Kiss Me Again (5 page)

“No,” Mom said. “Just killed some plants, I think.”

“Sam,” Joe barked. The string bean was halfway into her mouth. She let go with her skinny fingers but not her teeth, so it hung there limply.

Joe smiled gently. “Don’t eat off the floor, sweetheart.”

“Five-second rule,” Sam said. The string bean, still half-in/half-out, twitched as she spoke.

“That’s not …” Joe’s smile was starting to mold. “That rule does not make one bit of sense.”

“Mom says it does,” Sam said. “My mom.” She then proceeded to slowly chomp the string bean, which disappeared millimeter by millimeter.

We all watched. When she finished, Joe took a deep breath, turned his face away from Samantha’s, and shrugged apologetically to my mother. “How was your day, my love?” he asked her.

So much for my appetite. I’d been holding my phone in my lap the whole dinner, but Kevin, I guess, didn’t feel like texting under the table right then. Luckily. Because I certainly did not need to be texting with him. Hopefully he had gotten the point and was planning to just ignore me, too.

I slipped my phone into my pocket to clear my plate from the table as soon as it seemed like I could get away without being yelled at.

After a minute, when I was standing in the kitchen checking my phone to make sure it hadn’t died, Samantha followed me in, carrying her plate with the silverware and her cup on top. “Where’s the broom?” she asked.

“Did something break?”

“No,” she said.

“Why do you need a broom, then?”

“To sweep up after dinner. It’s my job.”

“Oh,” I said. “Um …” I tried to think of where we kept a broom.

“What’s yours?”

“My what?” I asked her, leaving my plate in the sink and opening the hall closet to broom-search. “My broom?”

“Job.”

“I, my job? I didn’t—I just have an interview.” It hit me that I had not yet asked my mother if I could get a job. “I don’t actually have a job. Yet.”

“After dinner,” Samantha patiently explained, beginning to wash off her plate thoroughly before placing it gently in the dishwasher. “What is your job, after dinner?”

“Um, walking the dog.”

“There’s a dog?” she asked, excited for the first time I’d ever seen. I felt instantly awful. “Where? I didn’t know we had a dog!”

“We don’t. Sorry.”

“So, but you said, your job is walking the dog?”

“If we had one, I meant.” My shoulders weighed a thousand pounds each. “So for now I am off the hook. Is what I meant. Lame joke. Sorry.”

“Oh.”

“Is Charlie torturing you?” Kevin asked her, coming into the kitchen with his plate stacked similarly with his place-setting stuff. On his way he grabbed the saucepot off the stove, too.

“Not on purpose,” I said. I grabbed a pear out of the bowl of fruit that was sitting like a still life on the kitchen counter.

“I wouldn’t,” Kevin said.

“Wouldn’t … what?”

“Monday pears,” Samantha said. The two of them were both looking at the pear in my hand, which started to feel like a grenade I had just accidentally pulled the pin out of.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked them.

They both shrugged.

“Monday pears?” I asked. “Is that a thing? Or another old family joke?”

Samantha said, “It’s a thing, I think.”

Kevin shrugged, then went to the sink and started scrubbing the pot. I felt like a geranium plunked down awkwardly in the middle of my own kitchen. I bravely took a bite of the pear. I waited, but nothing happened like instant death or puking. It was just a hard, juiceless pear. No taste, not even poison.

Joe materialized in the kitchen doorway with a broom and dustpan, which he handed to Samantha, and then kissed her on top of her head. She disappeared into the dining room to do her job. I sank onto a kitchen chair and took another hard bite out of the pear. I checked my phone while all the busy elves buzzed around me. No messages except one from George, asking if I wanted to do homework together online.

Sorry too late done already
, I texted back.

Grind
, he texted, and then a few seconds later, a smiley face. He had probably already finished, too. He was at least as big a grind as me.

Since my phone was just sitting there in my hand, not serving any good purpose, I texted Tess. So much for my plan not to. What I texted was:

So weird here.

Then I went upstairs to try to remember some inside jokes between Mom and me, to be sure to use in front of that other family who lives with us, and fell asleep in my bed until 3:32 a.m.

I FOUND MY
phone on the floor beside my bed. No text back from Tess. 3:33 a.m. Do you get to make a wish at 3:33? Tess never used to take more than a minute to text back. I decided not to interpret but instead to focus on the fact that I had been sleeping in my clothes and also that I had to pee.

I yanked off my jeans and T-shirt and bra, dropped all that on the floor, and stomped into my flannel boxers. I started pulling on a big T-shirt, but then I remembered enough about my current life to change my mind. I pulled on a tank top with bra support instead, even as I was swearing to myself I was just going to the bathroom and then back to bed. It was my cute pink tank top, the one Tess had once said looked hot.

I tiptoed to the bathroom in the dark and closed the door. When I sat down on the toilet, it was about four perilous inches lower than normal. I may have shrieked. I came disgustingly close to drowning bottom-first in the toilet, with its seat left up.

With my heart pounding and breath raggedy, I washed my hands extra well. Because, gross. I brushed my teeth fast and hard, then opened the door and gasped.

“Hi,” Kevin whispered, his face two inches from mine.

“Jesus,” I said.

“No,” he answered. “Just Kevin.”

I shoved him. His stomach is very flat and firm, I couldn’t help noticing. I made a mental note to do a sit-up someday soon. “Well,
Just Kevin
, you left the toilet seat up.”

“Sorry,” he whispered.

“Okay.”

“You smell good,” he whispered.

“Oh,” I romantically retorted.

“Come ’ere,” he whispered, and walked away from me, toward his room, the old guest room.

He stopped in the doorway and waited for me. I tiptoed down the hall and stepped inside.

“Didn’t you have to go to the bathroom?”

“No.” He closed the door behind me.

Closed it.

My whole body started shivering.

He sat down on his bed.

Not that it ever came up as a rule, but I was fairly sure that I would not be allowed to be in a bedroom alone with a boy in my house, with the door closed, in the middle of the night.

I sat down on his bed, too, but not exactly next to him. He faced me, his right leg triangled on the bed, the left down on the floor. I kept both my feet on the floor. Unsure whether to face him or stay profile, I alternated, as if a superspeed tennis match were being played in front of me. Not Good. I decided to stare at my hands, which were clutching each other in my lap, and to stay silent and still until he made the first move.

“I used to play in here,” I blurted immediately after that decision. “Playmobil, and I would make forts, with Tess, pretend we were adventurers, scientists. We decided, me and Tess, I mean, we decided to be epidemiologists for about a month, until her sister, Lena, told us what epidemiologists were.”
Can somebody please shut me up?

He didn’t respond, and didn’t respond, and still didn’t respond. The randomness of that little anecdote filled up Kevin’s silent room like noxious fumes. We would be found dead in the morning. The paramedics would nod comfortingly to our perplexed parents.
Must’ve been that odd epidemiology comment, ma’am, sir. Sorry for your loss.

So jittery I risked levitation, I popped up and looked around. “You all unpacked?”

“No,” he said.

“You choose a science fair project yet?”

“No.”

“Me neither. No ideas, even. Other than Fig Newtony goop, I guess. Haha.” He didn’t laugh. Unable to shut the heck up, I plowed relentlessly on. “Your father suggested … Just kidding. Anyway, so, hey, you’re going to visit your mom over break?”

“Guess so.”

“Is that—you like to visit her?”

“It’s okay.”

Stop interviewing him!
“Oh, you’re lucky, then. I hate to visit my dad. His wife is all, like, she thinks she’s on a commercial for cereal, you know? And I have a half brother. His name is Alexander, but they call him ABC. Those are his initials. Is why.”

“Uh-huh.”

I took a deep breath, hoping there was something other than helium in the air, because that’s what I felt like I’d been sucking. “Idaho, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did she—I mean, how long have your parents been …”

“Long time.”

“Oh, mine too. Such a long time. I don’t even remember mine together, actually.”

“I do,” he said. “I remember mine.”

“Oh.”
Urgh, why am I such a freak?
I realized abruptly that I was breathing like I’d just sprinted to the finish line. How to breathe normally? No memory of the technique.

To avoid his intense eyes, I turned away and pretended to look at the stuff on his desk, which was set up where the guest room dresser used to be. I tried to slow myself down—my pulse, my yammering.
Just stay quiet for three breaths, Charlie!
On his desk I saw his open drawing pad, which my mother had bought him for Christmas, and there, on the exposed page, was the weirdest, most beautiful picture I had ever seen.

“What is this?” Oops, only got through the one breath.

“Nothing.” He stood up quickly and flipped the pad shut.

“You drew that?”

He stood between me and the desk, with his back to me and his hand heavy on the closed pad.

“Kevin, you drew that?”

His head sagged.

“It’s, it’s, well, it’s beautiful. Let me see it. Come on. Let me see it!”
Oh, good, badger him. Excellent.
How to Win Friends
, by Charlie Collins.

“No.”

I stopped grabbing at the pad but let my fingers linger there, near his. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen colors like that,” I whispered. “How did you get those colors?”

“Pastel pencils,” he whispered back, much softer. “You wet them.”

“It, this is going to sound stupid, because I don’t know anything about art, and probably it was supposed to be abstract and I’m too unsophisticated to get it, but it kind of looked like the trees, you know, down by the lake? But not, obviously.”

He squinted at me as if I were written in fine print.

“Next to the ugly bush with the prickers?”

“No, they didn’t.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Only to me. And to you.”

A few jokes tried to break free of my mouth, like,
Well, maybe we could do a survey
, or,
How many people did you actually ask?
or,
Well, maybe if you used actual tree colors, more people would see that you’d drawn trees
, but my teeth held them in. And I wouldn’t want him to change that picture. The trees in it, the trees that I saw just for those few seconds on his pad, looked more like the trees down at the bottom of our hill than the actual trees did. So I just stood there, straight as a parallel line in front of him, not smirking or joking, just there.

“Damn, Charlie,” he whispered. “Who
are
you?”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“I always thought you were just … a funny girl. Hot, but silly.”

Hot?
Really?
SILLY?

“But the more I get to know you, the more I don’t know....”

I said something vaguely like
urghaswdftijkol
and backed a step away.

His eyes, so intensely blue, narrowed slightly. He closed the distance I’d opened up between us and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Maybe we can just
be
,” Kevin whispered. His words touched my mouth as breath, blowing across the spot on my lips where his lips had just pressed. “It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just find a cool space together. No rules, no labels, we can keep it undefined even, no complications at all. Just …”

“A cool space.”

His face was nearing mine again, his blue eyes closing as he approached, my eyes closing, too. I could feel my mouth moving to meet his, the warmth of his lips on mine....

I stepped back. “No,” I said.

“No?” He blinked his sleepy eyes open.

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Because of George?”

“Yeah.”

“But you said you and George aren’t even going out.”

“Officially.”

“So …”

“But I like him.”

Kevin stepped back and said, “Oh.”