Cake said, “Who better to have your first kiss with than one of your best friends, right? You know he’s aces, you know there’s nothing dark or creepy in Kai, the Movie, so why not kick back and enjoy?”
Cake even left us alone on her couch last week, saying she had to go water the plants for her mom, and there we were, suddenly afloat on the couch of panic. It was spectacularly hot and we were sweaty after sitting at The Pit earlier in the day, watching the skateboarders. We held cold glasses of grape Kool-Aid in our hands. It felt like hours as he leaned forward and carefully put his glass on the floor and then leaned back and said, “So…”
His breath smelled sugary from the Kool-Aid. That seemed right to me, that my first kiss might taste sweet and perfect. I could barely hear myself think, my heart was beating so loud.
And then Cake’s Uncle Connor stumbled into the room, kicking over Kai’s glass and collapsing next to him in a haze of weed, his socked foot resting in the oozing purple puddle of Kool-Aid.
He blinked at the television, and then at us, and said, “Scooby Doo is still fuckin’ on TV? That is crazy, dudes. It’s been like forty years.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon watching Velma and the gang solve mysteries, along with Cake and her uncle, who never took his foot out of the Kool-Aid.
Now things are even more complicated, because Kai found out a few weeks ago that he’s leaving at the end of the summer for some year-long schlepp in Germany, where he’ll become a completely different person and probably fall for some completely cool and super-confident German girl with blunt-cut blond hair and red lips and bigger boobs than mine who will kiss him like it’s no big deal. Ja.
Nein!
My face flames like a wildfire.
Kai looks up. “Hey, whoa, you’re red.”
And then, “Please don’t tell me Broken Cradle is practicing today. You guys are killing me. I don’t know how much more I can take.”
I suck in a deep breath, forcing my voice to sound normal and not all love me.
“I’m sorry. You have to stay. If we don’t have a guy in the band, people will assume we’re socialist feminist lesbians—not that there’s anything wrong with that—and we’ll lose a key demographic in our quest for world domination.”
“You don’t need me for world domination. You have Cake.”
“We need your sensitive backing vocals and awkward posturing. Your shoe-gazing and furrowed brow bring us the all-important cute-nerd-girl contingent.”
Kai fiddles with his pencil, not looking at me. “I don’t think the band has a problem with the cute-nerd-girl thing.”
“You guys.” The drone is Taran Parker, who has wheeled around on his stool, carrying a whiff of pot smoke.
There’s a weird triangular dusting of hair on Taran’s chin, like he’s deliberately trying to look like the spawn of Satan. I have pretty much hated Taran and his twin brother since the day they moved here three years ago from Phoenix. They stood in a lanky lump at the front of seventh-grade English as the teacher introduced them and Taran’s eyes immediately zeroed in on me and he blurted out, “Dang, those titties!” Causing the boys in the class to erupt in laughter and me to slink down as far as I could go in my seat. If the floor could have absorbed me, I’d have been eternally grateful. So grateful I probably would have even agreed to just rename myself Floor. Floor Tolliver.
It doesn’t have such a bad ring to it.
“You and you.” He points a chewed-up pencil at us. “Kai-Kai and Tiger-Girl. Get a room already. You’ll have a summer of sweet, sweet liebe before smarty-pants departs for Deutschland.”
I grab his pencil and throw it at him, but it sails over his head and hits Laizure, our Bio teacher, smack in his blue-plaid chest as he comes in the door, loaded down with his giant 7-Eleven coffee, briefcase, and seventeen thousand pencils in his shirt pocket. He gives Taran an annoyed look.
“Ding, ding, ding!” Laizure sings out, ambling to the front of the room. Ever since the school bell broke last fall, Laizure has delighted in doing the ding-ding-dinging to announce the start of first period himself. “You know what I like when we have a mere four weeks left of school and a dance to look forward to? I like pop quizzes. Let’s go, my little diploids! Let’s hop to it. Let me give you something wonderful to remember me by, all summer long.”
Kai whispers, “So, everything is cool about the dance and stuff? You said you were going to tell her.”
Our faces are so close. If I leaned in just a bit more…My stomach makes an unattractive gurgle.
I rear back, startling us both. My stomach is all over the place, a hot little ball of hunger and heat. “Yes, absolutely,” I whisper to Kai, trying not to invoke Laizure’s wrath. He already thinks I’m lazy about learning, which I’m not.
“I’m tepid,” I once told him.
“Nope,” he said, handing me back yet another test with a big red D. “You’re lazy, Tolliver. I can tell. I’ve been in this business a long time. You can’t fool me.”
“Absolutely,” I tell Kai again. I mean no, of course, because of the fight this morning, but he doesn’t need to know about that. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I’m going to this dance with Kai, whether my mother likes it or not.
I want this summer to be different, the beginning of new things for me, even if Kai is leaving in the fall for another country. He’s a chance, a tiny, bedazzled chance for me to be someone different. Step away from my mom. Even if it’s just at a dumb dance with crinkly streamers and lights hung sloppily from the rafters of a smelly old gym.
I concentrate on the quiz sheet in front of me, relieved to have the distraction.
“Hey,” Kai whispers, nudging me with his elbow. “Meet you at The Pit later? Hang out at Thunder?”
I know it’s dumb and cliché, but my heart soars when he says that. I nod. Yes, yes, yes.
I look back down at the quiz, filled with anatomical illustrations, all valves and arteries and tubes here and there and coils of things that seem vaguely disgusting, and I don’t even care that I’m going to fail.
I don’t understand the body and how it works, at all, but right now I know my heart is like a giant, colorful bird, flying right out of my chest and into the world.
* * *
• • •
Cake is waiting for me at our table in the cafeteria, nodding her head to the music on her earphones as she spreads her lunch out on the table.
The minute I sit down, she drags off her earphones and leans forward. “Did you tell her? She freak?”
I hold up my phone. Four missed calls and nine texts.
Cake whistles. “Damn. That’s some serious momming.”
She pushes a sandwich toward me. Then a baggie of apple slices. Then a baggie of hard Cheetos, because she hates the soft ones.
Cake always brings extra food for me. We don’t even talk about it anymore.
Sometimes I’m so grateful for Cake I could burst. I bite into the sandwich. Cream cheese and strawberries. Not bad. Her mom is an A+ sandwich maker.
Cake says, “You’ve been crying.”
I swallow a hunk of sandwich. “We kind of fought in the car about the dance. And then I saw Lupe, so the morning wasn’t swell.”
“At least it’s done. Now you can move on. Now you can focus on other stuff. Right? Focus.” Cake is big on goals. She has schedules for band practice, personal practice, when to research music schools, when to do homework.
On the table, my phone buzzes. Cake and I look at it, and then at each other.
She says, “Throw her a bone and answer it.”
I feel a surge of defeat. “I was going to try to go the whole day.”
Meep—meep, says my phone.
Cake shakes her head. “No, baby steps. It’s been four hours since the fight. You have to answer it.”
Meep—meep.
I sigh. My mouth is practically watering for the food in front of me. It’s like my mom won’t even let me eat.
“You do it. You check and tell me what she’s saying.”
Cake frowns and peers at the phone. Her expression goes from resigned to curious to…horrified. Her mouth drops open.
“Oh my God, what is it?” I ask. “Is it that bad?” My stomach starts to squeeze.
Cake takes a deep breath. “Tiger. It’s…she…”
She flips the phone in my direction. “She bought you a dress. For the dance.”
My mother bought me a dress.
I stare at the photo. At a dress draped over the back of our couch.
It’s a monstrosity. It’s a cross between Laura Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie and Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady. Ivory and lace, a high neck, and a sash.
A goddamn sash.
My mom’s text reads, It’s so beautiful! I couldn’t resist! Don’t hate me!
Cake says, “If we splattered it, and you, with cherry food coloring and then dumped a bunch of crushed watermelon on you, you could be a cool nineteenth-century zombie in that dress for Halloween, but for just going to a school dance? This is a hard no.”
Two girls next to us lean over. “Oh my God, what is that?”
One says, “Gross. Are you actually going to let that touch your body? It’s like a thousand years old.”
“No!” I angle the phone away from them.
She didn’t even ask. We didn’t even talk about it. I don’t even understand how we went from fighting about a dance to her buying a dress for the dance.
The phone starts ringing. I feel so angry it’s kind of like I almost feel nothing, like I’m floating on a river of fire but I can’t feel it. My stomach hurts from hunger so much I’m dizzy.
I swipe the answer button.
My mom’s voice is very, very loud, and yet, to me, it sounds like she’s calling from very far away, that’s how angry I am. I’m embarrassed and alone on a little island.
The kids around us are watching me curiously, waiting.
Breathlessly, my mom says, “Thank you for finally answering! Listen, I’m sorry, but it’s so beautiful, Tiger! It really spoke to me. You’ll look so lovely and authentic at the dance, not all glossed up and plastic-y. And if we put your hair up—”
“I can’t believe you did this to me.” My voice trembles with anger. I can’t help it.
Cake shakes her head at me, like, No, no, not now.
“What? Wait, what? Honey. I was just trying to—”
“You can’t let me do one thing by myself. I can’t do anything without…without you getting your fingers in it. Not even picking out my own stupid dress for a stupid dance.”
Silence. Then her voice again, still loud, but a little cracked. “Baby, listen, it was just my way of saying I’m sor—”
“Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?”
It comes out too loud. Maybe even louder than too loud, because it hurts even my ears, and it hurts me somewhere deep inside, too. In fact, I think I screamed it.
My mother’s voice says softly, “Grace.”
I drop the phone from my trembling hands. The kids in the cafeteria have gone eerily silent and are staring at me.
Cake bites her lip. “Tiger. That was…not good.”
I scrape the phone into my backpack and stand up, hitting my hip against the table. I keep my eyes down. I don’t want to look at anyone. I just want to get out of here.
“Wait,” Cake says. “You’re not okay. I’ll come with.” She gathers our lunch baggies.
“I have to go,” I tell her. “I just have to get out of here. I’ll see you later.”
I rush out of the cafeteria with my head down, like I always do around here, hoping no one will notice weird June Tolliver’s weird daughter.
And then I find the bathroom and cry in a stall until fifth period starts.
My phone doesn’t ring again.
* * *
• • •
I work my library shift after school, part of my student contract, which is something they make certain kids at Field do if they don’t have the most stellar grades. I think it’s supposed to make you feel more invested in your education or something, having to work in the office answering phones, or in Shop, cleaning up wood shavings and making sure your fellow students don’t sever an arm on a saw.
I’d like nothing more than to rush through this and get to The Pit and see Kai, but I don’t, because I do like it here, sorting the collection, pushing the squeaky cart up and down the stacks. We have some books here that are so ancient they still have those little cards where the librarian hand-wrote the name of the person checking the book out and then ink-stamped the due date. The books even have slots to fit the cards, which I think is very cool. I like sliding the cards out and looking at the names and dates and thinking stuff like, Well, whoever Tammy Frimpong was, she really liked Island of the Blue Dolphins. She checked it out thirteen times in one year.
I’m not very smart at school, but I do like books, and reading, and maybe I get that from my mom, since she was a librarian before she had me. She was the special kind, though: an archivist, which is a person who figured out the history of things from old stuff found in boxes. She worked six floors underground at a university in Albuquerque, fitting spare pieces into stories. “You might see just a postcard, a photo, and a matchbook from a bar,” she told me once. “But if I put those things together and do some research, I could find a love affair between famous writers, or political intrigue.”
My mom was good at putting the stories of strangers together, even as she was refusing to tell me any details about hers.
Like the identity of my dad: The Person Who Shall Not Be Named. The person I think about all the time.
Like when I fix my hair in the morning and she comes into the bathroom and stands behind me, resting her chin on top of my head and smooshing up her short blond hair in the mirror, and there I am, pulling a brush through my boring, straight hair, so different from hers. Or the freckles that careen across my face, while her face is an unmarked sea of perfection. Does my dad have a planetary system of freckles across his face, too? Is he where I get my dark hair, my broad shoulders?
I think Monty Python and old stand-up comedy from the seventies is funny, and my mother thinks both of those things are tiresome and misogynistic, and yeah, I agree, but also, still funny.
If The Person Who Shall Not Be Named was shown a clip of “Confuse-A-Cat” or had to sit through George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” monologue, would he laugh? Is a sense of humor a viable component of DNA? How about avocados and kiwis? One I like, the other I despise.
These are the things that often consume me as I stroll the stacks at the library.
That and kissing Kai Henderson, of course.
Cake texts me. Are you okay?
Not really. Yes. No.
That sounds about right. I looked for you!
I was in the stall.
Ah, the crying stall. Where tears are shed in silence and shame.
That’s the one. Tell me again about the kissing thing. Distract me. I think it might happen later.
NO.
YES. I mean, what do I have to lose now?
True, says Cake’s phone.
Hold on. Let me take a break. Cake has band in the afternoons. I can hear them, way, way across the school, an eerie cacophony of stumbling horns and tubas, interspersed with the occasional tinkling of a triangle.
I text, We’re meeting at The Pit. Thunder after. That’s when it will happen. I think.
Plush. That’s the same word she used a few weeks ago, as she leaned back into the velvety pillows on her futon, holding her pink stuffed unicorn against her shirt. She’d put a black spiked collar around the
unicorn’s neck, Magic-Markered a heart on its fluffy white chest.
Cake’s eyes turned dreamy as she thought about it, and then became a little sad, because she was still getting over that guy Troy, from Sierra Vista. Troy was not, as Cake’s mom Rhonda liked to say, “a gem.”
I don’t know what to do with my hands, I type.
It’ll be okay, she answers. Just remember to breathe, and to relax, because kissing is a fun and essential part of your adolescent development.
Ha ha.
It’ll be a whole new you after this. You’ll want to kiss everyone. Even Laizure!
That’s gross and also illegal.
It’s plush. You just fit, somehow. It’s warm, and you feel like you’re falling, but in a good way. Your body kind of figures things out for you. Don’t worry.
Last year, my mother took me and Cake to the dollar theater in Tucson to see a movie about a girl and boy who both have cancer. They go to Amsterdam to see a famous writer, but they really go to Amsterdam to have sex. Afterward, my mother took us to Bookmans, which is this huge and great used-book store, and I bought three books for less than ten dollars, which is a lot for us, and one of them was the book they based the movie on. We went for carrot cake and coffee after, and my mother said, “Girls, you don’t have to go to a whole other country to have sex. Just do it on the couch when your parents go out for groceries, okay? And use protection.”
I blushed, and I think Cake might have, too, even though she’d already had sex, though I’m not sure my mother knew about that and I wasn’t going to tell her, because if I did, then she’d be all “Are you going to have sex?” And I’d never hear the end of it.
I read the book when we got home, all at once, in three hours. I cried. Even though they were both hurt, and sick, in the same, and different, ways, the boy and the girl seemed nice and tender to each other, and I liked that.
To this day, when Cake and I see a cute guy, one of us will joke, “I’d go to Amsterdam with him.”
Okay, I type. I am definitely not ready for Amsterdam with Kai, but plush might be a nice place to start.
Okay. I have to go back. We’re butchering “Rolling in the Deep” right now. Can you tell?
How to Make Friends with the Dark Page 3