Kiss Me Again (14 page)

“Mom?”

“What?”

“You have to never say
hooking up
, ever again.”

“Okay.”

We rode along in silence. I turned off the radio, closed my eyes, and concentrated on the heat rising up from my seat.

“Is everything okay with you and Tess?” Mom turned to me at the light.

I didn’t answer.

“She hasn’t been over in forever, and …”

“And?” My eyes stayed closed.

“She didn’t even come to the wedding.”

I turned to Mom. She looked stressed, sad, both older and younger than usual—the parentheses around her mouth deeper, but the vulnerability in her eyes more pronounced, too.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and started crying. Just a little.

A tear dripped out of Mom’s eye, too. We both sniffed, at the same moment, as our hands, mirror images, wiped up at our noses the way my father hates.

“I’m sorry,” Mom said. “I’m sorry, too. I don’t want to be selfish, self-involved. I have so much going on, it’s true—but if something is going on with you, I want …”

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “We went through a rough patch, me and Tess. We’re better. Everything is fine.”

“You’re fine.”

“I am,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m good.” I smiled at her, surprised because I meant it.

“Good,” she said.

“And I’m happy you’re happy, Mom. I know I don’t always act like it, but I really am happy for you. Deep down. You deserve it.”

She smiled really big at that. “Thank you, Charlie.”

We ordered double scoops to go at Mad Alice’s. As we neared the door, heading out with the ice cream in a bag, George appeared on the other side. “Hey!” I said, forgetting to feel awkward around him, because he looked momentarily so happy to see me.

“Hi, George!” my mom said, and went to give him a hug.

“Hi, Elizabeth,” George said, hugging her back politely. “This is Sadie Wyatt. Elizabeth Reese. Charlie’s mom. You know Charlie, right?”

“Hi, Sadie,” I said.

“Hi, Charlie,” Sadie, the smartest girl in tenth grade, said. “Nice to meet you, Elizabeth.” Her light-blond hair was back in a loose bun, and her glasses, greenish rims that came almost to points at the edges, looked particularly cool and alternative. Sadie Wyatt and George? Really?

“Oh,” Mom said, looking from Sadie to George to me again. “Um, yes. You too.”

“We gotta go,” I said. “Mom?”

“Yes,” Mom said. “Bye.”

“See you,” Sadie said to me, and then, to my mom, “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Reese.”

“Bye,” George said.

Mom kept checking over her shoulder as they went into Mad Alice’s together. “What … ,” she said once we were safely behind closed car doors. “Why was George …”

“I’m not going out with him,” I said. “I told you.”

“You did? Is that—are you okay?”

“Yes. Can we just …”

She started up the car and I turned on the music, loud. When we got home, I went straight to the kitchen for spoons, and met Mom out on the deck, where we ate our ice cream in slightly awkward but companionable silence.

When Joe came home, he put Samantha to bed upstairs and stayed up there. Kevin was going to be out at Brad’s all night. I leaned back against the deck chair and could almost imagine life was normal for a few minutes, until Joe appeared on the deck.

Mom gave him a taste of her ice cream with her spoon, and he hum-sighed as it melted on his tongue.

I said good night and headed upstairs to bed, lonely but blissfully unaware of what my friends were doing across town.

“HEY,” KEVIN SAID,
walking in through the back door with his backpack slung over one shoulder. He smiled all big and happy, like seeing me halfway down the basement stairs with a loaded laundry basket in my arms was a surprise birthday party for him.

“Hi,” I said, grinning right back.

He kicked off his sneakers and picked them up by the backs. When he stood up again, his head was still bent toward the floor, but his eyes found mine. “Long time no see,” he said.

Who even says that? Tess and I hate when people use clichés non-ironically. So I chuckled a tiny bit and said, “Yeah, right. Did you miss me?”

He nodded. “Turns out I did.”

I leaned against the basement stairs’ banister to keep from tumbling backward all the way down to my dirty-laundry-covered death.

“Did you miss
me
?”

“Weirdly enough … ,” I answered, my voice shakier than I’d wanted it to be.

He took a step down and, in his hoarse whisper, asked, “Anybody else home?”

“Upstairs,” I whispered back.

“Maybe we should go … check on something in the basement …”

“I’m supposed to put in this load of laundry.”

“That’ll do.” He dropped his backpack and sneakers in the hallway. “I’ll help.”

His hands were on my waist before we got all the way down to the basement, and before we got to the laundry area, he had taken the basket from me. He set it on the floor beside the door that led to the laundry room. My back was pressed up against the wall with Kevin pressed up against me, when his father bellowed his name.

Kevin pulled his face away from mine and answered, “Yeah?”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Joe called from one floor up.

I tried to wiggle away from Kevin, but he touched my hair lightly and smiled. “I have no freaking idea,” he answered his father, looking right into my eyes.

“We’ve talked about this, Kevin, and I meant what I said.”

“You
talked about this
?” I whispered frantically to Kevin, who shrugged and shook his head.

“Sorry!” Kevin yelled back with another shrug, and whispered to me, “No idea what he’s talking about.”

“One more time and I mean it, I am tossing your shoes out on the lawn again.”

“Oh,” Kevin said. “Right. Okay.”

“Are you playing pool?” I saw Joe’s shoe appear on the first step.

“No,” Kevin answered. “Helping Charlie with the, uh, laundry.”

“Oh,” Joe said with a bit of disappointment in his voice. “Good. We can play pool later. Good idea to get our chores all done first. Good. Hi, Charlie.”

“Hi, Joe,” I called back, sounding suspiciously weird.

“You guys need help?”

“No!” both Kevin and I shouted, so I added, “We got it, thanks.”

“Okay,” Joe said. “Well, then, guess I’ll see what I can do with these garbage cans.”

“Sounds great,” I said, and when Joe’s foot retreated up the stairway, Kevin’s mouth came down hard on mine again.

“Hey!” Joe called, ripping us apart again.

“What?” Kevin asked.

“Don’t forget the fabric softener.”

“On it,” I answered.

We managed eventually to leave that spot in the basement and go to the laundry room, where we switched the dry clothes to a pile on the ironing board, the wet white clothes into the dryer, and the dirty clothes into the washer. When everything was thrumming in there, and we’d made out a bit more, I said, “We should go up.”

“Why?” Kevin asked.

“Well, for one, we can’t hear anything in here, like anybody coming …”

“I don’t care,” he said.

We kissed for another minute or two, and then I pushed him away. “You really did miss me,” I said.

“Brad’s not as fun at three a.m. as you are.”

“No?”

He grinned and took the basket from me. “He has his moments, it’s true,” he said.

I pushed him up the stairs, asking, “Oh yeah? Does he?”

We sat down together in the living room, on the floor, to fold the dry laundry. It was deeply awkward. His boxer shorts, and his father’s boxer shorts, were tangled up in my T-shirts and panties. We developed a system: Any time one of us got something that belonged to the other, or the other’s parent, we just flung it at each other.

“You have hearts on your underwear butts,” Kevin remarked.

“Shut up.”

“Just saying.”

“You have rocket ships on yours,” I snapped back.

“Those are cool,” he said.

“In third grade, maybe.”

“And again in ninth,” he insisted.

“Okay. And, in answer to boxers or briefs, you’d say both?”

“Depends on the occasion,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Like, you don’t want to be hanging loose if you—”

“Stop,” I said. “I do NOT need to know this information.”

“What information?” Mom said, peering into the living room. “Oh, thanks for folding, you guys. Do you have a lot of homework?”

“Yes,” I said, as Kevin said, “Nope.”

“Ah,” Mom answered. “Because it’s really nice out, and I was wondering if you guys would be willing to get the canoe out of the shed and bring it down to the beach. I thought maybe we could show these guys around the lake.”

“Now?” I started to object.

“We’re on it,” Kevin answered, as if he were a kid on a sitcom in the 1950s.

Mom took a step back and said, “Well, then. Thanks, Kevin.” She eyed me a bit suspiciously, so I shrugged.

“Charlie and I were just talking,” Kevin said. “And—you and my dad haven’t had much time alone, just the two of you. So if you guys want to go out to dinner tonight, Charlie and I could watch Samantha.”

“Well,” Mom said, smiling at him, her hands on her hips. “We were thinking we’d do a family night, maybe a movie or something.”

“Just an offer,” he said.

“Thank you,” Mom answered. “I’ll talk about it with your dad. You guys cooked this surprise up together?”

“We’re just awesome that way,” I said.

“You are indeed.” She stepped into the living room, between us, and picked up her pile of clean clothes. “Lots of laundry, huh?”

“Lots of people,” I said.

“Many hands make light work,” said my mother, quoting her mother.

“Too many cooks,” I said back, quoting the opposition.

Mom, who only uses clichés ironically, too, winked and left.

Kevin said, “Sometimes I have no idea what you two are talking about.”

“We lived alone together a long time,” I explained.

“Where’s the shed?” he asked. “I like the sound of it.”

Half an hour later, while we were making out amid the cobwebs and unused sports equipment in the shed, Kevin asked if I was buzzing or he was.

We stepped apart and checked our pockets. It was my cell, with a text from Tess, asking if Kevin was
there.

“Why wouldn’t she just text you if she wants to know where you are?” I asked Kevin.

“Dunno,” he said. “Looks like my phone is dead.”

“You can charge it.”

“It’s nice when it’s dead. It’s a break. I like it. You should try it sometime. Just disconnect completely.”

“You want to go inside and call her from the house phone?”

“No.”

“Well, what am I supposed to tell her?”

“Tell her, Kevin is here in my shed, trying to get under my shirt.”

“Kevin!” I pushed him lightly. He bumped into a pile of life jackets, which toppled.

“Just don’t answer,” he suggested. “Forget her. She scares me.”

“Scares you?”

“She’s scary.”

“She is not,” I said. Pushing his hands off my waist, I texted back,
yes. Y?
and then suggested to Kevin that we try to get the canoe down from its perch on the top shelf, where it had wintered under a tarp.

Before we began, my phone buzzed again.

I have to talk w/u about him!

“Why does she have to talk with me about you?” I asked Kevin.

“I don’t know.”

“Does she know?”

“Know what?”

“About—us.”

“Not from me,” he said.

“So how does she know?”

“Why are you jumping to the—know
what
about us?”

“Kevin …” Was he denying that anything was going on? Or that he had told anybody? Did he just want to make me put it out there, between us, that obviously
something
was going on, something secret and big and …

“What?” His lake-blue eyes blazed darkly.

“What is Tess talking about?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s crazy.”

“She’s my best friend,” I said. “And she has, like, a second sense of things. I think maybe she knows we’re—we’re, you know … whatever it is we are. Oh my god …”

“So ask her what the hell she’s talking about, if you want to know.”

He climbed up the shelves of the shed and shoved the canoe off the top. The pointy end of it came at me fast. I dropped my cell to catch the canoe as it speared through the musky shed air toward me, then stood there barely managing it while Kevin jumped from near the ceiling down next to me.