Soul Kiss (5 page)

Lashonda's family lived in an apartment in the flat part of Stewart's Crossing, down by the river. She had a bunch of brothers and sisters but she was the only smart one, as far as I knew.

"Anyone else?" he asked. Kate Marsh was applying to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a couple of the Seven Sisters colleges. Brie said she wasn't sure, and Chelsea and Mindy said where they were applying.

"I'm applying early decision to Penn," I said. "My parents both went there, and the admissions office said that early decision was best for me."

That sent Mr. Chandra off on another tangent, and once again, I spaced out, listening to the melody of his accent. My parents had already started putting together their tax forms and pressing me to write my essays. So instead of listening, I kept looking at Daniel. But he was spacing too; he wasn't looking at Mr. Chandra, or at me.

The class ended with Mr. Chandra reminding us that we could come to the guidance office any time to schedule an appointment to discuss our college plans. Mrs. Ash made us applaud him when he finished.

Daniel didn't look at me or walk with me when class was finished, and over the next week or two, I started to think maybe that kiss was just some sort of Latin thing, a way of saying
thanks for the trip
. We saw a documentary on Spain in eighth grade, and people were always kissing each other in that.

Chelsea had gotten it into her head to hate Daniel, even though he was no threat to her. She wasn't the smartest girl in school, so it's not like he was taking over valedictorian from her or something. That was Kate Marsh; she was dull and quiet, but she got straight As in everything and you could always ask her to share her notes if you missed class. They were written in perfect handwriting, not a scribble or a scratch out.

I'll bet Chelsea's father could have sent her to private school, but he had come to ninth grade career day once and announced that he paid his taxes to the school district and he expected to get his money's worth. At the time none of us really knew what a lawyer was or did, except Chelsea, and I think we all just figured it was a guy who liked to talk a lot.

Chelsea had the same aggressive attitude. You were either with her or against her. She had frizzy blonde hair always pulled into a ponytail, a pointy nose and a matching chin, and she always dressed in whatever was most stylish or most expensive. But I had known her since kindergarten so I was grandfathered in as her friend.

Not so with Daniel. Every day at lunch she sniped about his clothes, his shaggy hair, his off-brand sneakers. One day she was criticizing his T-shirt, a retro design from some Cuban cigar box label. Though it was a cheap cotton, baggy on him, and the design was faded, I thought it was kind of cool and that made me tired of Chelsea harping on him.

"Give it a rest, Chelsea," I said. "Not everybody has a rich daddy who buys her anything she wants."

She looked at me like I had stuck an arrow into her chest. "My daddy is not rich. We are upper middle class, just like your family, Melissa. Girls whose fathers drive Mercedes sports cars should not throw stones."

"I'm not throwing stones at you, Chelsea. Though I do owe you a snowball from last year--don't think I've forgotten. I'm just saying it's not his fault his mother can't afford to buy him fancy clothes."

"His mother? What about his father?"

"I think his father's dead."

She looked at me closely. "And how do you know so much about him?"

"Geez, Chelsea, it's not like I've memorized his complete biography. I sit next to him in math class, remember."

"Uh-huh," she said, nodding.

I got up and walked over to where Daniel was sitting. "I like your T-shirt," I said.

He looked up. "Thanks. It belonged to my dad. My mom dug it out from somewhere a couple of weeks ago because she thought it would fit me." He smiled. "I know it doesn't, but it's cool to have something of his."

That was so sweet. I couldn't imagine my dad dying, and I was sure that if he did I would want to wear his T-shirts too. "You ready to walk to history?" I asked.

He got up so fast he knocked the table, and a kid on the end said, "Watch it." Daniel just ignored him, and we walked out of the cafeteria together.

On the bus home that day, Brie asked me, "So what's up with you and Daniel Florez? Do you like him?"

"He's okay. Don't tell me you're starting to act like Chelsea and go all ballistic on the poor guy. He may be a geek but he's all right."

"Uh-huh."

"So have you heard anything from Military Boy lately?" That was always good for shifting Brie's attention.

"He scored really well in target practice," she said proudly. "He hit his target in all the important places. Did you know that you can break the body down in to different zones based on how easily a shot there can kill someone?"

"And you're worried about me hanging around with Daniel?" I asked. "Do you ever listen to yourself, Brie?"

"I'm just trying to develop some common interests with him."

I thought about Daniel reading all those Jane Austen books because I had mentioned them to him. Was he doing the same thing Brie was? "What about books? He must be taking English too, right? What's he reading?"

She shook her head. "He finished English last year. This year he's studying military theory, calculus, biology, and European history. And he's on the drill team."

She launched into a description of the kinds of commands he had to memorize and be able to perform, and I zoned out. Daniel
did
like me; that was clear. But did I like him? I just didn't know. I still thought he was hella cute, especially when he pushed a strand of his wavy hair back over his ear, or he smiled and this light shone out of his eyes.

But I was determined not to moon over him the way Brie did for Military Boy. And if Daniel ever told me about target practice, I was so changing my seat in math class.

After that day I felt like Chelsea was watching me, and just out of basic perversity I made a point of being extra nice to Daniel. I was also curious to see what would happen. I kind of liked him; he was interesting, when he didn't ramble too much about arcane crap, and he was polite and charming and his accent gave me little shivers.

About a week later we were filing into math class and Daniel said, "How is your netbook working out?"

"Great. Sometimes it does this weird thing where it makes the screen really small, without my ever doing anything, but I figured out how to get it back to normal."

"All the software working out?" he asked, as he slid into his seat.

"Yeah. My dad is still freaked out by Office 2010, though. Sometimes I hear him working in the study and it's like he's asking the computer questions or yelling at it."

"Yeah, a lot of people do that."

Mr. Iccanello rapped his pointer against the board. "Settle down, class. Today we're going to review for your first test, on Thursday."

Everyone groaned. I hadn't been paying as much attention as I should have been, spending a lot of time in math class thinking about Daniel, and I was seriously afraid of failing. By the end of class I was freaking out. As I stood up and gathered my crap, I said to Daniel, "They shouldn't let him give tests senior year. I mean, we've already got our college applications in, right? Who cares how we do in math?"

"Do you want to study together?"

Over his shoulder I saw Chelsea staring. "Sure. That'd be great. But I don't want you to have to come all the way to my house. I can come to yours."

"It's no big deal. I could ride the bus with you tomorrow, and then maybe you could drive me home again."

He smiled, and I remembered the last time I had driven him home, when he'd kissed my cheek. Chelsea was whispering something to Mindy and I felt kind of warm inside. "Yeah, I can do that," I said.

I usually sat with Brie on the bus, at least when we both took the regular bus home. Once a week I stayed after school to work on the literary magazine with Miss Margolis, Kate Marsh, Lashonda Jackson, and a couple of others kids, and once a week Brie's mother picked her up and took her to piano lessons. On Wednesday, though, Daniel sat on the bench next to me, and when Brie got on instead of sitting in front of us or in back of us, she made a point of sitting on the other side of the bus, up toward the front.

Robbie was one of the last kids to get on, like usual. And probably just to annoy me, instead of scrambling to the back of the bus where his friends were, he sprawled into the seat in front of Daniel and me. He turned around to us and put his arm on the seat back.

"You coming to our house?" he asked Daniel, ignoring me completely.

Daniel nodded. "We have a math test tomorrow. We're going to study together."

The Big Mistake snickered, and said, "Study."

I knocked him in the head. "Turn around, doofus."

"So are you, like, dating Missy?" he asked.

"Melissa," I said. "My name is Melissa. Do you have a speech defect to go along with your many brain defects?"

Daniel didn't say anything, and Robbie hopped up and went back to his friends. I was glad that the bus hit a bump as he was moving and he nearly fell on his ass.

"It's nice you have a brother," Daniel said. "I wish I had a brother or a sister."

"Oh, no you don't. It's horrible. They should have drowned him at birth." I was uncomfortably aware that Daniel was sitting very close to me, just the way he had when I'd driven him home. But we were in public, on the school bus. I nudged him. "Move over," I said. "You're locking me in over here."

He looked at me and there was pure mischief in his eyes, but he moved about an inch away.

I sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon.

My mom was still at work when we got home, so the Big Mistake thought he was in charge. Wrong.

"Now, Melissa, I want you to keep your bedroom door open," he said. "And one foot on the floor at all times."

"Where do you get this crap?" I asked.

"It was in a movie last week."

"I saw that," Daniel said. "A girls' boarding school, right? And the house mother was this old lady with a wart on her nose."

"Remember that scene in the bathroom?" Robbie asked. "When those two girls were fighting?"

"That was hot," Daniel said.

"Okay, this conversation is getting too weird," I said. "Robbie, if you don't leave us alone, I'm going to tell Mom and Dad you're watching inappropriate movies."

"Okay, okay, keep your pants on," he said, flopping on the couch. "I'll be out here with the sound turned up really loud so I can't hear you making out."

I turned bright red. "Come on, Daniel. We have math to study."

I pulled a chair in from Robbie's room so we could both sit at my desk. We opened our textbooks, and I handed Daniel one earpiece from my iPod touch and turned on My Chemical Romance. We sat there caddy-cornered to each other, both of us reading math, his eyes zooming across the page in that weird way.

After I had read for a while I came to a problem about binomials, which completely befuddled me. That must have been one of the days I zoned out on Iccanello's lectures. "I don't get this," I said, pointing at the problem.

Daniel pulled out the earpiece and looked at it. "It's not hard," he said. "You just have to split it up into its component parts."

He grabbed a pad and started writing. "See, first you try to isolate x, so you can solve for it."

I listened as he explained, and then tried a problem myself, and I thought I got it. I smiled. "Thanks." I handed him the earpiece back and we returned to studying.

We worked like that until I heard my mother's car in the driveway. "Daniel's helping me study math," I said, greeting her as she walked in the door, Daniel hovering behind me. "Can he stay for dinner?"

"Is it all right with your mother?" my mom asked him.

"She works until nine," he said. "I usually get my own dinner during the week."

My mother frowned. She was big on all four of us eating dinner together every night. She said it prevented the Big Mistake and me from becoming juvenile delinquents. I think it was too late for him, though.

By dinner time, I felt like I could actually pass the exam on Thursday. Daniel sat across from me, and I was afraid the Big Mistake was going to keep on teasing us. I had one leg primed to kick him, but he was strangely silent.

"So, Daniel, how is your semester going?" my father asked.

"Pretty good. I'm caught up on all my reading and I think Melissa and I are going to ace our math test tomorrow."

"Melissa can memorize things very well, but she has trouble applying what she learns," my father said.

"Dad."

"It's true, sweetheart. Remember last year in chemistry? You memorized every formula, but you still didn't do that well on your final exam."

I turned to Daniel. "I got a B. That was a huge disappointment to my father."

"I just want to you do as well as you can, sweetheart."

"I'm like that too, sometimes," Daniel said. "I can read everything and understand it but I need to practice in order to do well on a test." He looked down at his plate, which he had already cleaned of the gluten-free macaroni and cheese casserole. "I just finished driver ed, but I'm worried I won't pass my license test."