Kissing Midnight

by Rede, Laura Bradley

  My heart is threatening to break out of my chest. For an instant I had been sure I was having one of my hallucinations. My eyes flick across the frozen animals: a cougar with its teeth bared. Two raccoons stealthily climbing a tree. An eagle with a mouse clutched in its talons. My gaze lingers on the wolf. It reminds me too much of the beast I thought I saw at the warehouse—or maybe of Dev, with the wolf-skin costume draped over his head. “Wherever we’re going,” I say, “Let’s go.”

  “This way,” Dev grabs my hand and we take off down the hall. Darkened classrooms flash past on either side. Somewhere in the building I can hear a rhythmic noise, like a metronome.

  “What’s that?” I whisper.

  “Pendulum,” he whispers back. “There’s a big display on perpetual motion.”

  I remember the subject from high school—how objects in motion stay in motion forever unless something stops them. There’s something ominous about the sound. It makes me think of the ticking in my dream…

  I shove the thought aside. The last thing I need is to trigger an episode. I’m stressed enough. My heart is beating in time with the ticking, and I’m clutching the blanket like a kid.

  Just be here now, I tell myself, be with Dev. He doesn’t seem the least bit hesitant. He strides confidently down the hall, and when he turns to smile at me it’s the smile of a little boy getting into mischief.

  Trying to let some of that spirit infect me, I force myself to sound flip. “Let me guess,” I whisper. “Are we going to the lab? Cook our picnic over Bunsen burners?”

  “Why?” He shoots me a flirtatious look, “You think we have chemistry?”

  I stifle a laugh. “That’s not what I said.”

  “You’d rather study biology?” He raises his eyebrows suggestively. “Anatomy, perhaps?”

  He grabs my hand suddenly and tugs me into a little alcove.

  “What? Did you see a security guard?” I scan the darkened hallway nervously.

  “Seriously, Saintly, don’t worry. I’ve studied the security guards and they’re on a circuit. No one is due to check back here for another two hours. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Then why did you drag me in here all of a sudden!”

  He shifts a few inches closer. “I just thought it looked cozy.”

  I plant my palms on his chest and shove him back an inch. “Didn’t you have something to show me?”

  “Right you are!” He grabs my hand again. “Come on!”

  Dev hums the Mission: Impossible theme under his breath as we take off down the hallway again. I have to admit, it’s hard not to get caught up in his enthusiasm, and I catch myself smiling again as I run.

  But my smile disappears when I realize where we’re going. “The planetarium?” I hang back. “Oh, Dev, I don’t think we should. There’s all sorts of expensive stuff in there. Breakable stuff.”

  “Come on, Saintly.” He turns those blue eyes on me. “It’s fine. I’ve done it before.”

  “Already? You just moved here.”

  He shrugs. “I guess I made myself at home.”

  “Well, I’m sort of at home at this school, too. Which is why I’d rather not get kicked out.”

  “Getting kicked out?” He looks surprised. “Is that what you’re worried about?”

  “That and, you know, getting fired from my work study. Losing my scholarship. That sort of thing.”

  He looks relieved. “Good!”

  “Good? Me losing my scholarship is good?”

  “No! Good because I thought you were worried about being alone with me.”

  I study him for a moment. Am I afraid of Dev? Should I be? Looking into his eyes right now, all I see is his excitement, his eagerness to share something with me. “I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t want to be with you.”

  His smile is warm. “And you know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, right? You trust me?”

  I nod. “I trust you.”

  “Good,” he says, “because I’d never want to do anything that would make you uncomfortable.”

  “Then you’re not going to break into the planetarium?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  I let out a sigh of relief.

  “You are.”

  “What?” I hiss, “Me? I don’t know how to—”

  “I’ll teach you.” Dev takes the blanket from my hands and sets it on the floor as he pulls the little metal lock pick out of his pocket again. . Then he turns me around so I’m facing the planetarium door. Standing very close behind me—so close I can feel his warm breath on my neck—he reaches around and presses the lock pick into my hand. It’s small and smooth and metal. “Just let me move you, okay? You have to do it by feel.” He lifts my hand and guides the lock pick to the lock. “Just relax.”

  I can’t relax. The feel of Dev’s arms around me, of his chest pressed against my back, makes my body tense. “Breathe,” he whispers. “Now slide it in the lock.” He guides my hand as I press the lock pick into the keyhole. “Good.” He shifts a little closer. I can feel his pelvis pressed against my ass as he slowly moves my hand in circles, probing the lock. “You gotta really listen to it. Feel it.” He shuts his eyes, his face right beside mine. I hold my breath. “Shut your eyes,” he breathes.

  I shut them and try to give over to Dev moving my hand. I can feel the inner working of the lock, but nothing is moving. Then, suddenly, something catches.

  “Aha!” Dev smiles without opening his eyes. “There she is.” He turns my wrist and I feel the lock shift, the tumblers turning over and slipping into place with a satisfying click.

  Dev lets go of my hand and stands back, smiling proudly. “See? Not so hard.”

  I let out my breath. I’m surprised to find I feel proud of myself, too. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Juvie.” He scoops up the blanket. “I’m kidding. I was never in juvenile detention.”

  “Because you were good?” I say “Or because you were good at not getting caught?”

  “Yes.” His blue eyes are teasing.

  I hold out the lock pick. “Here.”

  “Oh, no. You keep it. You never know when it might come in handy. Plus,” he adds, “it’s a souvenir.”

  “More like evidence,” I mutter, but I put the lock pick in the pocket of my jacket anyhow.

  Dev scoops up the blanket and opens the door. “After you.”

  It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the velvet darkness of the planetarium, but once they do, I can see it’s beautiful. The room is round, with a domed black ceiling. Tiers of plum-colored theatre seats slope up from a round center platform. Off to one side of the door, a control panel like a DJ’s sound board glows in the darkness. “Make yourself comfortable,” Dev says.

  I go to take a seat in the back row, but Dev stops me. “Not there, down here.” He heads for the center platform and spreads the blanket out on the floor. “Best seats in the house.”

  I settle myself in the middle of the blanket. It smells sweetly of old campfires and citronella. “Did you take this camping?”

  “Sure,” he says, making his way back up to the control panel. “Why? Do you camp?”

  “Not since I was a Girl Scout.”

  He grins as he steps behind the control panel. “You were a Girl Scout?”

  “What? Weren’t you a Boy Scout?”

  “Well…” He searches the array of buttons and dials. “I do always come prepared.”

  I can’t help giggling. “For what exactly?”

  Dev finds the switch he was looking for. There’s a click as he flips it and suddenly the whole ceiling above me is lit with stars, an entire universe where a minute ago there was only darkness.

  Dev gazes up at them with satisfaction. “For anything.”

  He braces a hand on the control panel and vaults it in one easy jump.

  “Be careful! You’ll break something!”

  “Am I making you nervous?” He climbs onto one of the seats and starts making his way down
to me, stepping over the back of the seat in front of him, folding the seats down with his feet as he goes. “Aww, that’s nice of you to worry about me, Saint!”

  “I wasn’t worried about you. I was afraid you’d break the panel.”

  “So it doesn’t bother you if I do this?” He holds his arms out to the sides and bounces up and down on the seat. It creaks under him.

  “Will you get down here? You’re going to break your neck!”

  “I think you do care.” Dev grins as he steps off the last seat. “I’ll take you camping this summer,” he says as he settles on the blanket beside me.

  My heart lifts a little at the thought. I can picture it: A warm night humming with June bugs. Dev sitting beside me by the campfire, his hair still damp with lake water, eating sticky marshmallow off his fingers. It makes me smile. “That would be nice.”

  Dev slips off his jacket, balling it up into a pillow, and I do the same. He stretches out, languid, his long legs crossed at the ankle, his hands behind his head in a way that makes his sweater ride up. I can glimpse a lean slice of abs, the shadow of his hips above his low-slung jeans.

  “Lie down,” Dev says.

  I hesitate. Is this why he brought me here? So we could make out in the dark? Well, why else? But if Dev just wanted to make out with someone, he hardly had to go to all the trouble of breaking and entering. There are a million girls who would be happy to be in Dev’s bed.

  Am I one of them? I can feel the heat of him stretched beside me, his arm against mine. If we were both to turn our heads, our lips would touch.

  Dev does turn, but only to smile at me. “You ready?”

  “For what?”

  “You want a beer?” He props himself up on one elbow and reaches over to flip open the cooler and take out two beers.

  I shake my head. “I’m a lightweight. And a control freak. I don’t really drink.” I don’t mention that, until recently, it conflicted with my medication, or that I’m worried the hallucinations will only increase if I drink.

  He holds out the beer. “I thought you said you trust me.”

  “I do.” In fact, now that I think of it, I haven’t had any hallucinations tonight—and even at the warehouse, they stopped as soon as Dev arrived. Maybe being here with him is good for me after all. “I’m just playing it safe. You know, in case campus security arrives.”

  He shrugs. “Suit yourself. But it might help you relax.”

  “I am relaxed!

  “You should at least have something to eat.” He reaches back into the cooler and brings out a takeout carton.

  “Slow Boat Chinese! My favorite restaurant! How did you know?”

  Dev taps his temple with his chopsticks. “Psychic.”

  I give him a look. “Then tell me what I’m thinking right now.”

  He widens his eyes in mock horror. “You want me to what? On the first date?”

  He takes a sip of beer. “Actually, Delia told me the restaurant.”

  So this is a date. “Well, it’s not fair you already know my favorite restaurant and I know almost nothing about you.”

  Dev opens the Chinese food and pinches out a chopstick full of lo mein. “Not a whole lot to tell.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second.” I reach over and snag a noodle with my chopsticks. “Do you mean there’s nothing worth telling, or there’s nothing you plan to tell me?”

  “Well…knowing how you hate secrets…” The light from the electric stars sets off the twinkle in his eyes. “But seriously, I’m pretty boring.”

  “Said the guy eating Chinese food in the planetarium at midnight.”

  “Well, it’s not midnight yet,” he says, “But point taken. Fine.” He balances the takeout container on his knees and stirs the noodles idly with a chopstick. “I’ll tell you all my secrets. But first I want to know more about you.”

  “Like what?” I ask cautiously.

  “Like…you said your mom was in Mexico with family. Are you from there?”

  “No. Both my parents are, but I was born here.”

  “Only child?”

  “Brother,” I say, careful to avoid a verb that would put Enrique in the past tense. I’m not ready to tell Dev about Enrique, but not telling him feels weird, too—dishonest, somehow, because I know now he’s imagining I have a brother somewhere.

  Dev nods and slurps in a noodle. “So is your brother younger? Or are your parents empty-nesting it now?”

  The nest is emptier than you can imagine, I think, but I can’t bring myself to talk about Enrique.

  So I move on to the next-largest wound. “My parents actually aren’t together anymore.”

  Dev pauses, lowering his chopstickful of noodles. “Good thing or bad?”

  I shrug and look up at the electric stars. “It’s for the best, really. My dad was always gone a lot anyways. He did trainings in Spanish for businesses— mostly safety trainings for construction companies. Sort of a teacher, translator, cultural liaison thing. He traveled all over the country.”

  “And let me guess, absence didn’t make the heart grow fonder?”

  I give him a watery smile. “Well, not of my mom, anyways.”

  He shakes his head. “Bastard.”

  “Yeah.” I push the noodles around with my chopstick. “I mean, I still love him, but I haven’t seen him in a while. I think he always had women in the places he went for work, and I think my mom always knew it, but then it got more serious and she had to confront him…”

  Dev shakes his head. “That sucks, Saint.”

  You have no idea, I want to say. But compared to all that has happened since, my parents’ divorce is nothing. It was just the beginning, the thing that set everything in motion.

  But I can’t tell him that. I can’t say my brother killed himself because he thought my father didn’t love us. I can’t tell him my mother could barely get off of the couch after he died. And I certainly can’t tell him the rest of it.

  Not that Dev wouldn’t listen. He is looking at me with such sympathy and understanding in his bright blue eyes, I almost want to tell him everything. I feel suddenly sorry I thought he was a player like my dad. “So,” he says, “why aren’t you going to Mexico for Christmas?”

  Because my mom went there to get away from me. Because she needs a break from me. Because I’m not supposed to be that far from my psychiatric care. “I just felt like staying here. You know, to help Delia.”

  Dev nods, and I feel like I’m lying—at least by omission. I say I hate secrets, I think, but my life is one big secret.

  But of course, that’s exactly why I hate them.

  “I have to stay on campus,” I say, “Because my mom sold her house.” It feels weird to call it her house when it used to be our home, but when she sold it I didn’t get a say. I was in the hospital and, at the time, no one knew if I would get out.

  Dev nods understandingly. “Too many memories in that house, huh?”

  More than you know. “The ironic thing is, I originally wanted to go to school here to be close to home—”

  “And then home moved away from you.”

  “Exactly.”

  We both sit in silence for a minute, just looking up at the stars. Dev sips his beer. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, my parents should have gotten a divorce.”

  “Why?” I say, relieved to be talking about somebody else. ‘What’s wrong with your parents?”

  He holds up his almost empty bottle. “This.”

  I cringe. “Which one? Your mom or your dad?”

  “Both, really. My mom drinks more, but my dad handles it worse.” He’s gazing at some middle point in the darkness, like he’s watching a scene play out. Then he takes a quick swig of beer, like he’s washing it all away. “Doesn’t affect me much anymore. I haven’t lived at home for a while now.”

  I look at him, surprised. “But I thought you were only a first year, like me.”

  He shrugs. “I am, but I graduated early. Took a year off to
travel around. Figure myself out a little.”

  I look at him in the dim light, seeing him in a different way: the kid who worked his ass off to graduate early and get away from home. I can imagine him doing his homework at the dining room table while his mom lies passed out on the couch. He must be smart to have graduated early. Smart and determined. “So what did you figure out about yourself?”

  He laughs. “Mainly that I don’t want to be them.”

  I pick up my full beer bottle. “To not repeating the cycle.”

  “Merry Christmas Eve.” We clink our bottles. Dev downs the last of his beer, and I decide to open mine after all, taking a tentative sip and grimacing as I remember I don’t like the taste. For a long minute, we just sit in silence. Then Dev says, “What do you want to do in the future? I mean, if you don’t want to be your mom, then what?”

  I lie back and rest my head on my rolled-up jacket.

  Dev shuts the takeout container and puts it back in the cooler. He lies back beside me, picks up the remote and pushes a button. Above us, the sky seems to move as the light shifts, forming different constellations, cycling through the year as we watch. I recognize a few of the constellations that rise and fall: Orion, Cassiopeia, the big bear. “I’m not sure what I want,” I say, and for once I’m telling the whole truth. I’ve spent so long just trying to survive the moment, I don’t know what I want the future to be.

  “Well,” he says, “have you declared a major?”

  “Psychology.” I feel a little embarrassed admitting it, like it’s somehow too close to home.

  He turns to me curiously. “Psych, huh? You going to analyze me? Tell me what makes me tick?”

  I turn my head to look him in the eye. Our faces are only inches apart now. If either of us shifted even slightly, the gap would close. I study his eyes as the stars cycle above us on repeat, the years flashing past, one after another. Fake starlight dapples his hair. “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not sure what makes you tick.” I’m not even sure why you’re here with me.

  “Good,” he says. “It’s better that way.” He smiles, trying to make a joke out of his words, but it doesn’t match the seriousness in his eyes. Maybe he does think he’ll become his father, the pattern playing over and over again like the cycle of the sky.