Cold Kiss (2 page)

He asks me things like this all the time now. The first movie we went to (a terrible horror movie that made me laugh so hard, I choked on a piece of popcorn), the first time I met his parents (a Friday in late December, in the close, overheated crush of the drugstore, where everyone was buying bows and foil-wrapped chocolate Santas), the song that was playing on my iPod the first time he called me (the Brobecks’ “Visitation of the Ghost”).

He likes it when I tell him the stories out loud, and goes still as he listens—too still, silent. His eyes are the only things that move, watching my face, my mouth, as if he’s trying to picture what happened so he can hold on to the memories.

I worry that he’s trying to remember what those moments felt like, what
he
felt like then. One day he’s going to understand that he’s not that boy anymore.

“It was three weeks after we met,” I tell him, whispering even though no one can hear us way up here. I twine my fingers in his, holding tight. Even now, his hand is familiar, huge around mine, the long bones of his fingers sturdy. “We were outside the library, and it was almost dark and really cold. You put your algebra book down on the ledge so you could wrap your scarf around my neck, and I grabbed your hands and pulled you down and kissed you. Right in front of Tommy Gellar and that freak cheerleader he was sleeping with.”

It’s not romantic the way I tell it, but Danny smiles anyway, and the hard focus in his eyes softens. “You tasted like Juicy Fruit,” he says, and rests his forehead against mine. “I remember that.”

I do, too. I remember so much more than I tell him, because it makes me hot and uncomfortable to say some things out loud, even now. There was the way I could feel the length of his thigh against mine while we went over his tragic attempt at explaining the symbolism in
The Glass Menagerie
. The warm, sort of spicy smell of him in his layered T-shirts. The electric hum beneath my skin when he leaned close to ask me a question and his breath whispered over my cheek.

If I’d wanted to, I could have lifted right out of my chair and touched the ceiling that night, just sitting beside him in the library. And when I kissed him, opened my mouth to taste him, I shut my eyes to find the darkness melted into old gold.

I still have that scarf, tucked away in a torn cardboard box under my bed.

“I would have kissed you, you know,” he says, and slides his palm along my ribs, ticking off each one with his thumb. “If you hadn’t kissed me first.”

I believe him. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. I’ve always been a step ahead of him, even when I don’t know where I’m going, or where I might take him.

The house is dark when I let myself in the back door. It’s almost eleven, a school night, and Robin’s probably up in her room talking on the phone. I cross through the kitchen and glance into the living room, where my mom is curled on the sofa, lights out and the blue glare of the TV flickering over her face. I freeze for a second—she’s usually asleep by now these days, at least since she broke up with Tom.

Her boyfriends never last long. I wonder if they get discouraged when they see the picture of my dad on the mantel. Even though he’s been gone for ten years, that picture never moves. Mom says it’s there for Robin and me, but I see her looking at it, too.

Memories of Dad are what I couldn’t bear to have Danny become—a faded, flickering impression of a stubbled cheek scratching my face when he hugged me, the pine scent of aftershave, the low rumble of his laugh.

“Wren?”

I turn around before she can lift her head, pretending to be heading for the kitchen instead of away from it. I skin off my jacket and toss it toward the tiny stairwell leading down to the basement as she sits up.

“Just getting something to drink,” I say, and head into the kitchen without waiting to see if she’ll follow. I’m taking a diet soda out of the fridge when she pads in, yawning and pushing her hair out of her face.

She kisses the back of my head, and I close my eyes, waiting for her to say something. I can still feel the night chill on my clothes, on my skin, but as far as my mother knows I’ve been up in my room all night.

She pulls away, though, and fills the teakettle with water. I lean against the fridge with my soda, hoping she won’t notice if I don’t open it.

My mom is good at seeing only what she wants to see. About men, about the hair salon she owns, which only crosses the line into profitable once in a while, about the condition of our house, which she’s decided “has character,” since that sounds better than “falling down.” Right now I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to think about why I might have been out of the house tonight, although I know she can tell I have been. She doesn’t always like to examine things too closely, but she’s not stupid.

“Want some tea?” she says so suddenly that I jump. She’s looking right at me now, and my heart is beating too loud, a steady bass-drum
thump
beneath my T-shirt and black hoodie. She sets the kettle on the burner, and it flares to life before she can even reach the knob, which is bad news. Mom doesn’t usually let me see her do things like that.

“No, thanks,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. Tea means sitting at the kitchen table together in the dark, talking, and I can’t do that tonight. I can’t do that at all anymore, not with Mom, because when she wants to, the one thing she can see right into, down to bone and blood, is me. “I’m going to go to bed, I guess. I have a chemistry test tomorrow.”

There’s nothing more than weak moonlight filtered through the window over the sink, and the faint yellow glow of a night-light in the baseboard on the wall behind me, but even so I can see the betrayal in Mom’s eyes. She knows I’m lying, not about the test or the tea, but about something.

The blue flame licks higher at the scorched bottom of the kettle, just for a second, hungry and hot, and then she looks away to take a mug down from the cupboard. “All right, babe. Sleep well.”

I’m careful not to slam the door to my room, but when I get inside, I let the harsh buzz gathered just beneath my skin flicker out, a quick electric jolt that knocks the pile of books off my desk.
Basic Principles of Chemistry
falls hardest, pages crushed under its open spine, and I stare at it for a minute. I’m panting, my heart still tripping crazily, and instead of picking it up, I step around it to flop on my bed, a tangle of sheets and blue-striped comforter and clothes.

Across the room, Danny smiles down at me from a framed picture on my dresser. He was being extra goofy that day, making faces at Ryan’s camera as we all hung out on Becker’s front porch, stealing Ryan’s baseball cap and crossing his eyes as he pushed the porch swing into motion with one long bare foot.

“Point that thing at Wren, you loser,” he’d said, throwing a pretzel across the porch at Ryan to get his attention. “She’s the only one worth looking at.”

In that picture, which Ryan printed out for me a week later, Danny’s mouth is tilted up on one side in the little smile that was just for me. His whole face softened when he smiled that way, like he’d just remembered this incredible secret.

Some days now I can’t look at it. The frame spends a lot of time buried in the bottom drawer with my jeans, because it’s the same smile Danny gives me whenever I climb into the loft. Like nothing’s changed. Like I’m
his
secret, and there’s nothing he’d rather see than my face.

Sometimes when he sits up to look at me, or when I walk into my room and catch a glimpse of that picture, it’s all I can do not to scream. Scream and scream until my throat is shredded and every window shatters and the room goes up in flames.

I’ve only set something on fire once. It was one of Danny’s T-shirts, actually, an ancient gray Clash shirt his sister scored on eBay for his birthday. I’d found it on my bedroom floor right before Ryan called, and I was twisting it in one fist by the time he told me Becker was in the hospital and Danny was dead.

It hissed and sputtered for a second before a hot, angry tongue licked out and burned my wrist. I dropped it on the floor, and the phone with it. Ryan was still talking, a tiny, distant voice.

I don’t remember a lot of what happened after that, but the scorch mark is still there, a sooty black circle against the faded oak. Mom’s not sure it will ever come out completely, but she never once asked me how it got there.

I WASN’T EVEN THIRTEEN YET THE FIRST TIME. It reminded me of a sneeze coming on, that tingling tension when you know it’s going to happen and you can’t stop it. But this feeling was bigger than that, a vibrating hum just beneath my skin that made me squirm all over.

I was mad at my mother, which was pretty much a daily thing back then. She’d said no to a sleepover at Darcia’s because I hadn’t finished my social studies project, and in her words, “There’s no way I’m going to listen to you whine about it all day tomorrow, when you’re rushing to get it done.”

Robin stuck her tongue out at me from across the kitchen table, and I made a face at her before I stood up. “Clear your place, Wren,” my mother said, not bothering to glance over her shoulder as she rinsed dishes in the sink.

I didn’t even have a chance to mutter, “Do I ever forget?” because the humming was louder now, a hot, angry itch just beneath my skin, and then the lightbulb in the fixture over the kitchen table hissed and exploded in a white arc.

Robin screamed and waved her arms, batting at her hair, brittle pieces of glass skittering over the table, until my mother cut through the noise. “Stop it! Just sit still.”

I had frozen in place, my plate still in my hands, my mouth hanging open. The weird buzz had subsided, leaving behind a kind of dull sting, like the last day of a bad sunburn, but the kitchen was still crackling with electricity.

This, I was pretty sure, was one of those Things We Didn’t Talk About. Like where our dad was or why Mom didn’t invite Aunt Mari to the house anymore.

Or why, sometimes, even when the electric got shut off because Mom was behind on the bills, she could disappear into the basement and the lights would flare to life. Mom had broken her share of lightbulbs, and once the mirror over the bathroom sink, which cut us all in half diagonally for months before she replaced it.

She could make other things happen, too, better things. Balloons that stayed afloat for days after Robin’s birthday party. Daffodils that budded long before anyone else’s. A fire in the fireplace that burned for hours on just a handful of newspaper and a stray twig.

When I was really little, six or seven, and Dad had just left, I woke up crying almost every night, shrugging off nightmares like a tangled net. Mom would get into bed with me and sing, low, nonsense tunes that she said Gram had sung to her when she was a kid. And above me, the ceiling would swirl with gently sparkling lights, like summer fireflies, flickering in and out with the tune.

Those moments were gifts, offered freely, as surprising and wonderful as unexpected gifts always are, unlike the broken mirror and, once, the smoking ruin of the backyard. But even the fairy lights and the balloons weren’t something Robin or I could ask about. The warning was always there in Mom’s eyes, a monster in the closet of a brightly lit room.

Mom had never once mentioned it would happen to me, too, even though I knew Aunt Mari and Gram could do the same things. It seemed like one of those grown-up privileges, I guess, and not one Mom approved of anymore. But when Robin and I were little, she was totally free about it, and so were Gram and Aunt Mari.

I remember one Christmas when Robin was really little, not even two, and Gram had taken me into the backyard with Dad. It was snowing, fat, lacy flakes swirling out of the sky, and the trees were dripping with icicles from the night before. Gram stood there wrapped in her big red coat as Dad and I caught snowflakes on our tongues, and she lit up all the icicles like Christmas lights with just a few whispered words.

Dad had grinned, his teeth as white as the blanket of snow on the grass. “Nicely done, Rowan,” he said, and kissed her cheek. It was too cold to stay out much longer, but I held on to that moment after Dad was gone and later, when Gram died, What I couldn’t understand was what could be bad about something like that, something that was pure beauty, and why Mom never wanted to talk about it.

Even that night when I shattered the lightbulb, and she was picking sheer slivers of glass out of Robin’s hair, she didn’t say a word. Just tightened her mouth into a hard line and told me to get the broom.

Instead, I set my plate down on the table with a hollow
thud
and ran upstairs to my room.

It’s different now. Aunt Mari has told me some of it, even though Mom would probably kill us both if she knew. But once I was old enough to walk downtown on my own, I figured nothing was stopping me from going to Aunt Mari’s apartment or meeting her at Bliss, the coffee shop where I work now. Whatever happened to change things after Dad was gone was the one thing Aunt Mari wouldn’t talk to me about, but she was happy to share what she knew about the power inside of us.

Practice makes a big difference, too, even if I still can’t levitate on my own. But once, when Danny and I were tangled on his bed making out, I had to pull away before he noticed I was hovering over him, a half-inch of space between us everywhere but our mouths.

Being with Danny focused whatever it was inside me, somehow, When we were together, holding hands or kissing or even just curled on the couch, that hum was much stronger, a constant pulse I could feel hot in my blood. But I never showed him what I could do. I never once hinted at it. Even without Aunt Mari’s warnings and a lifetime of my mother’s example, I knew the things I could make happen were just for me.

Even now, Danny doesn’t know what I am, or what I can do. But then, there are a lot of things Danny doesn’t understand now.