge and I’ll start again. I’m going to the library.” Her freshly scrubbed face looked apologetic. She really was making an effort, though school was not her best subject. She looked about eleven without her gold eye shadow.

“I’ll go with you,” Jennifer said to Darlene instead of to me. “Good luck, Charlie.” They gathered their books.

“I should study too,” said Tess.

“You never study at lunch!” I yelled after her.

“Try the decaf!” she yelled back. Darlene snickered.

Fine,
I thought.
I’m independent, Mr. Lazarus said. George even once called me an independent thinker. So be it.

I lugged the karaoke machine out of the cafeteria, down the hall, and out the door. Luckily it was a clear day, though cold and windy. I set the machine down, zipped up my jacket, and pulled on my hat and fuzzy red gloves. The Bridge was out there ahead of me, the most distinctive feature of the school. I had never gone anywhere near it. It was not my scene, completely off-limits to good girls like me.

I hauled the heavy machine down the walk and out onto the Bridge, set it down, plugged in the microphone, and turned it on. “Testing, testing,” I said. Nobody looked up but I could hear for myself that it was on. “Testing, testing,” I said again, really to get people’s attention. A couple of stoners, a few feet away from me, looked up from whatever they were doing.

I dug into my backpack and pulled out the two pages of paper with my speech typed on them, double-spaced, fourteen-point Ariel font for easier reading.

“Hello. My name is Charlie Collins,” I read, and then the wind ripped the papers out of my hands. They flew over the heads of all the people hanging out on the Bridge. We all watched the two papers sail away, doing a light, graceful dance with each other in the air.

I told myself I probably had it memorized anyway by now and started again. “Anyway. My name is Charlie Collins. I mean, hello, my name is Charlie Collins, and I am here today to let you know about a really bad problem, and the really bad . . .” I was a little lost. I hadn’t written
really bad
twice.

I started over. “My name is Charlie Collins and I am here today to, to, today, to tell you, to alert you to the grave injustice of, the Board of Ed, a student tried to present, had, oh, and also our own school newspaper, because, well, a grievance, and the Board of Ed, a grievance was presented, I meant, to the Board of Ed—and the head of it, the Board of Ed, said, ‘I don’t have to listen to students!’”

I was panting. It was hard to figure out how to speak and breathe at the same time. A couple of the guys, who, it has to be admitted, were in all truth very skeevy, as Tess had said, were watching me with some level of interest.

“Can you believe that?” I continued. “And when I, as a City News reporter, for our own, I’m the, um, on newspaper, they wouldn’t, Mr. McKinley, who is all ‘most important element’ all the time, he . . .”

One of the stoners was standing right in front of me. “What?” I asked him, still using the microphone. “Was I talking too fast? Do you have a suggestion? My speech flew away; that was my speech, see those little white flying-up-there papers? So, should I start over, you think?”

He reached out and put his fingers on top of the microphone and gently pushed it down. He was the guy who had stared at me and Kevin back in the fall, at Mad Alice’s. I recognized him. Uh–Tony. He was tall and lanky and, though he could have used a haircut, sort of handsome, up close.

“What?” I asked him again, unamplified.

“Could you stop yelling? It’s really annoying.”

“Don’t you care that the Board of Ed won’t listen to you?”

“Does anybody listen to you?”

“Well . . .”

“Nobody listens to me.” He shrugged. “You get used to it.”

“Sorry.” I flipped off the karaoke machine and started to drag it back into school. It weighed a ton. The thought of maneuvering it back into my locker just overwhelmed me. I stopped, sat down on it, and felt tears well up. I was tired and alone, defeated and humiliated.

The bell rang to go back in to class, but I couldn’t. I stood up and headed the other direction, to the woods.

thirty-eight

RUNNING AWAY WHILE dragging a karaoke machine is quite a thing.

Running may be an overstatement. I had to stop every few steps to rest, but even so my arms were being pulled out of their sockets and stretched to gorilla length. I was even making gorilla noises. I thought I had sunk to my newest low point, when I heard someone’s footsteps behind me.

I picked up the karaoke machine and made myself look straight ahead and not stop to rest, while lecturing myself on the unlikelihood of a bad guy lurking in Winston Woods, preying on girls who might cut school and walk home through the woods with ungainly luggage. I mean, even a bad guy would have to calculate the low odds of finding such a victim, right? Of course.

But the footsteps were gaining on me. I’m not fast at the best of times.
Don’t look back, don’t look back,
I told myself.

I could hear him getting closer. I had to make a decision. Keep the karaoke machine for use as a possible weapon of self defense, or lose it and run? I was never much of a singer anyway.

I dropped the handle and sprinted, jumping roots, dodging branches. One branch slashed across my face. I couldn’t hear footsteps anymore, but I knew that could just be because I was breathing so loud. I was running for my life when I heard a loud voice say, “Charlie!”

How did he know my name? Was it on the karaoke machine? Was this a trick? A bad-guy lure to slow down gullible victims?

Again, “CHARLIE!” He was yelling my name into the karaoke microphone so loud he was getting feedback. Some predator—didn’t even know how to use a microphone properly, I thought, and then it occurred to me that there was something familiar about the voice. I stopped and turned around.

“What are you doing?” said the voice. “You forgot your karaoke machine!”

I walked back toward him, and when I came around a big spruce tree, there he was: George.

“Hi,” he said into the microphone. “I’ve always wanted to try one of these things.” He jutted a hip out to one side and sang, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Find out what it means to me!”

“What are you doing here?”

“Following you,” he said, as if that were obvious. “You didn’t finish your speech.”

I hung my head. “I didn’t even start. You were there?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“It was awful.”

“Um, yeah. Pretty bad, as speeches go.” He turned off the power and sat down on top of the machine.

I took off my backpack and sat down on it. “Mr. McKinley may as well have printed it. Nobody reads the City News section anyway.”

“That’s true.” He wiped his nose. “Well, at least you’re honest, and brave.”

“I’m so not. I’m not brave and I am certainly not honest. That’s what’s wrong with you, George—you just see what you want to see.”

“Really?” He considered that. “I thought it was my long torso.”

“You thought
what
was your long torso?”

“The thing that’s wrong with me.” He stood up to show me, even unzipped his coat. He was right. He did have an unusually long torso.

“I hadn’t noticed your torso before, particularly,” I admitted. “It is long. Okay, that and your delusions.”

“My delusions are—long?”

“Are what’s wrong with you.” I had to smile a little.

He rezipped his jacket and sat back down on my karaoke machine. “My delusions about what? You mean, how I think you’re perfect but really you are lying and conniving?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”

“When were you ever lying or conniving?”

“Trust me,” I said.

“How can I trust someone who’s lying and conniving?”

“George.”

“By your own admission.”

“Fine.” I shook my head and formed the snow into a ball. “Believe what you want. You always have.”

“Are you hating yourself because of that speech fiasco on the Bridge? Or because of Kevin Lazarus?”

I crushed the snowball. “What about him?”

“Yeah, I guess that is pretty bad. Okay. You’re right. You’re flawed. How shocking.”

“What? What do you know?”

His mild smile faded away. “Everybody knows.”

I took that in for a second. Whoa. “Everybody?”

“Yeah. I don’t think I’m the one, by the way, who’s deluded about your perfection.”

The woods felt very quiet, and very cold. I wrapped my arms around myself. “Everybody knows what?”

“Well,” he said, smiling mildly again. “Everybody except Tess, I guess.”

“Oh, God. You do know. What do you know?”

He shrugged. “Do you have to buy special CDs for this thing, or does it use the regular ones?”

“George, please.” I crawled over to him. “Everybody knows what about me and Kevin? That I, that we, that I kissed him?”

“Well,” George said. “For starters.”

I put my head in my hands. This could not be happening. “You mean, that morning outside school, everybody knows about? Or what happened in Vermont?”

“Both.” Oh, man. If everybody knew, it meant Kevin had to have told someone. Who? Only Brad, probably. Unless he was, like, bragging about it in the boys’ locker room before gym—
hey, guys, you know what? I made out with Charlie while I was going out with Tess. Isn’t that so cool?
No. Kevin may be slutty and selfish but he’s not an idiot. But then, how could everybody know?

“How did you—George, please, you have to tell me. How did you hear about it?”

“You told me.”

I was so confused. I looked up at him. “Me? When?”

“Just now.”

“You tricked me?”

He shrugged. “Vermont, huh? That’s gotta be awkward.”

“So, wait. Nobody told you? You just, how did you know to say Kevin?”

“Your feelings for him were, ah, clear. It is so cold out here.” He rubbed his hands together, then stood up and stamped his feet.

“It was that obvious?” I asked him, from down on the ground.

“Yeah,” he said. He held out his mittened hand to help me up. I took it.

I dropped my head against his coat. “You think I should tell Tess?”

“Why would you?”

“If I don’t, somebody else might.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Let’s think. Only you and Kevin know, right? And now of course you’ve told me. I could be paid to keep quiet, so there’s just Kevin. And why would he tell her? So maybe she’ll never find out. How much money do you have?”

“Why?”

“To keep me quiet. This is where we could meet for payments.”

I shoved him. “Shut up. This is . . . George, I’m serious. This is, like, eating me up.”

“The guilt? Because now, on top of it, you cut school. And forced me to cut too, which is a new one for me. I don’t think I’ve ever been out here before. It’s nice.”

“If she finds out from somebody else, she’ll never forgive me.”

“She might not, anyway, even if you tell her.”

“So what should I do?”

George shrugged. “Beats me. Why do you want to tell her so much?”

“Are you kidding?” I shoved him again. “Telling her is the last thing I want to do!”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Are you crazy?”

“The possibility has crossed my mind.”

We just stood there for a minute, facing each other in the cold woods. Puffs of breath from our mouths bumped into each other between us and merged. I looked up at George. He had on his knit cap, green-and-gray patterned, with a pompom on top and ear flaps. His cheeks were pink and his mouth had its usual half smile on it. I looked up into his dark brown eyes and for the first time I saw what my mother had meant. George was actually cute. Really cute. I found myself leaning slightly toward him.

Oh man,
I thought.
I must be the most horny, hormonal creature on the entire planet.

“Charlie,” he said quietly. “Can I ask you something?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, thinking, whatever else I do today, I cannot kiss George. I cannot get myself any more tangled up than I already am.

“Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kiss him.”

“Kiss him? Kevin?” I took a step back, looked up at the trees. What a weird question, especially coming from George as I flirted with him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

Was he mad at me, too? I guess he sort of had a right to be. But this was too weird. Why did I kiss Kevin? “Because, I don’t know. Why are you asking me that?”

“I just wondered.” He turned around and started walking.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know that many song lyrics, so I guess I’m done with karaoke for the day.”

“George . . .”

He turned around. “Isn’t there someone else you worry will never forgive you?”

“Who?”

He took off his backpack, set it in the snow, unzipped it, and pulled out a black book, a little bigger than an assignment pad. “This is for you.” He tossed the book to me.

I clapped it between my gloved hands. “What is it?”

“A metaphor.” He put on his backpack and walked away.

I looked down at the book in my hands. The cover was leather, smooth and black and blank. I opened it, and when I saw what was inside, I took off my gloves and dropped them on the ground. I sat down on the karaoke machine and looked slowly through the book. The weather report was glued down on each page, torn or cut from the upper right- hand corner of the newspaper, and, above it in George’s scrawly handwriting, the date. Every day, one day after the other. December 16—Today, mainly sunny, less windy, high 46. Tonight, clouds thicken, low 41. Tomorrow, heavier rain arrives. December 17—Today, rain heavy at times, high 39. Tonight, partly cloudy, diminishing winds, low 29. Tomorrow, limited sun . . .

On and on, not a day missing, not even today.