Kissing in America Read online

  Jill (Jacques Bluelake, 14A)

  I couldn’t absorb it. I couldn’t move or think or do anything but read message after message.

  I didn’t even notice when someone sat down beside me until I felt a squeeze on my shoulder.

  “Hey—I’m sorry I’m late, I’ve been—” He saw my face. “What happened?”

  I couldn’t speak. I didn’t cry—I was too stunned—I felt numb.

  “What happened?” he asked again. When I didn’t answer, he said, “Let’s get out of here.” He took my hand and picked up my bag, and we walked out of the auditorium.

  He led me toward an empty, quiet stairwell. We sat down. I was shaking.

  “Are you okay?” He held my hand. “Should I call someone? Or—”

  “It wasn’t a heart attack.” I spoke quickly, and somehow, saying it aloud, telling him I lied, cracked the numbness and made the tears slide out for the first time.

  I took out my phone and showed him the article.

  He read it and held me for a long time, until I caught my breath and calmed down, and then I told him everything. I told him how there had been different theories—from the small amount of wreckage they’d recovered two years ago, at first some people thought the plane had broken up in midair. Then they decided it had hit the water intact. My eyes focused on a piece of old gum that had turned into a black spot on the stairs. “I always thought—I decided—that he didn’t know it was coming. That he was sleeping and they fell into the ocean, and he was never scared or terrified or felt anything. That’s what I’ve always thought. Hoped. That he didn’t suffer.”

  “I don’t think he was scared,” Will said. “I know he wasn’t scared. He didn’t suffer.”

  I loved that he said that. I loved that he wanted that to be true, that he knew how incredibly important it was for that to be true. Something relaxed inside me, like an unwinding coil.

  He looked at me like I was the only thing he saw, not the stairs or the window or the trees swaying outside. He understood, without judgment or surprise. It was like our surfaces were peeled off and it was just our cores. He didn’t ask for details; he didn’t show the eager hunger. He just listened.

  “What bothers me most of all is that I don’t know what he felt in those last minutes. What happened to his body. Sometimes it upsets me more than even the fact that he’s dead—that I don’t know if he passed out and died peacefully, or if he felt pain . . . or if he was sort of asleep . . .” I had to stop and speak more slowly and keep my voice level. “It matters for some reason. I don’t know why. But it matters.”

  “Of course it matters.”

  Once I started telling him things, I couldn’t stop. “My mom got rid of all his stuff after he died, but one of his ties was hidden in a ball in the corner of their closet. She made this horrible groan when she found it months later, like she was so mad that he still had stuff in our house. She threw the tie in the garbage.”

  He stared at me, listening.

  “After she went to bed, I fished it out of the trash. I had to wash coffee grounds off it and egg and tomato sauce and it took me forever, it was silk, so I bought this special silk cleaner and spent three days getting the stains out. It actually looks pretty good now. I keep it in my shoe box. I only have a few things of his, and I hide them in my closet in a shoe box.”

  I’d never told anyone, besides Annie, about the shoe box. It had seemed too weird, keeping his receipt and candy wrappers and stuff hidden in my own closet. But Will was looking at me, not judging or anything, just staring at me patiently—it was okay to tell him; he was nodding like he understood exactly why I spent three days washing that tie.

  “I wish I could’ve met him,” Will said.

  “I can show you some candy wrappers. It sort of brings him back.”

  I took a tissue out of my bag and wiped my nose. We were quiet for a while, sitting on the stairs.

  Will said, “I almost killed myself—not on purpose—when I was a kid. We lived on the second floor of a brownstone, and one night I sat on the fire escape and I just jumped. I was eight. I guess I thought if I hurt myself really bad, it would make him come back.”

  I asked if that was where the scar on his chin was from. He nodded.

  “I also kind of thought that if my brother was dead, maybe I should be dead too. Or that maybe I could bring him back. I barely even remember my brother, but I still think about him all the time.” He paused. “I guess you never stop missing them.”

  You never stop missing them. It was a simple thing to say. But I’d never heard anyone say it before. Not the grief counselors. Not my mom. Everyone seemed to think the opposite: you moved on, you forgot, it was impolite to keep talking about it. My mom had stopped missing my dad years ago.

  We stayed on the stairs for a long time. I sat quietly in his arms until he said, “I want to show you something.” He picked up my bag again. He started up the staircase. It led to the south tower, the closed-off part of the school.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  We kept climbing the winding steps, higher and higher. At the third floor he stopped by a black door. “My coach came up here to propose to his fiancée two days ago. I snuck the champagne up here for him. He forgot to ask for the key back.”

  He opened the door.

  The walled garden looked like a surreal kingdom: birds fluttering, a blanket of weeds and tall grass and spindly dark trees sprouting from clouds of ferns and wildflowers. How was it possible that this place existed? A stone path wound through the terrace. Beyond the wall, the sun was setting, and the buildings around the park glowed like a bracelet of lights.

  “Listen,” he said.

  The wind whispered through the trees. We were in another world.

  I saw the giant stone table from the photo book. Will went over to it and brushed off the dirt, dead leaves, and branches, clearing a spot for us to sit. Its surface was cracked, with grass growing in the crevices.

  The sun dipped behind the buildings in the distance. He picked up a leaf and tore the stem off. He reached into his bag. “Here—I got these for you.” He handed me five copies of the Urbanwords book. “They had them stacked on a table outside the auditorium. I read your poem.”

  This was my poem:

  Fathers

  My father died two years ago.

  My mother met her new friend Larry

  at a Children of Holocaust Survivors

  social in the back room of Meredith’s Restaurant

  in Bayside, Queens. Apparently it’s a regular

  meat market at these things. They laughed

  and drank and flirted over cocktail knishes

  and cheap wine and shared familial genocide.

  No one actually discussed the shared familial genocide.

  It was just there, I guess, like the wine

  and the desperation. My mother never talks about her family’s

  history. Her mother escaped Poland during the Holocaust.

  But she never spoke of it either.

  Not once. I called my grandmother

  Bubbe 409 because she had a bottle of Formula 409

  permanently attached to her hand.

  She died when I was eight.

  My mom’s dad died when she was a teenager.

  Larry’s father survived Dachau.

  My dad’s parents survived

  the war in London. They died before I was born.

  My father’s grave is in Westchester but we never go see him there.

  A bad poem. It wasn’t even a poem really, just a bunch of sad and depressing lines chopped up into verses. I wondered why I’d even wanted my mom to come today. She’d probably keel over when she read it. I’d published private details about my dad and generations of our family. She’d murder me. What had I been thinking? Well, I knew what I’d been thinking: if she read the poem, maybe she’d be forced to talk about him again.

  “I know it sucks,” I said. “I wrote it
on the back of a Fresh Direct receipt.”

  “It sucks beautifully,” he said.

  The air felt chilly now. He took a fleece pullover out of his backpack and offered it to me. I pulled the soft navy sleeves over my arms.

  We were quiet. I kept thinking: as long as I’m with him, everything will be okay. I remembered catching my parents kissing on the bench in the park, how happy they were back then, a happiness I’d always wanted and that I finally felt now, for the first time.

  The trees swayed. There was a gentle sound, a bird, maybe an owl. We were in an owl-filled castle, a mansion that had been used for waltzes and parties a hundred years ago. Up there on that roof, it suddenly seemed that anything was possible. The world was literally at our feet. The sky turned the strange orangey-gray color it often was on city nights. I used to hate that color and wish for a deep velvet or indigo sky, a romance-novel sky. Now I loved this sky.

  He sat on top of the stone table and looked toward the park. He knit his hands together in a way I’d never seen him do before—his fingers touching each other, then moving apart.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “We didn’t find a new apartment,” he said.

  “Oh no. How long will you keep looking?”

  He shook his head. “We’re not looking anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gazed at me again, that intense stare. “We’re getting evicted from our old one. I didn’t think our landlord would actually go through with it, but he is. We’ve looked for a new place nonstop, but there’s nothing we can afford. My mom finally decided to move in with her best friend, into her one-bedroom apartment. She doesn’t have another choice. She wants me to move in with them too. I can’t. It’s crazy. That’s why I was out of school this week. We’re trying to figure all this out.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “My mom’s declared bankruptcy on the bakery. We’re getting evicted from there, too. I’m not moving into her friend’s place.” He shook his head.

  “Then where will you go?”

  “Only place I can go. My dad’s.”

  I froze. “What?”

  “I’m moving in with him,” he said quietly.

  “I thought he lives in California?”

  He nodded and stared out toward the park. “I’m taking a red-eye tomorrow night. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you.” His voice was soft.

  He told me his father’s wedding was this Sunday—the wedding I’d seen the invitation for, but I hadn’t looked at the date. Mrs. Jerkface. He was supposed to go for two nights and come right back, but now he was going to stay and live with his dad until his freshman year started.

  I couldn’t look at his face. Everything I’d imagined us doing this summer—taking the poetry class, going to the Strand, reading books in cafés, writing—evaporated.

  “It’s not such a big deal. I’ll be back soon to see my mom,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  My eyes focused on a light blinking in the park. I thought of cholera and typhus and tornadoes. It’s not such a big deal. It could be worse. Annie and I always said Could be worse whenever we didn’t do as well on a test or a paper as we’d hoped, or didn’t win an award we thought we might get—it was a joke between us, but there was something real to it, too. Whenever I said could be worse, I thought of my dad. It had been worse. The worst had happened. Nothing else could be that bad again.

  Will wasn’t dead. He was just going to California. It would be okay. He’d be back soon.

  He touched my wrist. Slowly, his fingers stroked my arm, my elbow, my collarbone, my neck. My skin felt like it could slip off my body.

  He kissed me. His hand crept up my back, his fingers wound through my hair, my mind danced and catapulted and shouted HE’S KISSING ME and MORE. My brain no longer felt connected to the rest of me. I looked at him but felt almost afraid to look at him—his hair, so thick and dark as chocolate, the pale scar on his chin. I was scared to look in his eyes, that he might see what I was feeling. That he might see the love that had been there all along, waiting so many months for this.

  Every bad feeling I’d ever had, the stomach bugs, the griefy grief, disappeared. Each kiss removed the bad things from the past—erased them, brushed them away.

  We spent the night in the roof garden. Later, when Annie asked me, I said nothing happened. I meant no clothes had come off. But everything had happened. Everything had changed.

  Wild nights

  After the sun came up, he drove me home. He parked two blocks away from my building; I didn’t want to take any chance that my mom might see us. I’d texted her last night before my ten-o’clock curfew and told her I was spending the night at Annie’s.

  “When will you be back?” I tried to sound normal, my voice even, casual.

  He smiled. “Soon.” He said it factually, without a doubt.

  Soon.

  “When?”

  “I’ll be back in New York in December.”

  December wasn’t soon. It seemed five thousand years away. There was no way I could wait till December.

  He saw the look on my face and said, “Come see me in California.” He said it so matter-of-factly, as if I could pop out there in a second, any time I wanted.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

  At that moment, even though we only had a few more minutes together, his leaving didn’t seem real. Our night together, our kiss on 96th Street, our whole friendship, had lasted a million years. Of course we’d see each other in California. Soon. We had to. Because this was so rare and strange and happy, there was no way it could end when we said good-bye.

  We kissed again and my mind blurred, and I thought how until now I’d never known what it was like to be kissed. Spell-casting kisses, kisses that take off layers of your soul, that split you open.

  There’s no way you can be kissed like that and not have it change you.

  It was like his kiss took a part of me into him, and I had to go find him to get that part back.

  Or to let him keep it, and to give him more.

  I wished that grief group had been led by Rosamunde Saunders. She would’ve told the truth. She would’ve told me: What you need to do, Eva, is find someone to love you. Not a parent—that’s not replaceable. We know that. Nothing you can do about that. What you need is one goddamn romantic dude who will love you like you’ve never been loved before. When you’ve found that person, someone who understands your secrets and sadness, don’t let him slip away.

  Go get him.

  PART TWO

  THE SMARTEST GIRL IN AMERICA

  if i were a poet

  i’d kidnap you

  —nikki giovanni

  47,500,000 ways to get to California when you have no money

  Will sent letters. Real letters, just like Sir Richard, Lord Ellis, and Gurlag did (though Gurlag’s were written on birch bark in ink brewed from blackberries).

  We’d only spoken once since he left two and a half weeks ago—he’d called on his ancient phone and we got cut off when his minutes ran out, and he hadn’t called again since. He’d given me the number to his father’s landline, but I’d called it once and a woman said, “Jim Freeman’s line, how may I help you?” and I’d been so nervous, I hung up.

  I remembered how he’d told me that Gia complained about his phone not being charged or prepaid. “I hate being interrupted. I don’t always want people to find me.” He’d said the words find me as if they were a punishment.

  “If I didn’t have a cell phone, my mom would probably implant one in my head,” I’d told him.

  In some ways, letters were even better, though. I sent him the reading list for the Poetry Society class we’d planned to take together, and he’d look up the writers’ work online and copy out a poem he liked, sometimes by hand and sometimes on his typewriter. So far he’d sent three letters with poems: Yehuda Amichai’s “A Letter,” Nikki Giovanni’s “Kidnap Poem,” and Marie Howe�
��s “What the Living Do.” Today I’d received this:

  Hi from the land of sunshine and plastic surgery. The wedding gifts for my dad and his wife (I can’t say stepmother—it sounds like she’d be ordering me to sweep the floor) keep coming. You wouldn’t believe what rich people buy. Someone sent a “gardening kit”—three bags of soil, compost, and fertilizer. No joke. They sent fertilizer. I couldn’t have come up with a better gift myself.

  I miss New York. Miss you.

  I felt the paper, soft as cloth, and could almost smell soap and sugar. The thought of him hovered behind everything now, like a shadow.

  I hadn’t had a stomach bug day since our night on the roof. I wrote back to him:

  I’m coming to see you. I’m not sure when I’ll get there yet—still working out the plan—but hopefully it’ll be really soon.

  I clipped out the latest newspaper article about the wreckage. There was little progress. We’d been waiting for the specialized recovery boats to reach the site, and they’d finally arrived, but the robotic submarine they used to travel to the wreckage took twelve to sixteen hours from the surface, and they’d been delayed by bad weather and storms. More waiting. I wrote:

  You were right—you never stop missing them.

  I always debated every word, writing and rewriting it.

  “You should send some of your own poems back to him,” Annie suggested.

  “I haven’t been writing any poems,” I said. I hadn’t had the urge to stand at the kitchen counter and scrawl on another Fresh Direct receipt. It was easier to pack those feelings away and read romances instead. After that night with Will, when I showed Annie the article about the plane crash being found, she’d said exactly what I wanted to hear. “‘A happy discovery,’” she quoted when she finished reading the newspaper report. “Happy. It’s nice how people always know the right thing to say.”

  I’d laughed.

  “The NTSB should send you a giant balloon that says Happy Discovery!”