Very in Pieces (16 page)

I nod.

“I saw you in that gallery staring at that photograph. It was like you were mesmerized, and I couldn't figure out what you were seeing there. I realized I'd been around you forever, and I didn't know one thing about you. I mean, our dots were right next to each other on the carpet in kindergarten.”

“They were not. I sat next to Grace until—” But as I say it, I realize he is right. Grace sat on my left, until Mrs. Hall got so tired of us poking and giggling and playing with each other's hair that she swapped Grace with this other girl—Lauren, I think, who ended up moving to Texas. But on my right was the quiet boy with dark hair and green eyes who always smelled like the apples he had in his lunch box every day. Dominic. “You liked it when she read to us. You would close your eyes, but you weren't sleeping.”

He smiles, slow and easy and real. “See. You didn't even remember it was me. So I decided I would try to get to know you.”

“Like a project.”

“Like a social experiment, I guess.”

I take a step back. “I don't want to be anyone's experiment.”

He steps closer. “That came out wrong. I say stupid things when I'm nervous. I mean, I just wondered if two people that everyone thinks are totally different—I just wondered what would happen, if we were really so far apart.” He takes my hand again. His palm is warmer now, and a little damp. He blinks
and I notice a bit of crust right at his tear duct. I consider brushing it away.

The air between us is charged, like before an electrical storm. My heart beats faster. He steps closer still. Closer and closer and closer again. There are no more voices. The only thing I can hear is his breath, coming faster and faster. I know what is going to happen next. There's nothing else quite like that feeling: heart beating, time stretched out, mouth buzzing. I lean in to him, and he leans in to me until our lips press together.

The weight of my body seems to leave me. I place my hand on his shoulder, pulling him closer so our bodies are right next to each other, pressing hard. Our teeth clack together and I giggle, but we're still kissing. He gently moves his tongue across my lips. I open my mouth a little wider. Then, I rock away, just enough to tilt back my head and sigh. The world won't come into focus. His lips travel down my neck. This is nothing like kissing Christian. This is the way my mother wants me to be kissed. I step away abruptly. “I'm sorry,” I say quickly. “I'm sorry, I have a, a—”

“A boyfriend? I know; we've been over that.”

I shake my head. “This isn't like me. This isn't . . . I don't . . .” The words won't come, and so I turn and start down the hill.

“You sure about that, Very?” he yells after me.

iv.

A kiss. Lips on lips. Such a simple act, but it spins me loose. I barely even finished my beer, but driving home I can't focus on the road. I find myself drifting right, then left.
This is what it means to change?

My teacher brought a caterpillar in to class in first grade. We watched it build its chrysalis, then waited, waited, waited for the beautiful butterfly to emerge, gorgeous gossamer wings spread wide. Finally one day it oozed out. Its orange wings were crinkled and slimy-looking. I remember Grace saying, “Ew. What a disappointment.” I should have paid more attention. I should have known there was no such thing as metamorphosis.

Our driveway is still full of cars, and I snake up along beside them. Subarus with rusting bumpers, an ancient Mercedes converted to run on biodiesel, tiny cars lined up on the edge of the driveway like children waiting to go to recess. I'm just able to pull Nonnie's convertible into the garage, then walk around back so I can get into the kitchen that way without having to go through the party.

The kitchen is full of festive detritus: plates with half-eaten appetizers, a stack of plastic cups, a purse, and two sports coats. Voices filter in, too.

On the counter sits a huge bag of lemons, and half a bag of limes. Mom always orders too much of things like this, and not enough actual food. They're beautiful sitting there, but also sad. I can already picture them molding, and the sour-sweet-sickly
smell that will permeate the kitchen until I take them and throw them into the woods. A waste. So I decide to do something with them. I know we have a special tool somewhere that peels off perfect strips of the rind. The rind curls like a spring, and you can drop it into a drink. But I can't find it in our kitchen, which is more for show than for use. I look in the drawer where we keep all those sorts of random tools—melon ballers, citrus reamers—no luck. Shoving it closed, I move on to the next drawer. This one has another disconnected assortment. There's string for trussing a turkey, wooden skewers, and knives for spreading dips. I rustle around in it, and then yank my finger back. Shoving my finger into my mouth, I taste blood. I pull it out and see a small cut, just a bit thicker than a paper cut.

“Damn it,” I mutter, and slam the drawer closed. “Screw it.”

Nonnie taught me how to make the twists without the tool. She said it was a necessary skill since fruit twists were one of the ways you could tell if you were in a classy joint. “It's not that I mind a dive bar. In fact, I'd actually prefer it. But if they're going to charge me more than the cost of one of my books for a cocktail, it better be the real deal with all the frills.”

I can almost see her, leaning back against the counter, holding a pencil as if it's a cigarette (this was after she quit, too late as it turned out). As she gives me the directions in my mind, I follow them. “Cut those pointy nubs off the ends of the lemon. Then cut it in half.” As I slice the lemon in two, its juice seeps into my fresh cut and I wince. But I keep going. It feels like a penance.
I'm sorry I kissed Dominic Meyers, Christian. But if it
makes you feel better, I cut myself and poured lemon juice in the wound
. He'd probably just kiss it and tell me that it would be all right. That's how nice he is.

I use a spoon to scoop out the lemon pulp, and set it aside in a bowl.
Make sure to get all of it out, and some of the white stuff, too.
More and more juice gets into the cut. I think the pain will go away, but each fresh drop brings a new spike.

I'd been in those woods before, maybe ten or eleven years ago. The town did this fairy-house event with girls in gauzy dresses and wings and a maypole dance. Mom and Nonnie brought us. We trekked up into the woods with scads of other kids and found a quiet spot to build our own fairy house. The rules were simple: use only items you find in the woods, no plastic. The organizers had gathered buckets of shells and sea glass from the ocean.

I built the structure, crisscrossing sticks and stacking rocks. Ramona furnished the place with a mussel-shell chaise lounge and a dining set of a stone and pebbles. “We'll leave them some peppermint,” she said, placing a leaf on the table. “So when they kiss they won't have bad breath.” She draped leaves over my structure and fanned pine needles over the doorway for privacy. “Look,” she said, as we surveyed the work. “The pine needles, they've got a bit of a gap. There's a fairy there already.” She dropped to her belly and peered in the gap. “Hello, little fairy. Hello, little, little, little one.” Mom told us ours was the loveliest and all the fairies would live there. She looked with pity at all the other houses we passed.

Two weeks later we returned. The wind or an animal or an angry middle schooler had romped through the path. Houses tucked in on themselves, shells crushed to shards along the way. Our house fared no better. It was only sticks and leaves, after all. One whole wall had slid off, exposing the interior. The mussel-shell chaise was missing, and the pebbles were spread around. The only thing still in its place was the peppermint leaf, brown but untouched by fairy lips. I blinked back tears. I had wanted so much to believe. Ramona fell to her knees. “Don't you like your peppermint, little fairy? If you don't eat your greens, you won't get any dessert!”

“There's nothing there, Ramona,” I told her.

“Of course there is.” She laughed. “It's Petaluna. She's being stubborn about her supper.”

“There's
nothing
there,” I repeated.

Ramona turned to the house. “She
is
a child, but she's a strange child. That's why she can't see you.”

The rage built in my small body and my foot shot out, destroying what was left of the fairy house. Ramona stared. I expected her to weep and wail. Instead she put her face into the wreckage. “Petaluna? Petaluna? Ah, there you are!”

Nonnie led me back to the car.

“There are no fairies. Right, Nonnie?”

“Of course there aren't,” she said, extracting a cigarette from her silver case. “But in this world we see what we need to.” She sucked in hard as she lit the cigarette. Then she turned and reached in through the open window to dig in her oversize bag,
pulling out one of her steno books.

I had wanted to tell this to Dominic, even the part where I crushed the fairy house. Now I'm glad I didn't. I can't be passing around memories like dealing a deck of cards.

My phone shakes and rattles on the counter. I wipe my hands on my jeans and check the text from Grace:
Please continue with your field report on the Essex College Male.

I text back:
Observing from secure vantage point. Little to report.

It feels like a lie.

It is a lie. This night is full of them, like stars popping out in the clear, black sky.

I slice the lemon peel into thin strips and then reopen the random drawer, where whatever cut me still lurks, and grab one of the skewers. I roll the lemon around the skewer into perfect spirals.

One down, about two dozen to go.

My hands burn.

At first the job requires just enough concentration to keep my mind occupied, but as I work through the lemons, it becomes a habit, and then my mind is free to wander. I replay the kiss. I replay how we got there, trying to assign blame.

I lift my fingers to my lips and taste lemon instead of him.

Christian's kisses are softer. His lips are loose. It's like he's afraid he's going to hurt me. I just assumed that's the way it was.

I try to picture how his face will look when I tell him. If I tell him. No, I have to tell him. And when I do, will he cry? I
wonder. Get angry? I have never seen him angry.

Ramona breezes in from the sliding door to the outside. She picks up one of the lemon rinds, spins it around in her fingers, then tucks the end into her mouth. “Bitter,” she says.

I nod.

“Do we really need this many lemon twists?” she asks.

I don't protest her use of the word
we
.

“Can you bring them out to the party?” I ask.

“Your hands are all pink.”

“I guess from the juice.”

She lifts herself up onto the counter beside me, even though it's splattered with lemon juice. “Do you care what Marcus Schmidt thinks about the sculpture?” she asks.

I laugh. More accurately, I guffaw. “No.” What Marcus Schmidt thinks about anything is about as far as you can get from what I care about.

“Me, either. What about you, though? Do you like the sculpture?”

“I don't know, Ramona. I'm not much for interpreting art.”

“I didn't ask you to interpret it. I asked you if you liked it.”

Our parents always say that whether you like the art is irrelevant. That's the lowest form of interaction. “I like the way the sun hits it in the afternoon. I think that's pretty.”

“I think so, too.” She nods. “Do you think Mom's still going to take it down?”

“No. Not after the reaction tonight. The only way she'll take it down is if they want to move it into the gallery.”

“You don't think they'd really do that, do you?”

“No.”

“Good.”

She chews thoughtfully on her lemon rind, staring at me. “You weren't at that party very long.”

“It was kind of lame.”

“But you knew that going in, didn't you? What happened?”

I shake my head. “You can't tell anyone. Anyone.”

“Who's to tell?” she asks, the lemon rind sticking out from her lips like a spiraled cigarette.

“I kissed Dominic Meyers.”

She nods and chews. “That's a good reason to leave a party.”

“That's all you're going to say?”

“What else can I say?”

She's right, of course. “I wasn't telling you just to tell you. What should I do? I don't have to tell Christian that I kissed Dominic, do I? It will hurt him too much to tell him. It's my mistake, not his.”

“I don't know the answer to that question, but protecting someone as a reason to keep a secret doesn't make sense to me.”

“Why not?”

“It protects the teller as much the person told, so you can never be sure if you're doing it for the other person, or just to protect yourself.”

“I guess. But I can't just give up Christian for this thing with Dominic. Because this thing is nothing. It's just like, like a magnesium explosion.” On the first day of chemistry class, as
soon as we were all settled in our seats, Mr. Tompkins had lit off a tiny amount of magnesium powder. The flame was bright white, and hot, and went out nearly as quickly as it had started. “Christian and I have a slow burn. That's worth keeping.”

“I don't really want to hear about you exploding or burning.”

“Can you please just bring these out to the party?” I ask.

She doesn't move at first, but then she pushes herself off of the counter and grabs the small bowl of lemon curls. “In the grand scheme of things, there are worse things you could have done.”

As she pushes the door open, I hear the din of the party rise and fall. I have a sudden urge to call her back, like she's walking into a trap. It's ridiculous. Instead I move on to the limes. The first one I choose is small and perfectly round, smooth in my hand. I once heard that if you looked at the earth from far, far away, it would be smoother than a marble. Smoother, by far, than this lime. I want to draw some perspective from the comparison, but all it does is make me feel small.