Kissing Ezra Holtz (and Other Things I Did for Science)

by Brianna R. Shrum

  Google, it turns out, does steer me wrong because there’s construction on the route and I am immediately annoyed that I should have listened to his dumb instructions. Siri keeps telling me to make a U-turn—make a U-turn—make a—make—m—make a U-turn and eventually I shut it off in a road rage furor and find myself studying Ezra’s directions.

  And wouldn’t you know it.

  I end up at his front door.

  He can never know.

  Ezra’s house is cute. It’s not big and haunted like Skylar’s, not cavernous like my grandparents’ house. Maybe a tad bigger than mine, but older. Carpeted, dated kitchen, cozy little fireplace in the living room. It’s one of those houses that, the second you walk in, you feel like you’re in a home. I knock on the door and his Tate answers, huge smile on his big bearded face.

  “Amalia Yaabez!”

  “Yep.” I smile, and my eyebrows jump up in this weird forced enthusiasm. Not that I’m pissed I’m here, just that I’m a little preemptively tired and that this is what my face does when I’m trying to communicate with adults.

  “Come on in.”

  I do, and he shuts the door behind me. It smells like oranges and cinnamon and I think maybe I’ll float along on it like one of those cartoons on a scent cloud. “Oh my god,” I say. “It smells incredible.”

  Ezra’s dad shouts from the kitchen: “New challah recipe. I’m trying it out before next Friday. Orange. Cinnamon. Chocolate.”

  I raise my voice a little and say back, “I’m obviously coming over.”

  He says, “Well, I’ll set you a plate.”

  Ezra walks up the stairs and kind of awkwardly waves. “Hey.”

  I’m a little taken aback to see him like this—in a close-fitting T-shirt, jeans, bare feet. His hair is a little mussed, his shirt a tiny bit wrinkled. Like he’s been—and this seems so impossible—relaxing.

  “Uh,” I say, “hey.” I realize then that I am not just looking, I’m staring at his arms in that T-shirt. It’s just that under a button-up, it’s impossible to tell when someone is jacked. Not that Ezra is jacked, exactly, but that shirt is too small and it is ninety percent because of his biceps. Holy shit.

  Now I’m staring again.

  I clear my throat and take a step back so he can get to the kitchen and hopefully snag a little of that challah. I blink up at his face so I’ll look a little less like a weirdo, and when he stands right next to his Tate and hones in on the challah, I realize I’m just going to start staring at his face now, there’s no stopping it.

  It’s like changing the font in an essay when you edit it. The words stay the same, but the tiny shifts in perspective that come from moving from a sans serif to a serif all of a sudden alert you to things you hadn’t seen before. The content is the same, but the context changes.

  You can’t help but pay attention.

  Everything changes.

  Seeing Ezra like this, well . . . I can’t help but pay attention.

  That little break in his otherwise perfect nose, I can’t not look at it. Can’t not wonder about it. The shift in his jaw every time his face changes expressions. He has his Tate’s dark straight hair and his dad’s thin, expressive mouth and jawline. People tend to think Dovid—his Tate—and Josiah—his dad—adopted him, but Josiah is trans, and they’re both his biological parents. He looks like a solid 50/50, which basically means he looks exactly like whoever he’s standing closest to.

  I can see his and Josiah’s identical mouths when Ezra says, “I was a little delayed—I was downstairs reinforcing the terrarium,” and I roll my eyes and they both laugh.

  “I’d apologize for Ezra,” Dovid says, and then Josiah just laughs harder. Dovid cuts him a half-grinning look and says pointedly, “and my husband. But we both know it would do no good.”

  “I did almost kill that spider,” I say.

  “You did.”

  Josiah is still smirking when Ezra cocks his head downstairs, then stops and says, “Actually, you wanna go for a walk?”

  I raise an eyebrow. “You’re just afraid for your poor spider’s life.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  I groan and head for the front door. It’s a rare day in September that the entire world isn’t a sauna, so, sure. We can exist outside.

  Ezra follows me out the door, hands in his pockets, and we walk together down his street. He makes a sharp turn a couple houses down from his, down this trail that veers off into the woods.

  “If I didn’t know you better,” I say when the trees rise tall and close around us and Ezra eases into a slow lope, “I’d consider the possibility that you were luring me out into these woods to murder me.”

  He says, “Maybe you don’t know me well enough if you think that’s out of the question.”

  “Nah,” I say. “I’m confident.”

  “Yeah? Even though you’ve proven yourself a possibly mortal threat to the thing I love the most in this world?”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “Rosie,” he says.

  “God. I’ll never live that down.”

  “And now I’m convinced you know me again.”

  I relax next to him, like I’ve been doing, bizarrely, this entire walk. Ezra is predictable and irritating, but he’s familiar. I can relax into the calm, constant knowledge of him. We walk, him straight and tall like he’s balancing a book on his head, me slouched, shoulders falling, hands in my useless holey pockets.

  I say, “See, and that’s how I know.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “You’d hire out a murder. You’re not the kind of guy who likes to get his hands dirty.”

  I quirk my lips up and steal a glance at him and his mouth twitches. “Is that so?”

  “Call me a liar,” I say. I pull my phone out and pretend to start recording him. “Tell me all about your murderous propensities. Careful. The NSA is listening.”

  “I’m not objecting to your accusation that I’d never murder you.”

  I laugh at the word accusation.

  “I draw the line at my never getting my hands dirty.”

  I’m quiet at that.

  “My hands live dirty.”

  And at that, I straight-up choke.

  “You okay there?” he says.

  “Yeah. Gnats or something.” Great. Talk about bugs in your mouth.

  He pulls one hand out of his pocket and flips it so his palm is facing me. And . . . shit, he’s not lying. My throat knots up because what I see on his palms is dirt and callouses. Like intense, how many hours has this guy spent in a weight room callouses. “Probably got nothing on your painter’s hands.” He says it with this wry tilt in his voice, like he knows as he says it it’s a lie.

  I say, “I don’t know, I’m half-impressed.”

  “Do mine ears deceive me?”

  “Where did you get them?”

  He walks a little faster so I have to push myself to keep up. “My hands? My dads. I hear it was a cooperative effort.”

  I roll my eyes. “The callouses, jerk.”

  He cocks his head, and behind those glasses, his eyes are sparkling. “I’ll show you.”

  I follow him up the twisty trail which would fool a person, if they closed their eyes for long enough, into thinking they really were in the woods. The trees here are just so tall and thick and vibrant that the air smells alive. If you were dropped right here, you’d never know that just on the other side of the trees was road and cul-de-sac.

  He veers off the path and I pause and furrow my brow.

  “Thought you were edgy and up-for-anything, Yaabez.”

  I clear my throat. I just . . . for whatever reason, I don’t feel the need to rag on him for last-naming me. I like it?

  I say, “Yeah. Of course I am.”

  “Not like it’s against the rules; there’s no posted signs.” We make our way across the kudzu. He says, “I’m still who I am; I wouldn’t lead you across a protected vegetation area or something.”

  “No,” I sa
y in mock horror. “What kind of absolute miscreant.”

  He purses his lips. Runs his long fingers over his glasses frames. Then says, “There.”

  “What?”

  “The rocks.”

  “I’m . . . not following.”

  “I boulder,” he says and nods at a cluster of rocks up ahead, just a few feet from the concrete path really. It just, like everything else out here, feels more remote. “Climb with me. This is low stuff; if you fell you’d be fine.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” I say.

  “Sure.”

  “Ezra. Don’t be an asshole.”

  His lips thin, just for half a second. “Yeah. Alright, well. You gonna come up?”

  He hops up on a low rock like it’s nothing, like he’s climbing a ladder. I have never bouldered in my life, but I’m not about to be outdone by Ezra Holtz of all people, so I clamber on up, too. “I thought we were supposed to be studying,” I say.

  Ezra says, from just above me on the rock, “And if you ever paid attention in class, you’d know we literally just learned that studies show physical activity can increase creativity.”

  I pull myself up the side of the rock and sit on top of the moss-speckled upper edge. Ezra keeps going. We’re only one rock high, and that rock is only a couple feet tall. But I’m surprisingly wiped. My hands already hurt from the roughness of the stone.

  “So we need to come up with our own updates to Aron’s stuff,” Ezra says. His voice comes out a little rough, a little in the middle of something. I flex my left hand across the spongy moss and grab my wrist with my right. Just to do something with my muscles and tendons and skin that will distract me from this unexpected uncomfortable awareness.

  “The first set of questions is all about surface level stuff, right?” I say. “Weird little factoids that tell you more about a person than they should. So, I don’t know, how about Myers-Briggs type?”

  “Come on. No one knows their Myers-Briggs type.”

  “I bet you do,” I say.

  “ISTJ,” he says without missing a beat.

  “God, you nerd.”

  He shrugs and says, “You coming? Don’t quit now, laz—” He stops himself with his tongue on the back of his teeth. “Don’t quit yet.”

  “How about zodiac sign?” I say. I’m annoyed that I rise to the occasion but even the teasing implication that I’m lazy stings now. So I move.

  “Please. Don’t tell me you believe in that crap.”

  “Be more condescending.” I pull myself, breathing harder than I’d like to admit, searching for a foothold to bring me up to the top of this rock that, all in all, will have me five whole feet in the air. I could have almost achieved this standing still.

  “It’s just meaningless, Amalia. My being a Taurus, you being a Scorpio, that doesn’t say anything. Except that I was born on April twenty-seventh and you were born on November twenty-second. That has nothing to do with compatibility.”

  I hoist myself onto the stupid rock and blink. He’s waiting there not even out of breath. I bet his palms aren’t red and stinging either. He’s used to this.

  I’m not thinking about that, though.

  I say, “You know my birthday?”

  Ezra swallows hard. “I, uh.” He glances up at nothing, and I’m so shocked to see him caught off-guard that I feel quite literally off-balance. He recovers from that single uncharacteristic stutter quickly, in a blink, really—back to cool and collected so fast I am pretty sure I made up the flash of insecurity. “Of course I do. I’ve got a head for dates, and I remember your bat mitzvah fell on Chanukah. Because you got totally insulted when I decided to give you a present and that present was a little eraser.”

  I cough out a laugh. I had completely forgotten about that. “I wasn’t insulted!”

  “Yeah, you were. You said, Ezra. That’s insulting.”

  “It was my birthday!”

  “Well,” he says, shrugging, “it was also Chanukah. Anything else felt extravagant.”

  “Code for: I was thirteen and I’d spent my allowance on video games or something.”

  He knocks my shoulder with his and warmth flares up my chest. “Give me a little credit. I’d spent it on a grow-your-own geode kit. Plus I never got the big deal about it; my parents had gotten you . . . I don’t know. Something respectable.”

  “Which just made that dumb eraser more ridiculous. Because that was the one with your name on it.”

  He shrugs. “I wasn’t going to take credit for my parents’ purchase. Not for your birthday present.”

  I’m smiling and trying to move past this little tingle in my chest. This concoction of weirdness I don’t know what to do with except sleep off.

  Ezra says, “What about Harry Potter house? Everyone knows their house.”

  “Ooh. Okay, yeah. How about Harry Potter house. And . . . and best gift you’ve ever gotten. Or worst.”

  “One of us should have brought a pencil.”

  “Probably. I thought I could trust a nerd Ravenclaw.”

  He laughs and it lights up my chest. It’s late, it’s getting late. And I’m sleepy. That’s why. I don’t . . . lord, I don’t know what’s going on. “Well, I knew better than to trust a jock Gryffindor with academia.”

  I narrow my eyes and flip him off.

  He half-smiles and says, “You want to climb more?”

  I say, “Why?”

  He furrows his brow. “This is way better than the gym.”

  “I hate the gym.”

  He furrows his brow even harder, staring at me, and I don’t think it’s that weird to hate the gym. Of course guys like Ezra, peak performance in everything, would believe in peak bodily performance and that probably means like, not skipping leg day and stuff which . . . I have lost my train of thought thinking about bodily performance because Ezra is standing there in that T-shirt that’s tight and thin enough that I can actually see the outline of his pecs through it. And he’s looking at me like he has never, ever looked at me, all intense and focused.

  And I just . . . I don’t know what the hell is happening here but I know I’d do just about whatever it was he wanted to do right now because of that stupid tight T-shirt. And then I’d regret it because it’s Ezra, and not only do I not like Ezra, I can barely tolerate him.

  But here I am, and who cares about my brain when it is not the thing doing my thinking for me right now.

  Ezra leans in a little and I can smell the woodsy deodorant he chose, the very specific scent of dirt and rock on his calloused hands that are moving up toward my face.

  What the hell what the hell—

  “Amalia?” he says.

  And I’m considering just honestly losing my mind and saying, Screw it. We can’t stand each other but there is no denying that you’re hot, dude, let’s get this out of our systems.

  “Yeah?” I say. My voice is all raspy.

  “There’s an orb weaver on your head.”

  “WHAT.”

  “Ssshh,” he says. “Just. Don’t move. Stand still.”

  “Oh my god,” I say. I am completely frozen, and all my limbs are like . . . rigor mortising. This cannot be happening again. Again I’m with Ezra and a spider has found its way onto my head. What are the freaking odds? He’s lying. He planned this. He’s lying.

  It moves and tickles my scalp.

  “Oh my god, oh my god.”

  “It’s fine.” Ezra is focused on my hair. His dark brown eyes are intense and he’s moving slowly, bracing himself probably.

  “Get it off,” I plead. I legitimately plead; my voice is hoarse. Spiders don’t freak me out that bad but orb weavers are freaking huge. There’s a picture of one on the internet actually eating a bird.

  “I’m going to. It’s not dangerous.” He looks away from the spider to lock eyes with me. “Okay? It’s not going to hurt you—”

  “I know they’re not poisonous, dumbass, but there’s a sp—” It moves again, and I can feel it. I can feel it, holy lord. I
whimper.

  The second I do, something shifts in Ezra’s eyes and he snatches it. Just moves like a whip and grabs it so quickly I can barely catch his arm moving.

  One second the spider is on my head, and the next it’s not.

  “Okay,” he says. “No big deal. You’ve survived this before.”

  “No big—” I start to get a little hysterical then clamp my mouth shut. “Nah. No big deal. It’s just a spider.”

  His eyes dart over me, and he says, totally sincere, “You okay?”

  “Jesus, Ezra.” I’m frustrated and flustered and there’s probably a million reasons but I can’t get a solid handle on a single one so I just start climbing down the rock. “It was a spider. Again. Not a bear. I’m fine.”

  I hop down the rest of the way and cross my arms over the tattered leather vest that hangs around my chest.

  “You gonna stay for dinner?” says Ezra from behind me.

  I say, without turning around, “Obviously. We have work to do.”

  When Ezra catches up to me, his mouth isn’t smiling.

  But his eyes are.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Uncontrolled variable (n.): Kool-Aid manning in to screw up your experiment, one pitcher-sized brick silhouette at a time.

  Example: That stupid break in Ezra Holtz’s stupid nose.

  Tuesday morning, we have our pre-experiment presentation. What that means is, Ezra shows up looking like he’s about to try a case in a court room, and I slide into class five minutes late, in the ripped jeans I wore yesterday and a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt. Ezra does not even try to disguise his frustration.

  I don’t know why it makes me smile.

  What it also means is that Bill Nye here explains everything in pretentious science terms and I translate for the class.

  “The participants will be selected this evening based on the most optimal factors of compatibility, using something of an algorithm—”

  We’ll match them up based on who we think will be into each other.

  “The participants will be required to answer Aron’s three sets of questions, increasing in intimacy with each set, and to log a number of hours with one another outside those sessions that demonstrate an optimal environment for—”