Kissing Kate (6 page)

Mom had told me that story a hundred times, and every time, it gave me the shivers. That’s probably why I liked hearing it so much. But then I’d started having dreams about it, dreams in which I was walking off to be kidnapped, or worse. In my dreams I
knew
I should turn back, but I couldn’t.

I’d had that dream a lot when I was younger, then less and less the older I got. Until recently. When I was a kid, Mom would sit with me after these dreams, stroking my hair until I fell back asleep. But Mom was no longer here to soothe me. The whole thing was stupid, I knew. I was sixteen. There was no way anyone was going to kidnap me. Who would want to? But the dream wasn’t really about being kidnapped, not anymore. Maybe it was about this Kate stuff, how I’d walked smack into a big mistake and now I had to be careful what I did next. I wasn’t sure.

But to banish the dream, maybe I had to find out. So after brushing my teeth and washing my face, I crawled into bed with the goal of having a lucid dream. I shifted around, smushing the pillow down just the right amount, and then I slid my feet farther into the cool sheets. I lay there, ready to begin, but my brain wouldn’t calm down. Now that I was committed to trying this, I was scared of what might happen.

I smoothed my quilt over my chest, my fingers finding its nubbly seams. On my bedside table, my Felix the Cat alarm clock ticked its muted tick. On the other side of the bed was the tall chest of drawers Jerry had found at a garage sale, its shadow stretching over the wall. Everything was familiar. Everything was safe.

When at last I felt ready, I closed my eyes and tried an exercise in which I tensed and relaxed my muscles, working my way up from my toes to my head. With each muscle group, I imagined a flow of energy traveling up my body, spreading through me in a wave.

The exercise was supposed to bring me closer to the dream state, but I must have done something wrong, because all that tensing made me feel weak, like I was going to faint. Plus, somehow during the course of the exercise, I forgot about my stomach altogether. I skipped from my hips and lower back straight up to my shoulders. What did that mean, I wondered?

I kept with it, though, imagining a flow of energy moving through my body, and after a while my arms and legs started to tingle. The book said that if you felt odd vibrations, you were supposed to try and intensify them, so that’s what I did. I relaxed my muscles and kind of
pushed
on the vibrations, like how you’d push on something if you were trying hard to remember it. The tingling sped up until my whole body hummed, including my heart, which whammed against my ribs.
Oh, God,
I thought.
What if I accidentally kill myself?

I tried to pull out of it, but it was hard. My arms and legs felt leaden, and it took all of my strength to slide my hand out from under the sheet. I felt like I was moving under water. Finally I wrenched free, and everything went ZAP back to normal. My heart was no longer racing, and I could move my body again. And then I wished I hadn’t gotten so freaked out, because maybe I’d been on the verge of doing it, of slipping into a lucid dream. What if I’d ruined it?

Not that it would have made much difference, because a minute later Beth pushed open my door and padded into my room. The light from the hallway spilled onto the floor.

“Lissa?” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

“No,” I said. I was irritated that she’d barged in, because even though she didn’t technically wake me up, she could have.

“Can I sleep with you?” she asked.

“I guess. But you better not talk.”

“I won’t.” She walked to the other side of my bed and climbed in. “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine. You can even go first.”

I snorted. She meant that I could scratch her back first and be done with it, which was supposedly the best strategy, since it left me free to drift off as my own back was being rubbed. But Beth almost always fell asleep before fulfilling her end of the bargain. Still, I knew I’d be lying awake either way.

“Roll over,” I said.

She flipped onto her stomach, and I started scratching. I listened as her breathing slowed. She sighed, and I wondered why she had woken up, what unwanted dreams had troubled her.

I smoothed down her hair. “Sleep tight,” I whispered.

AT SCHOOL, KATE AND I DANCED AROUND
each other like two like-charged magnets: close enough to keep tabs on each other, but with an invisible force preventing us from fully connecting. In history, she laughed too loudly at Missy Colquitt’s jokes, knowing I was watching, and in the cafeteria she sat one or two tables away when she could have chosen a seat at the opposite end of the room. For my part, I tried to strike a balance between not staring at her and yet not looking away if my glance did happen to fall on her, and the result was that I was hyperaware of every move I made, as if I were trying to act cool at a party where I felt totally out of place.

So when I got home on Friday afternoon, I was almost giddy with relief. The week was over and I didn’t have to see Kate until Monday, and I felt like I could breathe again. And eat. I dropped my backpack on the table and opened the refrigerator.

Pickles. Yogurt. Cold spaghetti left over from last night. Eggs. Applesauce. Half a stick of butter. Milk.

I closed the door and leaned against it. I wanted something comforting, something rich and fattening and full of calories. Homemade doughnuts. Grits casserole. Fried bologna sandwiches. When I was little, Mom used to make fried bologna sandwiches for me. The slice of bologna would puff up in the middle like a turtle shell, and Mom would slit it with a knife to make it lie flat on the bread. Then she’d cut the sandwich into four smaller sandwiches and serve them to me with apple juice and Goldfish crackers. While I ate, she’d tell me stories about my day: Lissa Gets Her Toenails Cut, Lissa Makes Up Her Bed, Lissa Finds the House Key and Saves the Day. Never anything remarkable, but the way she told them, she made me feel like a star.

Once I asked Jerry for a fried bologna sandwich, back when he first moved in with us. He didn’t butter the pan, and the bottom of the sandwich turned black. I ate it anyway, eyes on my plate while Jerry read the paper, until he saw my expression and dumped what was left in the trash.

Kate’s mom stocked their freezer with Lean Cuisines, and except for the times when her dad did the shopping, the only cookies in their pantry were fat-free oatmeal raisin. Jerry was a horrible cook and he knew it, but at least he made the effort. One time he invented a pretty good recipe for peanut butter-coconut bars, and every so often he whipped together a batch of fudge that we could snack on for days. The first time he tried, he turned the stove up too high, and the fudge hardened around the wooden spoon like cement around a flagpole. Jerry let the pan cool, then gave knives to Beth and me and let us chip off as many flakes as we wanted. Beth didn’t remember, but I did.

I checked the contents of the pantry, but there were no tins of brownies I’d forgotten I’d made, no secret loaves of banana bread. From the den, I heard the old cartoons Beth loved: Bugs Bunny’s wise-guy laugh and spurts of lively music. I tapped my thumbnail against my teeth, then reached to the top shelf and grabbed the graham crackers, which I set on the counter along with a jar of peanut butter, a box of raisins, and a bag of jumbo marshmallows. I grabbed two plates from the cabinet and got to work.

“What
is
it?” Beth asked when I presented her with my creation.

“It’s a snack. I made you a snack. Aren’t you hungry?”

“Not really.” She poked the marshmallow and wrinkled her nose.

“Beth, it’s good. It’s like peanut-butter-and-marshmallow cream, which you love.” I sat down beside her and took a bite, but the marshmallow made the peanut butter sandwich too tall, and raisins rained to the floor as I struggled to bite down. I’d tried pressing the raisins into the marshmallow—I thought it would look cheerful—but the marshmallow was too doughy and it didn’t quite work.

“Mmm,” I said. A raisin zinged the coffee table.

“Don’t we have any potato chips?” Beth asked.

“Just try it, Beth.”

She picked up her snack and took a small bite from the corner. Her expression stayed suspicious, but she took another bite. “Vanessa got elected class leader,” she said with her mouth full.

“Oh yeah?”

“She gets to pass out all the handouts, and if Ms. Hutchinson needs a note taken to the office, she gets to take it.”

“Huh.”

We watched as Bugs Bunny stole a row of carrots from a neighbor’s garden, pulling them from the soil as if he were ripping the seam from a pair of pants.

“And Toby Norton asked her to go steady with him, but she said no.” Beth plucked the raisins from her marshmallow. “She says his teeth look like vomit.”

“Beth.”

“Well, they do. They’re yellow and kind of speckled-y. I don’t think he brushes them enough.”

I finished my last bite of graham cracker and wiped the crumbs off my mouth. “What about Nikki? Are you two still best friends?” I liked Nikki. Nikki rescued daddy longlegs and wanted to be a firefighter when she grew up.

Beth shrugged. “Nikki’s kind of babyish, don’t you think? She doesn’t even wear a bra.”

“Beth,
you
don’t wear a bra.” I paused. “Do you?” I felt her shoulder for a strap and my eyebrows shot up. “Beth, you’re in fifth grade. You don’t
need
a bra. You don’t even—”

I stopped. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the other girls in her class were all wearing bras, all except Nikki, and so of course Beth had to, too. I didn’t wear one until seventh grade, but I knew that was pretty late. And even then I’d had no idea how to buy one, or how to ask Jerry to buy one for me, which I was not going to do, and I still remembered how traumatic it was to go to Rich’s lingerie department and riffle through the rows and rows of light, silky undergarments. I bought my one white cotton bra and wore it day after day, until Kate’s mom somehow found out and bought me another. She left it on Kate’s bed one night when I was staying over, explaining that she’d found a buy-two-get-one-free sale at Neiman Marcus. “And Kate certainly doesn’t need three new bras. If it doesn’t fit, we can exchange it. All right, sweetie?”

“Where’d you get it?” I asked Beth.

She was mad at me for touching her, and she wrapped her arms around her ribs. “It’s one of yours. An old one.”

There was no way a bra of mine would fit Beth’s skinny frame, even an old one. Maybe that’s why she was wearing a sweatshirt. God, what a nightmare, going through fifth grade wearing your big sister’s droopy bra.

I switched off the TV with the remote. “Why don’t we go to Rich’s and get you some of your own. All right? Let me write a note to Jerry telling him we’ll be late for dinner.”

Beth plucked at her jeans. “I want to go to Macy’s,” she said. “That’s where Vanessa got hers. And we don’t need to leave a note for Jerry, because he won’t be here anyway. He left a message on the machine.”

“Working late?”

“He said he was going to finish up some stuff, and then he and Sophie were going to grab a hamburger at Bennigan’s.”

“He and
Sophie
? Did he, like, ask her out? Like, on a date?”

“Lissa, please. This is Jerry, remember?”

Exactly, and Jerry was not a grab-a-hamburger kind of guy. Occasionally he took me and Beth to dinner, but he rarely went out on his own and never with his co-workers. He said situations like that made him uncomfortable, and he blamed it on how he was brought up. He was raised along with my dad on my grandparents’ farm in Tennessee, where, according to Jerry, bread-and-mayonnaise sandwiches were considered a delicacy, and catching greased hogs at the state fair was the closest thing to culture they experienced. My dad went to college and taught himself to act more sophisticated, but Jerry was still a work in progress.

I thought about how idiotic I’d acted around Kate these last couple of weeks, and it occurred to me that when it came to social skills, Jerry and I were a lot alike. Maybe it was genetic. I winced as I remembered the way I stopped and studied a “Say No to Drugs” poster when Kate passed me in the hall this afternoon, just so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. I had to tell myself all over again that it was the weekend, that for two and a half days I didn’t have to deal with anything I didn’t want to.

I stood up from the couch. “Come on, Beth. Let’s go.”

At Macy’s lingerie department, we were approached by a pinched-lipped saleswoman wearing a lime green suit. “Can I help you?” she asked.

Beth stepped a foot or two away. She fingered the strap of a black silk slip, then moved on to examine a cream colored camisole.

“I think we’re okay,” I said. I headed for the junior-miss section, and Beth ducked her head and followed.

“Oh, you’re shopping for your little sister,” the saleswoman exclaimed. She walked beside us, her panty hose swishing between her thighs. “Is this your first, dear? Your first brassiere?” She whipped out a tape measure. “Raise your arms, and let’s figure out your size.”

Beth shot me a look of desperation.

“You know what, uh”—I checked her name tag—“Edith? I think we’ll look on our own first. If we need any help, we’ll find you.” I steered Beth to a rack of nightshirts. “This one’s cute,” I said, pulling out a red-and-white baseball jersey with the word
Bazooka
spelled across the front. “You probably need something new to sleep in. What do you think?”

Edith frowned. “Well. Call me if you need me.” She waited another moment, then swished away to assist another customer.

“Do I really need to be measured?” Beth asked, as I draped the nightshirt over my arm and led Beth to the rows of bras.

“Nah. Just try on a few to see which fits best.” I selected some 30-As in different styles and handed them to her. “Start with these. You might have to adjust the straps.”