The Poison Apples (22 page)

It only took me a few seconds to realize that that point was Pradeep.

And then she was upon us.

“Hi, Molly,” she said sweetly. “Hi, Pradeep.”

Pradeep and I stared at her, mutually agog.

“Pradeep?” she asked. “Would you like to dance?”

I felt as if someone very far away, very tiny and sitting inside a cave inside a mountain inside an uninhabited country in a remote part of the world, was screaming,
Noooooooooo!
But because the voice came from such a great distance, it registered as a tiny, terrible tremor, and then faded away.

I blinked.

“Sure,” Pradeep said, grinning nervously. “I would love to.”

It was like I had completely ceased to exist for Pradeep the minute Kristen entered the room. On the other hand, the acknowledgment he was about to give me felt so humiliating that I found myself wishing I
had
ceased to exist.

“Stay cool, Miller,” Pradeep called over his shoulder as Kristen led him away.

And then she turned around herself and shot me a blinding and triumphant smile.

“Yeah,” she echoed, her white teeth gleaming, “stay cool.”

THREE

Alice

You spend a good part
of your childhood lying in bed at night and thinking about the future. You're picturing what kind of job you'll have; what kind of person you'll be; what you'll look like. When you're in third grade you try to picture what sixth grade will be like. When you're in sixth grade you try to picture what ninth grade will be like. And one of the great, eternal questions you ask yourself during those long years of anticipation is:

When will I meet my first boyfriend?

What will he look like, how will he sound, what will he wear, and, most important,
what will it feel like to kiss him?

I'd been asking myself those questions for as long as I could remember. And as I got older and older, and all the girls I knew met their first boyfriend, kissed him, broke up with him, met their second boyfriend, kissed him, broke up with him, and had already moved onto their third boyfriend before I'd even had a boyfriend at all, I started to worry that I would still be asking myself those questions when I was a fifty-five-year-old woman with chin hairs and pink curlers.

“You're crazy, Alice,” my friends at the Brooklyn Montessori School would tell me. “It'll happen eventually, and then you'll stop worrying.”

But it didn't happen … and it didn't happen … and it didn't happen …

And then, on a Friday night in November, at the Winter Wonderland Ball on top of Mount McKinsey, it did.

Everything happened so fast. Jamal Chapman asked me to dance, and then we were dancing, and smiling at each other, and his hand was resting on the small of my back, and then he rested his head on my shoulder, and then I rested my head on his shoulder, and then after a few songs he pulled away from me—my heart froze in fear—Was this the end? Would I ever see him again?—and asked if I wanted to take a walk.

Holding hands, we walked off the dance floor (I caught a glimpse of half the girls in the room staring at me with utter hatred) and out into the cavernous lobby.

Jamal took a deep breath. “It's nice to get some air.”

I nodded. My heart was beating so hard that I was sure he could hear it.

Our hands still clasped, we walked up the length of the lobby and right up to the big bay windows facing the snowy bank that lay right behind the lodge.

Then we stood there for a while in silence, staring out at the night.

“It's weird,” Jamal said, “I really don't know you at all, Alice.”

I nodded again, gulping.

“But I kind of feel like I do. I have no idea why. It's creepy.”

“I feel the same way,” I admitted. “What's weird is that it's, like, mutual.”

There was another silence.

“I want to know everything about your life,” he said finally. “But I don't know where to begin, I guess.”

Everything?
No one had ever said anything like that to me before. What sprang into my mind were visions of my childhood. Sitting with my mother in Prospect Park in the springtime, drinking soup from a thermos. My mother and father setting a birthday cake in front me, candles ablaze. Walking by myself to school for the first time, my feet crunching over piles of autumn leaves, my backpack thumping on my shoulders. My mother kneeling in the doorway, opening her arms as I clambered up the steps of our front stoop in the sunshine …

Jamal was looking at me quizzically.

“Sorry,” I said. “I kind of spaced out. Um … I had a pretty good childhood, I guess. Until my mom died. Then my dad married a psychopath and she sent me off to Putnam Mount McKinsey and so … here I am.”

It was unbelievable. Something about this guy just made the truth fly out of my mouth. I had no control over it.

Luckily he started laughing. “Wow,” he said, leaning forward and pressing his forehead against the windowpane. “That was an incredible summary.”

I blushed. “I mean, it's more complicated than that.”

He laughed even harder. “I would assume so. But I love the way you just
say
everything.”

“Usually I don't. Usually I don't say anything.”

We looked at each other. Whenever our eyes met, I felt like I was being sucked through a black hole into some kind of alternate universe. It was definitely a scary sensation. But I liked the way that alternate universe of me-and-Jamal felt. Things made more sense in it. Suddenly all the bad things that had happened to me in the past three years didn't seem as bad. And I did feel a weird freedom around him—like I could say whatever I wanted. Like all the fear and anxiety I normally walked around with had the potential to just … ebb away.

“What about you?” I asked.

“What about me?”

“Tell me everything.” I giggled.

“Oh, man. I don't know if I can sum it up as well as you did.”

Feeling suddenly bold, I reached out and touched his arm. “Try.”

He gazed out the window. “Well … I grew up with my mom.”

“Yeah. I saw her. That first day of Parents Weekend.”

He nodded. “I remember. Let's see. The two of us are really close. Um … she raised me all by herself. I'm an only child. I grew up in Washington Heights, which is in the northern part of Manhattan.”

“I know that,” I said. “I'm from Brooklyn.”

His face lit up. “You're kidding!”

I shook my head.

“I assumed you were this really rich girl from the suburbs of Connecticut or, like, southern California. That's so cool!”

My stomach fell a little. I was kind of a rich girl. After all, I'd gone to private school my whole life.

“Where in Brooklyn?” he asked.

I cleared my throat nervously. “Um … Brooklyn Heights.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

He cocked his head and looked at me. “So you
are
a rich girl.”

I nodded. “Yup.”

And then we both started laughing.

“Wow,” said Jamal a minute later, wiping the tears from his eyes, “this is funny. This is really funny. I've never had a conversation like this with anyone. No tact. No tact whatsoever.”

And that made us laugh even harder.

“Wait,” I said, holding my aching sides. “What about your dad? I remember you said that he was gone. What does that mean?”

The smile seemed to literally fall off his face. “It means he's gone.”

I wasn't sure how to respond to that. “Oh.”

He rubbed his temples with his hands. “Sorry. That didn't make sense. Uh … he ran away when I was baby. So basically I never had a dad.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

He smiled tensely. “Wow. Huh. Okay. Well, I guess I got myself into this, didn't I? I was the one who said I wanted to know everything.”

“You don't have to talk about it,” I reassured him. “It's okay. I don't need to—”

“No,” he said. “It's good. It's probably good for me. I never talk about this stuff with anyone except my mom.”

There was a pause.

“I grew up hating my dad,” he said. “I mean,
hating
him. I'd never met him. All I knew was that he'd gotten my mom pregnant, and that the second he found out, he took off. Then when I was thirteen we got this postcard from him the mail. He was living somewhere in Queens and he wanted to meet me. The guy had been living in New York City and it had taken him thirteen years to get in contact with me! At first I refused to see him. Then I thought about how much I wanted to tell him off, in person. I wanted to tell him what a jerk he was, and how he'd left my mom penniless, and how she'd had to work three jobs until I was six. All of that stuff. I wanted him to, like, realize what he'd done.”

I nodded. “That makes sense.” Not only that, it reminded me of how I felt about R.

“So one afternoon I took the train all the way to Queens. I got off the train and I walked over to his apartment. Then the whole time I was walking up his stairs I was thinking about all the mean things I was going to say to him. Words were running through my mind.
Scumbag. Loser. Jerk
. My heart was beating so fast. And when he finally opened his door…” Jamal paused.

“What happened next?” I demanded.

“Look,” he said, pointing out the window. “It's snowing.”

Fine, glittery snow was shimmering down from the black sky and dusting the ground.

“Please, please finish,” I said. For some reason I felt like my life depended on hearing the end of his story.
I really like this guy,
I thought to myself.
Actually, I like him so much it's terrifying.

“Sorry. Okay. So he opens the door, then there's just this person standing in front of me. And that completely shocked me.”

I stared at him. “Wait. I don't get it.”

“I mean, I don't know what I was expecting. Some kind of powerful … demon or something? I don't know. Maybe I just was so scared and angry that I forgot he was a real person.”

“Who cares?” I said. “He totally screwed you over.”

Jamal pressed a finger to the fogged-up windowpane and began drawing something. “I guess my point is that he was pathetic. And sad. And I realized that I wouldn't want to know him or be him, not in a million years. I mean, being mad at someone gives them power. And this was the least powerful man I'd ever met.” He took a deep breath in, then let it out. “Wow. I can't believe I just told you all of that.”

I stared out at the falling snow. Something about his story made me want to cry. I bit my lip.

“Is everything okay, Alice?” he asked gently.

I nodded and turned to face him. “Jamal?” I asked.

“Yeah?” He reached out and touched my shoulder. I don't think I'd ever realized how many pleasurable nerve endings were in my shoulder before that moment.

“You're amazing,” I said.

He smiled, and then, his hand still on my shoulder, he leaned toward me.

Suddenly I froze. This was what I'd been wanting for years. This was the person I'd been waiting years and years to meet. And yet when his face started coming closer and closer to mine, his eyes shut, his lips parted, I was overwhelmed by fear and anxiety.

“Wait!” I yelled.

Jamal's eyes flew open, and he backed away. “Oh, my God. I'm so sorry. I thought—”

“No, no!” I said, my cheeks aflame. “I just…”

He looked at me. I could see insecurity flooding across his face. Oh, no. I'd ruined it. I'd ruined everything.
Get it together, Alice,
I told myself.
Don't let your fears push this guy away.

“Jamal,” I managed to say, trying desperately to articulate what I was feeling, “I really, really want to kiss you. But I've only kissed one other guy in my life, and I didn't…”

Oh, God. What was I admitting to?

“I didn't even like him,” I finished. “So I'm scared. I wanted to let you know that I'm scared. Because … I really, really like you.”

He grinned. “Me, too. I'm totally terrified.”

I gaped at him. “You are?”

“Yeah. I'm, like, totally worried you're gonna think I'm a bad kisser, or annoying, or dumb, or—”

“No!” I said. “I would never!”

His grin got even bigger. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think
you're
amazing, Alice Bingley-Beckerman.”

And then, suddenly filled with a totally unfamiliar feeling of security and joy, I grabbed Jamal Chapman's cheeks with both hands, brought his face toward mine, and kissed him.

And he kissed me back.

His lips were soft. And warm. And strangely familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

We kept kissing.

I'm not sure how much time passed.

Maybe an hour. Maybe two.

Eventually someone—was it Pradeep Paruchuri?—shouted, “Chapman!” from the other end of the hallway.

“Oh, God,” Jamal muttered, his mouth against my neck.

“We should go,” I whispered, “I think it's way past curfew.”

He nodded. “See you tomorrow morning,” he said in my ear. “I can't wait.”

“Me neither.”

He planted a small kiss on each of my eyelids, and then darted away into the darkness.

I sighed, my lips aching, my heart bursting with happiness, and gazed out the window at the huge, perfectly round moon.

It was at that moment that I finally saw what Jamal had written on the fogged-up pane with the tip of his finger:

J loves A

(helplessly)

FOUR

Reena

I slammed the door
to our bedroom shut and stood there, panting and praying that no one had seen me leave the ball.