Soul Kiss (16 page)

She drained the last of her coffee. "You're crazy. But I know you. Once you get your mind set on something there's no changing it."

As we drove home I thought about that. Was I stubborn? Unreasonable? Sure, my parents were always complaining about that, when they were paying attention to me. And I did like to have my own way. Usually because I knew that my way was the right way.

"Thanks for calling me tonight," I said, as we got out of the car in her driveway. "I had fun."

"Me, too," Brie said. "But think about what you did, Melissa. All right?"

"All right."

I walked around the corner. It was after eleven, and most nights by then my parents are sound asleep. But it looked like every light was on at my house. Great.

I slunk around to my bedroom and tried to raise the window. It was locked. Shit. They must have checked on me and seen I was gone. Oh, well. They'd hardly cared before when I had snuck out. I'd get another one of those lectures and that would be it.

Little did I know.

I pulled out my house key and opened the front door. My parents and the Big Mistake were in the living room, my mom on the house phone, my dad on his cell. Robbie was sitting on the sofa like a lump. Nothing new there, except why wasn't he in bed?

"Oh my God, she's here," my mother said into the phone. "I'll call you back later."

She jumped up and ran across the room, pulling me into a big hug. Then she backed away. "Where were you? Your father and I were so worried. We thought you ran away."

I looked from him to her. "Ran away? I went to the movies with Brie."

"Why didn't you answer your phone?"

I pulled it out of my pocket. "I turned it off in the movies and never turned it back on again."

"I told you she was with Brie," my father said. "We called Brie's parents, we called her cell phone, but we didn't get any answer. Your mother has been frantic. She called every one of your friends, and your Aunt Rita, too."

"Mom," I said, drawing it out over several syllables. "I told you, I just went to the movies. No need to have a cow."

"You know you're supposed to tell us when you go out," my mother said. "And why do you think we let you have a cell phone in the first place? So we can get in touch with you if we need to."

My father stood up. "We're glad you're home safe, Missy. But you're grounded, effective immediately. You can't get away with everything you want, you know."

I looked from him to my mother. She had her hands on her hips. Usually she's the disciplinarian, and I can apply to my father for mitigation. But with him doling out the punishment, I knew I had no hope of appeal. I couldn't resist saying, "My name is not Missy," as I turned and stalked out of the room. Behind me, I heard the Big Mistake snickering.

Saturday morning, I was kind of hoping they would have mellowed out. But no such luck. My mother made me go with her on her errands, from the dry cleaners to the Office Barn superstore to the grocery.

She did let me get the mail by myself, but considering the mailbox was at the foot of our driveway that wasn't a big stretch. I came back up to the house waving my letter from the Educational Testing Service. "I got my second set of SAT results," I said, tearing open the envelope. I looked at the score for a second, not believing what I saw.

"What?" my mother asked.

I handed her the results. The SAT ranks in three categories: Literature, History and Social Studies; Mathematics; and Science. The top score possible in each is 800. I got an 800 in lit & history, a 780 in math and a 780 in science.

"Melissa, these are wonderful," my mother said. "Congratulations."

"So I'm not grounded anymore?"

She looked at me like I was from Mars. "Of course you're still grounded. Your brain has nothing to do with your poor judgment."

"That is so unfair." In what was turning out to be a very distressing pattern, I stalked down the hall to my room.

On my way, my mother called, "Don't even think about climbing out your window. I had your father put a lock on it while we were out."

The violation! My father had gone into my room while I wasn't there and messed around with my window. I hurried over. Sure enough, there was a latch drilled into the window frame with a combination lock on it.

I went back to my doorway. "I'm a prisoner!" I called down the hallway. "I demand my rights according to the Geneva Convention."

I didn't know what the Geneva Convention was but I had heard it a lot in the movies.

"Look it up online," my mother called. "If it says anything about grounding a teenager, let me know."

I did look it up, but of course it was totally useless. Even I could see that I wasn't a prisoner of war, and I didn't need access to the Red Cross or anything.

I logged into the SAT site as Daniel and read his results online. He had gotten 800s in each of the three subjects--a perfect score. That had to help him get into Penn. And my application was looking a lot better now that I had improved my own scores.

It was kind of irritating that he did better than I did. I knew he was smarter than I was, but still. I tried to call his house but there was no answer. We hadn't made plans for that night, though we had been spending every Saturday night together for a while. It didn't matter since I was grounded, but I was still mad that he never called me to check in.

I texted back and forth with Brie, telling her I had been grounded. "Not surprised," she texted back.

My parents made a point of taking us all out to dinner on Saturday night. "Just like a family," my dad said, as the Big Mistake and I piled into the back seat of the mom-mobile. "We should do this more often."

I remembered we had tried going out as a family when the Big Mistake and I were both little kids, but he made a scene everywhere. He'd scream and yell and pound the table. He'd kick and bite my parents. I always made sure to sit as far away from him as possible.

That night, though, he was the model child. I knew he was doing it just for effect, but he opened the door of the restaurant for my mother and even for me, ushering me forward with a big sweep of his arm. He walked up to the hostess stand first and said, "We'd like a table for four, please. The name is Torani."

I saw my parents exchanging astonished looks. When we sat down, he was so polite to the waitress, all "please ma'am" and "thank you ma'am." I wanted to throw up.

He quizzed the waitress about the ingredients in the dish he wanted, just like my mother had to do, and he was all apologetic. "I'm sorry, but I have food allergies," he said. He flashed the waitress a big smile and she just melted.

"I'll ask the chef to be extra careful," she said.

When we had put in our orders, my father said, "Your mother told me about your new set of SAT scores, Melissa. We're very proud of you."

"The other day you thought I had a brain tumor."

"They're just trying to watch out for you, Melissa," the Big Mistake said. "They're your parents, and they love you despite your faults."

I kicked him under the table.

"I've been thinking," my father said.

I resisted the urge to make a smart comment.

"You did such a good job with that public relations text, maybe you can help me with a problem we've got at work. You know one of our clients is Office Barn, right?" That was hard to ignore, since he was always bringing home their key chains and copier paper and mouse pads.

"Yeah," I said.

"They've been doing customer relations surveys and the results aren't good."

The waitress brought us a big bowl of salad and my mother started serving it.

"What do you mean, not good?" I asked. "Is the data unreliable or are the results negative?"

Hmmm. That didn't quite sound like me, but I remembered that as one of the points from the textbook I'd read.

"Negative results," my father said. "Customers have a perception that it's hard to find what they're looking for in the stores, even though the aisles are very well-marked. They perceive that the sales staff isn't helpful in finding things either."

I thought about it as we all ate our salad. I remembered going to the Office Barn with my mother that morning. She needed a three-ring binder, and we had a lot of trouble finding one. I closed my eyes, and the store's layout came right back to me. It was wild--I couldn't remember ever remembering a place so clearly. As we finished the salad, I visualized walking through the store, and then I thought I had an answer for my dad.

"If I help you, will you take me off grounding?" I asked.

My father and mother looked at each other. "You're still going to be grounded," he said. "Let's say a week. So you can go out with Daniel on Saturday night if you want."

That was, if I was still talking to Daniel by then. Or if he was still talking to me. If he found out that I'd applied to Penn on his behalf, the grounding order might not matter at all.

"Why don't you adjust the customer survey," I said. "They do it online, right?"

He nodded.

"So ask them how they would like to see the aisles described. Given them a bunch of choices, and then once the survey is complete, relabel all the aisles based on the results."

My father nodded as the waitress delivered our entrees and took away the salad plates. "That's a good idea. I'll suggest it on Monday."

"Glad to be of help." I looked across at the Big Mistake and gave him a big shit-eating grin. He slumped down in his chair.

The next morning Brie texted me before I was even out of bed. Fortunately it was Sunday so there was no bagpipe music.
U call DF?
she asked.

No. He's at work. Let him cl me.

U think he's mad?

Don't know. Don't care.

I knew that wasn't the truth as soon as I hit send, but I had an image to protect. If Daniel dumped me I would be heartbroken but I would have to make it seem like it was all his fault.

I was irritated that he hadn't called me, and then worried. I almost asked my dad if he needed anything from ComputerCo so I could see that Daniel was all right, but I decided that if he wasn't calling me, that was his problem, not mine.

That afternoon we had to play happy family again. My mom and dad took us up into the country to a big flea market. I got a plate of funnel cake, even though I didn't like it that much, just to piss off the Big Mistake, who was allergic to it. My dad got caught up at this vendor of antique books, and my mother nearly fainted when she saw an ancestry table with family crests and stuff. I decided to stick with my dad when my mom started looking at kilts. The Big Mistake busied himself pawing through a pile of used video games.

To cut the boredom I picked up a tattered paperback called
Kiss of the Spider Woman
. I thought maybe it would have something to do with actual kissing and stuff transmitted that way, like spider venom. But instead it was about two prisoners in jail in Argentina.

Once I started reading, though, I couldn't stop. As my dad pawed through old books with leather bindings and water-stained pages, I flipped through the pages.

My dad interrupted me just as I was getting to the end of the book. "Do you want to buy that, Melissa?"

He was standing up by the cash box with his wallet in his hand. "Nah, I read it already." I scanned the last couple of pages and then put it down.

As we were walking away, he said, "When you said you read it already, did you mean..."

"I read it while I was waiting for you."

He just shook his head. I wondered if he thought I was turning into a freak, the way we had all looked at Daniel when he showed up on the first day of school. But you know, that kind of didn't bother me.

Monday morning I saw Daniel in AP English. We both slid into our seats just as the bell rang so we didn't have time to talk. But as we left class, he said, "I thought about what you said all weekend, and I'm sorry I got mad at you. I know you were just trying to be helpful. But you have to let me work this stuff out on my own, all right?"

Well, that wasn't the time to tell him I'd applied to Penn for him. "I understand."

He smiled. "Good. And I'm sorry I didn't call you Saturday night. I just stayed home and brooded." He took my hand in his.

"It didn't matter. I was grounded." I told him about going to the movies with Brie on Friday night and how my parents had reacted.

"That was dumb, sneaking out like that," he said. "If you'd asked if you could go to the movies with Brie, they'd have said yes, wouldn't they?"

"Yeah."

"So why didn't you?"

"I was mad at them. Don't you ever get mad at your mom?"

He shook his head. "She's all I have. If anything happened to her, I don't know what I'd do."

I squeezed his hand. "She's not all you have."

He smiled and kissed my cheek just before we walked into math.

That afternoon as we studied in the library, the knowledge that I had gone behind his back to apply to Penn for him ate away at me. I felt like it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him. Usually I don't have much control over what I say--I open my mouth and it all spills out. But I kept struggling not to say anything, even as we studied and talked about other kids and all the dumb stuff we filled up the day with.