Kiss Me Again (10 page)

I felt his knee fall against mine as the bus went around a curve. I didn’t open my eyes or move my leg away, and when the torque straightened out, his leg continued pressing warmly against mine. I opened my eyes, an adrenaline surge waking me up fully, better than anything Anya could whip up at Cuppa, for sure. I spent the rest of the ride looking out the window, silent, with my thigh and Kevin’s pressed against each other, so anybody could see if they looked.

As we rounded the corner coming up to school, Kevin held out his hand to me. In his palm was cradled a pear, the last one, ripe, from the fruit bowl. I took it, held it against my chest, and let it slip into my bag before we got off the bus. I didn’t say thank you out loud, but I could tell he heard it anyway.

I passed Tess a note in bio that my mother had lost her mind or at least changed it because of her husband, so my sleepover was canceled. She didn’t write back, but she did wait for me, to walk through the hall together.

“Hey, sorry I didn’t tell you I was trying for the job at Cuppa. I …”

She shrugged. “Think you’ll get it?”

“Yeah, I did, actually.”

“You get a discount?”

“Twenty percent off.”

She looped her arm through mine. “That’ll help.”

My face unclenched. I may even have taken a note in class.

At lunch, all the girls gathered around me, commiserating as I told them about my mother’s horrible new flirtiness and mind-changing, and how Kevin’s father was almost always
there
, in my house, and how I can’t even ever leave the bathroom door open anymore.

“Does Kevin walk around in a towel?” Felicity asked, leaning close, her hand on my arm.

“Yes,” I whispered, and everybody shrieked.

“He is such a slut,” Tess said. “I’m sorry, Charlie, I know you’re stuck with him in your house, which has to be the most horrid, awkward thing, but I just have no use for him anymore.”

“I’d find a use for him in a towel,” Felicity whispered.

As she said the word
towel
, Kevin appeared in front of us like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and we all shrieked again.

At least he wasn’t in a towel. His feet in their scuffed sneakers were spread wide apart, his jeans a bit frayed at the back edges. His dusky, gray-blue T-shirt was untucked, and over it he wore an unbuttoned, blue-and-white-striped button-down. His arms hung lankly by his sides, with his crumpled-top lunch bag gripped loosely in his left hand. When I finally let my eyes wander up to his face, I saw, as I expected by then, that peculiarly Kevin-ish look of patient curiosity, his head tilted slightly to the side and forward, his soft, red lips almost curving into a smile but not quite, his right-cheek dimple hinting at indenting. But his eyes were not vague or hinting. They were unwaveringly staring right into mine.

“Hi, Kevin,” I said, striving for normalcy but apparently missing, because all around me, the girls other than Tess were giggling and collapsing onto one another, gasping for air, repeating,
Hi, Kevin! Hi, Kevin!

Tess’s eyes were pinched nearly closed, looking back and forth between me and Kevin.

“I got your lunch,” Kevin said.

“You what?”

“Cheese sandwich?”

“Maybe it’s your cheese sandwich,” I mumbled.

“Nope.”

I grabbed my lunch bag, or what I’d thought was mine, and opened it. There was a huge, round mound wrapped in tinfoil instead of my normal flat sandwich.

“Turkey and tomato?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t know. It’s huge.”

“That’s what she said,” Darlene whispered behind me.

Kevin didn’t glance over at her, or at anybody but me. “I like it on a roll. You should try it.”

Darlene and Paige were giggling behind their hands.

“Ignore them, Kevin,” Felicity said, which shut them both up.

I stood up to trade bags.

He leaned toward me and let his fingers brush mine during the lunch bag exchange. “Did you eat the pear yet?”

“About to,” I answered. “Thursday pear.”

“Mmmm.” He walked away, back toward the boys.

When I sat down, trying to look normal, Tess was glaring at me. “What the heck was that?”

“I must have grabbed the wrong—what?”

“Thursday pear?”

“It’s a …” The words
family joke
strangled in my throat. “It’s a pear. It’s Thursday. What?”

“You guys sound like you’re …”

“What?”

“Married,” Tess said, at the exact moment that Felicity said, “Siblings.”

We all opened our mouths wide at both ideas and how definite both Tess and Felicity had sounded. I tried to make it about Tess and Felicity, their conflicting ideas, but everybody was like,
Wow, Charlie, your face is so red
. I denied that, even though I could feel the heat fevering up my head.

We all just focused on our lunches for a while. I was concentrating too hard to say anything, working on not making eye contact with Tess, who would see the truth with her X-ray best-friend vision. At the same time, I was using every eye muscle I had on not lifting my gaze to Kevin’s, to see if he had heard what Tess and Felicity had said and if he was still, over across the way where the boys were slouching, looking at me.

AFTER SCHOOL I
went straight to Cuppa. Anya had said if I didn’t have too much homework, I could stop by, maybe learn how to clean the machines, maybe even make that pot of tea she got too busy to teach me how to make the day before. I wasn’t scheduled to have an actual work day yet; I had a bunch of training to do first, but she told me not to worry, she’d pay me for training, too.

I didn’t tell her I wasn’t worried about that because I actually had no interest in the money at all. It would just sit in a jar on my desk. There was nothing I wanted that money could buy. I was just happy to have someplace to go instead of straight home. On my way into Cuppa, my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. My first thought was
Kevin
instead of
Tess.
Before I could wonder what that meant, I saw that it was my mother.

Hi, Charlie!

I have a ?

My mother does not normally text me. She is a history professor at Harvard. Anything post–Civil War tends to strike her as disarmingly modern.

What’s up?
I texted back.

Does Kevin like it

Okay, I just stared at that for a few seconds. What the heck? Does Kevin LIKE IT?

I texted back:

????

I stood there and waited for a response. Finally, my phone shook again. My mom had texted:

Sorry. Does Kevin like IT

So I had to text back:

Mom what the heck is that supposed to mean?

Nothing. My phone just faked innocence, lying still as a walnut in my palm.

“You have to press something to make those work,” said a voice beside me.

“Excuse me?” I looked way up into a scraggly but familiar face. It was a guy from school, a senior with heavy-lidded eyes and a hipster’s slouch. Tall and slim, with dirty-blond hair hanging limp down his long neck. Rollerblades on his feet, a messenger bag slung across his torso.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi.” I had met him a few months earlier and seen him around, here and there. I groped my mind-files for his name, so I’d seem less little-girl frightened by his aggressive mellowness and sudden appearance. “Tony, right?” I asked.

“Close enough,” he answered.

“Okay.” Then my phone buzzed again. He looked over my shoulder at it.

Do you if Kevin likes

“My mother has lost her mind,” I said.

“Who’s Kevin?” Toby asked, raking his fingers back through his hair. “Your brother?”

“No, my … jeez. No! He’s not my—never mind. My, he’s my, my friend. Kind of.”

“Boyfriend?”

“No!”

“Your mom is wondering who he likes?”

“No! What?”

“Who does she think Kevin likes?”

“I have no idea. I don’t think she …”

“That’s kind of cute, that your mom wants to know who your friend likes. Weird, but …”

“
Weird
doesn’t begin to describe my family these days.”

“Yeah, tell me.” He skated forward and opened the door of Cuppa. I walked in. He followed me.

“Can I help you?” I asked him. The last thing I needed right then was a stalker, even one with a rumbly, slow-talking way and Rollerblades.

“No, I’m good,” he said, and skated toward the counter, then around it, back to the storage room. Nobody stopped him; nobody who worked there seemed to be around, just me and this guy, gliding to the storage room to, whatever, steal all the coffee filters.

“Hey!” I yelled in my toughest voice, shoving my once-again-buzzing phone into my pocket. “Hey, you, not-Tony! You can’t go back there! Hello?”

It was up to me, apparently, to stop him and save Cuppa from disaster. Awesome. I took a deep breath and charged across Cuppa, without a plan other than maybe to deck him.

I got bounced back to the counter when we slammed into each other. He was emerging from the storage room not with arms full of stolen merchandise but instead tying a Cuppa apron around his waist.

“You want a decaf, maybe?” he asked me. The skates were gone, replaced by TOMS. How was he so fast?

“No.” I sucked on my knuckle, which had bumped against the counter.

“Oh, great!” Anya said, coming from the milk station near the bathroom. “You’ve met. Toby, this is Charlie, the new kid.”

“I had a feeling,” Toby said, nodding slowly, his eyes half-closed. “Cool.”

“Can you give Charlie a manual and an orientation?”

Toby turned around and went to the back room. As Penelope emerged from under the counter and began her listless dance among the machines, which hissed and burbled under her care, Anya kept up a happy little chat with the elderly couple waiting for their drinks. I took up space.

Toby came back. He handed me a crisp Cuppa apron and a manual about seventy pages long.

“You gotta memorize that,” he said. “Quizzes every single shift.”

“You are frigging kidding me.”

“Yes,” he said. “Very few quizzes, for real.”

I flipped through. There were pages and pages of precise measurements for every type of beverage; brew times; how many pumps of syrup flavoring go in which size cup; definitions—I was getting sleepy just skimming the headings. Expectations for what baristas and expeditors must do, say, and wear. “No tattoos,” I read aloud.

“No visible tattoos,” Toby corrected.

“Oh?” I looked. He was right. I tried not to wonder if he had any invisible tattoos.

He smiled. “Put it down for now. First rule of Cuppa is …”

“Don’t talk about Cuppa?” I asked.

He smiled. “Yeah. Only other rule is, chill.”

“Chill?”

“It’s not pulling babies from a burning building, you know?”

“Yeah, but—”

“People are here to spend more on a cup of coffee than a Guatemalan guy makes picking coffee beans in a week.”

“That’s depressing.”

He shook his head. “Everybody’s day is what it is. May as well enjoy the one you’re having, yeah?”

“Um, okay,” I said.

“So you just give them some kindness with their cuppa. Even the ones who start their order with the dread word ‘Gimmea.’”

“Gimmea?”

“Yeah. ‘Gimmea tall, skinny latte?’”

“Oh,” I said. “I hate that!”

“Right. Those people don’t tip, either. Still.”

“Be kind. Okay.” I put the manual down on the one stool behind the counter. “So where do we start?”

Toby picked up the manual and handed it to me. “Senior person on the shift gets the stool. There’s lots of rules. Most important one, though, is …”

“Chill,” I said.

“And beware the evil frother.”

“I will beware,” I said.

Over the next hour I managed to mess up approximately everything Toby attempted to teach me. When I pulled out the brewer, which I thought I was supposed to do, the grinds and hot water splashed out with tidal force and then stuck like molten tar to my hands, all the way up my wrists. I was talking, at the time, to a supernice and patient woman, who kept telling me not to worry.

Penelope, meanwhile, stood beside me, behind me, ultimately in front of me, fixing the stuff I messed up, which was, well, everything I laid my hands on. After I shredded yet another garbage bag with a long line of customers waiting, Penelope suggested I haul the garbage out back to the Dumpster and take my allotted ten-minute break.

“But Toby’s not back from his,” I started to object.

“It’s okay. I got this. Go.” It was not an offer made from generosity, clearly, but in a desperate effort to take a break from my incompetence. I didn’t blame her, or mind.