Kissing in America Page 3

  I couldn’t get the image of them out of my head. Gia was a foot taller than me and a million times prettier, and all day my brain kept watching Will’s hands roam over her shoulders and behind her neck, again and again and again.

  The next morning, when I woke up, my stomach turned. My legs hurt. I tasted something sour in the back of my throat. The longing for Will rolled into my old grief like a mudslide, growing and gaining speed. I felt griefy. I wished griefy was a word. I thought about my mom and how she worked all the time now. She worried about money. She taught extra classes and on weekends spoke at conferences about women and economics. Sometimes she’d fall asleep with her head on her desk after grading papers. Other times she’d be buried in writing lectures and then suddenly look up and remember I existed. I’d seen two new books on her bookshelf: How to Talk to Your Teenage Daughter and Living with Your Teenage Daughter and Loving It.

  My dad wouldn’t have needed a book to talk to me. He never needed instructions.

  Almost two years had passed, but I missed him just as much—sometimes I missed him more. How was that possible? How could it get worse? Junk mail still arrived in his name (despite my mom haranguing the postal service); telemarketers asked for him; when I went to the grocery store, I bought the stuff that only he ate. He was born in London, and our cupboards used to be filled with tea and Jammie Dodgers, Lyle’s syrup, Heinz baked beans, Colman’s mustard, orange marmalade, and jars of Marmite. I’d always thought Marmite was gross, but a month ago I bought it, shut the door to my room, and ate tiny tastes of it with a spoon.

  Now, before my mom left for work, my stomach began to feel worse. I felt this gnawing inside me, a hollow ache. I felt like I might throw up. My mom leaned over my bed with a worried frown. She took my temperature. Normal.

  “It must be another stomach bug,” she said. She rubbed her forehead.

  For the past two years I’d been getting stomach bugs once a month or so. She’d taken me to the doctor after the first few times, and they tested me and said I might have some bacteria and put me on a course of antibiotics. “Sometimes these drugs work. Sometimes they don’t,” the doctor said.

  The drugs didn’t work. My mom worried that something really bad was wrong with me. She talked to her best friend, Lulu, about it on the phone. Lulu had gone to graduate school with my parents; she’d lived three blocks from us for years, until she moved to Arizona, where she was an English professor.

  “Depression and grief can make you physically ill,” Lulu had told my mom. “If you push those feelings away, they’re going to come back and bite you in the ass. Or the stomach,” she said. “Let her have her sick days, her days off. She needs them.” Lulu suggested my mom and I see a therapist, but we’d had such a bad experience with Wonderboob that my mom didn’t want to try that again. After our last group therapy session, Wonderboob’s parting advice to my mom was that we should get a cat.

  Now my mom muttered about trying a new antibiotic, and then glanced at her watch. She didn’t want to be late. She said I could stay home from school and made me promise to call her in a couple of hours to check in.

  I tried to sleep. I couldn’t. I turned on my Crapphone. And then I did the thing I sometimes did when I felt this crazy crushing pain in my chest—I went to a website my mom forbade me to visit.

  It was a private forum for the crash victims’ families. Visiting always made me feel better—maybe only a millimeter better—but at least it made me feel like I had company.

  Fran Gamuto, the forum’s moderator, had told my mom about the site over the phone. Fran called every family personally to let them know about it. She wanted a place where we could keep in touch about the investigation, the lawsuit against the airline, and the ongoing search for the wreckage. The fuselage and black boxes still remained somewhere on the ocean floor. Three major searches had been attempted over the last two years, and Fran and the other families lobbied for a fourth search to begin in the late spring. Three underwater robotic vehicles were going to search a new area of almost two thousand square miles. Without the black boxes, none of the theories of what caused the crash were ever proven. Fran was convinced that someday there would be proof.

  My mom had visited the site once and established a password (she used the same one for everything), and then she decided it was ridiculous. “They’re not talking about the lawsuit. They’re talking about their feelings. Why would anyone want to go on here and do that to themselves?” she asked.

  I wanted to do that to myself.

  I went on it sometimes at the laundromat, in the computer room at school, or at night after my mom was asleep. Other times I’d be waiting for the subway and I’d be thinking about Fran Gamuto and Nancy Johnson and Jill Bluelake and the others who posted. Some people had signatures that appeared after their names on every post:

  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 dwell in possibility

  In 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 lik
e 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.

  Mad love

  Will’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.