Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List

by Rachel Cohn

  Gabriel must hear my rumbling stomach over on his island. He makes the first move, signaling my island with a text message to my cell phone.

  Can I buy u breakfast?

  Sometimes giant pieces of ice, like almost the size of cities, detach from glaciers. They float iceberg majesty—or terror, if you’re on the Titanic.

  I’m sure to go down for this, but I do it anyway. I text back:

  Aren’t u supposed 2 ask me that the night b4, not the morning of?

  The man under the baseball hat doesn’t look up. But I see his fingers tap away.

  A gentleman shows more respect 2 a lady.

  I’m bored. This is pointless. I have nothing left.

  If I wasn’t a lady, I might be the Bruce laughing and kissing in bed with Ely this morning.

  I don’t answer.

  Yet the gorgeous big-eared man under the Mets hat will not back down.

  C’mon. Eggs. Bacon. Home fries. My treat.

  I really am kind of hungry. I give:

  I like cereal. I leave out the “with Ely” part. My fingers hurt too much to key those additional letters.

  The archangel wants to know:

  What kind?

  I lie:

  Product 19.

  Truthfully, I like Rice Krispies, with Ely across the breakfast table (at his apartment), eating Lucky Charms. We play food-fight war: Snap! Crackle! Pop! vs. pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers. Chaos prevails. Ginny throws a fit over the mess. Susan laughs and tosses Grape-Nuts like confetti.

  Gabriel tosses back:

  I’m a Müeslix man myself.

  I’ll bet Gabriel knows who Fred Astaire’s favorite dance partner was, too.

  Seriously? I have to ask.

  I see the shape of his fine, fine form laughing from yonder island.

  No. Just making sure ur paying attention. I’m all about the Cheerios.

  Cheerios are Ely’s backup favorite morning cereal, after we’ve eaten up the Lucky Charms (dry) in the afternoons.

  My body aches, my soul grieves. The smile that wants to taunt my lips: DENIED DENIED DENIED. I am not going to be the girl with the heart of stone waiting to be broken down by the quirky-cool guy with the heart of gold. Fuck that fantasy formula.

  Persnickety. That’s what Ely would text me now, his favorite word to tease and taunt away my dark moods. Quit it. B Angel Naomi, I no u can.

  I want to be touched by an angel.

  His name was Ely, not Gabriel.

  My heart is

  I’d rather have breakfast with Mom.

  I text a final message to Gabriel:

  I feel sick. Going home.

  Ely never wakes up before eight. If I get home soon, we can avoid face time entirely. We’re already not speaking—no worries there.

  Still. A custody arrangement needs to be worked out. Who gets to use the elevator, the laundry room, the lobby—when. Separate but equal. Dead to one another.

  There will be no this time.

  ELY

  WEEKIVERSARY

  I know things are really getting twisted when I think to myself that it would be better if she were dead. Like, then I could have all these good memories and be really sad and everyone would understand and eventually I’d move on, cherishing her always. I wouldn’t have to do anything about it, because it would be irrevocable. There’s something appealing about that.

  But of course I don’t really want her dead. I’m glad she’s alive. It’s all the good memories that are dead.

  Dumped doesn’t even begin to describe it. If you’re going to use a trash metaphor, incinerated is more like it.

  I don’t know if she wants me dead, but she’s made it pretty clear that she doesn’t want me to exist.

  Thou shalt not use the laundry room on Saturdays.

  Thou shalt look through your peephole and make sure I am not in the foyer when you’re going to the elevator.

  Thou shalt go and check your mail if you see me waiting for the elevator in the lobby.

  Thou shalt go straight to the elevator if you see me checking my mail.

  Thou shalt avoid the following Starbucks: Astor Place (the one on the triangle, not the one close to St. Marks), Broadway between Bowery and Houston, University between Eighth and Ninth.

  And so on. Only she didn’t phrase them like this. Instead it was:

  Don’t use the laundry room on Saturdays.

  Look through your peephole and make sure I’m not in the foyer when you’re going to the elevator. I’ll do the same.

  Check your mail if you see me waiting for the elevator in the lobby; go straight to the elevator if you see me checking my mail. I’ll do the same.

  Here are the Starbucks I’d like to go to; please go to other ones.

  She had Bruce the First deliver the commandments to me, and even he looked a little embarrassed. I didn’t show them to Bruce the Second, because I knew they would only make him feel guilty and sad. He feels guilty and sad enough already.

  I’m stuck on incomprehension. I don’t understand why she’s doing this. I don’t understand how something that’s held strong for so long could crumble so fast. I mean, not over a boy.

  I called. I did. The next morning. That afternoon. Then the day after that.

  I thought we needed to cool down, and then we’d be back to being us again.

  Instead: incinerated.

  I wasn’t going to lie and say I was sorry; there wasn’t any reason for me to say I was sorry, except for the Bruce the Second thing, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t about the Bruce the Second thing. And the joke was—it’s not like Bruce and I were suddenly condom companions. No, that first night, all the clothes stayed on. And when we went to sleep— I don’t know how to describe it. It felt like someone had left a night-light on. It had that small glow.

  Now it’s been a week—and, to be honest, if I were to treat it like an anniversary, I’d say it’s the weekiversary of Naomi & Ely’s incineration, not Bruce & Ely’s relationship. I’ve never been one to take it slow—I mean, why wait?—but I think because Naomi and I are crashing so fast, Bruce and I are taking it slow. Like, nursing-home slow. Doing the things that end withalking instead of the ones that end withucking.

  I’m being careful with him, even if I don’t know why. I guess I just sense that I should.

  He hasn’t asked me back to his dorm, and I’m not sure whether that’s because he doesn’t want people to know he’s with a guy or if he just doesn’t want them to know he’s with me. I don’t really mind. My bed’s more comfortable than anything NYU provides anyway—I’ve had a good sampling. Naomi was always more into dorm beds than I was.

  We go for dinner at Chat ’n Chew and a movie at Union Square. Then it’s almost midnight and he has a morning class, so we decide to call it a night. In front of his dorm, there’s that sweet moment when he so clearly wants me to kiss him goodbye and he’s clearly still too nervous to kiss me good-bye, so I lean into him and we kiss right there. It’s brief, because Bruce is still so shy, and it’s not like kissing in public with other guys, where it’s all about showing off or showing each other. With Bruce, it’s about the kiss itself. I don’t know how he does that. I mean, I don’t know how he does that to me.

  I’ll admit that I still don’t get it. As I’m walking home, I’m as much amused as I am aroused. Then I get into our lobby and all the blissful feelings are drained away, leaving me with my hurt and resentment and anger. Even if Naomi wasn’t there, I’d feel these things, just from the way she’s turned my home against me, the way she’s haunted it with all her damage. But because Naomi is there, I’m almost paralyzed with the hurt and resentment and anger I feel.

  She’s checking her mail. I know what the rule is. I know I am to head directly to the elevator.

  But I never agreed to the rule. I was never even asked.

  I nod to Gabriel as I pass him, but he’s too caught up in a book to notice. Then I take out my mail key and head into the small
mailroom.

  I’ve only taken a step inside when she asks, “What are you doing?” She doesn’t even turn around to say it. Just looks at her mailbox. Glares.

  “I’m checking my mail,” I say lightly.

  She slams her mailbox shut. Locks it. Faces me. Says, “Fuck you.”

  “Sorry,” I say, pointing to an imaginary ring on my wedding finger. “Already taken.”

  I know it’s a bitchy response, but where I come from, “Fuck you” does not require a polite response.

  “I told you not to do this,” she says.

  “No,” I correct, “you didn’t tell me anything. Telling requires actual vocal contact. You wrote a list that said I shouldn’t do this. Which is, I might add, majorly childish—and not the good kind of childish, either.”

  I have seen her this unhappy before. Never about a boy. Not about that. But about her mom and my mom, and about her dad leaving, and about her grandfather dying. All of those sadnesses held a different degree of anger. This one—right now—is near the top of the scale.

  “C’mon, Naomi,” I say. “This is so silly.”

  “Yeah, it’s a total barrel of laughs.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “ ‘Silly.’ ”

  “Look—”

  “No, you look,” she interrupts. “You blew it. You totally blew it. You had me—you really had me—buying into this whole Cult of Ely that you created. But you know what? I’ve turned in my membership card. I’m getting my own life, because I’m sick and tired of sharing one with you. You’re not good for me, Ely. You’ve shot me down one too many times. I’m tattooing you at the top of my No Kiss List.”

  “I should’ve always been tattooed at the top of your No Kiss List! I mean, duh!” I can’t believe this. “It’s not about kissing, Naomi. Give me a break.”

  “Oh, I’ll give you a break. A clean one. I’ve put up with your shit and your drama and your carelessness for so goddamn long. How dare you. You come in here, having just fucked my boyfriend of a week ago, pretending to get your mail when you and I both know that Ginny picks up the mail every day when she gets home from work, and you make it seem like this is all my fault. ‘Fuck you’ isn’t big enough for that, Ely. And, to top it all off, you’re wearing my goddamn jeans!”

  This is definitely incineration, because I’m feeling hot and burned and fierce and intense.

  “You want your jeans back?” I shout. “Well, here.” I kick off my shoes, one of them hitting the lowest row of mailboxes. I take off my belt. Rip open the button fly and pull off the jeans. Then I ball them up and throw them right at her. “You happy?” I ask her. “Is that what you wanted?” I am crying now, this is so wrong. I am crying, because I don’t want this to be happening and still it’s happening and it even feels like it has to happen, but I’m so sad and angry and resentful and hurt and Naomi just looks shocked. She throws the jeans to the ground and calls me an asshole and just leaves me there, crying in my boxers, the biggest fucking fool, the angriest bewildered object of incineration, and there’s nothing to do but wait until I hear the elevator arrive, wait until I hear it leave, wait enough time for her to get upstairs, for her to get inside, then take the same exact route, only too far behind for any of it to matter. I think about leaving the jeans outside her door, then I think about taking them back with me, and ultimately, I just take them to the garbage chute and throw them down. Neither of us will wear them now. It’s best if they’re done.

  Incinerated.

  KELLY

  BINGO

  Divide and conquer has been both a successful military strategy and an algorithm design paradigm. Military leaders theorized that it would be easier to defeat one army of 50,000 men followed by another army of 50,000 men than to conquer a single 100,000-man unit. Combat would be best served by dividing the enemy into two forces and then conquering one followed by the other. As an algorithm design technique, the divide-and-conquer principle requires dividing the problem into two smaller subproblems, solving each of them recursively, and then melding the two partial solutions into one solution to the full problem. When the merging takes less time than solving the two subproblems, an efficient algorithm results.

  Naomi and Ely are probably both too self-absorbed to notice, but they seem to be going for the military version of divide and conquer within our building, although I doubt either of them is intelligent enough to understand the mathematical paradigm. I barely do, and I scored ninety-eighth percentile on the math PSAT.

  The long-awaited Naomi-Ely meltdown finally happened in our building lobby, but it’s taken time for word to get around. Not everyone hangs out in the lobby in the middle of the night. Some of us actually sleep at night. So it’s only now becoming clear, based on the division of bingo seating, where loyalties in the building are divided. It still remains to be seen who shall be conquered—and who shall be the conqueror.

  From viewing tonight’s bingo seating in the building’s basement-level multi-purpose room, loyalties appear to be split straight down the middle, like the groom’s side and bride’s side at a wedding. To the left we have among the Naomi contingent: the illegal subletter in 15B; Bruce, my twin brother and not the new boyfriend of Ely; Mr. McAllister, who will always sway to the side of the better-endowed mammary glands; Naomi’s mom’s friends from the co-op board, who sided with her mom during the time of the bitter breakup feud between 15J and 15K; the residents of floor fourteen, who all agree that Naomi and her mom make less upstairs floor noise than Ely and his moms; and me. But I’m a variable coefficient, sitting here only to protect my brother from her. Again. To the right, the Ely contingent includes: PFLAG members from assorted floors; That Other Bruce, who, for a guy outfitted by the Gap, really has a lot of unexpected nerve showing up here tonight; every gentleman in the building who ever shared hot looks in the elevator with Naomi only to have their advances rebuffed (why did my brother have to be the exception? Oy!); and the Lesbian Nation of Ginny and Susan and all their comrades with the bad Park Slope haircuts.

  I’ve created a monster. I only started the bingo nights at my building to fulfill my high school community service requirement. I figured we’d get ten residents max, all over the age of seventy, we’d meet for games like five times and then like forget all about it, and I’d get my school credit and be done with it. But noooooo. Everyone wanted in on bingo— everyone from the building, the block, the borough. I didn’t count on that variable, and now it’s, like, out of control with hipsters here. Whatever happened to billiards as the hot group game of choice? People, I’m trying to get into Harvard here— not start a revolution!

  Che, I mean She who leads us, is she who shall not be conquered—our resident bingo caller, Mrs. Loy, who cares only about bingo and not at all about the Naomi-Ely-Bruce1-Bruce2 quadrangle. Mrs. Loy is loyal only to her dog and to my brother, who treats her dog more like a sister than he does his own sister, she who happens to be me. Back in nineteen hundred forever ago, long before she moved to Manhattan to marry old what’s-his-name, Mrs. Loy once competed in the U.K. Caller of the Year Competition, which is like this big-deal contest where bingo callers compete for a cash prize and the chance to call the numbers in Las Vegas, as well as to become the bingo “ambassador” for Britain. Mrs. Loy didn’t win, but she seems more than happy to settle for serving as our building’s bingo ambassador so many years later.

  “Dirty Gertie!” she calls out. The only way to thin out the ranks of our game’s burgeoning popularity was to require players to learn U.K. Housie slang. Room occupancy deference to fire department hazard codes.

  “What number is ‘Dirty Gertie’?” Bruce my twin brother asks me. Thirty-fifth percentile on the PSAT. His mathematical experiment was to choose “All of the above” as the answer to every fourth problem. Boy needs to get a good night’s sleep. Otherwise, he’ll be lucky to get accepted at SUNY–So Far Upstate You Might As Well Be In Canada, eh?

  I cross out the number 30 on his card. I have to do everything
for him. I’m five minutes older. The burden always falls on me.

  Mrs. Loy spots me in the crowd and I know what number will be called out next. I cross out the number 1 on my card well before she calls out, “Kelly’s Eye!”

  Next up is “Two Fat Ladies!” and I would so have bingo if number 88 was on my card. I avoid looking directly up at Amstel Not-So-Light Susan and Ginny, because that would be too obvious. They’re not really fat, even, they’re more just . . . relaxed, not heterosexually emaciated, like most of the other building moms, e.g., my mom, Naomi’s mom. I’m glad they worked things out, although my parents voted against them in the co-op board dispute, because Mom and Dad wanted to buy the moms’ apartment, directly downstairs from ours, and break through to build us a bi-level apartment. So I’m sort of grateful to the moms as well, since I really could not get behind my mother’s menopausal plan to adopt a contingent of special-needs babies from Macedonia once Bruce and I take off for college. My mom breaks down in sobs when salesclerks at Bendel don’t recognize her. I don’t think she could handle the pressure.

  “Heinz Varieties!” That Other Bruce across the room is close. I can feel it. He just crossed out number 57 on his card. How a guy that bland and nice got caught up in the Naomi & Ely situation beats me. I mean, Ely’s hot, but not that hot— except when he’s paying me top dollar for my Gremlin aka Titanium Man’s appearance in vintage X-Men vs. The Avengers #1.

  If That Other Bruce reaches bingo before me, I will not be happy. I wonder if he’s miserable when he’s trapped in the elevator with Naomi and Ely at the same time. The freeze is so cold between Naomi and Ely, both Iceman and Emma Frost are shivering from their silence.

  My Bruce points at my recently delivered burger and fries container. Food is strictly forbidden on the bingo tables, but since I am not only the master of this game but also fix most every resident here’s computer when it breaks down and consequently know all the sordid details of their online porn, gambling, and illegal music-downloading addictions, nobody dares call me out on my rule bending.