Second Kiss

by Natalie Palmer

  "What's going on?" Bridget pushed. I remained silent. I had already done enough.

  Dad spoke again when it became obvious that Mom wasn't going to. "Let your mom and I have a moment down here, Bridget. I'll come up and talk to you both in a minute."

  Bridget threw her napkin on her plate and pushed her chair out from behind her. It squeaked as it slid across the linoleum. She marched up the stairs as loudly as she could, and I followed sheepishly behind her. I walked into my bedroom; the sun was far beneath the surface of the earth, and the only thing coming through the windows now was the dim glow of street lights below. I didn't have the courage to turn on the lights. I folded down the comforter on my bed as well as the sheet below. With my shoes still on, I slid safely underneath them, pulling them far over my head. I didn't see the light come on some moments later, but I felt a warm hand brush over my back that was followed by the cool tone of Dad's voice.

  "Gemma, sweetheart." He sounded sad. "Would you come on downstairs? Your mother and I need to talk to you and your sister about something."

  I unfolded the sheets, revealing my face that was covered with matted hair. "Before we go down there," I urged, "please just promise me one thing."

  Dad's eyes looked bigger than I had ever seen them. He didn't say anything; he didn't even nod, but I continued.

  "Don't leave us." The familiar sting of salt built up behind my eyes. "I'm sorry for everything I've done. Just tell me that you won't leave us."

  Dad said nothing. Instead he reached out for my hand and led me out of my room and down the stairs to the living room, where Mom and Bridget were already sitting, waiting. The silence in the room was almost tangible, like it was waiting for the right moment to pounce on me and make breathing an impossibility. When we were all sitting down-Mom and Dad on one couch, Bridget and I facing them on the other-Dad started to speak.

  "Girls, there is something that Mom and I need to tell you."

  "Wait!" I pleaded. I couldn't let Dad tell us whatever terrible news he had to tell us while there was such tension between Mom and me. The air had to be clear or else the new news would swallow me whole. "I'm sorry for everything the past couple days. I'm sorry about the party, and I'm sorry for sneaking out. I'm sorry that I skipped class, and I'm sorry that I fell asleep in the closet." I barely took a breath. I kept rambling my apologies off so that no one could interrupt me before I was finished. "I didn't skip class on purpose today. Drew told me she didn't want to be friends with me after what happened Friday night, and I was crying so hard that I had to go to the bathroom to clean up. I know it's a lame excuse, but I'm not purposely skipping class. I'm not being rebellious on purpose or anything like that. I'm just making some really dumb mistakes." I was looking at Mom, who was watching me with kind, wet eyes. "I'm still me. I'm still Gemma. I'm sorry."

  Mom leaned forward and reached for my knee. "I know, honey. I knew that all along. I just haven't been myself lately. I'm sorry too."

  And with that, the air was cleared. I was able to take in a solid, deep breath for the first time since my parents got back from their trip. The tension between Mom and me, between Dad and me, even between Bridget and me, was obliterated in that instant, leaving room for a brand new dilemma that was rising to the surface.

  "Girls," Dad picked up right where he had left off, "I'm sick." His words came like a semi truck directly at my forehead, and I felt whiplash from the blow. We've all been sick with the flu or a cold; Bridget even had pneumonia when she was twelve, but this was different. The way my parents watched us while Dad was talking made me realized that this wasn't a sickness that would be cured by Tylenol or Amoxicillin. I doubted that Dad was even referring to a sickness that would require surgery before he would be well. Somewhere deep inside I knew this was different. It was much worse.

  Bridget was the first one to react. "What do you mean you're sick? Sick with what?" She sounded defensive, but I didn't know why.

  Mom was the one to answer. "Your father has something called small cell lung cancer. It is an aggressive disease, but the doctors are doing everything they can to help him."

  Cancer. The word meant the same to me as tsunami or piranha. I had never seen them; I wasn't even quite sure what they were, but I knew they were bad. And I knew in many cases, they were deadly.

  I could barely move let alone reply to what I had just heard. Bridget, on the other hand, was angry. "You have cancer? How long have you known about this?" She was off the couch and red faced, yelling loudly at both of my parents, mostly at Dad.

  "Have a seat, Bridget. We're going to talk about this calmly." Dad's voice was even, as though he had expected this reaction from her. Bridget hesitantly sat back on the couch, clutching tightly to a pillow. Dad continued, "I went in for a chest exam about two months ago. I was having a hard time breathing, and I thought it might be asthma."

  Mom picked up the explanation from there; it wasn't strange for them to bounce off each other like that. "The doctor found a lump in your father's chest. He ran some tests and found a malignant tumor."

  I didn't know what that meant either, but the force at which Bridget etched her fingernails into the pillow she was holding told me it was bad.

  Dad continued from there, "Doctor Howe, our oncologist, suggested we go to a special hospital in Jacksonville that does a lot of work with cancer patients. He thought maybe they would have some better ideas of how to get me better. They had good news for us."

  Bridget sat up straighter. "You told us you went to Jacksonville for work!"

  "I know we did, Bridge." Dad looked down at his hands. "We wanted to find out as much as we could about this before we told you and Gemma. We wanted to be able to give you as much information as possible."

  "So stop lying to us then and give us the information!"

  I turned to Bridgett and yelled, "He would if you would stop interrupting him!" She jerked away from me and melted into her pillow. I was surprised that she let it go so easily.

  "The tumor hasn't started spreading yet, and the doctors at the Mayo clinic think that radiation and chemotherapy could do a lot of good in my situation."

  Bridget was back on guard and ready to fight. "So how long do you have to live?"

  "Bridget!" Mom gasped. I felt nauseated and wanted to crawl onto Mom's lap and burrow myself in the safety of her arms.

  "What?" Bridget's eyes looked like daggers as she turned to Mom. "We deserve to know how long he's going to be around! I deserve to know if he's going to be alive when I get married or when I graduate from high school!"

  Mom began to sob. Big, wet, alligator tears streamed down her cheeks and around her jaw line. She didn't wipe at them; she just let them fall as she stared blankly into the face of her oldest daughter.

  "Bridget, I know this is hard on you," Dad began, but again he was cut short by Bridget's raging temper.

  "No, you don't! You don't know how hard this is! You didn't just find out that your father is dying and he's known for two months and never told you! You didn't just find out that you're going to be the one raising your little sister because your mom is going to be in a state of depression when you're gone! You weren't just sentenced to a life of living at home so you can glue back the pieces of your messed-up family! You don't know what it's like! You don't know what it's like!" Bridget stepped over me in a fit of tears and ran up the stairs before any of us knew what happened. Mom was still staring at the empty space on the couch where Bridget had been sitting. Dad was whispering calming words in her ear and rubbing her back. He then looked up at me.

  "Gemma, how are you doing with all of this? I know we bombarded you with a lot of information. Do you have any questions?"

  Did I have any questions? Only a million. Was he going to die? And if so, when? And when he did die, what would life be like? And where would he go? Would he be gone forever, or just floating in the clouds somewhere waiting for the rest of us? But I shook my head. "No."

  I searched in the dark for some small rocks to lob
at Jess's window. I looked up at the back of the big old house that Jess's mom had inherited from her grandmother. There were a dozen windows at least, but I had them memorized. I knew exactly which one was Jess's bedroom. I realized for the first time just how hard it was to find a rock the right size. They were either too small and wouldn't fly to the second story level of the house, or they were too big and I was risking breaking the window. I finally managed to find one, and it made a little smacking sound as it hit the window. It sounded so different from this angle outside than it did all the times I had heard the rock against the glass in my bedroom.

  The pane of the window rattled, and I could see a dark figure through the glass. Soon the window was open, and Jess's twelveyear-old sister, Vivian, peered down at me from above-a look of consternation etched across her face.

  "What are you doing here?" she asked, annoyed. I got along okay with Jess's sisters, but I had known for a while that they didn't like that Jess spent so much time with me. I guess they saw me as competition. To be honest, I didn't blame them. If I had a brother like Jess, I wouldn't want to share him either.

  I ignored her question. "Is Jess home?"

  Vivian scowled then ducked her head back inside and yelled Jess's name. Soon Jess's head was peering out of the window where Vivian's had once been. He squinted his eyes at me. "What are you doing down there?"

  "This is how you always get me to come down and talk!" I yelled up to him, my neck stretched as far is it could go.

  Jess bent his head back inside the window and looked at the watch on his wrist. "Gemma, it's barely eight o'clock. You could have just come to the front door."

  "Could you just come down here?" I urged. My voice cracked, and Jess's expression changed from humored to concerned. In an instant the window was empty.

  I wandered around the yard toward the back door. Caris had mentioned to my mom once that her husband, Kevin, had promised to someday put in a patio with a Jacuzzi. But between me and the back door was a bare slab of cement. That was one promise out of many that was never fulfilled.

  Jess stepped through the sliding glass door and immediately walked toward me until he was close enough to wrap an arm around my shoulders. "What's the matter? Is everything okay?"

  He had asked me this many times before when my problems had all been so trivial. I wished I was coming to him with a concern about a boy not liking me or an issue with a friend. But this was so much worse. So unfixable.

  "Can we go for a walk?"

  We walked in silence until we reached the cement jungle at the top of our street. It was harder to climb the blocks in the dark, but we had done it enough times that it came naturally. We sat dangling our feet from the highest stack of blocks. From this stack we could see over the rooftops and the tall pine trees and catch a glimpse of Emery Lake as it shimmered under the moonlight. It had been almost a year since Jess and I had sat there together. Though never before had he sat this close, with his arm wrapped around me so tightly.

  Jess's voice broke the silence. "Is this about Drew?"

  Drew? It took me a second to realize who he was talking about. It occurred to me that the girl belonging to that name had shattered my world only ten hours earlier. But now that seemed so insignificant.

  "No, it's about my dad," I choked as I spoke.

  "Your dad?" Jess squeezed me. The sides of our bodies were perfectly aligned, and his warmth sent a chill down my spine. "What's wrong with him?"

  "I think he's going to die." I said it matter-of-factly because I didn't know how else to say it.

  "Is he hurt? What's wrong with him?"

  I was trying to avoid the word. It seemed so encompassing. But it crept out of my mouth like a dying caterpillar. "Cancer."

  Jess looked away from me and out toward the endless amount of trees. I could hear him breathing in and out until he finally responded, "What kind?"

  I shook my head. "I don't know, some kind of lung cancer, I guess.

  "Lung cancer," he said quietly as though he was talking to himself. "My grandpa had lung cancer."

  "He had lung cancer?" I asked hopefully. "Did it go away?"

  Jess looked at me with pained eyes. "No, he, uh... "

  "Oh." I looked down at my hands. He didn't have to finish the sentence. His grandpa had died.

  Jess pulled me even closer to him. "But he was old. Your dad's a lot younger," he whispered the words into my hair. "Your dad will fight this."

  I didn't doubt what Jess was saying. My dad was tough, and he had a strong will to live. He would fight this. But would he win?

  Jess unwrapped his arm from around my shoulders and rested back on his hands. I felt cold without him right up against me. "How did you find out?" he asked.

  "I fell asleep in my closet this afternoon, and my parents didn't know I was in there."

  "You overheard them talking about it?"

  "My mom asked my dad how she was going to raise me without him. So I asked them about it, and they told us he had cancer."

  Jess grimaced. "I'm sorry." Then a look of confusion crossed his face. "Why were they talking about that in your room?"

  "They came to get me for dinner."

  "But you were asleep in the closet."

  "Uh huh."

  "Why were you asleep in the closet again?"

  "My mom got really mad at me for skipping class and sneaking out with you last night, so she sent me to my room, and I just wanted to be alone in a dark place, so I went into the closet."

  "You skipped class again?"

  "Not on purpose. I was crying and didn't want to go to first period with tears running down my face."

  "Why were you crying?"

  I was amazed at how far behind Jess was in the goings-on of my life.

  "Because Drew kicked me out of her locker and told me she didn't want to be my friend anymore because of how the fake birthday party turned out."

  "Seriously?" Jess seemed bothered.

  I nodded as I stared blankly ahead.

  "Wow. That girl just gets better every day," he grumbled.

  "It doesn't really matter anymore." I sat motionless, staring at the blackness ahead of me. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. Friends, boys, school ... they all seemed so petty, so pointless. "What will I do if he dies?"

  Jess replied quietly, "I don't know."

  "What did you do?"

  "What do you mean? My dad didn't die."

  "No, but he's not really in your family anymore."

  "Yeah, but that's a good thing. There were so many years of him corrupting the whole feeling of our home that once he was gone we were happy."

  "I wonder if it will be that way for us. I wonder if he'll just get sicker and sicker, and it will finally get to the point that we want him to die."

  Jess didn't have a response. For the first time in our friendship Jess didn't have any advice for my predicament. He had never had a parent diagnosed with cancer. He didn't know what it felt like, and he wasn't about to pretend to. I offered a new subject. "What's going on with your dad and the custody issue?"

  "My dad's lawyer thinks he should get us for the summer and every other holiday. But we're hoping that I can just go, so the girls won't have to leave my mom."

  I jerked my head around. "Does your dad's lawyer know that he's an abusive jerk?"

  Jess shook his head. "I guess because it was the first time he ever showed physically abusive behavior, they're letting him off pretty easy. He had sixty days in jail, and he's pretty much off the hook."

  "So what now," I was starting to get angry, and my words were defensive, "you're just going to be gone all summer with your dad?"

  "Maybe, I don't know." Jess didn't look up from his hands.

  I was frustrated at Jess's apathetic response. "Where does he even live?"

  "He moved back to where he grew up. I think he's sharing an apartment right now with my uncle."

  "Where did he grow up? Is it far away?" I couldn't imagine a summer without Jess. We always spent ever
y second together at the lake, the snow cone shack ... it didn't matter, we were always together. I couldn't bear to face the school break without him.

  Jess looked up toward the lake and rubbed his hand over his hair. His expression was still and lacking in emotion as he answered, "California."

  Neither is rejection. I hadn't spoken to Drew for over a month. I sat on the opposite side of the room from her in German and did everything I could do to avoid her locker as I walked from class to class, which meant I was spending a lot more time at my own assigned locker in the dreaded eighth grade hall.

  I needed to stop there before heading home, and as I passed all the unfamiliar eighth-grade faces, a tornado of fluttering butterflies swirled around my stomach when I saw Trace Weston standing at his locker. Even though I had been using my own locker for a while, I had only seen Trace a couple of times.

  I approached my locker and started turning the combination lock. I could smell the sweet aroma of Trace's cologne-he was probably the only boy in junior high that could wear cologne and get away with it. I finished the combination and lifted the locker handle. Darn! It was still locked. I hated it when I got the combination wrong. Those lockers were so temperamental, and of course I would struggle with it the one time all week that Trace was at his locker!

  I started again from the beginning, twisting the lock a few times to make sure it was reset. I turned the knob to thirty-seven, then turned it the other way one and a half times to nine, then back the final time to seventeen. I took a deep breath. Please open. Please open. Please open. I lifted the handle. Still locked! I shook the handle with a grunt of frustration. From the corner of my eye, I could see Trace put his last book in his backpack and zip it up. He was going to walk away, and I was going to be stranded here looking like the moron that couldn't open her own locker!

  Trace closed his locker smoothly. It barely made a sound as it clicked into place. He lingered for a moment before clearing his throat. "Uh... " He was facing me when the sound came out of his mouth. Was he actually talking to me? Was Trace Weston actually talking to me? "Gemma, I think you are trying to open the wrong locker."