Autumn's Kiss (4 page)

I don't even realize Mom's looking over my shoulder until she laughs. “You have no idea how long it took me to get that white stuff out of our hair. My first idea was even worse. I tried using flour, thinking it would look good and powdery, but when I washed
that
out, it clumped and clogged up the only good shower on my dorm room floor. I have friends who still give me a hard time about it.”

“It was fun,” I say, “dressing up together.”

“Yeah, it was.”

Mom puts her arm around me and steers me back to the table, where she's laid out the muffin and a cup of chamomile tea for each of us. As we sit, she adds, “But I'm glad you have Reenzie's party to go to this year.”

“You are?”

“Mmm-hmm. I was worried about Erick, but last night Aaron invited him to spend Halloween at his house, trick-or-treat, then spend the night. Now, I figure you're going to be at that party pretty late….Do you think you'd be able to stay overnight? If not at Reenzie's house, maybe Amalita's or Taylor's?”

“Why?”

Mom grins. “My friend Amanda found a deal online at a hotel in Miami. Spa treatments, room service, a beautiful pool…We want to get there before dinner and make a whole night of it, come home the next afternoon.”

“You're not going to be here giving out candy?”

Mom suddenly looks exhausted. “I'm not up for it.” She opens her mouth like she's going to say more, then shakes her head. “I'd rather just go away and pretend it's not Halloween at all. You don't mind, do you? You don't even have to stay away overnight—I just thought if you didn't want to be here alone, and you'd be out so late with your friends anyway…”

“No, you're right, it's a good idea. I'm sure Ames'll be cool with it.”

I tamp down the urge to throw a fit and tell her she's being selfish…because the truth is she's not. I didn't
tell
her I'd rather be home than at Reenzie's, so it's stupid to think she'd want to stay home by herself when Erick and I are both going out. And the photo album shows it pretty clearly—Halloween was her and Dad's holiday long before it belonged to all of us. If I were her, I'd probably want to run away from it too.

I'm just upset because I had a wish, and I'd hoped it would come true.

As soon as I can, I run back upstairs and get dressed. I grab the journal and toss it into a purse, then call J.J.

“Hey,” I say. “Any chance you're up for giving me a ride to my grandmother's?”

“As you wish,” he says.

He gets to the house so fast I'm still putting on my makeup when he rings the bell. By the time I get downstairs, Mom's foisted a muffin on him and they're bent over the newspaper together so he can help her with the crossword.

“I'm taking back my friend, Mom,” I say. “You can have Erick's.”

“He won't stay your friend if you make him drive you everywhere,” Mom says. “Amanda told me about a fantastic driving instructor she used for her son. I want you to give her a try.”

I roll my eyes. “I'll think about it.”

“I don't mind driving her, Mrs. Falls,” J.J. says.

“See?” I say. “He doesn't mind.”

We're in the car before J.J. asks, “You didn't tell her?”

“She should know,” I say.

J.J. nods and lets it go. He turns up the music. Then he turns it down again. “She probably doesn't want to think about it. But if you
told
her, she'd get it. Then she'd stop bugging you.”

“Or she'd stick me in therapy,” I say, “which would be a waste, because it's not like there's some deep dark mystery. My dad died in a car crash. I don't want to drive. Done.”

“Right,” J.J. agrees. “Except, you know, a therapist would have you work through it and—”

“Change things so my dad
didn't
die in a car crash?” I ask.

J.J. turns red. I feel like a jerk because I'm being difficult on purpose, but really, I don't want to talk about it.

“No,” J.J. says tightly. “You're right.”

“I think you're just sick of being my chauffeur,” I tease him.

“Madam, it is my unbridled honor and privilege to be your chauffeur,” he says. “Should we be so lucky as to go to college in the same vicinity, I will happily continue to be your chauffeur even then.”

“Totally want that in writing,” I say. “And after college?”

“Goes without saying.”

We pull up to Century Acres, the residence my grandmother moved to after she had her stroke last year. I pop out, wave goodbye to J.J., and run in. It's a big sprawling building, but Eddy's always in the lobby listening to the day's entertainment, in the dining room eating, in the activity room playing bingo, or in her room. Today it's the lobby, but Eddy isn't happy. Her small brown body with the cotton tuft of white hair is swallowed by the chair she's in, and she clings to the arms with a clawlike grip. She's glaring up at a similarly tiny woman, who could be Eddy's negative image. This woman is just as old and just as tiny, but her wispy corona of hair is black, and her skin is chalky white as opposed to Eddy's nut-brown. They're even dressed the opposite of one another: Eddy's in a black T-shirt over white sweatpants; the other woman wears a white button-down blouse over black high-water slacks.

The other woman also wears glasses…but as jewelry. They hang around her neck on a chain. Seems to me to defeat the purpose of glasses, but then again I'm not old, so what do I know.

Actually, as I move closer, I realize I
do
know one thing—this woman is screaming at my grandmother.

“This is
my
seat!” she screeches. “I
always
sit here before dinner!”

Let the record show that it's now two o'clock in the afternoon. I just had breakfast. They're prepping for the dinner they're going to eat in about two hours.

“You think I don't know that?” my grandmother shoots back. “This is the most comfortable chair in the whole building and you hog it every day. Not this time. I got here right after lunch, and I'm not moving. And don't think you're getting me up for a bathroom break, because I'm wearing supplies.”

I squeeze my eyes shut as I try to erase that last part from my mind, then move closer to the fracas. I notice there's a guy around my age holding the other woman's arm. I wonder if he's a relative or volunteer trying to break up the fight. “Hi, Eddy,” I say, then ask a question I'm not sure I want answered. “What's going on?”

“Autumn!
Carina!
Come down here so I can kiss you.”

I bend down and let her give me a too-wet kiss on the cheek.

“I'd get up,” she says, “but then this vulture would swoop into my seat.”

“
My
seat!” the vulture squawks. “You stole it!”

“It doesn't belong to you!” Eddy shoots back.

“Excuse me,” the guy holding the vulture's arm says. He has a baseball cap pulled low over his face, but I can still see he's giving Eddy a sweet and charming smile. “Mrs. Falciano?”

“
Sí.
But if you think you score points knowing my name, you're wrong,” Eddy says.

I don't know, I'm pretty impressed he knows Eddy's name. I don't know the names of anyone else around here.

The guy's smile doesn't falter. If anything, his voice gets kinder. “You did say that you know my grandmother always sits there…and that you sat down specifically to take the seat from her, right?”

“Sí…,”
Eddy says suspiciously.

“So it's reasonable to say that you
did
steal the seat from her, right?” he asks. “And we all know stealing's wrong, so—”

“Whoa whoa whoa!” I jump in. “Does your grandmother own this place?”

The guy looks up at me like he only just realized I'm here. There's something familiar about his face, but I don't want to figure out what it is—I'm too angry that he's trying to manipulate Eddy into giving up her seat.

Now he's trying to do the same to me. He gives me the same overly kind smile and uses the same tone, like I'm a little kid throwing a tantrum. “No, of course she doesn't own it.”

“Stop it,” I say. “Don't talk to me that way. Be real. It's not your grandmother's place, so it's not her chair.”

The guy drops the condescending tone. Now when he talks, he sounds annoyed. “I know it's not her chair, but is it such a big deal to let her sit there? Your grandmother's been there for hours.”

“Because
your
grandmother's
always
there!” I shoot back.

A voice in the back of my head starts screaming at me to shut up because it just realized something, but I don't pay attention. I'm too furious. “Do you have any idea how many times my grandmother's complained to me because she never gets a chance to sit in the only comfortable chair in this place?”

“Do you have any idea how many times
my
grandmother's complained to me about the woman who stands over her glaring at her all afternoon when she's just trying to sit down and rest?”

The two old women are watching us like we're a tennis match, but I'm not even paying attention to them anymore. I'm all about this guy and putting him in his place.

“Your grandmother's a seat hog,” I say.

“Yours is a bully!”

“
You're
the bully! If I hadn't come in here, you'd have conned my grandmother out of her seat when she has just as much of a right to be there as yours!”

The guy's grandmother gasps and moves in front of her grandson like she's going to shield him, which is pretty ridiculous since her head barely comes up to his chest. “You can't talk to my grandson that way!” she snaps. “He's a
superstar.
”

Eddy scoffs out loud. “You think
my
granddaughter isn't a superstar? They're all superstars to us!”

But my jaw's on the floor because I just realized what that voice in the back of my head was trying to tell me. There's a very good reason the guy looks familiar to me. It would be shocking if his face
didn't
look familiar to me, since I've been gazing at it longingly for almost three years.

I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.

I'm fighting over a Century Acres chair…with
Kyler Leeds.

“No,” Kyler Leeds's grandmother snaps at Eddy, “
my
grandson is an
actual
superstar. He's on the radio. He's on TV. He's in the paper. He does movies.”

Kyler puts his hands gently on his grandmother's shoulders and smiles like he's embarrassed. “I haven't done movies, Meemaw.”

He glares up at me at that last part, like he's afraid I'm about to pull out my phone and post to Twitter
@KylerLeeds calls his grandmother Meemaw! #soooadorable

Which I totally am, by the way. After I figure out how to turn this around so he doesn't completely hate my guts, which would be a problem since he's destined to fall hopelessly in love with me.

“I don't care if your grandson
has
done movies,” Eddy retorts, “and neither does my granddaughter. Right, Autumn?”

“Well…” I stall as I try to find an expression for my face that's something resembling normal.

“I bet neither one of us has ever even heard of him,” Eddy continues. “I don't know a single superstar with the last name Rubenstein.”

“That's because he has a different last name,” his grandmother snaps. “He's
Kyler Leeds.
” Then she turns to me. “And I bet you
have
heard of him, right?”

Eddy laughs out loud before I can answer. She's so giddy she releases her claw grip and relaxes back in the chair cushions. “Kyler Leeds? Oh, she's heard of him. She won a prize on a TV show to spend an evening with him and you know what she did? She dumped him off on her friends because she didn't want to be around such a talentless
panzon
!”

Oh crap. I forgot I'd told Eddy that story. I know I didn't tell it to her
that
way, but still…

Eddy's still cackling in the chair. I feel my face grow hot. I close my eyes and cringe. When I open them, Kyler has a strange look on his face.

“That was you?” he asks.

“Um…yeah,” I admit. I shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other and wonder if I can steal one of the geriatrics' scooters and bug out of here.

Then Kyler smiles. “It's really great to meet you.”

“It is?”

“Yeah,” he laughs. “Your friends told me a lot about you. I was really impressed by what you did for them. It was cool.”

New planned tweet:
@KylerLeeds thinks I'm cool!!!! #totallydying

“Thanks,” I say.

His smile fades. “Of course, that was before I found out you think I'm a talentless
panzon.
”

Face getting hot again. “I swear I didn't say that!” I lower my voice so my grandmother won't be embarrassed, and add, “Eddy got it a little mixed up. She does that sometimes….”

Kyler laughs out loud. “It's okay. I get it.” He says that with a glance down at his grandmother, and I smile because I realize he
does
get it. For a second he's not Kyler Leeds; he's just a really cute guy who's dealing with something really similar to me.

Then my insides start freaking out again. Even to my own ears, my voice actually sounds shaky when I try to sound casual and ask, “So what are you doing
here
?”

“He's visiting his Meemaw, what do you think?” his grandmother says, reaching up and taking his hand. “Because he's a good boy.”

“Thanks, Meemaw.” He leans down and kisses the top of her head. “I rent a place down here whenever I can, between tours and stuff. I like to be around for her.”

“Oh yeah,” I say. “Me too. For Eddy, I mean.”

Eddy snorts a little too loudly. “So what are we doing about the chair?” she says. “You two are all chummy now, but a minute ago this one was trying to take my seat!”

“Tell you what,” Kyler says. “Meemaw, let me take you out. We'll see a movie, and we'll get dinner someplace with way more comfortable seats than this one. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“Great. Give me one sec. You start, I'll catch up with you.”

His grandmother nods and starts shuffling toward the door. At her pace, she could give him an hour and he'd still catch up with her. “Autumn,” he says.

Kyler Leeds just said my name. In person, right in front of me. Talking to me.

Which probably means I should answer.

“Yeah?”

He beckons me close, and I wonder if he's going to invite me to join them for dinner…or join him for a quick trip to Paris. Something little like that.

He looks around as if making sure no one's listening, which is pretty funny since his grandmother was screaming his name a second ago. He speaks in a low whisper, and I can feel his breath against my cheek.

“Can you do me a huge favor and not tell anybody about this? Everyone here has been really good about it, and I don't want it to turn into some kind of paparazzi thing when I come and visit my grandmother, you know?”

“Totally, I get it. I won't say a word.”

I wonder if tweeting counts as saying. Probably does.

“Thanks. I'll see you around.” He grins. “And I'll try to get Meemaw to be cooler about the chair thing.”

I return the smile. “I'll talk to Eddy too.”

He trots the five feet to catch up to his grandmother. When I turn to Eddy, she's already half out of her chair.

“Good, she's gone,” she huffs. “I lied about the supplies. I need to pee like a racehorse.”

A half hour and a string of frenzied, sworn-to-secrecy texts with Jenna later, Eddy and I are perched in chairs in her room. I lean forward and anxiously watch her run her fingers over its blank cover.

“Why did he go?” I ask softly, the words thick in my mouth.

Eddy shrugs. “The way of the Taino…it's a mystery.”

I look down at my fingers and pick at the edges of my gel polish—turquoise in honor of yesterday's football game. “I did some things with the diary that weren't so great,” I admit. “Do you think…do you think he left because he's mad at me?”

“Oh,
querida.
” Eddy sighs with a sad smile. She lays down the journal and takes my hands. “Your father, he loves you very much. A little mistake…a
big
mistake…that wouldn't send him away. If you need him, he's there.”

“But he's not. You see it yourself. The symbol's gone. And when I wrote in it, nothing happened.” My voice drops to just above a whisper when I say the last part. “He left me.”

“He left you with a
mission,
” Eddy clarifies.
“¿Sí?”

“Peace and harmony, little corner of the world. Yeah,” I say mechanically.

“Then if you need his help, he's there. Maybe you just need to look a little harder.”

I'd need a microscope to look harder. The symbol is gone. That's obvious. And it's just as obvious that Eddy isn't going to help get it back. I hang out with her while she finds an acceptable hoodie for dinner in the dining room—this one is for a CrossFit studio and I have no idea how it ended up in my grandmother's closet—then call J.J. “Not trying to abuse the chauffeur privilege,” I say, “but if you're around and available…”

“As you wish,” he says. “Be there in five.”

He's there in four. By five I'm already in seat-tilted-back, shoes-off, feet-on-dash position.

“Seems to me it's a complete waste of a new car and a driver's license if we don't go someplace different every day,” J.J. says. “If you look in the dashboard, you'll see I made a list.”

That involves shifting from my feet-up position, but I do it anyway. “Monkey Jungle?” I ask. “Is that a thing?”

J.J. nodded. “So's Butterfly World. I also include things like the mall, the beach, and the movies, not just the ones close by but within a four-hour radius.”

I flip over the single page of notebook paper. “This is a very short list for all that.”

“It's a list in progress.”

“Disney World?” I see it on the last line on the back of the page. “Let's go there now!”

“Family dinner tonight, otherwise I would. Pick another.”

I'm still looking at the sheet when Amalita calls me and Jack calls J.J., so we pick them up before we go. Taylor's at
Guys and Dolls
rehearsal, and Reenzie and Sean are doing homework—which the rest of us should probably be doing too, but this is way more fun. It's torture not to spill to Amalita about Kyler Leeds, but she's not like Jenna. She's as huge a fan as I am, and even if she swore to me she'd be cool, she'd totally stalk Century Acres to see him again. I can even imagine her dressing up as a little old lady and having J.J. push her in a rented wheelchair so she could try to fit in. It's something I have to admit I'd love to see, but Kyler would kill me, so I keep it quiet.

We let Ames choose the destination from J.J.'s list. She picks Butterfly World, so we drive a half an hour to this really beautiful place filled with massive outdoor gardens that are netted so the butterflies don't escape. They fly free in there and can even land on you, which totally freaks Jack out. I Instagram like twenty pictures of him twisting and contorting as he dances around trying to get butterflies off his arms, chest, and back without actually swatting them. Then we move into the Lorikeet Encounter, where you can buy tiny cups of nectar and the lorikeets—these parakeet-sized birds with bright green bodies and blue heads—swoop down to eat it. I get a picture of Ames with three on her head, and J.J. snaps one of me with a lorikeet on each of my shoulders. Jack is too traumatized from the butterflies and refuses to come in, but J.J. convinces him it'll be fine, that he doesn't have to bring in nectar and the birds won't even notice him, and besides, we need him to take a picture of the rest of us with lorikeets on our heads. It takes forever, but he finally agrees to come in…and we pour cups of nectar on him so the birds dive-bomb him like vultures on a lion's leftovers.

Not that they bite him or anything. They're very tame. That's why it's so funny. Jack's screaming and wailing because he's tackled by basically a bunch of winged kittens.