Kissing Kate (2 page)

“Ready?” she said.

“You already know how to do a headstand,” I said.

She shrugged. “Do you?”

“I know
how
—I just can’t do it. But you don’t have to help me.”

“I don’t mind.” She knelt beside me. “Try one, and I’ll watch.”

Great,
I thought,
I’ll fall on my butt and you can watch.
But she was looking at me with her wide blue eyes, and if she was being mean, she was doing a great job of hiding it. I got on my knees and put my head on the mat, but when I tried to lift my lower body, I tipped forward and rolled onto my back.

“I feel like a bug,” I said, staring up at the high ceiling.

Kate smiled. “Try again.”

This time I got my knees onto my elbows before teetering sideways and landing in a heap.

Kate covered her mouth with her hand. “Whoops.”

“You do one,” I said.

She put her head on the mat and pushed herself up, extending her legs and pointing her toes in the air. She stayed like that for a couple of seconds before bending her knees and rolling forward in a somersault. “I think it’s the way I put my hands,” she said. “I think you’re putting yours too far apart.”

I put my hands closer together, but I still tipped over. “I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can. Put your hands on the floor, okay?”

I did as I was told.

“See how your fingers are pointing straight out? You want them to point more to the middle, like this.” She adjusted my hands with her own, angling my fingers inward. I thought of the way her spine straightened as she did her headstand, and I wondered how it felt to be so lovely.

 

 

 

My cut had almost stopped bleeding, and I made myself go to the bathroom for a Band-Aid. I washed my hand, then tore off a piece of toilet paper and pressed it against my finger. A small red dot soaked through, and my tears welled up all over again. Such a dumb thing, a cut on my finger, and yet here I was sniveling like there was no tomorrow.

Kate would never fall apart like this. Even in seventh grade, she’d been sure of herself. How could she not be? At school she roamed the halls with the cheerleaders and the members of the pep squad, and during lunch she ate with the most popular kids. Until that gym class, I’d never spoken to her, not really. That’s why I was so startled when she came up to me after school that day. I was sitting on the curb near the faculty parking lot, waiting for Jerry to pick me up, when out of nowhere Kate plopped down beside me.

“Hi,” she said.

“Uh, hi,” I said. I glanced around, but there was no one else nearby. “What’s up?”

“Not much. Just killing time before gymnastics practice.” She leaned back on her elbows and crossed her feet on the asphalt. “Coach Greer has a meeting, so we’re starting late.”

I nodded. She wore a thin silver bracelet on her left arm, and it glinted in the sun. Her wrists were tiny.

“Does your head still hurt?” she asked.

It took me a moment to get what she was talking about. Then I remembered: the headstands.

“Only if I press it on the ground and put all my weight on it,” I said. I made a face. “Which, you know, I like to do a lot.”

She laughed. “You did get better, though. You almost had it those last couple of times.”

“Yeah, because my head was dented in by then. By the end of the unit, I’ll be like Barney Rubble, with a big, square head.” I imitated her position, leaning back on my elbows so that the concrete dug into my skin. “It must be fun to be good at that stuff—headstands and cartwheels and all that.”

“I guess.” She glanced at me. “What about you? What do you do?”

“What do you mean, what do I do?”

“You know, what are you good at?” She said it so easily, like
everyone
was good at something. But I wasn’t on any teams, and in P.E. I was one of the last people picked, even for something simple like dodgeball. I didn’t play the piano. I didn’t draw. What did I do?

Karen and Elise, two girls from our grade, came around the corner of the school. They stopped when they saw us, and their eyebrows went up.

“Hi, Kate,” Elise said. “Hi, Lissa.” She turned back to Kate. “We’re going to walk over to Dairy Queen and get a Blizzard. Want to come?”

I focused on the pavement. The lines marking the parking spaces were faint and needed to be repainted.

“Nah,” Kate said. “Y’all go on. I’ll see you in practice.”

“You sure?” Elise’s eyes flicked to me. “Well, whatever.” She nudged Karen and they walked away. Karen said something in a low voice, and the two of them broke out laughing.

“Why didn’t you go with them?” I said. It came out sounding snotty, and I blushed. I sat up and wrapped my arms around my legs.

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “I’m not hungry. And Elise can be kind of a pain sometimes. Anyway, I know both of them already.”

I sat still, feeling the sun on my neck. I wanted to say something witty, something to prove I was worth getting to know, but the words wouldn’t come. I felt that way a lot, like I had thoughts within me but it took a long time for them to bubble to the surface. By that point, most people had lost interest.

“You never told me what you like to do,” Kate said.

“That’s because I can’t think of anything.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’m serious. I can’t.”

She looked at me, then gave a funny half-smile. “I bet you’re good at tons of things. You’re just being modest.”

That’s when I felt it. It was her expression more than anything, as if she’d summed me up and actually liked what she saw. But that was four years ago. Now when Kate looked at me, which didn’t happen very often, something in her eyes wouldn’t let me past.

I asked her once why she had come up to me that day, why she had decided to be so nice.

“Oh, you know,” she teased. “I was bored, I had nothing else to do—”

“Come on,” I said. This was when we were still friends, so I grinned and shoved her shoulder.

“Well,” she said, “part of it was that you seemed so solemn, like you had some great secret or something. But you were funny, too. You made me laugh.” She looked at me, one of those penetrating gazes that made me feel special. “You were different from what I expected.”

“Oh, great,” I said.

“In a good way, Lissa. You know that.”

But I didn’t, not anymore. Not since two weeks ago in Rob’s gazebo, when Kate leaned in to kiss me and like an idiot I kissed her back. All I knew now was that nothing lasted forever, even a friendship, and that being “different” felt the same as being alone.

“BETH!” I CALLED. “ BREAKFAST! ”
I felt conspicuous with my bandaged finger, but at least I’d stopped crying. I passed Jerry his bagel, then plucked Beth’s from the toaster and dropped it on a plate.

“Thanks,” Jerry said. He put down the paper.

“You going in today?” I asked. Jerry used to work the grave-yard shift at the city waste-treatment facility, but he gave that up, along with his trailer and his vintage Harley-Davidson, when he came to live with us. Now he managed a plant nursery over by Chastain Park, and he often worked on weekends.

“Yeah. Sophie’s trying her hand at the cash register, so I need to be there to supervise. You want to come? Got some new saplings that need to be potted.”

“Can’t. I’m getting my hair cut.” I craned my head toward the door. “Be-
eth!
”

She pounded down the stairs and dropped into her seat. She reached for the jar of jam. “Hey, Lissa,” she said, “I want to go to the mall with Nikki. Can you drop us off?”

“I guess,” I said. “But we need to leave soon.”

“Okay. Nikki’s cousin Vanessa might come, too. She just moved here from North Carolina, and she’s going to be in my homeroom at school.”

“Well, you be nice to her,” Jerry said. He took a sip of coffee. “I’m sure she’d appreciate a friend.”

“Nikki says she was the most popular girl in her class where she used to live. She has a tattoo.”

“A tattoo?”

“Uh-huh, a daisy. I’m going to get one, too.”

“Beth—” Jerry said. He turned to me for help.

“They come in a package for about two bucks,” I said. “You press them onto your skin and they wash off after a couple of days. They’re like stickers.”

“They’re not like
stickers,
” Beth said. “Anyway, when I’m older I’m going to get a real one, like Kate’s.”

Jerry lowered his cup. “Kate has a tattoo? A real one?”

I glared at Beth. “No.”

“She does so. On her ankle, a little purple moon.”

I could feel Jerry’s look, but I didn’t respond.

Too late, Beth realized she’d messed up. “Oh. But maybe that was someone else. I think I got confused.”

I ignored her. By now my bagel was cold, and I pushed it away. “So Sophie’s working out?” I asked Jerry.

His brow cleared. “Yeah. So far, so good. She’s a chatter-box, though—I’ll tell you that.”

Sophie was Jerry’s new floor clerk, and she was nice in a goofy, overbearing kind of way. She had to be in her late thirties, yet she still wore ceramic earrings shaped like cats and hearts and question marks, and her tennis shoes were red with sparkly gold laces. And Jerry was right: she was definitely a talker. The day I met her she went on for twenty minutes about her gray-and-white-striped kitten, which she’d rescued from the pound the week before. “I named him Q.T.,” she told me. “As in the initials.” She waited for me to get it. “Q.T., because he’s such a cutie pie. Isn’t that a hoot?”

“Well, good,” I said now. “You need someone to make the customers feel welcome.”

“Maybe.” He downed the last of his coffee. “So how
is
Kate? She hasn’t been around much these days.”

I took my dishes to the sink. “She’s been busy.”

“Busy? I thought you two were glued together at the hip.”

“She’s got her gymnastics meets. You know. And school’s been kind of overwhelming, even though the semester just started. Fall semester, junior year—it’s when all the teachers start piling on the work. They say it’s to get us ready for college. Anyway, it’s just been really busy for everyone.”

“Huh,” Jerry said. “Sounds like it.” He pushed his chair out from the table and returned to his paper.

Beth brought up her plate and rinsed it off. “Maybe you could ask her to go with us to the mall,” she said softly.

“No.”

“But—”

“I said no, Beth.” I yanked open the dishwasher. “Go call Nikki. If she’s going with you, she needs to get ready. I’m leaving in half an hour.”

Upstairs in my room, I flopped onto my bed and stared at the ceiling. Why had I treated Beth like such a jerk for mentioning Kate’s tattoo? It wasn’t my job to protect Kate, and even if it were, she hardly needed protection from Jerry. It wasn’t like he was going to call her parents or anything. Anyway, it had been almost a month since she’d gotten it. Surely they’d noticed by now.

“A
tattoo?
” I’d exclaimed when Kate first suggested it. We were sitting in a booth at McDonald’s, and I looked at her over the top of my Coke. “Kate.”

“What’s wrong with a tattoo? I’ll get a cute one, not ‘I Love Mother’ stenciled across my biceps.” She laughed. “God, wouldn’t she love that.”

I’d smiled. Kate’s mom already hated the fact that we didn’t dress more like “ladies.” “You two have such darling figures,” she chided. “You need to accentuate them. Boys like to see a girl’s curves.”

“You have to come with me or I’ll wimp out,” Kate said, slapping some money on the table and standing up. “I
need
you, Lissa.”

At the tattoo parlor—“Tattoo U” it was called—Kate got nervous and clutched my arm. “What if it hurts?” she whispered as a man named Big Joe readied the needle.

“What if you get gangrene?” I whispered back.

She drove her elbow into my side.

“Ready?” said Big Joe. He wore a cracked leather jacket, and he had thick lines of oil, or maybe dye, under his fingernails. His stomach hung over his jeans like a sack of flour.

Kate sat down across from him. “It won’t hurt, will it?”

“Hell, no. No more’n a bee sting. You ever been stung by a bee?”

Kate nodded.

Big Joe cackled. “Hurts, don’t it?”

Kate’s eyes flew to me, and I lifted my shoulders.

Big Joe had her prop her ankle on a stool so he could stencil the outline of the tattoo. “A snake, right? Heh. Just kidding.” He switched on the tattoo machine, Kate turned pale, and fifteen minutes later it was done. Big Joe taped a gauze pad over Kate’s ankle and wiped his hands on his jeans.

“Leave this bandage on till the next time you take a shower,” he instructed. “Then turn the water up hot—hot as you can stand it—and let the bandage soak off. The hot water’ll soak the plasma out of your skin, too, make it heal up quicker.” He gave her a tube of antibiotic. “You’ll want to smear on some of this ointment every day for two to three days. After that, switch to plain lotion. No aloe vera or any of that scented crap. Any questions?”

Kate stood up. She was still a little shaky, but the color was coming back to her cheeks. “How long will it take to heal?”

“Two to three weeks, unless I screwed up.” He slapped his leg. “That’ll be forty dollars, no out-of-state checks.”

Afterward, we went to Baskin-Robbins to celebrate. “You’re amazing,” I told Kate as she slid in beside me in the booth.

“I thought I was going to faint. I didn’t know it would bleed so much. Did you?”

I shook my head. “I guess I thought it was more like getting your ears pierced.”

“Yeah. Remind me to put on socks when I go home, so Mom won’t see the bandage.”

I slurped my milk shake. “So. What about Big Joe? Pretty hot, huh?”

“Omigod. Did you see that he does body piercings, too?”