Kissing in America Read online

  The whole subway ride I could barely focus on anything but seeing him. I couldn’t read. I kept staring out the window of the 7 train and the 1 train, into the dark tunnels, and dreaming.

  I got off at the 96th Street station. I walked a few blocks. I froze for a second when I saw it on the corner.

  Sugarland. Its polka-dot awning fluttered in the breeze. A little blue bench sat in front. Inside, its turquoise-and-chocolate-brown walls were decorated with framed black-and-white posters of old New York. I was the only customer. A chime rang when I stepped on the front mat.

  Will poked his head out from the back.

  “It’s you,” he said, and smiled. He was hauling a sack of flour. “Just one sec.” He stacked it in the back room and dusted himself off.

  Will’s muscles glimmered with a light coat of man frosting as he placed a forty-pound bag of flour in the corner.

  He looked sincerely happy to see me.

  “I heard about Silas,” I said. “I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry for saying sorry.” I reached into my backpack. “I brought you this.”

  I showed him Amphigorey, and I told him my dad had gotten it for me during one of our trips to Gotham Book Mart before it closed.

  He opened the cover and read the beginning. “Can I keep it for a few days? I’ll give it back to you in school this week.”

  “Of course.”

  He pointed toward the tiny marble tables. “Have a seat,” he said. “I know it’s hard to find one, what with the swarms of customers.”

  I sat down. He grabbed a plate from behind the counter. I gazed around, taking in the surroundings, trying to imprint them on my memory. It was decorated so elegantly—an antique crystal chandelier hung from the pressed-tin ceiling, and the glass case holding the cupcakes was trimmed with aged, polished wood with brass hardware. Stacks of turquoise gift boxes sat on the counter, tied with brown ribbon.

  “Which would you like to try?” he asked. “Chocolate? Red Velvet?”

  “I can’t decide.”

  “Here.” He put four cupcakes on a china plate, grabbed two blue napkins, and sat at the table with me.

  I took a bite of the chocolate. I even liked the frosting. I let it melt on my tongue and bit into the cake—dark, rich, delicious. “I love it,” I said.

  “Judging from the crowds, you’re the only person in the city who feels that way.” He didn’t take a bite himself.

  “Don’t you want one?”

  “After working here, I never want to eat another cupcake in my life.”

  I glanced at the chandelier and the photos on the walls. “It’s so pretty here, though. Maybe it just hasn’t been discovered yet.”

  “The problem is my mom opened this place at the same time as a thousand other cupcake bakeries were opening. It’s kind of a brutal business.” He ruffled the corner of the Edward Gorey book and shrugged. “Thanks for coming, though.” He said each word slowly, then lowered his voice. “It means a lot.”

  “Of course. I mean—well. Was the end—with Silas—okay? Did you get to say good-bye?”

  He made a sort of laugh. “Yeah. I appreciate your asking. The vet was great—he died in my arms. It was okay. Peaceful.” He paused. “No one else wants to hear you talk about your dead dog. Even my mom. I missed two days of school over it. I told my mom I was sick. I don’t think she even got it, why I stayed home. For a dog.”

  “I’ve done that. I mean—feeling sick over grief. Missing school.” I’d never said it so plainly before. Sick with grief. “In my head I call it a griefy feeling.”

  “That’s exactly what it is. A griefy feeling.”

  I told him about my cat, Lucky, who died when I was ten. She was a stray; my mom was allergic so I couldn’t officially adopt her, but I fed her every day and snuck her into my room whenever I could, and she slept in a little plastic house on our fire escape every night. “A few weeks after my tenth birthday, I saw blood in the corner of Lucky’s eye,” I said. I told him how my dad and I took her to the vet and they diagnosed her with squamous cell carcinoma. The tumor had started in her mouth and spread toward her brain, creating pressure that made her bleed. I snuck Lucky into my room each night, and we paid the vet hundreds of dollars to do surgery—we never told my mom what it cost. Lucky never woke up from the surgery.

  “That’s awful,” he said.

  “I cried on and off for two months. My mom said that was too long to mourn a cat. ‘Try not to be so thin-skinned,’ she said.” It was a phrase she repeated when Joey Braga started calling me “Jewfro” in fourth grade, after a bad haircut, and more recently when I cried at the end of Roman Holiday and An Affair to Remember.

  “I spent more time with that dog than I did with my dad. Than I have with either of my parents,” he said. He looked down at the cupcakes on the table. “Gia hated Silas. He drooled on her. When I told her he died, she seemed relieved.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “We broke up,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “It wasn’t just the dog.”

  I tried to process what he’d said, but it was almost too much to absorb. I wanted to text Annie and tell her.

  We were quiet for a minute, and then I said, “I took your advice. I wrote a—thing—and I sent it to that poetry contest.” I told him about the honorable mention. “It didn’t win but, you know. Thanks.”

  He smiled, seeming the happiest I’d seen him yet today. “I knew you had it in you.” He folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “I’m coming to the ceremony. So it better not suck.”

  “Oh, it sucks. It totally and completely sucks.”

  I felt warm all over, a hundred different kinds of warm.

  He stood and put my plate back behind the counter. “Come in the back a sec—I have a couple of books to return to you.”

  The back of the shop was brightly lit with long stainless steel tables, concrete floors, a giant sink, stand mixers, ovens, and stacks of metal trays. In the far corner were two large, messy wooden desks. One had to be his mother’s—covered with files, a vase of dried flowers, a desktop computer, account ledgers. Two framed photos hung on the wall above it. One was Will at about ten years old—he looked like a tiny version of the way he looked now. The other was a baby, swaddled in a blue blanket in his mother’s arms.

  “Your brother?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  I touched the frame. He was so tiny—pink-faced—and all you could see of Will’s mom was the back of her head leaning toward him, kissing the top of his head. I sent out a silent hello to his mom and the baby, and I thought of his telescope, staring down through the universe.

  Will riffled through the stacks of mail and school papers on his desk. “Here they are.” He pulled out a Millay book and one of e. e. cummings’s collections that I’d lent him. “I didn’t mess them up. I promise.”

  I walked over to his desk. It held his typewriter.

  “This is where I write all those goddamned essays,” he said.

  A blank page was rolled inside the typewriter. I typed Hello!, getting a feel for the keys. “It’s nice,” I said. I typed: I am griefy.

  Beside the typewriter, on top of the stack of mail, was a wedding invitation. Will picked it up. “Mrs. Jerkface’s wedding,” he said. “I’m just going out there for two nights. My mom wants me to bring moldy cupcakes as a wedding gift.”

  I noticed something else next to his typewriter—a little white tin box decorated with black paw prints.

  I picked it up. “What’s—?”

  “Silas,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “I had him cremated.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He was sixteen. That’s like a hundred and ten in people years.”

  “Still.”

  “It cost four hundred and fifty dollars for the ashes. I paid for the rush service. This place is probably going under and I paid four hundred and fifty dollars for the ashes of my dead dog. Well, I asked my dad to pay for it,
actually.”

  “It’s worth it.”

  He sighed. “I can’t exactly explain why it’s next to my typewriter. Inspiration?”

  “Very inspiring. I mean, who wouldn’t be inspired?”

  “I’m glad you finally got to meet him.”

  “Me too. I think it’s nice having him near your typewriter. Kind of like a muse.”

  “I can sprinkle him on the keys for good luck,” he said.

  I put down the tin of ashes and he placed his hand over mine. I couldn’t speak. He laced our fingers together. He pulled me to him until our waists were touching. My throat dried up. Everything in the room gleamed bright.

  The phone rang. Loud, shrill. He rolled his eyes. “I better get that. Hold on.”

  I almost had a heart attack. What had happened? What had almost happened?

  “My mom,” he said when he’d hung up. “I have to go meet her in a half hour—we’re checking out a new apartment to see if we can afford it. We can’t pay the rent on the one we’re in anymore.”

  “Oh no, that sucks,” I said.

  “We’ll figure it out.” He shrugged. “She told me to lock up the bakery for a couple of hours. Not that anyone will care if it’s closed. We’ve had about four customers all day.” He picked up my hand again naturally, as if it was no big deal at all. He kept holding it. “I’m glad you stopped by. I’ll walk you to the subway. It’s on the way to where I’m meeting her.”

  He picked up the books he’d borrowed from me, and we went to the front of the shop and I put them in my bag. He slung my bag across his shoulder and we walked up the street, still holding hands. On the way to the subway we stopped at a Rite Aid—he’d promised his mom he’d pick up one of her asthma prescriptions. I never enjoyed being in a Rite Aid so much. I loved this Rite Aid. I loved the bright lighting and shiny rows of gum and shampoos, and how the entire store pulsed with life, and even the shaving cream and soaps seemed happy.

  We left the Rite Aid, still holding hands. His fingers were softer than I’d imagined, his grip gentle. I was floating. The sidewalk sparkled in the sun.

  And then, just before we reached the station, he stopped walking.

  He swooped down and kissed me. I was in his arms, suddenly, without warning, leaning back, I couldn’t believe it was happening, I melted into the sidewalk and became two people at once. The person who was kissing him and the person who could barely think and absorb and believe that I was kissing him. Time stopped. The world stopped. There was only the kiss.

  It seemed as natural as breathing—the kiss, good-bye, thanks for the book, thanks for stopping by, and I was off into the subway, sailing through Manhattan and back toward Queens.

  The whole subway ride home, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t do anything except replay the kiss, the whole afternoon, in my head again and again and again—I could have replayed it forever.

  When I got off the 7 train, I called Annie.

  “We kissed.” I repeated it three times. I told her about the bakery, the typewriter, the ashes.

  “Only you would have a romantic moment over the ashes of a dead dog,” she said. She didn’t sound sarcastic—she sounded impressed.

  “It was perfect,” I said.

  At his touch, the scabs would fall away

  In romance novels, nobody ever asks, “Hey, what’s going on here exactly? Why did you kiss me? What kind of relationship do you have in mind? Are we going to be together or what?” Instead, there are three hundred pages of cholera, explosions, amnesia, stabbings, natural disasters, and misunderstandings keeping the couple apart.

  I can handle cholera, I thought. I can handle typhus, tornadoes, and packs of wild homicidal javelinas if it means getting to kiss him again.

  It felt like he was still kissing me as I ate fried eggs for breakfast, washed the plates, and waited for the 7 train. He was still kissing me while I studied, grocery shopped, and as I fell asleep.

  He texted me on Monday:

  Apt hunting w my mom—out of school today & maybe this week—see you Friday at festival tho

  His first text to me. I wanted to bronze that text. I wanted to say back: I love you come here now kiss me again please I can’t wait till Friday. But I wrote instead:

  Ok—see you Friday!

  “What do you think?” I asked Annie for the third time before I sent it. We were riding the subway to school. “I want to sound confident and not needy, you know? I mean instead I could say—”

  “Send it or I’m going to kill you,” she said.

  He didn’t write back, and he didn’t return to school. On Friday I didn’t see him in the hallways, or in the cafeteria at lunch, or anywhere. At tutoring that afternoon—the last tutoring session of the year—I waited for him to show up. Annie wasn’t at tutoring that day either—she had her own awards ceremony that afternoon at Hunter College, for the winners of the Schilling Science Prize. Her parents, her grandfather, and her sisters were going.

  Mrs. Peech had brought juice and popcorn to celebrate the last session. I crammed handful after handful of popcorn into my mouth and watched the door, waiting for him to arrive. I pretended to listen to the other tutors talking about summer jobs and classes and TV shows, but all I could think about was Will. I glanced at the clock. Thirty minutes till the festival started.

  Twenty minutes.

  Ten.

  My stomach dropped.

  He couldn’t miss this. It wasn’t possible. I couldn’t go to Urbanwords alone.

  There was a reason, there had to be a reason why he wasn’t here. Cholera. A car had struck him like in An Affair to Remember.

  It was four thirty. “Let’s clean up and head to the festival!” Mrs. Peech chirped.

  I helped pack up the leftover juice and wipe down the tables and then picked up my backpack and followed everyone else out the door.

  The Urbanwords festival had been set up in the lobby of our school—I wandered past tables representing literary magazines and poetry organizations from around the city. I kept watching the front doors, waiting for him to come, and when the ceremony started, I sat in the auditorium in a back row, alone.

  The room was packed with kids and families, everyone hugging and picking lint off each other’s clothes. All I had to do was walk across the stage and pick up the award. I stood behind the other kids, got the award, and followed along, but my knees felt wobbly. I returned to my empty row.

  I could sneak out and leave, but where would I go? Home alone? I fingered the certificate in my lap. I touched its raised letters. “Honorable Mention.” Whoopee. Maybe if it hadn’t been a “mention” but a real prize, my mom and Will would’ve come. There had to be a reason why he wasn’t here. There had to be. I clung to the belief that something had happened. A subway delay. Or something simpler: he’d gotten the time wrong. I checked my phone to see if he’d texted me.

  Nothing yet.

  I felt paralyzed. Glued in place. I checked emails and voice mails—nothing—and then went to the message board. I hadn’t been on the message board for a week, not since the kiss. I hadn’t needed or wanted to. I hadn’t even thought about it.

  Normally there was a slow trickle of new messages, just a few new ones a day. Now there were 114 new ones.

  Fran Gamuto had started a new thread. I clicked on it. She’d posted a link to a newspaper article. From this morning.

  Freedom Airlines Flight 472 Wreckage Is Found

  By HUMPHREY COLES

  Investigators announced that they have located the wreckage of Freedom Airlines Flight 472, which crashed in the North Atlantic two years ago, renewing hopes that the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder can still be located and may explain what caused the plane to crash.

  A team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution led the search. Three REMUS 6000 autonomous underwater vehicles helped investigators locate the wreckage nearly one and a half miles below the surface.

  “It’s a happy discovery,” Frank Longbrown, the chair of the N
ational Transportation Safety Board, said at a press conference. He noted that it could take weeks before specialized recovery vehicles can reach the site and begin bringing the wreckage to the surface.

  The flight crashed in a thunderstorm while traveling from New York to Paris. All 228 passengers and crew members were killed.

  My chest tightened. I felt dizzy and began to sweat.

  I had known they were starting the search again, but I figured it would be just like the other searches—like a needle in a haystack, someone had written on the message board. We shouldn’t get our hopes up, other people had said.

  Try to breathe.

  Was I dying? I wasn’t dying. I’d felt this before. A panic attack. I’d felt exactly like this two years ago, when I had my first panic attack, before they identified his remains, when I was sure he was still alive. I was supposed to give an oral presentation about dolphins for school that day. Long-beaked, short-beaked, white-beaked, bottlenose, Indo-Pacific humpbacked. I’d researched almost every dolphin in existence. All the parents stood in the back of the room—my mom couldn’t make it, of course, since she taught a class at the same time—and I kept watching the door. I knew he was going to come. He’d never missed a presentation, school play, or anything. I went last—I’d asked the teacher if I could go last—I got up to speak and my dad still wasn’t there, and everyone stared at me with this weird look. My chest froze; it felt like it was slowly filling up with cement. I woke up in the nurse’s office.

  I kept reading the message board.

  Even if they find the data and voice recorders, the data might not be intact. As much as I want to finally put an end to the questions and misery and uncertainty, we have to accept that we still might not get any answers.

  Tim (wife Beth, 3B)

  I don’t want to know what the recorders say. I’m at peace now and I don’t want to know any more about it. I wish things had been left alone and this had not happened. I’m not sure why it was important to everyone to lobby for the search to continue all this time.