by Nikki Harmon
∆∆∆
At a small bar around the corner, which apparently, Meer goes to after every game, we catch up. Meer inhales the hot wings, fries and a Bud special. I, however, am unsuccessful in my attempt to be neat and dignified while eating my favorite sandwich.
“What is that called again? A Turkey Rueben?!” she asks.
“Yeah,” I mumble trying not to spill out the contents of my sandwich, “It’s messy but it’s my favorite. Mmm … delicious!” She laughs and shakes her head at me.
After the waitress has cleared our plates, I tell her about my scholarship at Temple. She responds with tales of her one year on scholarship at Lincoln University. She played varsity ball, but she couldn’t keep up her grades and had to drop out.
“So what’s your plan?” I ask her.
“My plan? I think I would be good in sales. You know, I like talking to people, and I can be pretty convincing when I want to be. I have some leads I’m working on but you know…” She trails off.
“But what?” I ask her.
“But right now, I’m not thinking about work. I’m kind of thinking about you. I wish I had known you were gay in high school. We could have gone to prom!” She laughs.
“I doubt it, even if you knew about me, you were way too out there for me. I like to be a little more low-key.”
“Aahh”, she replied, nodding her head. “Keep it on the down low, I got you shortie. Is that how you roll now? You got a boyfriend somewhere you keep for special occasions?” she asks.
“No, that was then. I’m grown now and don’t care what anybody thinks!” I say.
“Is that right? You out and proud, huh? Good for you! I bet you wouldn’t mind kissing me right here, right now, in front of all these folks, right?”
She waves her arm indicating our fellow patrons. I look around. The bar is half full with older men enjoying a drink and watching basketball on the TVs mounted above the bar, but there are some couples and a few women alone with their wine. They all look like they could be friends of my parents. I swallow my doubt and say, “No, I’m not afraid to kiss you here in this bar but I don’t go kissing every girl I hang out with. You’re cute and all but my kisses ain’t cheap.”
“You think I’m cute?” she says smiling. “I knew it. I knew you were checking me out this whole time!”
“Oh, you are too much! I’m sure you have a girlfriend too! I know your type, player!” I tease.
“Ooohh, now you want to know if I have a girlfriend! This is getting better and better,” she laughs, stroking her chin and grinning at me.
I laugh but I am blushing. I say, “Look, I have got to go. I have things to do. Papers to write. My mom is probably wondering where I am. Seriously, we should go.”
She looks a bit taken aback. “Yo, chill. I was just messing with you, Kim. Don’t worry, I won’t make you kiss me. I see you have not changed. So serious all the time!”
“Meer, I am chill, I just have to get back home. I don’t even know what possessed me to come out here. I had fun, though. I really did. It was good to see you again,” I say trying to soften my earlier words.
Meer says, “Ok let’s pay up, I have to hit the bathroom and then we can go.”
I watch her stride away. I wonder if she does have a girlfriend. My guess is that she probably has a few. I reflect on how confident she looked playing ball, how at ease she was hanging out with her friends. Even as I admire her, I’m a little jealous. I can hear her laughing and joking with some guy before I see her turn the corner. I catch my breath and smile to myself. I start to stand up as she approaches the table. I hear a buzzing in the space behind my ears, time slows, my vision blurs. I tilt left and I see me slide up into an unexpected but welcome kiss. I tilt my head right and I see us walking out the door laughing and joking. She’s looking at me with a raised eyebrow. I shake it off, hand her my bag, which she takes laughing, and we walk through the bar to the door. I look back towards our table and see the faint outline of us kissing, long and hard. I think I hear hoots and clapping. I pause. I want to go back there, but the moment is gone, the outline fades and she’s holding the door for me. I go through it.
She drives me home. We listen to Beyoncé and sing along with the music. When we get to my block, I show her the house and we slide to a stop.
“Hey”, she says, “give me your phone. I’m gonna give you my number in case you ever want to hang out again.”
I give it to her and she taps in her info and then makes a call. I’m about to protest when I hear her phone ring. Ahhh… She grins at me.
“It was really nice hanging out with you Kim. I don’t know how I got so lucky but if you ever want to do it again, just give me a call. Maybe a movie, whatever …”
“Ok”, I say, “I’ll do that. Good luck with the sales thing,” I add on and immediately cringe. Why did I say that?
“Yeah, and you too, have fun at Temple!” she says as I drag my bags out the car behind me. I close the door and look back to wave, but she is already putting the car in gear and pulling off. I climb the steps feeling like I just lost something important. I want to yell for her to come back. I want to call her and apologize for being an ass. I want to go back and get that kiss. But I don’t do any of those things. I fish my keys out, put them in the door and go in.
Chapter 2
My mom and step-dad are in the living room when I come through the door. My mom is reading a magazine; Walter is listening to Miles Davis and flicking through TV channels. They look up, glance at the clock on the wall and greet me.
“You’re kind of late today, Kim. I thought you would be home for dinner,” my mom says, trying to keep it light, though I can tell she’s annoyed.
“It’s a long story, but I ended up running into an old friend and we hung out for a while. Sorry I didn’t call but I didn’t think I’d be out too long,” I explain as I hang up my coat.
“Ok, Kim, but a phone call would have been nice. I left you a plate in the fridge,” she replies.
“Thanks, but I ate out. I’ll eat it tomorrow for lunch, I promise.” I lug my bags upstairs and deposit them there. I poke my head in both of the kids’ rooms, but they are fast asleep. Oh well. When I come back down, they have turned off the music and are watching a crime drama on TV. I grab myself some water and cookies and sit down to watch with them.
“Hey, something weir ….” I start to say.
“Shhhhhhhh!” they both hiss at me. Man! People are intense about CSI.
I close my mouth, sit back, munch my cookies and look at my parents. Even though he’s my step-dad, I’ve known Walter most of my life. He and my mom were friends even before she met my biological father. And yes, that is what we call him, he was such a dirty dog he gets “adjectified”. He and my mother were together for about five years, only two after I was born. Apparently, as soon as I became verbal and prone to tantrums, he had had enough. My mother says it wasn’t me. She said that they were on their way out the day they began but I can’t help but wonder. They looked happy in their pictures before I was born, afterward though, they look stiff. But I’ll never know because he up and left for Alaska to work on the oil drills and we haven’t heard from him since. It was just my mom and me for eight years after that. We didn’t have much but we had fun. I spent a lot of time with family while she worked but I was a pretty happy kid growing up, oblivious to most of the world around me.
Walter started coming around as I left childhood and entered puberty. I hated him and everything about him. My mom fell head over heels for him. I was disgusted. They dated. I grew bitter and jealous. They got engaged. I was furious. They got married. I withdrew into myself. They got pregnant and I resigned myself to being alone. To be honest, Walter was always good and fair to me, but I was an asshole to him and my mother stayed angry with me. She tried to be understanding and empathetic in the beginning, but by the second year, she’d had enough and grew cold to me. I think she thought I was trying to ruin her happiness. I was only trying to pre
serve mine but neither of us could have said those things then. Her love was my tragedy and over time we grew distant and became polite to mask the cold between us.
She was preoccupied with her newborn son when I inconveniently came out at thirteen. I spent months agonizing and trying to understand “gayness” and what it all meant for me and my “identity”. I had my short-lived tomboy phase, my granola crunchy activist phase, my fag-hag phase … it was all just too much for my mother and she left me to my own devices to figure it out. She had a baby and then a toddler to care for and when I came home with the tongue piercing, she just looked and walked out the room, shutting the door behind her. I became the babysitter and later, just a ghost drifting through the rooms. The years came and went and we became accustomed to the chill. We used good grades and school activities to stand in for approval and affection. We’ve come a long way since then, but even now she tolerates me and I fend off the pain of it. I need her and she knows it. Walter is smart. He stays out of it.
It’s late and I’m tired. I head on up to bed.
“Good-night,” I say to them.
“Good-night,” they chime back, eyes never leaving the screen.
∆∆∆
It’s Wednesday and I don’t have a class until 4:40pm. I spend the day reading assignments and writing a paper on phages, looking at my phone, and Instagramming my cat, Chuckles. My mom and step-dad are at work, my brother and sister are at school, and I am here alone (with Chuckles). We are two peas in a pod. We like to appear very aloof and self-sufficient, but we are one good belly rub from rolling over and throwing our legs in the air begging for more. And we purr. It’s true.
I think about calling Meer but it already feels over. It felt like trying to wave to someone on a ride, by the time I lifted my hand, I was feeling the breeze of her rushing by, watching the blurred back of her head. I decide to write my paper and watch the astronauts on NASA.tv. That’s probably weird but it helps me stay focused. I have wanted to be involved in space flight since I was 12 years old. I got into science fiction first by reading Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Then for a science fair, I did a presentation on gravity and the effects of zero gravity on mice temperaments and temperatures. I decided then I wanted to work for NASA. When I began high school, I joined the afterschool STEM program. I thought I was in heaven. Robotics and engineering with other kids like me, from all over the city. The program was intense. We met after school, over the summer and sometimes on the weekends. Most of the kids were boys. As a matter of fact, all but five out of 50 were boys. But we girls hung tough and bonded into our own little crew. Until she came.
She was Savvy. Savvy Montana. There was never a more perfect girl than she. Smart, kind, generous, compassionate and gorgeous. She was half Dominican and half Filipino but grew up in Brooklyn and had just moved to Philly where we were just not used to such exotic loveliness accompanied by keen intelligence and a Brooklyn accent. Bronzed-skinned, lithe but curvy around the hips, all fifty of us wanted to be her best friend and fights would break out over who got to sit next to her, who got to be her partner for an assignment and who got to walk out the door with her when the day was done. Even the teachers were in her thrall, calling on her all the time, giving her extra help and consideration for assignments. None of us minded though, she was unabashedly beloved.
I, too, coveted her but I was patient and bided my time. And it came. She was a senior, and I was a junior and we were paired up for her last assignment in the program. It was the beginning of May, the flowers were blooming, the air was warming up, the days were longer and we were given the task of building a mini solar car for a competition with our fellow STEM nerds. Because we wanted to keep our designs secret, we decided to build it at her house. She and her dad had converted their detached garage into a workshop and its dusty greasiness was perfect for our project. I took the bus there just about every day after school that May. We became friends and I realized that for all her popularity, she was lonely. Her parents were strict and kept a close eye on her. She wasn’t allowed any male friends and few girls could stand to be around her for too long as her perfection threw their imperfections into sharp relief. But not me. I wasn’t interested in comparisons; I was infatuated and only interested in being with her, whenever I could. She was graduating and going to MIT in the fall. I wasn’t going to squander my time.
Every day we worked on the car, talked, complained, solved problems and became friends. Even though she had to know I was smitten with her, she allowed it and, I’m sure, she enjoyed the attention. I was aware of how fragile my position was so I did nothing to jeopardize it. But she, I think, wanted to be kind to me and began to bestow gifts – a hug, a brief hand hold, a kiss on the cheek. My blushing and stammering must have pointed out the obvious – that she had all the power in this relationship and she used it. She would ask me to bring her things, or fetch something from her house or do more than my fair share of the work and I would do it with adoration. She began to run her fingers up my arms and to find reasons to touch my clothes incidentally caressing the skin underneath. She liked to see me squirm. She would look over my shoulder and breathe on my neck or whisper something in my ear and I would swoon. She would pass by me too close and her breasts would brush my arm or my hand and I would nearly faint. Oh, it continued like this for weeks until one day she asked me if I had ever kissed a boy. I said I had, but I had not been impressed as he had been a very wet and sloppy kisser. She confided that she had not kissed any boy except her cousin and she didn’t think that counted.
She took a step towards me, I took a step towards her and she kissed me. I had never felt passion before, but I felt it that day. That kiss was like a dam bursting. I had been walking on eggshells for so long that the relief of being able to touch her, to hold her, to kiss and caress her was overwhelming. I devoured her as I had in my daydreams many times before. I think even she was surprised by the intensity of my desire, but she didn’t back down. I went up her t-shirt and cupped her breast through her bra running my thumb over her nipple until she unbuttoned her bra and offered her flesh. She sighed in my ear and whimpered when I lowered my head and put it in my mouth, running my tongue all over and around it. She brought my head back up and kissed me while running her hands all over my body, grinding her hips against mine. I started to reach around to the front of her jeans when we heard the back door of her house open and her dog run out into the yard. We both knew her 10-year-old brother would not be far behind. We quickly straightened our clothes out, putting her bra back on but sneaking kisses all the while.
Her brother busted in as expected. We showed him the progress on our car and hurried him out to get back to kissing. We had two more weeks left to work on the car and, although we completed it and raced to a second-place finish, it didn’t come out as perfectly as we would have liked. I didn’t mind though. I had two weeks of all-consuming passionate making out with the most perfect girl in the world. And as it turns out, she was kind of into me, too, at least for a while. She wrote me every week that summer from her pre-freshman program at MIT. But once school started, I didn’t hear from her again. I wasn’t able to afford going straight to MIT from high school, but my plan is to go there for my junior and senior years. If I work hard, get the grades and win the scholarship I want, then I will be able to transfer. And maybe I’ll get to be with Savvy again, maybe I won’t (but God, I hope I do). Either way, I’ll be one step closer to NASA.
Chapter 3
It’s Thursday night and instead of drinking with my fellow students, I am sitting in the lab doing the most boring but well paid work-study research ever. Professor Patel, my advisor, is doing some really interesting work regarding the intentional movements of plants. Everyone knows plants can move grow, shrink, send out pheromones, and emit electrical charges. But nobody knows how the stimuli they receive are processed and interpreted. That’s the objective of our experiment. Every 30 minutes I test a stimulus on this lovely sweet potato vine that I have named
Mable, and we monitor its electrical output and then I take a cell sample, label it and file it for the grad students to analyze. Tonight, it’s army ant pheromones, increasing distance in small increments. Professor Patel has very interesting ideas to ponder but very boring experiments to conduct. Hence, work-study students in the department do the grunt work, grad students do the analysis, and Professor Patel will take the credit. This is my second semester at this position, but I’m not complaining. It’s an easy gig except for having to sit in this “isolation” room. It’s sterile and self-contained to keep out any other influences, but it’s creepy to be here alone at night. I can’t use a computer (electromagnetic frequencies) and I can’t play music (plants respond to music). I can only read … on paper.
Biophysics. That’s my major. I usually don’t even tell people that. When people ask if I am in school and am I doing well, they just want to hear “yes!” So I say, “yes!” and smile. Once or twice I tried to tell a neighbor or an old friend about what I’m studying and after about the second sentence, their eyes glazed over. I stopped myself mid-thought and just said, “Yes, I love it!” Relieved, they smiled at me and said, “good for you, Kim!” Then I slipped back into whatever everyone else was talking about – Jay-Z or the upcoming election or whatever. I’ve learned that science is only interesting to other scientists and even then, if you’re not into the same scientific field, they could blow you off in a heartbeat.
Bzzzzzz….Bzzzzzzz….Bzzzzzzz… time to take a sample, then I’m done for the night. Mindful of the blade, I pick up my X-ACTO knife and slice off a section of the stem near the base of the leaf. Then I press it between two tiny pieces of glass, label it and file it in the box of samples for examination in the morning. Next, I snip off a leaf and drop it into a preservative solution for chemical analysis. Then I make my comments in the logbook, pack up my textbook, whisper good-night to Mabel and head out.