Soul Kiss (4 page)

We even had chocolate mousse for dessert, which is like my total favorite, but I still spent the whole meal cringing inside.

"This was really wonderful, Mrs. Torani," Daniel said, when we were finishing dessert. "My mom doesn't get a chance to cook big meals much, and when she does it's mostly Cuban comfort food,
arroz con pollo
, rice and beans and that kind of thing."

"Is that where your family is from?" my mother asked. "Cuba?"

He nodded. "We left when I was six. I just did one year of school in Cienfuegos. I was just finished when my mom came home one day and said we were moving."

"That's when you came to the United States?"

He shook his head. "We went on a boat to Grand Cayman, an island west of Cuba. My mom won't tell me the details, but I think she was running away from something."

We were all quiet for a minute, until my mom said, "And how did you come to live in Pennsylvania?"

"We move around a lot," he said. "From Grand Cayman we went to Tampa for a while, then Mississippi, then Tennessee. We were in Massachusetts last year but it was just too cold."

After dinner my dad walked outside with Daniel, and from my bedroom window I saw him try to give Daniel some money, which Daniel refused. Then he came back into the house and called, "Melissa? Daniel doesn't have a car. Why don't you give him a ride home? It's the least we can do to thank him."

I was torn. I love to drive and I never get to. I just got my real license a couple of months ago and my parents are totally afraid I'll smash up the car or something. But driving Daniel? No way.

I groaned. I knew that if I refused, my father would drive him home, and God knows what kind of trouble that could cause. "Sure, Dad," I said.

"You can take my car," he said, tossing me his keys.

Well, that was cool. Usually the only car I could drive was the mom-mobile, the big hulking SUV. Dad's car was low-slung and sporty. Mom called it his mid-life crisis car, but I never understood why. I mean, if you could drive a cool sports car, why wouldn't you?

The only bad thing was that the seats were really close together. As Daniel slid in next to me, I felt his body heat. When I put my hand on the gearshift to back out, it brushed against his leg, and I pulled back as if I'd been electrocuted.

"Sweet car," he said. "Your parents are very nice."

"Yeah, well, they just look that way from the outside," I said, concentrating on backing out of the driveway without hitting the mailbox. Don't ask.

"Where do you live?" I asked.

"You can just take me back to ComputerCo."

"Don't be ridiculous. I'm taking you home."

"I kind of live near the store," he said.

"No probs."

Years of riding the late bus home from extra-curricular activities had given me intimate knowledge of the back roads between Stewart's Crossing and Levittown, and even though it was dark and the roads were curvy, I relaxed as we left suburbia for the farm country.

"It was nice of you to come over," I said finally. "I didn't know that trick about setting up the online backups before."

"I know I talk too much," he blurted out. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I blabber myself sometimes. Especially if I get nervous."

He nodded. "It's tough, always being the new kid. We've moved nearly every year since we got to this country."

"Why?"

"I don't know. My mom doesn't like to talk about stuff."

"You have a dad somewhere?"

"He died. Back in Cuba. I think maybe that's why we left."

"I'm sorry."

Lots of my friends had divorced parents, and I knew I was very lucky to have a mom and a dad who lived together and got along. Brie's parents divorced when she was ten, and then her mom remarried the dentist who had taken care of Brie's teeth. There was something shady about that, we were both sure, but her parents were careful never to say anything bad about the other.

And as much as I longed to get out of Stewart's Crossing, I knew I was lucky to have lived in the same place all my life, not to have to pick up and move every year like Daniel, or like kids I knew whose parents were in the military or who had to move for jobs or stuff. I could only imagine how tough it must be to walk into a classroom of strangers, to try and make friends from scratch every year.

As we got close to ComputerCo, I said, "Where exactly do I go?"

He directed me to turn just before the store, then make another turn until we pulled up in front of an apartment complex. It didn't look like that nice a place, but then, I was spoiled, living in a big house with a nice yard.

"Thanks for the ride," he said.

He leaned over and kissed me, quick, on the cheek, then jumped out of the car.

I waited until he had disappeared between buildings, my cheek tingling where he had kissed me, until I finally put the car in gear and pulled away.

I didn't text Brie until the next day, and even then, I didn't tell her that Daniel had kissed me. She was obsessing over her military school boyfriend. He only had limited e-mail privileges and wasn't allowed a cell phone, so every time she got a message she stored it on her phone and kept reading it over and over again.

At school on Monday, neither Daniel nor I said anything about what had happened on Saturday. I could see he was trying to dial back his weird brainiac-ness, giving short answers in class and not always raising his hand. We sat next to each other in calculus, because that's the way things had shaken out that first day, and we were polite to each other, but it's not like we were holding hands and mooning over each other, like some kids did.

We were leaving English class a couple of days later when he said, "I read that author you were telling me about. Jane Austen. I liked
Pride and Prejudice
and
Sense and Sensibility
, but the one I could relate to best was
Northanger Abbey
, with all the stuff about her going to Bath and all the snotty people there."

As he said it he looked over at Chelsea Scalzitti. She turned away.

"You didn't really read all three of those books since last week," I said.

"I read fast. I read all her books--those were just the ones that made me think."

"Seriously, Daniel. You did not."

"Seriously, Melissa. I did."

By then we were in calculus so I couldn't argue with him anymore. But all through class I brooded. "Meet me in the library at the end of lunch," I said as we walked out.

The tide of students swept him away before he could ask me anything more. In the cafeteria, I gobbled my sandwich and then said, "I've got to go to the library. I'll see you guys in class."

I stood up. Chelsea said, "You're not meeting Daniel Florez, are you?"

"Are you my mother now, Chelsea? Because if you are you need to raise your voice a little and make it whinier."

"He's not like us, Melissa." She lowered her voice. "Seriously. You should stay away from him."

"Thanks for the advice." I turned and walked away, nearly banging into a sophomore with a tray full of Jell-O. I had no idea what was up with that, or why Chelsea thought Daniel was a bad influence. I mean, was he going to bore me to death?

He was already in the library when I got there. I went right to the fiction shelves, searching for Jane Austen. The high school hasn't bought any new books since like 1950, so I was sure there had to be some of her books there. Sure enough, I found a battered hardcover copy of
Northanger Abbey
. I hadn't ever read it myself, but I pulled it off the shelf and opened it.

"All right, time for a quiz," I said to Daniel. "Who's the heroine of this book?"

"That's easy. Catherine Morland. And her friends are Isabella Thorpe and Eleanor Tilney."

I flipped through a few more pages. "She has a favorite book. What is it?"

"
The Mysteries of Udolpho
. The author's name is Radcliffe. By the end of the book Catherine comes to understand that life is not like a novel. Which is kind of ironic considering that she's a character in a novel, wouldn't you say?"

I stared at him, baffled.

"I told you, I read fast," he said.

I shoved the book back on the shelf and pulled out another. "Okay, read the first chapter of this."

He took the book from me, opened it, and started flipping pages. Though I watched his eyes move across the page, I couldn't believe he was really reading, or understanding.

He looked up when he reached the end of the chapter, then handed the book back to me. "Okay, ask me something."

I looked at the book myself. What kind of crap had I picked up? It was some dumb novel about a girl growing up in Kansas at the turn of the last century. And they wonder why kids don't read.

I started asking him questions. He got them right, even obscure names of characters who appeared only once.

Finally I closed the book and put it back on the shelf. "I believe you. But you are some kind of freak. Can you read everything that fast?"

"Pretty much. But don't tell anybody else, all right?"

We started walking to Mrs. Becker's class. "Wow. You must spend like no time on homework."

"It's how I can work at ComputerCo. If I had to study all the time, I couldn't do it." We got to AP history just as Brie, Chelsea, and Mindy did. They all looked at me like I had some kind of disease, just because I was walking with Daniel.

Neither of us said anything about that kiss on the cheek, but I no longer actively ignored him, and he didn't push himself toward me. I could see he was trying to fit in--he must have acid-washed his jeans so they weren't so shiny or creased, and he had picked up a couple of decent T-shirts somewhere, and though his hair was still wild and shaggy it looked like he'd gotten it cut.

The next day, the guidance counselor, Mr. Chandra, came to AP English to talk about college applications. "You all should have already taken the SAT and the Achievement tests; if you haven't, you'll find the next set of dates on the handout I've given you."

Despite his Indian name, Mr. Chandra was black and came from Trinidad; he spoke with a lilting accent that was kind of mesmerizing. I usually ended up listening to him but not really processing what he said.

He turned to the blackboard and started writing. "You should have a list of six to ten colleges you are going to apply to," he said. "At least one should be a safety school--a college you know you can be accepted to, based on your scores and your academic record. For many of you, that's going to be Penn State."

I looked at Brie and Chelsea. There was no way our parents were going to let us go to Penn State. Mindy wanted to go to the University of Michigan for some strange reason, or to the University of Maryland. We kidded her that there were Mississippi, Miami, and Minnesota, too, if she was set on going to a school called UM.

We had even started pretending to meditate around her, chanting, "Um, um, um," like it was a mantra.

Chelsea's parents were totally on top of her. Her father went to Rutgers for college and law school, and her mother had gone to the College of New Jersey in Trenton, and they were convinced she was going to Princeton and then to Harvard Law. Honestly, I didn't see it. Chelsea was smart but shallow-- she got things fast but then she didn't have the brains to get deep into any subject. Her papers always came back with marks that said she had good ideas but needed to explore them in greater depth.

My parents both went to the University of Pennsylvania; they met when my dad was a junior and my mom was a sophomore, when one of his roommates had been dating one of her friends, and they had all gone to some street festival in Philadelphia.

They spent the whole afternoon together, my mother told me over and over again, and by the time they got back to the campus they were sure they were meant for each other.

They really wanted me to go to Penn too, but I wasn't sure. It just didn't seem far enough from home, and with my dad working in Center City I thought it would be too easy for them to be constantly on my case.

Up at the board, Mr. Chandra was still droning on. "Then you should have your aspiration school. The college you'd love to attend, but you're not sure you can get in. And in the middle, a group of schools where you have a good chance of being admitted, where they offer programs you want to study, in an environment where you'd be comfortable."

He lectured us on the difference between colleges--did we want to go to an urban school or one in the country? A big university or a small college? One with a narrow curriculum or a broad one?

He turned to us and asked who already knew where they were applying. Lashonda Jackson, who was usually the only black girl in AP classes, raised her hand. "I was thinking of going to Howard University in Washington," she said.

"Very good school," he said. "But don't lock yourself in. You're a smart girl, and you should be applying to a number of very good colleges." He looked at the room, as if he wasn't really talking just to Lashonda. "There are services that will pay your application fees, if your family needs the help. Don't let that stand in your way."