Authors: Rachel Vail
“Hi,” he said.
“You couldn’t sleep?” I managed in a whisper.
“No,” he whispered back.
“Me neither.”
We stood there, for a silent minute.
“I’m not great at sleeping,” he said. “You either?”
Usually I am a champion sleeper; it is my best sport. I might go to the Olympics in sleeping. But instead of bragging about that, I whispered, “I like it out here, in the night.”
“It’s nice,” he whispered back.
After another silent-except-for-crickets minute, I let a “Yeah” float out.
“You brought cookies,” he said.
“Well, I can’t draw, so …”
His cheeks burned red as he fingered his pad. He didn’t say anything.
“Just kidding. I mean, not about that I can’t draw, because I can’t, truly, don’t even doodle in math class, but I just, you look like I caught you doing something embarrassing, so I just thought, well, a joke will diffuse the—obviously, though, it didn’t! More trees? Are you drawing?” I ran out of breath, thankfully, so I stopped talking.
He shrugged.
“Can I see this one?”
“No.”
“Why not? Is it for me?” Cringe. Die.
“I don’t—show people. Anybody.”
“Fine, that’s fine. Sure.”
Impasse. Okeydokey, then.
After another horrid moment of silence, Kevin said, “I’m color-blind.”
“Really?” I put down the bag of cookies on the table beside his closed pad. “Color-blind?”
“Pretty pathetic, for someone who wants to be an artist, huh?”
“Actually,” I said, “I think it’s kind of cool.”
“You do?”
“Well, to see things differently from everybody else? Yeah.”
He shook his head. “It’s not—I never thought of it that way.”
“You want to be an artist?”
“Yeah. Stupid, right? Everybody wants to be an artist, every little kid.”
“I don’t,” I whispered. “I never did. Maybe only artists think that, when they’re little.”
“What do you want to be?”
I shrugged, trying to think of a goal other than kissing or not kissing him. Save the world from evil? Cure cancer? Win Tess back? Invent a calorie-burning cookie?
“When you were little,” he persisted. “What did you want to be?”
I smiled. “A teenager.”
“Most likely to succeed.”
“Talk about a stupid wish, huh?”
“Not as much fun as you’d imagined?” He kept his lake-blue eyes latched on to mine, though his head was ducked down.
“It has its moments,” I whispered.
“Mmmm,” he answered. His smile, that slow, sexy one, spread his mouth and revealed his white teeth. With no choice in the matter, I stood watching. He watched me back.
A shiver shook my body. I wrapped my arms around myself.
He stepped toward me, closer, closer, stopping my thoughts dead. Inches from me, centimeters, he whispered, “Chuck.”
We stared at each other, and for once I didn’t fill the silence with inane babbles. Just breath.
“I don’t think … ,” I finally whispered.
“Good,” he said. “Don’t think.”
“No,” I whispered. “I mean …”
“Shhh.”
“This is probably a very bad idea, us being out here like this, together in the middle …”
“Very bad,” he echoed.
“Yes, for so many reasons, so we should …”
“Shhh. Can I kiss you?” he asked, his face so close to mine I could feel the heat from it on my cheeks. “I really want to kiss you.”
I don’t think so.
Not a good idea.
What if our parents walk out here right now?
What if your sister sleepwalks?
I’m not even sure if I actually like you.
Kissing you outside that other time practically wrecked my life.
Who are you to me?
We shouldn’t.
“Yes,” I said.
He smiled a millimeter and then tipped his head toward mine, his eyes closing.
We met in the middle, our lips touching lightly, so lightly you could barely qualify it as a kiss, so lightly there might have remained a molecule of air between my mouth and his, until, after a moment, there wasn’t even that, and then, just as soon, there was, again, the movement as imperceptible as it was unwilled.
We looked at each other, with questions in our eyes. And then I lifted my hands and threaded my fingers into his hair and pulled his mouth to mine.
We breathed each other, kisses upon kisses—faster and harder, more intense—then slower, soft, tender. Soon we were pressing tight against each other and then soft again, a rhythm like unheard music—on and on it played … until the trees began to clarify themselves out of the darkness and then, blinking, we let the air fill in the space between us again.
Our lips, a bit bruised and swollen, smiled a little. There was nothing to say, no pretending this was just a slightly flirty
good night
between two not-quite-friends who happen to live together. We both knew we had to get inside, in the silence of the brightening dawn, before anybody found us.
He held the deck door open for me. I tiptoed past him to the kitchen. While I was tossing the unopened bag of cookies onto the counter, he grabbed a pear from the fruit bowl and bit in. Slurping, he held it out to me.
“No,” I whispered. “Remember? Those pears sucked.”
“On Monday. Monday pears are hard and unripe. But it’s Thursday now. Bite.”
I took a bite. He was right. It was perfect, juicy and full of pear flavor. I stretched to take another just as he pulled the pear away and took one himself. We cracked up silently, and then he held it out again to me—but yanked it away before I could bite and took it for himself. So I had to grab his wrist and hold the pear steady to get another one in. “Yum,” I whispered. He took a last bite before holding it out toward my mouth. Despite the sticky mess, sharing that pear felt even more intimate than the kisses out on the deck.
By the time he tossed the core into the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink, the light coming through the window was dayish enough to see each other clearly. His hair was rumpled and his lips were puffy red, with a bit of pear juice just off the center. I’m sure I looked similarly worse (or better) for wear.
He wiped his sticky hands on his pajama pants and grabbed my hand. “Come on,” he whispered.
Our hands stuck together as we dashed around the corner to the stairs. He stopped short on the landing. Our parents were behind a door just above us. I made a face like
Go! Go!
He grinned back at me, leaned toward me.
I shook my head and pushed him up the steps.
At his room, he stopped again and turned around, grabbing me by the sleeve of my fleece and pulling me toward him. “This is fun,” he whispered in my ear.
There was a noise from behind our parents’ door. His eyes opened wide and mine did, too. I scurried down the hall. At my bedroom door, I turned around. His head was peeking out from behind his.
“See you at breakfast,” he mouthed.
I rolled my eyes and dove into my bed. My mother’s alarm clock buzzed before I was fully under my covers. I froze, listening, as some whispering and then some giggling wafted down the hall from her room toward my unwilling ears, until I had the sense to cover my head with my pillow.
In the silence and darkness, I didn’t plot out how in holy hell I was going to get through breakfast and the day of school—Spirit Day, I remembered in my fog; have to wear a purple shirt. But I didn’t jump up to make sure my purple shirt was clean, or contemplate what I had gotten myself into and how many ways it could end in complete catastrophe (and how few, well, how
zero
ways it could end well). Or whether I’d tell Tess what had just happened. Nope. I fell asleep thinking forward twenty hours or so, to when maybe we could meet out on the deck again.
I BLAME THE
lack of sleep. But when my mother announced at breakfast that she had changed her mind about my sleepover Saturday, I think I was slightly justified in losing it, even if I had been in a normal state of mind.
Though how could I possibly be in a normal state of mind in front of Kevin and his family at breakfast, while having a should-be-private conversation with my mother despite my kiss-swollen lips?
She changed her mind. Saturday wasn’t going to work after all.
“But I already invited people,” I protested. “Tess will be so—I can’t just cancel!”
“People?” Joe asked. “How many people were you planning on?”
“Excuse me?” I said. “I wasn’t talking to—”
“Charlie,” Mom interrupted. “We just think—”
“We?” I may have been yelling by this point. Just what I did not need was to cancel on Tess.
“Charlie,” Mom said in a
Calm down NOW
voice. “Joe and I discussed it—and …”
“And he said no?”
She opened her eyes wide at me like
Let’s discuss this later, not in public
, but we were not in public; we were in our own kitchen. And she was letting this guy take over what I was allowed to do or not even after she gave permission.
“That’s not fair, Mom,” I said.
“Charlie, come on now.”
“Why can I suddenly not have friends sleep over?”
“Well, for one thing, what about Kevin? It doesn’t sound fair to …”
“He could invite some of his friends over, too,” I suggested, trying to sound both spontaneous and reasonable. “I don’t mind. That’s fine.”
“Never gonna happen,” Joe said. “Coed sleepover? Ah, no.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Mom said, her hand on Joe’s arm. “My point was, I wasn’t really thinking of this when I said yes, but now I realize it could be uncomfortable, for Kevin, to suddenly have five girls …”
“Five?” Joe asked.
“Doesn’t sound uncomfortable to me,” Kevin piped up. “Sounds like my birthday and Christmas all wrapped up in—”
“Kevin!” Joe said, but I could see he was sucking his smile in, trying not to laugh. Every once in a while, I get a glimpse of Joe’s fun side and it really throws me off.
“Hey, that’s a good idea,” Mom said.
We all turned to her, like,
what
is a good idea?
“Why don’t you postpone, have the sleepover during spring break? Kevin and Sam will be out west, so you and your friends can have some space, and …”
“I’m going to Dad’s,” I objected.
Mom hesitated.
“I’m not going to Dad’s?”
“He’s taking his wife and ABC to Paris that week.”
“I thought he hated France,” I said, despite completely not wanting to discuss this in front of the Lazarus family.
Mom’s lower jaw tightened twice. She raised her eyebrows while shaking her head and said, “I thought he did, too.” A small, mirthless chuckle escaped her.
“He’s not taking me with them?” I asked in an unfamiliarly small voice. Not that I would want to go on vacation with them, where I’d basically be an unpaid nanny, but still.
“Maybe call your father later to discuss it?” Mom suggested. “And also the job thing? But meanwhile, wouldn’t that be a better idea, postponing your sleepover until then?”
I shook my head, not trusting my voice, not trusting anything.
“Sure! You girls can rent some movies, and I’ll get one of those tubs of popcorn for you, and Joe and I will mostly stay upstairs, and it won’t be so awkward for Kevin, and it will all be good.”
“The end,” Samantha said without lifting her head from the book she was reading. She said it like the narrator at the end of a sweet little tale for children. I had to laugh a tiny bit at that.
“We gotta run,” Kevin said, and thrust my bag at me. “Bye!”
We were out the door before I could even continue arguing or figure out what had happened.
“I can’t believe her,” I grumbled on our dash to the bus, which was pulling toward the corner already. “Or my father. Damn. Screw everybody.”
“Better this way,” Kevin said. “We’ll tell them they can go out for dinner Saturday, then get Sam to sleep early …”
I opened my mouth in disbelief and gave him a little shove.
“I was just thinking we’d watch a movie,” he said. “You’re the one with the dirty mind.”
“So are you,” I said, climbing up the bus steps.
“Yeah,” he said. And for the first time, he didn’t pass me to go sit in the back row with Brad. He plopped down next to me instead.
I didn’t ask him anything about his mom or tell him anything about my father. We didn’t talk at all, in fact. For once I didn’t get all awkward and compulsive about filling in the silences. I closed my eyes and slumped beside him, this hot guy I still didn’t know all that well who had just witnessed private, inside family stuff, stuff nobody had gotten to witness before. Maybe somebody with siblings would feel different, but for me, it’s always been me on my own, with only my mom or my dad for
discussions
. It was kind of embarrassing—
whose father disses her like that
? But I’d witnessed some of his secrets, too, I realized. We might tilt our heads down toward our feet during moments of odd family tension, but still there was no way to avoid getting some inside views, simply by living in the same house as each other.