Soul Kiss (17 page)

That night at dinner my dad said, "I pitched your idea to Office Barn, Melissa. They loved it. They put a programmer right on changing the survey."

"Cool. Do you want me to take a look at it?"

He looked at me, cocking his head like he was confused. "Would you like to?"

"If you want."

"Great. I'll e-mail you an entry code."

After dinner the Big Mistake and I were both walking up the hall to our rooms. He said, "You're a big suck up, Missy."

"And you're not? Give me a break. The good news is I'll be out of here in nine months. And you'll be stuck here for two more years after that."

"Won't be so bad without you."

I knocked into him, and he pushed me back. But I knew if we got into a fight I'd get my grounding extended, so I ducked into my room. I'm sure he knew that too, the jerk. I spent some time plotting revenge against him, but I couldn't come up with a plan that wouldn't lead back to me.

The next morning Daniel and I talked about Thanksgiving. "My aunt and uncle are coming down from Scranton with my cousins," I said. "Are you and your mom doing anything special?"

"We're going to church," he said. "They have a worship service in the afternoon and then a turkey dinner." He smiled. "I remember when I was in elementary school I really wanted to have turkey for Thanksgiving. But my mother didn't know how long you had to cook it, and it took forever. It was like eleven o'clock at night and it still wasn't done, so we just ate some pork. Since then we go out somewhere."

I wished I could invite Daniel and his mother to join us, but I didn't know how they would fit in. My uncle is a big Republican, and I was sure he'd get into some kind of immigration debate, or worse, go off on Fidel Castro.

"Will your grounding be finished by Saturday night?" Daniel asked. "Can we go out?"

"Yeah. That would be cool."

"I feel bad that I don't have a car to take you around."

"What happened to the one you were going to buy?"

"He got a better offer. I was bummed."

"Don't worry, my parents don't mind letting me drive. They think you're having a good effect on me. That is, once they got over the idea that I was getting smarter because I had a brain tumor."

"They're just looking out for you, Melissa," he said, and I heard the echo of what Robbie had said at the restaurant. "I wish I had a family like yours."

Well, that just tore my heart out. I wanted to wrap my arms around Daniel and promise him that I would always be his family. And I was so tempted to tell him right there that I had applied to Penn for him so we could be together--but I held back.

That night I surfed around the Internet and found some recipes for Thanksgiving dinner, and convinced my mom to let me pick up all the ingredients. Not that it was all that hard--since my shopping extravaganza she was eager to shift grocery responsibility to me.

I woke up early on Thursday morning, even before my parents, and started cooking. I made us a big mushroom and cheese frittata for breakfast and then baked a pumpkin pie and a cranberry tart with a gluten-free crust. I even found a recipe for stuffing that Robbie could eat, and by the time everyone woke up I had prepped the turkey and had it ready for the oven. As they started filing in, I pulled the fritatta out and served it.

My parents looked at me like I was from Mars, but they dug right in. "My grandmother used to make a dish like this," my dad said. "But hers wasn't this good."

"How did you learn to make all this?" my mother asked.

"I just read the recipes." I kept bustling around the kitchen, mashing the sweet potatoes and slicing green beans for a casserole. It felt good to be so busy. I was kind of hoping we would have leftovers and I could take them to Daniel's the next day, to show him what a family Thanksgiving was like.

My aunt and uncle and cousin showed up around noon. My dad, my uncle, Robbie and my cousin went into the den to watch football, and my mom and my aunt sat in the kitchen with me as I started pulling stuff out of the oven and getting the meal ready. "You're going to make someone a wonderful wife, Melissa," my aunt said.

"Gag me with a chain saw," I said. "Just because I can cook doesn't mean I want to be someone's wife."

But did I want to be Daniel's wife? I had already told him I loved him, that I would always be there for him. But geez, we were only seventeen. Who gets married that young?

Everybody complimented me on the meal, and I was happy everything had come out so well. But I missed Daniel and decided that I would make sure he and his mom were invited to anything we did at Christmas.

It was late by the time everyone went home, and there wasn't much food left over, which bummed me out. "You should be glad, Melissa," my mother said, as we loaded the last platters into the dishwasher. "Everyone loved the food so much."

"Whatever."

She sat down at the kitchen table and pushed another chair toward me. "Sit down. Please."

I sat.

"What's wrong? You haven't been yourself for a while now."

"Mom. I don't have a brain tumor, all right?"

"That was your father's idea, not mine. But I can see that you're changing. Not just the way you think, but the way you act too. A year ago you wouldn't even eat with the rest of the family, and this year you're cooking the whole meal."

I couldn't argue with that.

"Isn't this just what growing up is?" I asked. "You're always telling Robbie and me to be nicer, to do more stuff around the house."

"You can't make yourself over for a boy, Melissa."

"Is that what you think I'm doing? That I'm just being smart and nice because of Daniel? That I'm not actually a very smart or a very nice person and I'm just faking?"

"That's not what I said." She sat back against her chair. "There was this boy in high school. Jimmy MacTavish."

"Oh my God. Not another Scot."

"Yes, that was part of it. He played football and he was very popular. But he wasn't a very good student. When I started going out with him, I went out for cheerleading, and I started hanging around with different kids, and my grades went down."

"My mom, the after school special," I said, but I wanted to hear what happened.

"Very funny. When it came time to apply to college, Jimmy was going to Penn State and he wanted me to go with him. But I couldn't imagine spending four years in State College. Harrisburg was bad enough. I just had to get to the city, and I had been set on Penn for a long time. He made fun of me--he kept calling me "Ivy Girl" like it was something terrible."

"That's mean."

She brushed a strand of her brown hair from her face and for a minute I saw her the way she looked back in those old pictures--a girl, kind of like me.

"The day I got my acceptance to Penn, I was so excited. And Jimmy broke up with me. That's when I realized what an idiot I had been to try and change myself for him."

"And Dad didn't want you to change?"

"By the time I met your dad I had gone completely the other way. All I did was study. Every weekend night you could find me in the Rosengarten Reserve library, studying. I got straight As. I think now I was still reacting to Jimmy MacTavish."

"Was Dad studying with you?"

She shook her head. "Your dad was on the newspaper staff, and he belonged to a fraternity, and he was always on the go. He just swept me up in his wake. But he never expected me to be anybody other than Caroline Macgregor."

"Daniel doesn't want me to be anybody other than I am, either," I said. "If I'm changing, it's because I'm becoming the person I'm supposed to be. I haven't given up literary magazine or anything."

My mom leaned over and gave me a hug. "That's good, Melissa. Because we love you just for who you are."

I wasn't quite sure who that was, though. As I was getting ready for bed I thought back to the year before, when I had refused to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the family. I couldn't even remember why I had been mad, but I was sure I had a reason. And suddenly I got this idea for a short story, about a girl who discovered at seventeen that she was an alien from another race who had been brought up on earth.

It was nearly two o'clock in the morning before I turned off the laptop, and I had written almost the whole story. I felt like the old Melissa for the first time in a long time.

I slept in Friday morning, and since there were no leftovers to take to Daniel I didn't try to call him. The next night, as I was getting ready to leave, my dad was so pleased with the help I'd given him on Office Barn he slipped me two extra twenty-dollar bills. I stuck them in the back of my wallet for the next time I wanted something I didn't want to tell my parents about.

Oops. That reminded me that I had used my mother's credit card to pay for Daniel's application to Penn. Maybe I'd have to give that money back to her. When her bill came, I could tell her that Daniel's mom had asked me to put the payment through because she didn't have her own credit card, and she'd given me the cash. I had just forgotten to tell my mom. Yeah. That story would fly, I thought.

And that was the old Melissa too. The sneaky one, always looking for an angle. Guess she was still around.

Daniel was waiting outside his building when I pulled into the parking lot. He was pacing back and forth like he was upset about something. "What's up?" I asked, as he got in the car.

"My mother got a phone call a while ago and it made her really upset. She wouldn't tell me what it was about, but she said she had to go out."

"Parents are weird," I said, putting the car in drive.

"But she's never done anything like this before."

"I'm sure it'll be okay. Probably just a friend of hers was having a problem and she had to go over there."

"She doesn't have friends."

I pulled out into traffic. "What do you mean, she doesn't have friends? Not even people she works with?"

He shook his head. "Nobody. We don't have any family, either. That's what's so strange."

I didn't know what to say. My parents' lives were full of dealing with my aunt and uncle, miscellaneous cousins and other assorted relatives, and their friends from childhood, from college, from work and from our neighborhood. They were always going out to dinner with other couples or going to other peoples' kids' weddings and bar mitzvahs.

My dad had a bunch of guys he played poker with, who got together to watch big sports events like the Super Bowl. My mom had what she called her coffee klatsch, a couple of other women she met up with periodically to bitch about their husbands and kids. Their old friends were always coming by the house.

How could Daniel's mom live without friends? If I didn't have Brie to talk to, I think I'd die sometimes.

Daniel was really quiet. We ate tacos and burritos and then went to see an adventure movie full of car chases and gunfights. I could sense him squirming in the seat next to me.

"You want to go out for coffee?" I asked, when the movie was over. "My dad gave me some extra cash."

He shook his head. "I just want to go home. I'm worried about my mom."

"No prob." I drove him back to his apartment complex and pulled up in front of his building.

"Will you come in with me?"

I could hear a strange note in his voice, something that said he was worried.

"Sure." I locked the car, and we walked up to his door. It was about an inch ajar.

"My mom always locks the door," he said, as he put his hand on the knob.

I got a bad feeling. "Daniel. Maybe we should call the police."

But he already had the door opened, and we could see someone had ransacked the apartment. Chairs were overturned, books pulled off their shelves, sofa pillows on the floor.

"Mami!" Daniel cried. He ran through all the junk toward his mother's bedroom. He was back out in a minute. "She's not here!"

"Somebody must have seen you both go out and decided to rob you." My hands felt ice cold. "We should call the cops, Daniel. Right now."

"It's worse than that. Something's really wrong."

There was a sharp knock on the open door behind us. We both turned around to see one of the gangbangers, a guy in his late twenties, wearing torn jeans and a calico bandana around his head.

Shit, I thought, sucking my breath in hard.

"
Hola, amigo
," the gang banger said. "I am Oscar."

"What do you want? Where's my mother?"

"I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "But we saw the guys come and rip through your place."

"Why didn't you stop them?"

"Not our business. But your Mami, she asked me a favor. If anything happens, I should give this box to you."

He handed Daniel a beat-up metal box with a combination lock.

"I don't understand," Daniel said.

"I don't know what's going on," Oscar said. "But I saw trouble, so I'm just doing what your mami asked."

Daniel reached out and took the box.