No More Dead Kids

by Thomas Marshall

“Good, haha, you?”

  “Good good, hahah.”

  We talked on the phone for a little while, I tried to keep my composure and put the same thought into what I said as I did into what I’d texted. (I know, I know, cutting out of the ‘showing’ and going into the ‘telling’ of describing a conversation, but how can I be blamed, I can barely remember what I said, let alone what she said. My heart was racing, and my mind had to keep up.)

  “So, did you have fun at the party, any cute guys there?” I let out with baited breath.

  A pregnant pause.

  “Umm… yeeaah actually…” she said in a way that had me picturing her on the other end of the phone doing one of those corner-of-the-mouth smiles of satisfaction and desire. Goddamnit. Why did I ask?

  “Oh.” Uh-oh, I thought. I let her continue.

  “Yeah, there was this guy—”

  Shit.

  “—and we were dancing—”

  Piss.

  “—I was pretty drunk at that point—”

  Fuck.

  “—and we started making out on the dancefloor—”

  Cunt.

  “—then he took me to another place inside and we made out more—”

  Cocksucker.

  “—and then he asked me if I wanted to go upstairs—”

  Motherfucker.

  “—but I said no, so he just stayed on the couch, kissing, and feeling me up—”

  Tits?

  “Oh, god, I’m sorry, why did I tell you any of that,” she said laughing.

  “It’s fine Lila, I asked.” Yeah, I did.

  I asked her about it a little more. She said it was fun, but, of course, it didn’t mean anything. I started to ask her what she wanted, or where she saw herself in the dating scene. I was steering the conversation in that direction, and there was no turning back. There’s that moment in a conversation, a moment where something is said that cannot be unsaid; whether you learn something about this person, or they truly let you into their life, or they just say something special, but whatever it is, from that moment on, everything is different. You can’t go back to not loving this person. You can’t help falling in love. After this moment, the conversation changes, and you both inch toward that one truth, and with each successive step, there’s no going back. You just go deeper, the innuendos become less subtle, the hints more blatant, and then you get to that point where there’s nothing else to do other than to just say it. Nothing else to do other than to open your heart and let them inside, and never to go back.

  She said she never thought much about it but that it would be nice to be in a relationship. I said I felt the same. I also said that I had really enjoyed getting to know her so far and that I enjoyed her company a lot, but I hesitated to go so far as to say ‘had we but world enough and time.’ I think at this point she knew where the conversation was going, so I just came out with it as best as I could.

  “I don’t know, um, well, what would you think about, y’know, what if we tried it.” Real poetic shit, marriage proposal material right there. God, I’m so pathetic, but I continued, “I dunno, neither of us have done anything like dating before, but we want to, and I don’t know, it’d be fun, it’d be nice, right?”

  “You think so, Alexander?” she said, enunciating each syllable of my name, as if at that moment she was creating an image of me in her mind that she could see herself being with.

  “Yeah, I mean, you’re absolutely great, and I—”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Wait what, really? Shit, this actually worked? I actually did something right? Really? “What? Um, okay, wow, yeah, okay—”

  “Haha, yeah.”

  “So I guess we’re…”

  “Yeah, I guess we are…”

  “Soo… I’ll talk to you tomorrow?”

  “Yep, talk to you tomorrow. Have a good night, Alex.”

  “You too, Lila. Night.”

  Um, wow. It took a little while for what had just happened to sink in, and even then it still didn’t seem real. I was so unbelievably happy in every way, words can’t really come to mind, just a love-drunk euphoria. I just hope that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and this all will still have happened.

  CHAPTER 14.

  First Date

  LILA WOULD BE BACK home in San Diego in two days, I wondered if she talked to her dad. I talked to Dan, and all he could say was ‘I told you so.’ There were less than two weeks of summer left, and I was almost ready to begin the end of my high school career. When Lila got home, I went to see her. She opened the door to her house, and we just kind of looked up and down each other thinking ‘this is it, this is her’ and ‘this is it, this is him.’ She stretched out her arms for a hug, and we embraced as boyfriend and girlfriend. Her parents were home, and so I drove with her down to the beach at Crystal Pier. She hadn’t told them anything yet. I parked at the park, the grassy outlook above the cliffs and beach, opened her door for her, and we walked up and down the Cliffside and down onto the beach.

  Walking next to each other, chatting, our hands brushed up against the other’s as I made that nerve-racking yet ever-hopeful slow crawl of my fingers to meet hers. Heart pounding, I was barely paying attention to what was being said, let alone where I was walking, as I thought how so much depended upon on such a small gesture. Then our fingers touched again, and I made the smooth move to interlace mine with hers, and her hand was quickly in mine. She looked up to me with those big, beautiful eyes and smiled. She squeezed my palm affectionately, and she swung our arms back and forth as we continued to walk.

  The sun was starting to set, and so we wanted to get somewhere nice to watch it, but as late summer days go, the sun crept down to the crepuscular horizon quicker than we had thought it could and we were soon in the dusk. Time flies when you’re with a person like her.

  “Um, where do you want to sit?” I asked.

  “Here is perfect,” and she just sat down where she stood in the damp sand as she pulled me down next to her by my hand.

  Keeping our hands held, I swung my arm around her shoulder, and we sat close, watching night follow day, moon chasing sun. And it just felt so very right. It was so completely new for me, for the both of us, everything we were doing was pretty much a first for both of us, so we were just making it up as we went along, but it still just felt so right, everything we did felt right, and secure, and just nice.

  There was a small break in the conversation, and I turned to look at her, looking from her eyes to her lips and back again as she did the same to me.

  “Well…”

  “Well, I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “You want to?” I asked with hope and interest.

  “Well, talking about it is only making me want to do it more.”

  I reached my free hand up and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, resting my palm on the back of her neck and pulling us together. And then our lips met. I could feel all of her in my arms as she opened her lips, ever so slightly, and closed them again, as I mirrored her mouth with mine. She drew back slowly, looked at me again and smiled, I couldn’t help but smile what was probably the goofiest, involuntary, full-faced smile; a smile that continued into the next kiss.

  I didn’t care that I was cold, or that my pants were damp, or that there was sand in my shoes or about anything else, and I hoped she felt the same way as we continued to kiss. Just kiss, which was nice, only employing a tasteful amount of tongue. And it was perfect. I can’t think of any other time in my whole life where everything had just seemed so perfect in every way-

  “As absolutely perfect as this
is, Alexander, I’m so cold.”

  “Oh thank God you said something about it because I wouldn’t have moved otherwise.”

  I got up, helped her up, and walked with my arm around her holding her close all the way back to my car, shaking off the sand on the way. I opened the door for her, taking it all in on the walk around the car to my door. As I sat down in the driver’s seat, I reached the key to the ignition as a motor reflex and then thought better as I put the keys in the cup holder and leaned over to kiss my girlfriend. My girlfriend, I thought. This time she went at it, tongues dancing, her fingers running through my hair, I still couldn’t help but smile that goofy smile of pure elation as I ran my hands softly over her supple curves over her clothes.

  Lover’s Spit played on the radio on the drive back as I held the wheel with one hand and held her hand in her lap with the other.

  And she’s so pretty that you’re lost in the stars, as you jockey your way through the cars… and you’re in love with all the wonder it brings, and every muscle in your body sings as the highway ignites.

  I dropped her off two houses down from her door, she had told her parents that she was out with a girlfriend of hers, she didn’t want to drop the bomb on them just yet. I put the top down, and drove home with the wind in my hair, still smiling wildly like a happy idiot.

  “Wooooooooooaaaaa!” I shouted to the heavens and oncoming traffic, thrusting the fist that wasn’t attached to the wheel into the air. I had just had the first kiss with my first girlfriend, and so I felt that I was allowed to embrace clichés for a night.

  I texted her when I got home, as she asked me to, and we said goodnight to each other ten times before finally letting each other go to bed. I didn’t mind though, not at all.

  And I knew I could just mentally zoom out through the lens of my depression and know that none of it mattered at all, but for now, not in that specious present, but in that spectacular now, it was all that mattered.

  CHAPTER 15.

  400 Lux

  DAN AND I would fantasize some more about the trip we said we’d be taking in less than a year, but nothing in the future seemed quite real. Not a cross-country road trip, not college, not adulthood.

  As the start of the year of lasts approached I went to dinner at Lila’s one more time, this time, her parents knew that she and I were more than acquaintances, but I’m not sure how much they really knew or imagined. I felt like we went through the introductions all over again, and that something, somehow was different. Mr. Darcy was less cordial, more paternal, I just wanted him to like me like he did. Mrs. Darcy was still as chipper as always though, which was nice; Mrs. Darcy more than anything made me feel at home there. I was always happy when I was a part of that family, it’s just now I have even more reason to feel a part of it, even more reason to be happy. I hadn’t really thought about how Mr. Darcy would react until now, though.

  Dan and I had Hodad’s burgers, fries, and shakes at the cliffs the night before the first day of school; too bad this only became a tradition of sorts in the last two years of high school. I don’t know how I’d describe the feeling I had that night: reluctant, hopeful, relieved? High school’s been a long fucking climb, and I’ll be glad when it’s over, this college application shit has just become tedious and annoying, and I’m tired of the cliques and trivialities and the drama, but at the same time I’m looking forward to this last year, and looking forward to whatever comes after, and I’m so happy to have someone like Lila in my life.

  It’s moments like this though, infinite moments that I know will be over so soon, when I just want time to stand still. Times when I remember my dad would play with me in the yard as a boy, when we’d go camping, or when my mom would come into my room and kiss me goodnight. Times when I’d fall asleep on the couch in my parent’s arms and wake up safe in my bed. Back in a time before time was valuable before the weight of the adult world was on my back. Goddamn, I really fucking miss Mister Rogers. I wish I could go back and tell myself to live up those days and moments, but I don’t even know if I’d do a single thing differently. I wish I could stay here, I wish I could just sit right here with Dan, and the sun would never set. I wish I were holding Lila in my arms for an endless night. I wish the summer would last forever. It feels so scary getting old.

  . . . . .

  Wake up you need to make money. Well, the year of lasts had begun with the last first day of school. Among the populars, tubby juniors came back as skinny seniors having spent a summer on oxy and in gyms; that was just what happened. I saw Ken in passing in the halls, I asked him how his first day was going, and he just shrugged. Classes were pretty normal and the year seemed pretty much like any other. And then, in that time after school and before practice, Lila and I sat and talked on a bench overlooking the small valley behind school. We talked the small talk of ‘how are you’ and ‘how was your day’ that, with her, meant the world to me. We’d make a habit of alternating talking in that hour with driving off-campus to some hidden residential nook to make out in the back seat of my car or hers (I liked driving, but I liked the fold-down back seats of her big new Subaru even more). I loved spending any time with her, I’d enjoy just talking with her, about her day, her friends, and her life, and I’d love sitting with her in her room watching Netflix, and I’d love cooking with her, all like real grown-ups.

  One day after school we stopped at a Starbucks before finding a parking spot. We both got the seasonal Peppermint Mochas in the red cups, and as we soon found out, they taste great when shared over a kiss. That taste on our lips and tongues, our lovers spit. And after that, any day after school, ‘let’s go get peppermint mochas’ became shorthand for ‘let’s go make out,’ even after winter had passed. One of the best was when we went to get a gas station automated drive-through carwash to get her car washed, and we kissed as the colors of soap ran down the windshield like a cotton candy sunset.

  Homecoming came and went, and it was really nice. There was already a shit-ton of hype for the Gatsby movie coming out next year, and so the dance was 1920’s themed. I asked Lila to the dance with less than a room full of flowers, but she accepted me anyway. That was the first dance I’d been to in a long time, and the first dance I’d ever had a date at, but also the last homecoming I’d ever go to too. And we had fun, and damn did I find out she’s a good dancer. Ken would tell me he spent the night pining over Livi, who left the dance early for some reason.

  The weekend after that, when we’d planned to go to the bookstore by her house and have coffee at the little shop next to it, we instead just laid in her bed, holding each other, talking, laughing, and kissing. Pillow talk became one of, if not my favorite thing (well we haven’t had sex yet, so there’s always that too); but anyway, pillow talk is that incredible thing, where we could even just stare at each other or hold each other and be happy. I’d hold her in my arms, laying in her bed as a record would quietly play, her head nestled at the space in between my shoulder and my chest, smelling her hair, feeling my heart beat against her head. In that moment I was simultaneously completely vulnerable while also completely comfortable, we saw and experienced a side of the other that no one else knew; that was intimacy. And then we’d hear a stirring at the front door, and immediately sit up, pull out her laptop, and turn on Netflix. We were making our way through all of Mad Men, a show that more often than not had the wonderful effect of turning her on quite a bit.

  And then I’d drive, or she’d drive, she’d take me to The Pannikin, and I’d take her to The Living Room, she’d take me to The Baked Bear, and I’d take her to Bud’s Lighthouse Ice Cream, she’d take me to Puesto and I’d take her to Rancho’s (now it’s called Hugo’s, and it still has the best Mexican food in the city); we’d each let the other into our worlds, I knew she was from a different world, that she’d grown up happy and never had to want, but no part
of me resented that about her. I was happy that she was happy, and that’s a great thing to feel for someone else.

  And we’d talk. And then we’d have the big talk.

  “I mean why not?” I just put it out there.

  “I don’t know, I never really have before, ever. Have you?”

  “No, never. But really what’s the difference?”

  “I know,” she smiled, “do you want to?”

  “I’ve never been more sure before in my life.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course, Lila. I mean, you know, we ‘like like’ each other, we do everything else but say it, so why not just say it? Because that’s how I feel, Lila, that’s really how I feel.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.” (Ugh, did we just...? Yeah, I think we just… Eww, gross.)

  We each drew in a breath and said to each other “I love you,” as if it had never been said before.

  We smiled.

  “I love you, Delilah Darcy,” I said, and I kissed her.

  “And I love you, Alexander Kaoruac,” and we kissed again.

  . . . . .

  One night, when we said we were going to some school football game we drove back down to Sunset Cliffs in her car, leaving mine at school, and parking a few distant blocks away from my house; in all four years of high school, I never went to a single high school football game. Lowering the back seats, we settled in, making out, and feeling all of each other. As we made out, and the windows began to fog up, we began to take off more and more of our clothes in the back of that humid SUV. She was so beautiful in her matching underwear. We were both in our underwear as I began to kiss her from her neck, around her earlobe and down, down her neck, down her elegant collarbone, grasping her breasts; I reached under her bra and pulled out a breast, sucking and kissing her nipple, and she gasped with pleasure as I continued downward, kissing and licking and pecking down, down her stomach, and further down. My head was between her trembling legs as I kissed her over her underwear, feeling the warm and the damp underneath. I clumsily undid her bra strap, reaching around her. I kissed down and back up her legs, grazing the stubble on my chin across the inside of her thigh and to that place again. I looked up at her, she bit her lip and smiled with a nod as I ran my finger under the hem of her panties, and pulled them gently aside. She shook and quivered and moaned underneath me, her hand running through my hair, and the other hand held mine over her breasts.