Soul Kiss (14 page)

Daniel and I deliberately didn't talk about any brainiac stuff at the restaurant. The chicken was delicious, crunchy on the outside and juicy inside, but the potato wedges were soggy and the biscuits would have been better at breakfast, smeared with strawberry jam.

When we were finished eating, we went to a strip mall down the road from where Daniel lived in Levittown. The air was crisp and I felt like I could almost see my breath. I took Daniel's hand as we walked down the row of stores, looking in the windows at cell phones and ladies' clothes and photos of kids doing tae kwan do.

A big chain bookstore anchored the far end of the center, and we went into its coffee shop, where we sat back in big overstuffed chairs with fancy coffee drinks, and I read the book about learning disabilities. It took me about the same amount of time--forty-five minutes. And it felt like I had the same level of comprehension. I was also making all kinds of connections in my brain between the things in the book and the ways I had seen Robbie behave, the failed therapies my parents had tried, and the few things that had worked.

"I don't think I'm reading any faster than I was after the first time we kissed," I complained. "So it's not like a cumulative thing."

"Give it time. Maybe it's not an instantaneous thing. You're going to do another experiment tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah. But what if that connection we had was only a one-time thing?"

"You think? You don't feel connected to me anymore?"

"Of course I do. But I don't get those brain flashes anymore."

"Did you have them after the first time?"

I stopped to think. "I don't think so. I mean, I was more caught up in kissing you than in thinking about what was going on with my brain."

He pulled out a small notebook. "Are you writing all this down?" I asked.

"Of course. This is a scientific experiment."

Well, yeah. It was. But it was also me and Daniel kissing, and I didn't think that needed to get written down anywhere.

He started asking me questions from the book. I was amazed at some of the things--like how many different additives and chemicals were in the most ordinary foods, and how some people genetically just weren't prepared to handle them. "Which group of people has the most difficulty digesting lactose?" Daniel asked me.

"Non-Europeans," I said. "Because those people have only been eating milk products for a few generations and their bodies haven't caught up yet."

"Close enough. Explain how nutritional disorders can be connected with behavioral and learning problems in children."

"Jesus, Daniel. How about a couple of easy questions first?" He smiled, and I started to think about the connections.

I must have talked for five minutes before he said, "All right, you understand that. Now how does it relate to your brother?"

I frowned. I didn't like admitting that Robbie's problems might just be outside his control, but that's what all the reading indicated. "When my parents started experimenting with his diet, his behavior got better. I remember the first time he was good the whole time we were at my grandparents' house. It was like all of us could let out a breath we were holding."

"Anything else?"

"He had a lot of those symptoms that ADHD kids have--stuffy nose, all these ear infections, eczema, hives. He couldn't sleep for more than a couple of hours when he was a baby. That's when my mom had to quit her job for a while just to take care of him."

When we had gone through the whole book, I drove Daniel home, and we kissed in the car for a while, with the lights out. It was cold but that was okay, because it made us huddle together more. I had my eyes closed, kissing Daniel, when I sensed a bright light behind us.

"Don't move," Daniel said.

We were slouched down in the backseat, so no one could see us. I heard the booming, rhythmic beat of the bass. It even made the mom-mobile shake as the gangbangers drove past.

Or maybe it was that I was so scared I was shaking. Daniel pressed me closer to him and I buried my face in his thick, wavy hair. We stayed like that until the gangbangers were long gone.

Daniel pulled away from me and said, "You should go. I'll see you on Monday and you can tell me what happens with your experiment." As soon as he got out of the car I locked the doors and turned the car on. I waited until he was in his apartment to back out of the driveway and I drove home very carefully, my hands on the wheel just as my father had taught me.

The next afternoon I went into my father's study to look for a book for our experiment. I found this public relations text that looked about the same length as the history book and the one on behavior. I carried it out to the living room where my father was sprawled on the sofa with the Sunday paper.

"Can you help me with a school project?"

He looked up from the business section. "What do you need?"

"Just time me reading this book, and then ask me some questions about it when I'm done." I held it up to show him.

"That's one of my college texts. It's going to take you a long time to read it."

"Just start the clock, okay?"

"If you say so." He pulled his cell phone out and set the timer, then went back to reading the paper.

I must have been about halfway done when he said, "Are you really reading that? You're turning those pages awful fast."

I looked up. "Yeah. I'm reading about this guy Edward Bernays and how he says public relations is about informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people."

He shook his head. "Don't let me disturb you. Go back to reading."

I did. When I finished the book I looked up and said, "Okay. Stop the clock." He pulled out his phone and stopped it, and I said, "How did I do?"

"Forty-eight minutes."

"Shit."

"Melissa!"

"Sorry, Dad. I was hoping I would read faster."

"I can't believe you read that whole book so quickly. It took me a whole semester."

"No, it probably just took you a few hours over the course of a semester." I handed the book to him. "Here, ask me some questions."

He opened up the book to the end of the first chapter and asked me one of the review questions. I answered it. Then he paged halfway through the book and tried again.

When I finished answering, he shook his head. Then he flipped to the last chapter and asked another question.

"How did you do that?" he asked, when I had finished. "How did you read that so quickly and understand it? Have you always been able to read that fast?"

"I've been studying with Daniel," I said.

He didn't look like he believed me. He was my dad, so I wasn't going to tell him about kissing Daniel. And I didn't think he would believe that some of Daniel's brain cells had gotten into my body when we kissed. So I just started making stuff up. "It's a trick I picked up from him. You just look at the sentence, pick up the key words and move on. You train your brain to act quickly."

He shook his head. "You always tested well, Melissa. But I didn't realize you were a genius."

"I'm not a genius, Dad." I thought back to Algernon the laboratory mouse. "I've just learned to read fast, that's all."

"It's not just about reading. You understand this material. That's comprehension." He looked at me. "When do you get your first report card?"

"Next week."

"I expect to see grades that reflect this ability." He looked at me, as if an idea had just popped into his head. "Is that why you took the SATs again? Because you learned this way of reading from Daniel?"

I shifted around on the sofa. "I guess. I was just curious to see if I could test better."

That night at dinner, I noticed my mom looking at me funny. I was sure my dad had told her about the speed-reading thing, and she was bursting to ask me about it but holding back. Funny, that's not usually her problem. Most of the time she's willing to just dive in to things, like "How has your period been, Melissa?" and "Do you think you need to go up a bra size?" Horrible, embarrassing things. But reading? Ooh, that must be very taboo.

As I was carrying the dishes into the kitchen, where she was loading the dishwasher, her curiosity got the best of her. Of course, though, Robbie was all she thought about. "Do you think you could show your brother this reading trick you learned from Daniel?"

"It's not a trick, Mom. I'm not some performing seal with a ball on my nose."

"Technique, then. Your brother is smart, I know it. But he just can't focus."

What could I say? That she was delusional, that the Big Mistake was a doofus who would probably never even get into college? But then I remembered what I had read about the connection between diet and learning disabilities. "I don't think it will work for him," I said. "His brain is wired differently from mine."

I put the dishes I was carrying into the sink so she could rinse them. "Just a single change in one gene can make a big difference," I said. "And you know neither Daniel nor I are qualified to work with someone with a disability. Suppose he got frustrated because he couldn't learn the way we do and that only made things worse." I went on with the DNA evidence I had read in the book, and I could see my mom's eyes glazing over. Then she looked worried.

"You don't think there's something changing about your DNA, do you?" she asked.

"I wasn't bitten by any mutant spiders, and I didn't fall in any pools of radioactive waste, Mom. I just started learning better."

She closed the dishwasher. "Well, if you do learn anything you think would help Robbie, I hope you'll tell us."

She looked so sad I had to lean over and kiss her cheek. "Of course, Mom."

That freaked her out even more. "Who are you and what have you done with my daughter? You haven't voluntarily kissed me since you were eight years old."

"Mom. You know I love you and Dad. Even Robbie."

As I walked out of the kitchen I heard her muttering, "Aliens. My daughter has been kidnapped by aliens. Now if they could only take my son."

The next day Daniel and I met up in the library to go over the results of our weekend experiments. "It doesn't seem to have made any difference," I said. "It's like it was a one-time thing."

"Two souls meeting for the first time." He tilted his head and smiled goofily, and I could tell he was messing with me.

"A soul kiss," I said. "AKA a French kiss, AKA too much tongue."

"Well, if you didn't like it..."

"I didn't say that." My foot found his under the table.

"Maybe we should try something different." He looked over at me. "I could kiss another girl and see if she get smarter. Like Brie, or Chelsea. Not Mindy, though. Braces."

"No way." I pushed him in the side. "You are not experimenting on any other girl."

We must have been talking too loud because the librarian looked over at us. I quickly ducked down to stare at the computer screen.

"It was just a suggestion," Daniel said. When I looked at him out of the corner of my eye I saw he was smiling.

"A bad one."

We settled down to work. Just before we had to catch the bus, though, Daniel said, "I need to log into my school account before we go. I have to answer a message from Mrs. Goodwin."

She was the school guidance counselor. "Are you in trouble?"

He shook his head. I watched as he called up the school website and logged in. Interesting; his password was CubaL1bre. I hadn't thought he was that in touch with the whole Cuban thing. My mom could probably relate, with her Scots obsession.

Ick. Did I just compare my boyfriend to my mom?

"She just wants to know why I'm not applying to colleges."

"You totally should," I said.

"We went over this, Melissa. I'm not."

I crossed my arms and pouted while he typed his answer, then we walked down to the bus dock together. We held hands until we both had to get on our buses.

When I got home, my mom was in the kitchen making meat loaf for dinner. I wanted to barf. I started to back out of the kitchen but she wouldn't let me. "Stop there. I want to talk to you some more about your speed-reading experiments with Daniel."

Whatever reticence she'd been feeling the night before had evaporated. Great. Next we'd be talking about sanitary napkins and feeling fresh. "It's no big deal," I said. "I can read a lot faster now than I used to be able to. Who cares?"

"Your father thinks you're insecure about your chances of getting into Penn. But I have to tell you that if you're just now waking up to your talents it's a bit late in the game."

"Late in the game, Mom? I'm seventeen. It's not like I'm some fifty-year-old loser whose smartest years are behind her."

Oops, that looked like it hit a target. Didn't mean to.

"I'll have you know that your father and I use our brains a lot, Missy."

"If you used them, you'd remember my name is Melissa. Not Missy."

She turned to the sink and washed the crumbly bits of meat loaf from her hands. When she started drying them with a paper towel she shifted her attack. "You know your father and I love you for who you are, Melissa. If you don't get into Penn, it's not the end of the world. You'll go to college somewhere, and you'll have the chance to develop into the brilliant, beautiful girl we know you are."