As I considered texting Ballard to call the whole thing off, someone grabbed my arm. “Hey, don’t I know you?”
I jumped, my heart pounding over the music. “Me?”
“Yeah, I swear I know you from somewhere. You don’t go to Dadeville, do you? I haven’t seen you there.” She had long brown hair. And I mean super long, like past her waist. I’d never seen hair so long before.
“I go to Moorhen,” I said, steeling my spine against a twitch. “I don’t think we know each other.”
She ran a hand through her wicked long hair and examined my face. “Have you always lived in Moorhen?”
I hid my flexing fingers behind my back while I explained, “I was in Auburn until seventh grade.”
She grinned, and her teeth were slightly crooked. I found them attractive. My shoulder jerked and I desperately hoped she hadn’t noticed.
“That’s it. I remember now. Your mom is Reverend Luckie, right? You were in my Sunday School class.”
I flushed guiltily over not remembering her, but Mom served a few churches in the Auburn area over the years, and there’s no way I could remember all those people. “That’s her. She’s at The Exchange in Moorhen now. It’s pretty cool, The Exchange.”
I stopped talking. Rambling about my mother and church was not the way to snag a girl. The girls in the living room had panicked me, but I forgot about the experiment so long as this girl looked at me.
“I’m Pilar,” she said. “It’s fine if you don’t remember me. No worries.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just been a long time.”
“You’ll remember me from now on though, right?” She raised a perfect eyebrow.
“Of course.” I blushed, though I couldn’t tell you why. What she said felt suggestive in some way. The only girl I’d spent much time around was Erin, and Erin’s words never affected the parts of me Pilar’s words affected.
I wasn’t sure what to say, but I wanted to keep talking to Pilar. The best I could come up with was, “How’ve you been?”
Someone turned the volume up, and my words were overrun by the loud, fast beat.
“What?” She leaned closer.
“I said, how’ve you been?” I was practically yelling my inane question. I felt silly.
“Let’s go somewhere quiet.” She motioned to the speaker in the corner and turned to walk down the hallway.
This wasn’t like following Sylvie upstairs. Then I knew what was going to happen, at least to some extent. It was a kissing game. We were going to kiss. Following Pilar was different. My heart was more bass than the sounds of Khalid blaring behind us, and I had no idea what would happen next.
She led me to a room with only a few people inside. A couple was sprawled across the couch, only half dressed, and a group of boys huddled around their phones laughing at TikTok videos. There was a loveseat in one corner and we dropped onto the cushions. As we sat, my shoulder jerked three times. I glanced at Pilar.
“You okay?” she asked, concern creasing her forehead.
“Yeah, I’m fine, it’s just—”
“In Sunday School, you used to make machine-gun noises.” She cocked her head to one side. “It drove the teacher crazy. Papá said you couldn’t help it.”
I squirmed in the seat, not wanting this conversation to be about Tourette’s. In general, I don’t mind having Tourette’s, but it’s a pain to explain to other people. They only know the stereotypes, and I get tired of being everyone’s neurodivergence educator.
“I made the machine-gun sounds to cover the throat clearing. It’s called Tourette’s. Shooting noises seemed cooler than throat clearing.”
She nodded like she truly got it. “It’s cool. Everyone’s got struggles, right?”
I leaned closer to hear her better.
“Like my little brother. He has ADHD. He takes meds and stuff. He thinks really differently than I do. Plus, he’s smart and fun. I bet you are too.”
“Thanks,” I said, and maybe it was true. I could be smart and fun, because Pilar said so. Something about how she talked, how she carried herself, told me she wasn’t a girl anyone said no to.
“Do you like it in Moorhen?” she asked.
“I like my friends here, and I like our church better, but I miss Auburn. We go back pretty often. They have way cooler events and restaurants and stuff with the university and all. Do you go back a lot?”
“No, my parents are super strict. I barely leave the house except for school and church. It’s mostly okay, though. I’m not much of a party person. My cousin made me come to this one.” Pilar twisted so she was facing me, one leg pressed against the back of the loveseat. “I had to convince my mom Isabel was helping me study for the ACT.”
“Parties stress me out,” I told her. “My best friend, Ballard, convinced me to come with him to this one.”
“I’m glad you came.” She leaned forward an inch or so.
I willed my shoulder not to jerk and said, “I’m glad I came too.
“I’ve never done this,” I added. “I mean, met a girl at a party.”
Pilar smiled and moved closer, tucking herself against me. We could hear each other better that way, and it felt comfortable, how she fit snug and warm.
“I haven’t done this either,” Pilar said. “But if you think about it, it’s not like we’re total strangers. We’ve known each other for years. Sort of.”
I nodded, my chin resting on her head. “True. And we met at church, of all places. Very proper.”
She laughed and pulled her head back so she could look at me. I smiled.
“Very proper,” she repeated.
Then she kissed me.
I wasn’t expecting her to kiss me. The experiment had flown right out of my head. But, every centimeter of my skin sparked like electricity. I kissed her back, my fingers in her curtain of hair.
“Pilar,” a girl called from the door.
She pulled back from our kiss, and I smiled at her. She was smiling too before she glanced at the girl.
“Your mom called my mom. We’re busted.”
“Shit.” Pilar hopped up from the chair and handed me her cell phone. “Here, put your number in.”
“Pilar, the longer we wait, the worse this will get,” the girl said.
“Isabel,” Pilar said, drawing the name out, “we’re already busted. Three extra seconds won’t change anything.”
Hurrying, I tapped the digits and hit save.
She slid the phone into her pocket, kissed my cheek, and left the room, followed by an impatient Isabel.
For a while, I sat on the loveseat, the cushion beside me still warm where Pilar had been. I pulled out my phone and had a text from Ballard.
Any luck?
That brought the experiment back to mind and I wondered if Pilar might have been one of the kissing girls after all. I didn’t think so though. She didn’t seem to be here with any group, just her cousin.
I believed she kissed me because she wanted to kiss me. Me, Stephen Luckie, not me, stranger at a party.
I texted Ballard back, Sort of.
When I looked around, the hookup couple and the video boys had disappeared. The three girls from the living room were on the couch, talking quietly.
The girl in the pink dress glanced around and saw me staring. When she got up to cross the room, my gut twisted. I’d kissed a girl, and I’d been right. Not a single tic while I kissed her, but it was a short kiss. And the whole point of this party was to kiss multiple girls, not just one.
True scientific experiments required gathering as much data as possible.
But Pilar hadn’t been part of the experiment. At least, I hadn’t kissed her to gather data. I would’ve been happy to kiss her with no experiment at all.
The girl dropped onto the loveseat beside me. “Was that your girlfriend who just left?”
I shook my head. My fingers flexed, but she never looked down.
“What’s your name?”
“Stephe
n.” I considered getting up, pushing her away, calling the whole thing quits.
But I didn’t.
Up close, this girl wasn’t so intimidating. Her eyes were a light brown color behind her silver-rimmed glasses, and she even seemed a bit nervous now that she was this close.
“I’d like to kiss you,” she said. Very matter-of-fact.
And okay, yeah, I liked Pilar, but I’d just met her, fourth grade Sunday School notwithstanding. And this girl was practically in my lap, asking me to kiss her. If I’d walked away, Ballard would’ve never let me live it down.
I leaned in, pushing my lips tentatively against her mouth. Her lips were slightly dry, and she didn’t push for anything more than one quick kiss.
“Thank you,” she said after. “We’re doing this high school bucket list thing.”
I nodded. “I heard about it. From Clara.”
“Really? So you know it’s just kissing, then?” The girl in the T-shirt walked over.
“Right,” I answered.
“This will sound weird, but can we kiss you too? We want to knock it off the list, but when we tried to kiss a couple of other guys tonight, they were assholes about it.”
My fingers flexed and I rearranged my hands to hide the movement. “I guess. I mean, sure. Yeah.”
I should’ve at least asked for the girls’ names, but the whole thing felt too good to be true in the moment. The girl in the white tank top grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. She was really short, like barely five feet, and I had to bend over to give her a peck on the lips. Then she and the first girl moved aside so I could kiss the girl in the T-shirt.
She was a little more aggressive, with a dagger of a tongue, but I wasn’t as into it as I thought I would be anyhow. Kissing those girls felt hollow. They were all pretty and seemed nice enough, but I didn’t know them. Regardless of my lack of mental involvement, other parts of me did rise to the occasion. Was that how girls felt when guys like Wade moved so fast? I was flattered and willing, but also confused and ready to stop.
Thinking of Wade made me think of Joan for the second time that night. I wondered what she’d think about this experiment and felt embarrassed. I was glad the bucket list girls moved on quickly, leaving me to sort my own thoughts.
Walking home with a drunk Ballard at two o’clock in the morning, I tried to figure out if I’d had the best night of my life or the worst. It was exactly what I went there for, and the tics stopped, but Pilar threw a wrench in things. I wasn’t sure I liked her liked her, but kissing her had been sweet and fun and it made the randomness of the other kisses all wrong.
Was sweet and fun conversation what it meant to like a girl? The only thing I had to compare it to was my fascination with Joan, but we’d hardly had a real conversation in the years of going to school together. How do people know when their feelings are more than physical?
“How many girls did you kiss?” Ballard asked.
“Three,” I answered. Then I decided Pilar counted, even if it was different with her. “Well, four.”
“And the tics?”
I shook my head. “None.”
This was really good news. It meant some of my fears about relationships and sex could be let go. My body did have the ability to focus when it needed to.
And Pilar had been interested even though she knew I had Tourette’s. That was even better than stopping my tics, the feeling of being wanted for who I am.
“Sweet.” He grinned. “I bet my cousin knows of more parties next weekend.”
“I’m done,” I said. “I don’t want to be one of those jerky guys who uses girls without even knowing their names.”
“Stephen, you weren’t using those girls any more than they were using you. No one got hurt, so what’s the big deal?”
“I dunno,” I said. “But it doesn’t feel good.”
“All four were bad kissers?”
“No. I mean, one was, sort of, but…” He wasn’t going to get it, not while he was drunk. “Let’s drop it, okay?”
We reached Ballard’s house and made our way up the stairs. He was snoring as soon as his head hit the pillow. I lay on the second twin bed, staring at the ceiling, analyzing my supposed data. All four girls had kissed differently. Who knew there were so many ways to move your mouth?
I was happy with the results, excited to know my relationship prospects weren’t as bleak as I had feared, but there was still that gnawing feeling in my gut. I didn’t want to be a guy who made out with four girls in one night.
Before I fell asleep, my mind was full of Pilar’s forever long hair, the taste of Coke still cold on her tongue, and how she didn’t care at all about my tics.
Then Joan flashed across my brain. I don’t know why, but there she was inside my head. I pictured her dark hair sweeping over me as Pilar’s had done.
I didn’t sleep well at all.
Chapter Six
Mom stopped in my doorway Sunday evening. “How was the lake?”
I was strumming my guitar, regretting the shot of espresso I’d had at youth. It was sure to keep me up half the night. My notebook was open on the floor, and I’d scribbled some lines about ice cream girls and their strawberry lips. When I sang them, I sounded like a one-man boy band, so I crossed them out.
“It was good,” I told my mother, not meeting her eyes. “I feel a lot better now, a lot calmer.”
She bit her lip, standing in my doorway. It was clear I’d lied, because my tics were still intense. I know she saw me at church, shoulder jerking and leg kicking at the same damn time. But she didn’t push it, and I didn’t want to talk. At least, not to my mother. Dad started typing and Mom glanced at the wall between us and his closet of an office.
“More edits?” I asked.
She nodded. And that was that. She went back to the living room, and I tried to make the idea of ice cream girls sound deep and soulful instead of poppy and bubble-gummy. It didn’t happen. What did happen was I stayed awake until 3:00 a.m., hopped up on caffeine, rewriting the same sucky stanza over and over and over.
The next day, I was exhausted, and school was the last place I wanted to be. School was the last place I wanted to be every day, though, so I guess it wasn’t much different than usual. I slept on my desk through most of study hall and was better by the time I sat down for lunch.
“Clara says she talked to those girls about you. Did you really make out with three of them at the same time?” Ballard asked through a mouthful of French fries.
Guilt churned in my gut again. “No, not at the same time. But yes, I kissed three of them. I told you this already.”
Ballard stared in disbelief. “I was drunk, dude. I barely remember walking home, so I sure don’t remember you telling me you made out with three different girls.”
“Lower your voice.” My eyes darted around the crowded cafeteria. It was a small room, requiring us to go to lunch in two shifts. I paused at the sight of Joan a few tables away, staring at me with an odd look on her face. “If you can’t remember walking home, that’s a problem. How is that even fun, drinking so much you can’t remember anything?”
“I don’t usually get that drunk, okay. And I wasn’t driving. Plus, I had you there to get me home. I’m not a total idiot.” He waved a French fry at me, lecturing. “Anyway, Clara also said you hooked up with some other girl, Pillar or something.”
“Not pillar,” I corrected him. “Pilar, like Pee-lar. And we didn’t hook up. We talked.”
“And kissed.” Ballard smirked.
“And kissed,” I conceded. “But only once, and not as part of the experiment. I … I like her.”
“Did you get her digits?” He quit waving the fry and popped it into his mouth.
“No, but she has mine.” I sipped my carton of chocolate milk.
He laughed and smashed another handful of fries into his mouth, leaving a ring of grease around his lips. “That means she’s in control, so she can choose to not call you now.”
“It wasn
’t like that,” I said, remembering her effortless confidence. “My phone was in my pocket and hers was out, so … never mind. It doesn’t matter. By now, she’s probably heard I kissed those other girls and written me off as a total jerk. Which I am.”
“You’re not a jerk. You are the least jerky person I know.” He paused and studied my face, which was twisted into a grimace as usual. “Unless you count the fact that your body parts jerk a lot. But that’s a whole other situation.”
Ballard could get away with joking about my tics. I chuckled, but wasn’t in the mood to truly laugh.
“You seriously feel bad, don’t you? You went from never kissing a girl to kissing four in one night and you feel bad. He shook his head slowly. “You must really like this Pilar.”
“She was easy to talk to. Girls are never easy to talk to.”
“Sure they are. You’re the one who makes it difficult, assuming they care about the Tourette’s. I promise, you think about that crap way more than the rest of us. I bet most girls at Moorhen don’t notice your tics anymore.”
I couldn’t believe he was even close to right, that no one noticed my tics anymore. Still there was a small nudge of truth in what he said. Was I the one to make it difficult?
I tried to remember the last time I attempted to talk to a girl, not including Erin, who was practically family. It must have been freshman year. Ballard dragged me to a football game and disappeared under the bleachers with one of his many girlfriends. I was left with her best friend, a quiet girl in pink-framed glasses who moved away a few months later. I stuttered over everything I said. I had a vocal tic, and it made my words come out like a scratched CD sometimes. Plus I was nervous as hell, and she was wearing the shortest shorts I’d ever seen.
We hadn’t hit it off or ever talked again. I chalked it up to the Tourette’s, the way my foot kept bouncing involuntarily on the metal benches. But maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe we didn’t hit it off because we didn’t hit it off.
My stomach flipped at this, that I could be looking at everything through the lens of my differences, judging girls for judging me without even knowing them. I couldn’t believe Ballard was right, because if my Tourette’s wasn’t what made me unlikable, something else did. My tics might slow with age, but what if they weren’t my problem in the first place?
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