Kissing in America (4 page)

Fran (husband Frank, daughter Lisa, Seats 22C, 22D)

Jill (Jacques Bluelake, 14A)

Nancy Johnson (Adam, Robert, Adam Jr., 11C, D, E)

I never posted myself but I loved lurking, reading what other people wrote. In the Wonderboob group sessions we went to after it happened, people were stunned and sometimes cautious and hesitant when they talked about their feelings. Online, everyone was more honest. One day, a year ago, Fran started a new thread. She asked what everyone was most afraid of. The responses came quickly.

I drive 10 miles out of my way to avoid going by the airport.

The depression. Wallowing. Sometimes I get stuck in this pit of grief and bad feelings and I don't know how to get out of it.

I always thought I had some control . . . exercise, drive safely, get checkups, wear a seat belt, and now I laugh that I ever thought it was that easy. I'm afraid maybe I'm marked for disaster. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It's the guilt that gets me. I should never have let him go on that trip.

I ran my finger down the screen of my Crapphone—it loaded each message slowly, as if it were clogged with sand—and I watched its reload symbol struggle to get unstuck until I finally fell asleep. When I woke up, I read romances and ate cookies till my mom came home.

The next Friday, Will asked: “Hey, where were you last week?”

“Oh—I was sick. A stomach thing.”

“I had to meet with Mrs. Peech,” he whispered. “She's got bad breath.”

I needed to forget this crazy crush. I had to push it out of my mind, which I tried to do over the next month as we kept working on his essay. Each week I learned more about him: that his mom owned a bakery in Manhattan, and his dad was an artist and lived in LA now. He told me that his mom was black—her family from Saint Lucia—and his dad was Scottish and Italian. People could never guess what race Will was—black people guessed he was Latino. White people thought he was Jewish.

One chilly fall afternoon, Will told me the story of how his dad came to New York last year for a gallery show, and Will agreed to meet him for the first time since he'd left. Will's mom was okay with them getting together, but she wouldn't
say his dad's name. She called him Jerkface. “Jerkface called you,” she'd say. “Jerkface sent you a check.” Jerkface was getting remarried next summer to a woman who was twenty-seven. Will's mom called her Mrs. Jerkface.

My mom had met a guy herself a couple of weeks before. She'd been out with him twice. Apparently, she did have time for one thing besides work. “His name is Larry,” I told Will now. “He's the first guy she's gone out with since my dad. She won't admit they go out on dates. She calls him her ‘acquaintance.'”

“What do you think of him?” Will asked.

“Annie and I call him the Benign Fungus. He's not awful. Just mildly annoying and might be hard to get rid of.”

He laughed. “You should tell your mom that.”

“I can't tell her she's going out with a fungus.” It felt good to laugh about it. It was either laugh or scream.

“You told me I sucked—you can tell her anything.” He paused. “You're really honest. You're one of the most honest people I've ever met, you know.”

I glanced at my lap, thinking of all the ways I'd lied to him. I'd told him my dad died of a heart attack. I was lying to him even now, not telling him how I really felt about him. I'd been tutoring him for nine weeks. An eternity. Longer than he'd seen Vanessa Valari or Gia Lopez. It seemed forever.

He finished his essay. He applied to colleges. I thought he'd stop coming to tutoring, but he signed up for next semester,
too. The Undead had told him that he needed a good grade on his AP English test if he wanted to place out of freshman English in college. He said he needed help. I tried not to read more into it.

I knew he wasn't interested in me, but I couldn't stop daydreaming.

Will showed up for tutoring hour on time. He loped toward the window and tore off the bars with his bare hands. “I never loved Gia Lopez. I only want to reach the zenith with you,” he said as he grabbed a vine, enfolded her in his manly arms, and swung with his beloved out of the north tower and into his jungle love lair nestled in the trees of Van Cortlandt Park.

I
n January, on the first day after winter break, the news coursed through our school within hours: a big modeling agency signed Gia. They'd flown her to Europe for a fashion shoot in a wilderness preserve. School had given her a leave of absence. She'd be back in three weeks.

That Friday, at tutoring, I waited to see if Will would show up. I'd caught a glimpse of him at lunchtime as he wandered off by himself, but I hadn't seen him since.

Mrs. Peech sat at her desk marking papers. Outside, it began to snow. Aside from the two of us, the tutoring center was empty. Annie was at Science Club; all winter her project group met every afternoon.

I shivered in the freezing room. Frost laced the windows and clung to the iron bars.

I hoped he'd come. I'd woken up at six that morning and spent an hour getting ready. I'd tiptoed around the apartment—if I woke my mom, she'd squint at me and ask why I had on eyeliner and had straightened my hair, but I couldn't tell her about Will. My mom's concept of feminist freedom
didn't include freedom in love. “I trust you,” she told me once. “I just don't trust boys under eighteen. Or under thirty, actually.”

Over break, I'd kept daydreaming and feeling so anxious about this endless hopeless crush that I called Lulu for advice. Lulu was kind of a second mom to me—she never judged or criticized, and I could tell her things I couldn't tell my own mom. During the blurry weeks after my dad died, Lulu had stayed with us. She grocery shopped, she did the laundry, she sorted the mail, she cooked. Homemade mac and cheese. Lasagna. Pot roasts. Tortilla soup. She slept on our couch at night and opened our blinds every morning—she was probably the only reason my mom and I survived those black-hole days.

Now she told me not to worry. “Don't be so hard on yourself. It's okay to have a big crush. When you're around him, just be yourself,” she said. As if I knew who that was. Which self? Should I tell him I had stomach bugs and ask if he wanted to eat an entire pack of Chips Ahoy cookies with me in my twin bed?

I looked up—Will appeared at the door. My neck prickled. He walked over to my table and took out his essay. It was his AP lit assignment from over vacation. An essay about Edna St. Vincent Millay. The Millay topic had been my suggestion—I'd lent him a book of her poetry and a biography of her that had been my dad's. I stared at the paper but I couldn't absorb the words.
Gia is gone
echoed in my head.

He leaned close to me; his knee touched mine. I shivered again. My hands went cold.

“Do you need this?” He took off his maroon scarf and put it around my neck and shoulders. It smelled like him, like soap and sugar. I wished Annie could see me in the scarf. Even she had to admit that scarf lending was much better than touching a callus. Or a bunion.

After a while, Mrs. Peech stood and picked up her bag. “I'm leaving early before the snow starts coming down hard. You two better get going, too—they're predicting three inches.”

Will put his hand on his essay. “Could we stay a few more minutes? It won't take long.”

“All right.” She smiled at him. I think she loved him almost as much as I did. “Just a few minutes. Lock the door on your way out.”

She left. Will and I were alone. I felt a sharp stab beneath my ribs. I picked up his essay. It was typewritten. “Where'd you get the typewriter?” I asked.

“I found it. Someone left it on a stoop near the Strand with a Free sign on it. Carried it all the way back uptown.” I'd mentioned the Strand bookstore to him once before—he'd never been—and told him that my dad and I used to go there all the time, and now Annie and I loved to go there together.

“You liked the Strand?” I asked.

“I want to move in there.” He took a book out of his messenger bag. “I found this there too. On the dollar cart.”
Mansions and Manors of the Bronx
. He flipped to page twenty-three, to a picture of our school.
Brookhill Manor
. “Look.” He pointed at a photo of our auditorium, which used to be a private theater. A woman dressed in white read on the stage. The caption:
Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay addresses the audience.

“I can't believe it. Our school is famous.” I paged through the other black-and-white photos. They showed our cafeteria when it was a ballroom, and our school's roof: a spectacular garden covered the whole place, with a giant stone table, trees, fountains, and a view of the city. I'd heard rumors before that our school had an abandoned roof garden (or a forest, or a colony of escaped convicts, depending who was telling the story). People also said the moldings on the first floor were made of solid gold, which was proved wrong when Evan LeDuff chiseled a chunk off and plaster crumbled out.

“I can't believe it's true,” I said. “What's up there now?”

He shrugged. “Who knows. Dead bodies maybe. Ghosts.”

“I've always thought this building was haunted.” The pipes always clanked, the radiators hissed, the floorboards on the stage creaked. “Maybe Edna's the ghost. If people called me a poetess, I'd come back and haunt the place too.”

“Poetess,” he said, and stared at me. Then he took out a colorful flyer that had been tucked into the back page of the book, under the jacket flap. “I saw this in the Undead's classroom today. You should enter it.”

URBANWORDS: A CITY-WIDE POETRY CONTEST AND FESTIVAL. STUDENTS, SUBMIT YOUR POEMS BY JANUARY 31ST. WINNERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN JUNE.

“I don't have any poems to submit,” I said.

“Write one. I'll proof it for you. It better have good punctuation.”

“It will be all punctuation. A blank page with question marks.”

He stared at me a little strangely. Then he said, “I missed seeing you over the break.”

My heart flipped. I wanted to say
I missed seeing you too
, but the words caught in my throat. I touched the typewritten pages again.

Out the window the snow came down harder.

“I can't talk about this kind of stuff with anyone else,” he said.

Obviously Gia would never talk about writing and books. It was probably a big deal when she read the entire J. Crew catalog.

“The guys on the team are not exactly into reading,” he said.

“I'm shocked.”

He shook his head. “They already think I'm weird.”

“You
are
weird.”

He smiled. “So are you.”

“Exactly. Welcome to the club.”

My dad used to tell me:
All good writers are weird. Proudly weird.

I always sort of wondered what he meant. I knew it was kind of strange to lie in bed at night and grasp thoughts and feelings and memories and corral them into lines and verses. Was that why I'd stopped writing, too? Because it was a strange thing to do, without my dad here to encourage me, and to share that strangeness with me?

Will's strangeness, and his mysterious and elusive thing, somehow made me like him even more. In December, I'd mustered the guts to ask him where he went on his solo lunches—any good delis he knew of? He hadn't answered. “I need a lot of time alone” was all he'd said. He was always forgetting to charge his flip phone, and he used a pay-as-you-go plan that kept running out of minutes. Gia had yelled at him one time when she picked him up from tutoring:
Why don't you get a new goddamn phone?

I glanced out the window at the snow.

“We better go or we'll be stuck here all night,” he said.

I felt a buzzing beneath my skin. We gathered our things and walked down the winding staircase toward the main floor. Girls stared at him as we walked by, as they always did, though he didn't notice, or ignored it. “How long does it take
you to get home?” he asked.

“Over an hour usually. Today will be longer, if the trains are running.”

“Let me give you a ride. I've got my mom's van. It's parked around the corner.”

My mom told me once that if a guy ever asked me into his van, he was probably a serial killer, and I should only say yes if I wanted parts of me scattered across the tristate area.

“Sure,” I said, and got in.

W
ill's van wasn't a typical choice for serial killers: a giant chocolate cupcake rotated on its roof, and the words “Sugarland Bakery” curled down its side.

As we drove, we passed broken-down cars and kids throwing snowballs; traffic crawled along. A woman pointed at our roof and squealed, “Cupcakes!” A kid shouted, “Yummy yummy yeah yeah
yeah
!”

Will sighed. “The guys on the team refuse to ride with me in this thing.”

“I like it. Every car should have a cupcake on its roof.”

He turned the heat on high, and I took off my coat but kept Will's scarf on. Everything felt different, being alone with him in the van, in the seat beside him where a girlfriend would sit.
I missed seeing you.
We talked about Mrs. Peech and whether her bad breath had improved (it hadn't), and Edna St. Vincent Millay—how she'd traveled around the country and read poems to packed theaters and giant crowds, like a rock star—and we talked about our fathers.

He told me how over Christmas his dad sent him lots of
gifts—a watch, a wallet, a tie he'd never wear, and a check for $600 to buy a new phone. His mother couldn't watch him unwrap them without muttering “Jerkface” and “guilt money.”

“What kind of phone did you get?”

“I never got it. I gave the check to my mom.” He said his mom's bakery was in trouble—they were losing money and she had to lay off most of the staff. He'd spent the whole break working there, in between meeting with the swim team to practice. “We're behind on rent, and our landlord's really nice, so we'll see what happens.” His tone had a harsher, darker edge. “I'm actually glad school started.”

“Me too.”

He paused. “Christmas must be hard without your dad.”

“We're Jewish, so we never celebrated it, but—you know. It's like the world is made for families with two parents and lots of kids. Not for measly families of two,” I said.

He nodded. “I know.”

I felt a surge of sympathy for him about his mother's bakery, and his father who'd abandoned him for all those years, and his baby brother, and at the same time I reveled in these things, that we both had this in common—tragedies. Did he talk to Gia about his lost brother and his dad? Did he only talk to me about it? There was no way he could talk to Gia like this. What tragedies had she survived? A snag in a cashmere sweater. A slight redness after a mustache wax.

“Holidays kind of suck,” he said.

“I used to like them. I remember the winter before my dad died, we used to go to this coffee shop he liked in the West Village—it isn't there anymore—where they had crepes and huge cups of hot chocolate. We'd sit there by their fireplace for hours and write in notebooks.”

“You stopped writing because it was something you only did with him?”

I shrugged. “I guess.” That wasn't entirely true, since I used to write on my own also, at night before I went to sleep. Now, instead of writing before bed, I read romances. It was a painless way to escape.

“So are you going to send a poem in to that contest?” he asked.

“No.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I'm not afraid.” My voice sounded more defensive than I meant it to. Why was he bugging me about this?

“I just don't think talent should go to waste,” he said. “Maybe you just need company. Sometime we can go find a café and write.”

“We should.” Did he mean it? Would we do that?

He peered over the windshield. “Sorry this is taking so long. Takes them forever to plow.”

“It doesn't matter.” I felt so happy, inching toward the Triborough Bridge, happier than I'd felt in ages. The sun began to set, sitting on the horizon like a butterscotch candy. Orange
light bounced off the windshield, and everything became quieter as the snow sugared the streets and parked cars. I loved the city in snow, the hush and slowness. And I liked looking at him as he peered over the steering wheel. I saw things I'd never noticed about him before: the tiny red birthmark on his neck, and the crumbs and little moth holes in his black coat. I listened to the van's motor humming and the voices on the radio, which he kept turned down too low to really hear. The faint voices rose and fell in waves, and I wanted to freeze that time in the van with him, to keep it forever.

The happiness stayed with me the whole drive, and when we finally reached my apartment building, he exhaled.

“We made it,” he said.

I asked if he wanted to get something to eat, but he said he should get back, it would be a long drive back to his apartment on 114th Street. I thanked him. I still couldn't believe he'd driven so far out of his way. I started to take the scarf off.

“Keep it,” he said. “Stay warm.”

He drove off.

As soon as the lobby door closed behind me, I called Annie.

“
He drove me home
.” My voice dropped about ten octaves. I sounded like a dying werewolf. I had to repeat myself twice before she understood.

“Wow. He's a really nice guy,” she said.

“He said he missed me over break. Does he like me? Do you think he likes me?”

“Of course he likes you. You're
friends
. He has a girlfriend in case you've forgotten.”

I reminded her that Gia was in a European wilderness preserve and hopefully had been eaten by bears. “Why did he drive me home if he doesn't
like
me?”

“Because he wanted to show you his liquid velvet eyes and his manroot.”

“Ha ha ha. Funny.”

“Because he can't stand the thought of you waiting, cold and alone, on a subway platform. He's a genuinely good guy.”

“But he said ‘I missed seeing you.'”

“He could've meant it as a friend.” She paused. “I don't want you to get your hopes up.”

“I'm not getting my hopes up.”
Friends
. Friends was good. Friends was great.

Except we weren't exactly
friends
, not like any friends I'd ever had. It didn't feel like friends when he stared at me, or the way he said my name sometimes,
Eva-a
, a little too slowly, a little sarcastically. Or that electric feeling between us, like we were always balancing on a high wire.

Maybe I was imagining the whole thing. Maybe it was just limbic resonance. During the school day he was with the swim team crowd and the seniors, a distance so far it could've been another country. Maybe we were a different type of friends: Friendish. Friendesque. Someone needed to invent a word for it.

The next Friday morning I felt hyperawake, the afternoon lying ahead like an unopened present.

Then came lunchtime.

“What are you staring at?” Annie asked me, and followed my gaze. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Gia's back.”

I felt this crumpling inside. At tutoring, Will explained that Gia's parents changed their minds. They didn't want her missing so much school. (A rumor I'd heard that afternoon told a different story: she'd been fired from her modeling job for getting drunk. I didn't ask him about that.) When she picked him up that afternoon, her legs seemed to have grown even longer, her hair thicker and shinier. Her eyebrows looked like skinny black licorice.

I blinked back tears the whole subway ride home, wishing I was in the van with him. I felt this huge ball of shame in my stomach, too, at this crush that never seemed to go away. At all this doomed yearning and useless hope. What a waste. “Pour all that energy into school,” Annie said when I called her that night. “That will help you forget about him a little.”

It didn't help. I had a stomach bug day the next Friday, and the Friday after that. I knew I had to stuff the crush away again, to stop it from growing and flowering. I thought about quitting tutoring, but Annie said that was a mistake—I needed a good recommendation from Mrs. Peech for college. Anyway, quitting tutoring probably wouldn't make a
difference—whether I tutored him or not, the crush still simmered beneath everything, like a fluish misery.

“Just wait till summer,” Annie said. She'd heard a rumor that Gia was going to Greenland over the summer. “It'll be different then,” she said. Lulu agreed with the wait-till-summer plan. “See what happens,” she said. “Let the feelings be there, without judging them. Everything is always changing. This will change, too.”

Will started his final term paper, and the warm weather arrived early—the school yard sprang alive with Frisbees and thumping basketballs and backpacks on the ground like colorful sleeping cats. One afternoon, he came to the north tower holding a letter. He'd gotten accepted to UC–Santa Cruz, his first choice, with a scholarship.

Will took off his cowboy hat. As the moon rose into a perfect crescent in the indigo sky, he told her, “I know everybody supposes I'll head off to Santa Cruz, but I ain't goin'. I'm stayin' here with you, Miss Eva. Now get over here and lie down with me by the creek on this bed of moss.”

Our friendish friendship continued but the crush never disappeared. It just lay buried, like an underground spring.

Little things he said in passing encouraged it.

We should hang out at the Strand over the summer.

I'm supposed to write an essay for college freshman English in August. You'll have to help me. No one else will tell me the truth about how much I suck.

We exchanged phone numbers, though he never used mine. (I'd texted him once when he missed tutoring:

Hope you're ok—are you coming today?

but he never wrote back.) He didn't find small things important: returning texts, charging his phone, being on time, punctuation.

I brought him a brochure of summer classes that the Poetry Society was offering for free to high school students—I planned to take a three-week one starting in late June. He signed up also.

The end of school wasn't the end but the beginning. Gia would be gone and things would start over. Start new. Annie still said that after Gia left for the summer, I should tell him the truth about how I felt about him, but I knew I could never go through with it. Loving someone seemed like offering your soul on a plate—
Here you go! You can have me!
—and they could so easily say,
No, none for me. No thanks
. If my dad hadn't died, if my insides weren't filled with quivering Jell-O, maybe I could handle the rejection. But his death had scrubbed off a layer of my skin. It made me feel scared that at any moment the world might throw something else at me that I couldn't take.

I loved romances because when you opened the first page, you knew the story would end well. Your heart wouldn't be
broken. I loved that security, that guaranteed love. Sure, a minor, usually unlikable character might drop dead from typhus or consumption or starve to death in the brig, but bad things were only temporary in those books. By the end, the hero and heroine would be ecstatically in love, enormously happy.

In real life, you never knew the ending. I hated that.

I knew if I told Will how I felt about him and he said
no thanks
I'd have a stomach bug day that I'd never get out of. It would become a whole stomach bug life.