Kissing Kate (16 page)

I looked at her, how she’d widened her eyes and lifted her hands, and a lump rose in my throat. It wasn’t easy for her either, I realized. And she
was
trying.

“I needed you, Lissa. I needed you to give me the cure.”

The cure was for Kate to take a deep breath, stare straight at me, and slowly exhale while I counted backward from ten to one. While she exhaled, she was supposed to draw a cow in the air with her finger. Or a poodle. Or a zebra. Once I told her to draw a warthog from hell, and she let out all of her air in a giggling whoosh.

“How’d you finally get rid of them?” I said.

“I ignored them, and finally they went away. It took forever, though.”

I’d been stirring my smoothie with my straw, but now I stopped. I wondered if she knew what she’d just said. Or was she so good at ignoring things that she even had herself fooled?

She gestured at my Styrofoam cup. “You done with that?”

I wasn’t, but I pushed it toward her anyway. It was the least I could do.

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
I took Beth to the High Museum so she could get extra credit in art, and at the last minute I called Kate and asked if she wanted to join us. She said sure, so Beth and I stopped by her house to pick her up.

“There she is,” Beth said, spotting Kate jogging down her front steps. “Oh, her coat is so cute. I want a coat like that.”

I smiled. I liked Kate’s coat, too. It was periwinkle blue with a hood and big buttons up the front, and it reminded me of Paddington Bear.

“Hi,” Kate said, opening the door of the truck. Crisp fall air blew in as she climbed onto the seat.

“I love your coat,” Beth said. She scooted over to make room. “Where’d you get it?”

“My mom ordered it for me. Somewhere in New York.” She pressed her legs together and shut the door.

“Sorry it’s so crowded,” I said.

“That’s okay.”

“I could sit in the back,” Beth said.

“No,” Kate and I said in unison.

“It’s dangerous,” I added. “You know that.”

“Anyway, we want you up here with us.” Kate said. She was blushing, but we both ignored it. “You’re the whole reason we’re going, remember? And I haven’t seen you in ages.”

Beth beamed and launched into a blow-by-blow of her day, telling us how a boy named Roger lost the fifth-grade gerbil and threw the entire elementary school into a state of chaos.

“I bet it was in somebody’s lunch box,” Kate said. “Was it in somebody’s lunch box?”

“No,” Beth said. “How would it get in a lunch box?”

“You never know. Gerbils are tricky. Did it crawl into someone’s jacket? Hide in a shoe?”

“No, no, no.”

“I know,” Kate said. She tickled Beth’s side. “It’s right here! It’s been here all along!”

Beth shrieked and jerked back, and the two of them fell together giggling.

I glanced at them and smiled. This was the way it was supposed to be with me and Kate, even if it took a ten-year-old to smooth things over. I pressed on the accelerator, snapping them, laughing, against the back of the seat.

At the museum, we wandered single file through the post-Impressionist exhibit, listening to the tape-recorded audio tour on individual headsets. All of the paintings were nice, but there was one, a Matisse, that I absolutely loved. It was called
Icarus,
and it showed a man falling through a night sky. The figure of the man was curvy and sprawling, and stars were flung onto the sky so that their points went every which way.

The voice on the audio tour switched to the next painting before I was ready to move on, so I clicked off the tape and gazed at the figure’s outstretched arms. There was a red dot to show where his heart was, the only color on his otherwise solid form.

Kate came and stood beside me. Her earphones hung around her neck. “Wow,” she said, studying the Matisse. She took a step closer. “He’s the guy who died because he flew too close to the sun, right?”

“Well . . . but look at his heart.”

“You mean that one dot?”

“Yeah.”

Kate shrugged. “So?”

“It’s red, which means he’s still alive.”

“Until he hits the ground,” Kate said. She smacked her hands together. “Splat.”

Her comment cut me. I could feel my ears heat up, and I took a step away from her.

For a second Kate looked surprised, and then her mouth drew into a knot. She thought I was being too sensitive, I could tell.

“But he doesn’t hit the ground,” I said. “In the myth he lands in the sea, remember? Which means there’s a chance he survives.” I didn’t know why I was going on about this, but I couldn’t let it go. I wanted Kate to understand.

Kate glanced at me, then back at the Matisse. She didn’t respond.

 

 

 

Beth’s favorite part of the museum was the children’s exhibit on the lower level, and she dragged us there as soon as we finished the tour.

“This is so cool,” Kate said when she walked into the first room. Brightly painted metal structures stretched from the floor to the ceiling, an avant-garde jungle gym. “Has this always been here?”

Beth scaled the side, looping her leg over a thick red bar. “Come on! What are you waiting for?”

Kate swung onto one of the bars, then sidestepped toward the middle and climbed higher. I followed, resting midway across to admire Kate’s grace as she climbed from bar to bar. Her movements were quick and assured, and she seemed more like herself than she had all day.

“What’s the holdup?” she teased when she glanced back to check my progress. The weirdness between us had retreated. “You going to stay there all day?”

“Probably,” Beth said. “She’s such a slowpoke.”

“Excuse me?” I reached for the bar above me and pulled myself up.

After the metal jungle gym came a hall full of twisting mirrors, which we stumbled through with our hands out, grinning at our multiple, clumsy images. Next was an optical illusions room, and following that was a room called “The Magic of Touch,” where you could run your fingers over every kind of texture imaginable.

But the last exhibit was the best. I watched Kate’s face as we filed in.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow.” She stared at the far end of the dark room, where heat and motion sensors projected kaleidoscopic images onto the wall-sized screen. She lifted her arm, and an orange figure on the screen lifted her arm as well. She took a step forward, and the figure enlarged. She leaned to the left, and the figure, no longer orange but purple, leaned with her. Colors rippled across the screen like a puddle of rainbows, and in the middle was Kate’s outline: slender, pale yellow, her arms moving in a fluid arc above her head.

A turquoise Beth twirled and danced, giggling at her reflected twin, while Kate moved more slowly, swaying back and forth as if she were underwater. I stood still and watched my image shift from one hue to the next. It reminded me of my lucid dreams, that same quality of reality overlaid with fantasy. Enchanted. Surreal.

“Watch this,” Beth said. She leaped into the air, and her image splashed across the wall.

“Stunning,” Kate said, clapping her hands.

“Now you,” Beth said. “Do a cartwheel.”

Kate stepped away from us and did a perfect cartwheel. “Your turn,” she said to me when she finished.

“It’s getting late,” I said. “I told Jerry we’d be home by five.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. She poked me in the ribs until I grinned and twisted away.

“Okay, okay,” I said. I raised my hands over my head and shook my hips. “There. Are you happy?”

Beth rolled her eyes. “Kate, do one more thing. Do that flippy-over thing where your hands don’t touch the ground. Please?”

“An aerial?” she asked. She lifted her arms, then brought them down quickly and tucked at the waist, flipping her legs over her body. My breath caught in my throat, and I clapped hard to cover what I was feeling.

Beth clapped, too. “Do it again! Do a handspring!”

“No, Beth,” I said, “we’ve really got to go.” I started forward, and Kate turned to wait for us. Her profile changed from gold to green, then back to gold.

I fell in beside her, and together we left the exhibit. I was careful not to brush against her, because I was too aware of wanting to. I didn’t want her to sense it and pull away. But on the screen, when I glanced back one last time, colors flowed between us as if we were connected.

“LISSA, YOU’RE NOT LISTENING, ”
Beth complained on Friday evening.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “You were talking about Vanessa, how she’s got a new best friend. Mandy something-or-other.”

“
Mindy,
” Beth said. She draped herself over the back of the sofa, one foot dragging the ground. “Mindy’s dad manages the Apparel Mart, and Mindy gets to go whenever she wants and buy jewelry really cheap. Today she and Vanessa wore matching necklaces. Fourteen-carat gold.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s terrible! They sit together at lunch and everything!” She shook my shoulder. “Lissa!”

I jerked myself back. “Huh? So they eat together. What’s the big deal?”

She slid off the sofa. “You’re not paying attention. You don’t even care.”

“Beth—”

She stomped upstairs and slammed her door.

I closed my eyes. Beth was right; my mind was somewhere else. Today during my free period, I’d gone to the library and accessed the Internet on one of the school computers. My palms had gotten sweaty and my stomach had cramped up, but I’d glanced around to make sure no one was looking and then typed in the word
homosexuality.
Over a thousand pages were found, so I typed in
teenage
to narrow the search. This time there was less information, and most of it was really depressing. Gay teenagers were two to six times more likely to attempt suicide than other teenagers, one study reported, and another said that up to thirty percent of all adolescent suicides were committed by gay teens.

Jesus.

But I also found an on-line magazine called
Prism,
and in it were poems and essays by kids who were gay. Someone named Lucy McDonald had written a poem about loving another girl, and she compared stroking her girlfriend’s stomach to running her hands along the inside of a wooden bowl. I read that and I got a breath-catching feeling inside, anxious and full of longing.

When Kate and I were in junior high, there was a game the two of us played where I would close my eyes and hold out my arm, and Kate would walk her fingertips in light, fluttering steps from the inside of my wrist to my elbow. Then we’d switch, and I’d do it to her. The point was for the person with closed eyes to call out “Stop” before the other person got all the way to her elbow, which is harder than it sounds. But really, we did it because we liked the way it felt. It wasn’t sexual or anything, no more than tracing letters on each other’s backs or fixing each other’s hair.

I sank into the sofa and stared at the ceiling. Things were better now that Kate and I were talking again. They were. But in some ways I still missed her so much.

The doorbell rang, rescuing me from my thoughts. Sophie. She was here to take Beth and me shopping—her idea, not ours. I pushed myself up from the sofa. “Beth!” I called. “Sophie’s here!”

In the front hall, Jerry opened the door and invited Sophie in. When I joined them, they were standing close together, Sophie’s hand on Jerry’s arm. She let go when she saw me. “Lissa,” she said. “Hi. Ready to go?”

“Sure,” I said.

Beth trundled down the stairs.

“Beth, honey, better grab a jacket,” Sophie said. “It’s chilly. And Jerry, I don’t know what you’re going to do with yourself all night long, but this is a girls’ night out and we’re going to have some fun. Isn’t that right, girls?”

Beth made a face. She was still mad at me, I could tell, but we were stuck in this together.

“Right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Beth wanted to check out the jewelry counter at Macy’s, so that’s where we went first. We each had fifty dollars, given to us by Jerry, and Sophie had thrown in twenty-five apiece on top of that. I told her she didn’t need to, but she insisted.

Beth pored over the gold necklaces, tons of them, all different lengths and widths, then pointed to the one she liked the best. The salesclerk separated it from the others and draped it over her fingers. “A hundred sixty-five dollars,” she said.

Beth bit her lip.

“You don’t have enough money,” I said.

“I know.”

“Anyway, you shouldn’t get one just because Vanessa and Mandy have one.”

“
Mindy.
”

“Whatever. I’m not trying to be a jerk, Beth, but you don’t even like jewelry.”

“How do you know? I
love
jewelry. I’ve always loved jewelry.”

“Beth, honey, how about this?” Sophie said. She held up a delicate gold chain with a pendant shaped like a teddy bear. She took in Beth’s expression and wrinkled her brow. “Not your style?”

“Uh, not exactly.”

She placed the necklace on the counter. “Well, then, we’ll just keep looking. And if I pick out something you don’t like, you just tell me. Just say, ‘Sophie, that is the
ugliest
necklace I’ve ever seen.’ All right?”

Beth rubbed the toe of her shoe against the floor. “I might not want a necklace after all. I’m not a hundred percent positive one way or the other.”

“Should we go look at clothes?” I suggested.

“Yeah. Let’s go to The Gap.”

Beth found a denim skirt she loved, and Sophie, who turned out to be better at clothes than jewelry, helped her select a couple of shirts to go with it. “Tops,” Sophie called them. They were cute.

I grabbed some sweatshirts from the rack, along with some loose-fitting jeans. I’d just about made up my mind when I heard a tap on the dressing-room door.