Kissing in America Read online

  One of the reasons Annie is my best friend is because she understands how funny and absurd all this is. My mom of course didn’t find the whole thing funny at all. When I got home from seeing Will, I’d asked her if she’d seen the news. Her lips were thin and tight. “Yes,” she said in the high-pitched voice she used when she wanted to pretend something wasn’t happening, and then changed the subject. Afterward, she went to her office. On a Saturday.

  Now, after we finished our summer classes in the morning, Annie and I worked at her parents’ laundromat all afternoon; her mom paid us to do the wash-and-fold for the drop-off service. Outside, a heat wave had struck the city, and even the blacktop seemed to melt. Inside the laundromat, the gas dryers made it even hotter.

  I glanced at the row of framed academic prize certificates Annie’s mom displayed behind the cash register—Annie’s sisters, Jenny and Lala, called it the Annie Shrine, with a roll of their eyes. Jenny and Lala were always calling Annie “14C.” (14C was the apartment where their neighbor, a retired, never-married scientist, lived alone with her six cats. She rarely appeared except to welcome delivery boys carrying groceries and kitty litter. Nobody knew she’d died until the hallway began to smell and Animal Control came and took away the cats.)

  Jenny and Lala worked weekend shifts at the laundromat, which they hated, and weekday shifts at American Eagle in Queens Center mall, which they loved. They were happy to let Annie shoulder all their parents’ hopes.

  Annie never complained about the pressure from her parents, mostly because academics came naturally to her, and she was the most ambitious person I knew. She wanted to do big things. It rubbed off on me—I wanted big things, too. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life exactly, but I definitely didn’t want to stay in Queens forever, watching the Empire State Building looming over 43rd Avenue in the distance, as if it were taunting us.

  Annie tossed a bag of men’s clothes into a washing machine and tugged at her latex gloves. That day, a woman in her seventies had dropped off a giant bag of G-strings; a tall guy handed over a sack of lace lingerie, size 44W, and he had no wife or girlfriend that we ever saw; and when a woman with a baby came through the door, we wanted to hide. I had no idea what a little baby could do to clothing. It was terrifying.

  If I did write Will a poem, it would sound like this:

  Seeing you is the only thing

  keeping me going while washing and folding

  old G-strings

  man undies

  and stinky onesies

  with rubber gloves on

  and if it wasn’t for you

  I’d read the newspaper articles

  about my dad

  over and over and over

  feeling worse

  and worse

  but I don’t

  because I think of you.

  I couldn’t send that. It was bad, it was too much, and I wasn’t that brave or that crazy.

  We finished the folding while the dryers thumped and the washers whirred, and then we took a break. Annie studied, poring over her Animal Behavior: Mechanisms, Ecology, Evolution textbook, and I did homework and Googled. Every day since Will left I searched:

  free bus New York to California

  free train cross-country

  must get to LA broke

  I had no idea how I was going to get to California. I couldn’t fly—just the thought of getting on a plane almost gave me another panic attack. My mom had been afraid of flying even before my dad died, and she hated to leave New York. When he was alive, we never even visited our cousins in London because she couldn’t stand the idea of getting on a plane; my dad visited them alone on business trips. “New York has everything,” my mom always said. “Why would you need to leave?” I’d only left New York the handful of times my parents took me along to visit their friends in New Jersey and Connecticut. I didn’t think it even counted as travel if you’d never left the tristate area.

  I kept Googling, and I fantasized about finding a bag of money on the street. I saved all the money I made, but it would still take me the entire summer to save enough for the bus fare—it was cheaper than the train—and food along the way. By then it would be time to go back to school.

  I couldn’t ask my mom for the money. Her elbows tensed whenever a bill arrived, and she often said how much she hoped that I could go to the Honors College at Queens College, where she taught, for free. Though even if we did have the money, she’d never let me go see Will. How could I even ask her? Oh, by the way, I fell in love with this guy, so I’m going to travel to LA by myself, don’t you love that idea ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha?

  I had to find a way to get there. I kept thinking that if I could find a last-minute internship out there, or some reason that my mom would approve of, then I wouldn’t even have to mention Will to her.

  There had to be a way. Buried in the internet, there had to be something.

  I kept Googling.

  need job internship student free travel LA no flying desperate now PLEASE

  There were contests sponsored by travel agencies (but you had to be eighteen to enter), sketchy-sounding real estate brokers, and some particularly skeezy-looking sites that sounded like they were abducting girls into slavery.

  My legs stuck to my plastic chair as I waded through www.be-a-courier.com, www.freestudenttravel.com, and sites casting for reality TV.

  Are YOU a Female Athlete Who Has Overcome a Devastating Illness?

  Are YOU a Promzilla?

  Do YOU Own Lots of Cats and Need a Boyfriend?

  And then I read this:

  Are YOU the Smartest Girl in America?

  Are you taking college-level courses as a high school sophomore? Do you read math books for fun? Do you feel like your academic achievements are worlds ahead? How would you like to earn a full college scholarship worth $200,000? Reel Life, Real Teenz Productions is looking for the smartest teens across the country for a new game show that will crown the Smartest Girl in America this summer.

  I clicked links; it sounded like an ordinary quiz show taped in Burbank, except it featured teen girls vying for scholarships. The show would be broadcast on a new cable network; the scholarships were funded by various corporations and a nonprofit called Girls Strive (their mission statement: “Fostering Female Academic Achievement.”) Casting calls were taking place right now in cities all over the country, including New York.

  I answered the Sample Test Questions. “What are the names of the Brontë sisters?” Easy: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne (I read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in English class, and they were basically romances). But “What scientist and peace activist discovered the concepts of orbital hybridization and electronegativity?” “Which Nobel prize winner is also the mother of another Nobel prize winner?” and “One hundred people are in a room. How many handshakes can take place between any two people?” I had no idea.

  I touched Annie’s elbow and asked her the handshake question.

  She thought for five seconds. “Four thousand nine hundred and fifty,” she said.

  “What scientist and peace activist discovered the concepts of orbital hybridization and electronegativity?”

  “Linus Pauling.” She answered instantly, with a yawn.

  “Which Nobel prize winner is also the mother of another Nobel prize winner?”

  She glanced at me as if I was a bit dim. “Marie Curie and her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie. Marie Curie is the only woman to have won the Nobel twice, and the first person to win in two different fields. Her daughter won for chemistry in 1935 for discovering artificial radioactivity.”

  I wasn’t the smartest girl in America. But Annie was.

  If Marie Curie would do it, you should too

  It’s not happening. No way.” Annie shut the dryer door with a clang.

  “Think of it as an honor. Marie Curie would’ve kicked ass on this show. And every quiz show on the planet.”

  “No self-respecting int
elligent person would go on a show produced by people who spell teens with a z.”

  At least I hadn’t asked her to be on Promzillas.

  “You love reality shows though,” I said.

  “Because they’re like rubbernecking at a traffic accident. I don’t want to be on one.” She opened another dryer, removed a load, and dumped it into one of the huge rolling metal baskets. “They’re not looking for the smartest girl. They’re looking for the girl who’s most willing to flash her underwear or make out with someone just to get on TV.”

  “That’s not true. Look. It’s sponsored by Girls Strive. They’re fostering female academic achievement.”

  She wheeled the basket to the folding table. “I can’t believe you want me to go on a crazy show just because you’ve got a crush on some guy.”

  “It’s not a crush on some guy. It’s Will. It’s the real thing. I have to see him again. We have limbic resonance. He resonates my limbs.”

  She pointed at me. “Dopamine. Your brain is flooded with dopamine and norepinephrine every time you think of him, which makes you act kind of nuts. And by the way, those are the same brain chemicals associated with falling in love and with drug addicts and people with OCD.”

  I folded a fitted sheet. “I’m not a drug addict and I don’t have OCD. I just want to see him again. I have to.”

  She shook her head. “‘Smart girl’ and ‘reality TV game show’ should not be in the same sentence.”

  “The grand prize is a two hundred thousand dollar scholarship.”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars for whoever strips naked on TV.”

  “It’s not like that.” I went back to the computer and read more of the site, in case I’d missed a sentence requiring everyone to be naked.

  An hour later, I’d read everything. There was nothing about being naked. In fact, the more I read, the better it sounded. One of the show’s sponsors was the Mirabelle Resort, an oceanside hotel that was offering three nights’ free lodging to contestants and their companions. When I clicked a link to the “Companion” page, it said that contestants were allowed to bring a friend, sibling, or parent who would serve as their lifeline, offering help whenever they floundered on a question. “Every time the companion successfully answers a question, they will receive a ten thousand dollar cash prize,” I read aloud. “The companion will have the opportunity to earn up to fifty thousand dollars.”

  With $50,000 I could move to California.

  “We have to do this,” I said.

  Annie had been collecting scholarship information for years—she had folders full of applications for grants and loans. She dreamed of going to MIT; she drooled over pictures of their laboratories and had lists of all the classes she wanted to take. But MIT cost an insane amount of money.

  “You told me once that the only way to make sure you get a scholarship is to apply for as many as possible,” I said. “Just read it. Read the site. Please?”

  She put down the laundry, sat in front of the computer, and squinted at every page of the site like she was expecting it to reveal a diabolical darker purpose.

  I stood at the table matching socks. “You’re a shoo-in,” I told her. “If you win, you’ll have college completely paid for. You can go to MIT and study brain chemicals and chromosomes and animal behavior for four whole years and not worry about financial aid or loans or anything. What’s there to lose?”

  “My self-respect? My pride in not having anything embarrassing about myself on the internet?”

  “You were thinking of trying field hockey just so you could get a sports scholarship. This would involve a lot less pain and humiliation.” And with our athletic abilities, the only sport we qualified for was the Scrabble team.

  She tilted her head and studied the site for a long time, reading every page and sidebar and pop-up window. Eventually, her face began to soften, and she got that dreamy look she often had when gazing at the pages of Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory.

  “It says, ‘Professors from Princeton and Cornell are developing the quiz show questions,’” she read aloud. “They’ve even linked to the professors’ websites.” She read their bios. “I guess this is legit,” she whispered. “It says, ‘The grand prize winner will also have the opportunity to attend a summer program at the National Science Foundation, the Princeton Laboratory Learning Program, or’”—her voice thickened— “‘the MIT Research Science Institute.’”

  Her face flushed. She looked the way I did when I read about Gurlag or dingle starries.

  “Do you know how hard it is to get a spot in MIT’s RSI program?” she asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s almost impossible.”

  She stared dazedly at a dryer for a moment, then started typing. I set down the socks and peered around the computer screen. She’d typed her name and address into the online form. She paused. “This is crazy,” she said.

  She bit her lip. Her fingers hovered over the Enter button.

  “Two hundred thousand dollars,” I said.

  She sat still.

  “An internship. And four years at MIT completely and utterly free.”

  She pressed the button.

  Reel life

  The waiting room of Reel Life, Real Teenz Productions on West 23rd Street swarmed with girls. One stared at the book on her lap so hungrily, it looked like she wanted to eat it; another listened to her earphones and chanted mathematical theorems. In Latin.

  Annie had been in the audition for over two hours. I was getting worried. We hadn’t told our moms we were coming—we’d decided to tell them only if we got picked, since Annie’s mom would probably expect her to get chosen, and my mom would freak out and find a million new things to worry about.

  Would they pick us? They had to pick us.

  She stood beside Will on the deck of his ship, the Black Dawn, off the coast of California. She smelled the wind and sea and his wild manly tang.

  “I waited a fortnight until word came that I was to see you again, dear Eva. But I’d wait an entire lifetime for you.” He kissed her with a fiery, ancient need and carried her to his love grotto.

  “You okay? You look dazed,” said the curly-haired girl sitting beside me. She wore a navy skirt, white knee socks, saddle shoes, and a navy blazer embroidered with “Lillian Birch School” in gold thread, even though it was a Saturday.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Hey—good move, wearing the uniform.”

  She shrugged and scratched beneath her sock. “My friend I’m here with wanted me to wear it in case it helps. No uniform at your school?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.” If my school had uniforms, they would be orange jumpsuits, since the powers that be seemed to try to re-create the experience of prison as closely as possible. Guards at the front doors, metal detectors. ID numbers. I sometimes thought that we were part of some disturbing psychological experiment being performed on New York City public school kids. I thought again of the photo book Will had showed me, and the roof garden. The other world on top of our school, that barely anybody but us even knew about—I hoped that the next time Will was back in New York, we could somehow sneak up there again.

  “At least you don’t have to wear white knee socks and saddle shoes every day,” the girl said. She adjusted her matching navy headband.

  “True,” I said, but I wondered if we’d be any match for the private school set.

  A few minutes later her friend returned. She was about six feet tall and wore the same uniform. A blond version of Gia Lopez. She smiled and held up a golden envelope. They both squealed.

  “Good luck,” the curly-haired girl said to me as they headed out of the waiting room. “Maybe we’ll see you in LA.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I drummed my fingers on my lap and then turned on my phone. The Wi-Fi network was named ReelTeenzDrama­Queenz. That didn’t bode well. As always, my Crapphone took an ice age to connect.

  Sitting there in the waiting room al
one, with the fate of my future in the hands of some TV game show producers, I felt my chest beginning to hurt.

  Don’t panic.

  Annie would get chosen. We’d get to LA. We had to.

  The anxiety always built slowly, simmering. I was afraid everything could change again in a second. Someone could die. Someone could stop loving you. Tragedy was always peeking around the corner.

  I tried to ignore the pain in my ribcage. I needed company. I opened a new window on my phone and went to the message board.

  There were 102 new messages.

  The recorders have been recovered. It will be announced to the media tomorrow. It will take a week or more to examine them and see if the data is intact, and then several more weeks to transcribe and analyze it. We’ve waited this long to know. It will only be a month or two longer. The bad news is they still can’t retrieve the second part of the wreckage from the ocean floor. He assured me they’ll keep trying.

  Fran (husband Frank, daughter Lisa, 22C, 22D)

  I’m relieved that after years of waiting, we’ll finally have answers.

  Erin Farwell (Malcom, 19E)

  I read the messages one by one. My blood pounded in my ears. I wanted to know what the data said—what had happened, how he died, what he felt—but I was scared to hear the answers, too.

  In a grief group session after the crash, a girl had asked Wonderboob if she thought her mother and little brother, who’d been on her mom’s lap in the back of the plane, had been afraid. Wonderboob said no. She said it was common for passengers to fall unconscious from the sudden change in cabin pressure. They wouldn’t know what was happening. They wouldn’t be afraid.

  It was so swift, they never felt a thing, she said.

  I ask you: How did she know that? Have they done studies, dropping people at hundreds of miles per hour and tearing their limbs apart, then asking them how they felt? How could they possibly know this? How could they know?

  On the message board a year later, the subject came up again. Fran said the unconscious theory wasn’t always the case. Unfortunately the passengers might have felt the plane’s violent lurching movements and have known what was happening. Or so Fran said.