Big Girl Small (19 page)

I smiled, but felt a flutter of something like fear. He hadn’t even asked me where I lived, hadn’t invited me until we were already at his door. Had he been so confident I’d say yes? I thought for a minute that I should say no, take me home now instead, but I didn’t want to.

“I guess you thought I’d say yes.”

He laughed in an odd, flat way, turned the engine off, and got out. I couldn’t decide what he meant by the laugh. I think he thought I’d been making a joke, so in that sense, it was a polite gesture. But I hadn’t really been joking, exactly, so the more genuine the laugh, the ruder it was. He didn’t offer to help me out, and even though I could have used a hand, I was kind of glad. Kyle never once patronized me. I opened my door and jumped out and then body-slammed the door shut. I followed him up three wooden steps to a front door flanked on either side by enormous windows. I could see the foyer on the left and on the right, the living room, a soaring, modern room with a balcony over it. We walked in, and Kyle threw his book bag on a bench and his shoes on the floor, even though the house was so spotless I felt like I might have to tiptoe through it, straight to the shower, and scrub myself before I was allowed to sit down. I took my shoes off too, lined them up neatly at the window. A giant flat-screen TV was embedded in the living room wall, across from a black leather sofa with silver feet. I would have put lots of money on no butt ever having been perched anywhere near that couch. I looked at my socks, made sure they had no lint or dust on them. They were striped. Looked pretty clean.

“You want something to eat?” Kyle asked. I did not. We went into the kitchen, lit by a giant window in the ceiling, and he opened the fridge and poured a glass of milk. “You want milk?” he asked. I remembered how when he’d had the beer at Chessie’s party, I’d imagined him drinking milk. I don’t like milk, shook my head no. “You want something else? We have everything,” he said. I peered into the fridge as he put the milk back, saw that they did, in fact, have everything. Their house looked like an advertisement for a house, rather than a place where anyone lived. The contents of the fridge were lined up so neatly it was almost as if they’d been alphabetized and organized by a robot.

“I’ll have lemonade, if that’s okay,” I said. I thought in the impossible event that Kyle kissed me, I’d like to taste lemony, rather than like punch or diet soda. Milk seemed worst to me, but obviously he wasn’t thinking ahead, or didn’t care if I thought his teeth were coated with white film when we kissed. And he was right. I would have kissed him if he’d had Rachael Collins’s and my fetal cat in his mouth.

He poured me lemonade, and went to the cupboard for some Smartfood popcorn.

“This okay?” he asked, shaking the bag.

“Perfect,” I said, thinking there was no way I was going to eat anything, since my stomach was on fire.

“Let’s go upstairs.”

I followed him up a flight of carpeted stairs, also lit by a skylight. He took the stairs two at a time, thundering up to his room.

“Show off,” I said.

He looked back down at me and laughed in a friendly way. Then he came back slowly and reached his hand out to me.

“Sorry!” he said. “Here.”

I let him take my hand, and the moment our hands touched, electricity shot through my hand, up my arm, and straight down my body, pouring heat into my stomach. I frankly thought I might faint down the staircase. But I managed to climb the stairs, taking them as slowly as possible in case he never touched me again. I wanted to make the hand-holding last as long as it could. At the top of the stairs was an enormous canvas, painted with a design so modern it gave me the hillbilly I-could-have-painted-that feeling, before I squashed it. And when I looked closer, I realized it looked kind of like the shape of a light blue baby, floating against a darker blue background. But I couldn’t be sure. It gave me a bad feeling.

“Cool painting,” I said. Kyle let go of my hand.

“Yeah,” he said. “My parents are into art. My dad used to collect it.”

“But now he doesn’t?” I asked.

“No, I guess he still does,” Kyle said.

Something about his voice made me change the subject.

“Where do you practice lines?” I asked him, kicking myself as I said it. It was too boring, too obvious, too like—I want to fantasize forever about you in this house, about my having seen it, about—

But he seemed to appreciate that I had steered the topic away from his dad’s art collection.

“In my room.” He pushed a door open, and there it was, glory: the only disorderly part of the house. I felt relief at the sight of a mess, as if there was potential that anything could be alive in this drafty museum. I wondered what his parents thought of Kyle, his sport socks thrown on the floor. Maybe they never came into his room. Or maybe they found it cute that he was sloppy, that it was part of his being “artistic.” He wanted to be a filmmaker, everyone knew that he was going to be a big director, and even though he didn’t talk about it, everyone said he was going to D’Arts so he could learn “every aspect” of the business, that is, how to act—and apparently also how to dissect cats, because he was taking AP bio. Other than his desk, the rest of the room was a storm of stuff, sweatpants thrown over his chair and bed and books and papers all over the floor. His room reminded me of Chad and Sam and their rooms, Chad’s ratty Snoopy doll and Sam’s car-shaped bed and salamander terrarium.

Kyle slumped down onto a sofa next to the window, rested his arm along the back of it. He looked relaxed and sleepy, like himself, for the first time since we had come into his house. A TV faced him. He patted the cushion next to him. Was it so obvious that this was why I had come over? Was he going to kiss me? Disbelief shot through me over and over, in little jolts. I sat and glanced around at the walls.

A
Sopranos
poster. And another of Robert De Niro from
Raging
Bull
. Across the room from where we were sitting was a desk with a white Apple laptop and about twenty DVDs stacked there. They were labeled with dates, but that was it, and they were the only thing he kept neat at all. But I could tell that he would have to do a lot of work to escape being a complete sociopath about neatness, because the rest of his house was so still and immaculate that you felt like if you coughed or something, floor-to-ceiling windows and priceless pieces of modern art would shatter.

Kyle picked up a remote, turned the TV on. A blue HBO screen came up.

“Do you have on-demand?” he asked me. I did not, but I nodded.

“You ever watch
The Wire
?”

I hadn’t. “Yeah, once or twice.”

“You want to watch an episode with me?”

I didn’t. “Sure, I’d love to.”

He put it on, and then put his arm around me. I reminded myself what Chad had said about how teenagers can’t have heart attacks. I hoped he was right. And that if he wasn’t, and my heart exploded, I would at least have kissed Kyle before it happened.

Sometimes, climbing onto the bed at the Motel Manor, I wonder, would I take back that day? I don’t think so, even now. Call me crazy. I wondered on the couch why he wasn’t at all nervous about what I thought of him. Maybe it was totally obvious that I was so in love with him I was about to combust spontaneously. Or maybe he figured I had so much to be embarrassed about that I wasn’t the type to judge other people. Sometimes people like to be my friend for this reason. They don’t realize you can be both really short and fucked up yourself and also quite judgmental and bitchy. Too bad for them.

“Where are your parents?” I asked. It came out all scrunched up, like now that my heart was in my mouth there was no room for words in there.

“At work,” he said, and again his tone made me feel like I couldn’t ask anything else about them, so I didn’t.

To the left of his room, I had noticed another bedroom. Because the door was open, I could see a big four-poster bed with a cream-colored bedspread on it and a beige carpet. It looked like a hotel room. The curtains were open in there, too, and I could see the branches of an oak tree, touching the side of the house and the window. I thought if there was a bad Michigan storm, the tree might come right in the window and impale Kyle’s parents while they slept. Or just smash open the whole side of the house and expose them. Maybe they’d fall out of the house. I’m not usually a morbid person, but there was very weird and scary energy in Kyle’s house.

“Maybe it’s stupid to watch this from the middle,” he said suddenly, and turned
The Wire
off. “If you’ve only watched it once or twice. You should really watch the whole thing in order.”

For the first time I thought he might be nervous. He got up and went to his desk.

“Whatever,” I said. “I’m happy to do whatever you want.”

This came out kind of sexier than I’d meant it to, and I could feel my skin turn to lava. I looked out the window.

Kyle was sitting at the desk and scrolling through songs on his laptop. Maybe he had put his arm around me as a gesture of friendliness, the way I might put mine around Sam. He settled on Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, plugged some speakers in, and music flared into the room. Darcy Arts kids were always like this—showing off that they have classic taste. Kyle would never have been the type to put on anything trendy.

Tomato, tomato, potato, potato. We were quiet for a minute.

“Do you want to sit down here?” Kyle asked. Now he patted the bed next to him. I looked at it, judging quickly that it was low enough that I could get onto it, but high enough that I would have to climb like a Munchkin. I smoothed down the shirt I was wearing, a fabulous red Lucky Western button-down with pink roses on the cuffs. I wanted to make sure it didn’t rise up over my jeans as I hoisted myself onto the bed. Kyle waited. I put both hands on the mattress and pressed down, raising myself up, and then climbed as gracefully as I could until I was perched next to him. I was grateful that he had offered me no help. The staircase was bad enough; if he had had to lift me onto the bed, then he might as well have tucked me in and read me a story, too.

I sat on the bed like a tiny bird on a high wire, and looked around. There was a picture facing down on the nightstand next to his bed, and I was like, “What, is that a picture of your girlfriend or something?” maybe just because I was so nervous. I leaned over and picked it up and saw a girl with pigtails held by rubber bands with red marbles on them, squinting and laughing into the sun next to a pool. She had a cherry-print tank top and jeans shorts on, and was sprawled out on a big white reclining chair. I could tell right away that the girl—with her skinny legs and a smile full of pointy baby teeth—was probably six or seven or something. I said, “Oh, sorry,” because I was embarrassed, and he was like, “Yeah, whatever,” and his eyes looked like the marbles on her ponytail holders, and I didn’t ask anything else about her, not even her name.

Then Kyle leaned down and started to kiss me. Heat spread through my mouth and into my body—so much of it I thought I might boil over my own edges and burn his house down. I didn’t know where to put my hands, was glad for a million things: that he hadn’t said anything embarrassing like “I want to kiss you” or “Can I kiss you?” like Joel had said to me at the LPA conference. Kyle didn’t pretend it was anything other than what it was, an obvious make-out session. I felt feverish, tried to absorb the moment, to enjoy it as much as I possibly could, to remember everything about the way it felt so if it never happened again, I could live off the memory of kissing Kyle Malanack for the rest of my life. But I couldn’t enjoy it. Where was I supposed to put my hands? I wrapped them around the back of his neck, which was hot and smooth. I felt the hair at the nape of his neck, more babyish than I had expected. His hands were moving on the buttons of my Lucky shirt, undoing them.

“Is this okay?” he asked.

I nodded, went to help him with the buttons. As soon as I did, he let go and reached to take his own T-shirt off, stretching it over his head. When neither of us had a shirt on, he moved up to the pillows and motioned for me to join him. I lay down, face to face with him, and it was almost as if we weren’t horribly mismatched. His legs went on forever, but I couldn’t see them, and now that we were lying down, it mattered less. He put his arms around my back and pressed my chest to his, all skin and pulse. His fingers were on the strap of my bra, a pink cotton, simple one I definitely wouldn’t have worn if I’d known Kyle would be fumbling, plucking, guitar-strumming it. Should I help him? It was taking way too long, but I didn’t want to be aggressive. Finally, I reached back with one hand and unclasped it for him, and he said, “Thanks,” and then we both laughed. I was really glad we laughed. I wanted very much to do a good job, to fool him into thinking I had had my shirt off before, that I wasn’t dying of embarrassment. I didn’t even wonder whether he’d had other girls with their clothes off in his room, just assumed he had been Don Juan since he turned seven. That’s how sexy he was. Although as soon as my bra was off, I was horribly uncomfortable that it was sunny outside, that I had a freckle on the side of my stomach, and freckles on my chest, and probably farmer tan lines from last summer. And I wondered what he thought of the way I looked—too big, too small? I was so tense, I was lying there like I’d been freeze-dried, so I focused on being flexible, and while I was doing that, I noticed a frantic quality to the way he was moving and undressing. He unbuttoned his fly and kind of shoved my hand in there. I had no idea what to do, so I moved my hand up and down, but it was basically stuck in his jeans and boxers anyway, so I could barely move it, and I was glad, since I didn’t know how to move it without hurting him. My mind raced. I had once heard someone—Was it Meghan? Stacy from Huron? Someone likely to be right about such things? I couldn’t remember—say you could never touch a guy without first putting lotion on your hands, or they got “dick burn,” which was something like rug burn. I didn’t want to give that to Kyle. But I wasn’t going to ask him for lotion, either. While I was thinking about this, he undid my jeans and put his hand inside my underwear, moving his fingers for like two seconds before he was like, “Should I get a condom?”