Rocks and Stars

by Sam Ledel

  Emily looks from her to me. I shake my head, so she looks to her left.

  “Alex,” she declares and nudges his shoulder.

  “Cheers,” he says. They raise their beer cans to each other before taking a drink. Then Alex reaches out for the next card. As he does, I am very aware, as I have been all game, of Joey’s leg resting against mine. We’re seated on the loveseat (which, by the way, looked a lot bigger before we sat down) and her left leg has been bumping against my right since we started playing. I keep telling myself it’s because her legs are twice as long as mine, and she’s probably feeling crowded. However, five minutes ago, I also couldn’t help but notice the way her hand landed, and then lingered, on my thigh when she had turned over a two and said, “That means you, short stack.”

  “Five,” Alex says, pulling me from my thoughts by the excitement in his voice. “Never have I ever.”

  “Oh, gosh, I love this game,” Emily says, prompting inquisitive looks from both me and Alex.

  “How does it work?” asks Joey.

  “Everybody puts up five fingers,” explains Alex, and we all do as he says. “Then we go around, and when it’s your turn, you have to say something you’ve never done before. And if you have done whatever it is the person says, you put a finger down and take a drink.”

  “It’s a great way to get to know people,” Emily adds, giving me what I swear is a knowing smirk.

  “For example,” Alex says, “never have I ever gone skinny-dipping.”

  A few people put a finger down, and I do a double take at Emily as her thumb goes down. She notices and mouths “soccer camp” at me like that’s supposed to explain everything.

  The guy next to Alex takes a second to think, then says, “Never have I ever smoked pot.” A few more fingers are down around the circle, and I try not to think about the fact that I’ve apparently done very little in my life.

  “Never have I ever kissed a girl,” the girl on the other side of Joey says next with a curious grin.

  All of the guys put a finger down, along with two girls. One of which is Joey. I look at her as she takes a drink from her beer. When she notices me, I glance away and ignore the flush in my face.

  Eventually, the game within a game ends with Alex and the “never have I kissed a girl” girl running out of fingers. They toast one another as the guy next to Alex flips over a new card.

  “Six is chicks,” he says.

  “Cheers, ladies,” says Emily, raising her beer up. It takes me a second, but I toast with the rest of the group and end up finishing my beer in the process. And either the alcohol goes straight to my head or all that I’ve learned about everyone in the last hour makes the room start to spin.

  “I need another beer,” I say before standing up. But what I really need is out of the circle of overshared information.

  “You want us to wait for you?” Alex asks as the girl next to him flips another card.

  “No,” I reply, giving what I hope doesn’t look like a forced smile. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll be back in just a minute.”

  I move through some people lingering around the kitchen entryway. The couple who had been making out on the beanbag chairs has now moved to the kitchen counter, oblivious to the stack of beer cans being formed into a pyramid right next to them by a loud and eager group of guys.

  I’m about to open the fridge when I realize I have to pee. I head down the dimly lit hallway that’s off one side of the kitchen. I try the doorknob but hear a girl’s voice say, “Just a minute!” from the other side.

  I lean back against the wall, my eyes flickering over several photo collages Alex has hung up. Most seem to be from his years at Meadowbrook. I’m looking at a particularly funny one of him in a mockingbird costume doing a beer bong when a tall figure from the kitchen moves my way.

  “Hey, you.” Joey’s hair falls over one shoulder like a ruby waterfall.

  “Hey,” I say, shoving my thumbs into my jean belt loops, trying to act and look as casual as possible.

  She leans against the wall next to me so that she too has a direct view of the photo collages. “I was wondering what was taking you so long.”

  I gesture to the bathroom. “Ocupado.”

  “Gotcha.”

  It’s quiet for a minute, just us standing in the hallway while the music from the living room drifts toward us. Suddenly, there’s a crash like a hair dryer falling from inside the bathroom. The girl’s voice from before giggles, followed by somebody else shushing her. Joey and I exchange looks.

  “Doesn’t seem like the bathroom will be available anytime soon,” she says.

  I shake my head and, with a deep breath, decide to take advantage of the dim lighting to regard her tall, lean figure. She could be a model, I think as I take in her long legs and clearly taut stomach beneath her shirt.

  “So,” she says, turning so that she’s leaning with one arm flush against the wall and facing me. She crosses her arms. “You’ve never kissed a girl, huh?”

  Heat rushes into my face and I run a hand through my hair, looking down. My mind runs a banner exclaiming “Holy shit!” over and over while I try to think of something to say.

  I glance anywhere but at her. “Um.”

  Joey uncrosses her arms. Her fingers touch my elbow. “Hey,” she says, her voice matching the softness in her eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you or anything. I was just messing around.” She pauses. “I guess I’m feeling a little overconfident after all that beer.”

  “It’s okay.” Then I gather myself and turn so that we’re face to face. “You were just curious,” I add with a shrug. “And, um, no. I haven’t kissed a girl before.”

  I have to remember to never play Never Have I Ever again.

  A door across from us opens suddenly. We watch a couple stumble out from inside the room. They see us and grin goofily before wandering out into the kitchen.

  “Cute,” Joey mumbles before she quickly lunges forward into the now open doorway and says, “No way!”

  I glance at the bathroom door, which shows no signs of opening anytime soon. So I follow Joey into the room.

  It must be Alex’s room. There are a few photos of him and people who I assume are his parents on one of the walls near his bed. There are also tons of art supplies scattered on every available surface. And the bedspread has Van Gogh’s Starry Night stretching out across it. Definitely Alex.

  Joey, however, is paying no attention to any of those things. Instead, she’s in the far corner of the room, nose to glass with a lava lamp.

  “Um…Joey?”

  She doesn’t move, and I find it hard not to laugh the longer her towering figure stands bent at the waist to take in all that is Alex’s lava lamp. I lean against the doorjamb, smiling while I watch her clearly joyous discovery.

  “I love these things,” she finally says, her voice a whisper, as if she might disturb the floating goo if she’s too loud. “Kyle, can you get the light?”

  Standing upright, I swallow. “What?”

  “The light,” she says, throwing me a look over her shoulder. “These things are so much cooler in the dark.”

  My palms begin to sweat, and I flick off the light switch.

  “And the door,” she adds.

  I close the door. The small square of hallway light disappears, so that now I’m standing in a dark room alone with Joey, watching her watch globs of blue goo float around a tube of water.

  “Isn’t this great?” she asks.

  I have to admit, once I tear my eyes away from her, the effect is pretty impressive. Crossing the room, I take in the almost ethereal blue light surrounding us. I feel like I’m underwater, walking at the bottom of a pool.

  Once I’m next to Joey, she straightens up so that she’s once again a good head taller than me. Her eyes are still on the lamp when she says, “Can’t you feel that?”

  I raise an eyebrow, then look at the lamp. Part of me wonders if she took some sort of hallucinogen when I wasn’t looking.
But when she finally tears herself away from the lamp and looks at me, her eyes are clearer than I’ve seen them all night. “Yeah,” I say, though I’m not exactly sure what I feel. A bit like I’m floating, maybe. The blue hues dance around us and over Joey’s face.

  Now I know exactly what I feel: exhilaration.

  Joey smiles and my eyes won’t look anywhere but at hers.

  I’m barely aware of her hand reaching out to move some of the hair away from my face. She tucks it behind my ear. I swallow, my body ice cold and on fire all at the same time. Then she leans down, cupping my face with her hand.

  When her lips connect with mine, her other hand reaches up, too. Her fingers run slowly through my hair. I stand on my toes just slightly, returning her kiss before I can tell myself that I’m afraid.

  All I can think about then are her lips. They’re so soft moving against my own. I open my mouth a little and she mirrors me. I move forward, and her hand gently pulls my head closer, pulling me deeper into the kiss. Our hips bump and something rises up inside me that I haven’t felt before. And then her tongue parts my lips, finding my own. She kisses me slowly, deeply, like she’s pouring whatever that silly lava lamp made her feel right into the core of me.

  Kissing Joey is like all of those cheesy romance movies come to life. Everything else disappears until only she and I are left floating in the blue haze. All I feel is her. All I feel is our kiss.

  Eventually, our lips part slowly, as if even they don’t want this to stop. I open my eyes. Joey still has my face cupped in her hands, and her eyes flutter open to meet mine.

  “Are you sure you’ve never kissed a girl before?” She runs a finger along my brow, then tucks more strands behind my ear.

  I nod, my breath coming fast. “I’m sure,” I finally say.

  But I could definitely get used to it.

  Chapter Nine

  A week after the party, I drag myself out of bed, throw on a bra, and scamper down the dorm hallway in my PJ’s. If I’m quick enough, I can avoid Joey and make it to the cafeteria scot-free. Not that I don’t want to see her. It’s just…complicated. I’ve managed to go six days since Alex’s party with hardly any Joey encounters outside of soccer. I would run past her in the hallways on my way to class, shouting some excuse over my shoulder about being late or having to meet Emily. Or stand awkwardly in the bathroom while we brush our teeth side by side after dinner, then rush out with a quick good-bye. One week of not talking about what happened. One week since we kissed.

  My house shoes scuff along the tile floor when I swing open the cafeteria doors into the large and practically empty room. Considering it’s only eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, I’m not surprised that most of the student body is still asleep, probably recovering from their respective parties the night before. Though a few early risers are up. As I grab a tray and start down the buffet line, I notice three soccer guys at a corner table and one couple sitting near the soda fountain machines to my left. Otherwise, the only souls awake at this hour are the apron-clad cashier and two cooks who come in and out the kitchen behind the buffet line.

  I grab a tiny box of Frosted Crisps and a carton of milk, placing them on my tray next to a banana. Then I pour myself a plastic cup of orange juice and slowly make my way over to a table in the opposite corner of the room. The table I choose faces floor-to-ceiling windows that look out into our dorm’s courtyard. At this hour, it’s completely vacant of activity. I plop down and stare tiredly out the window, my back to the rest of the morning’s early risers.

  Crunching into my cereal, my mind drifts to an assignment I have due in Spanish class. With some encouragement from Emily, I decided to take the language again after a mediocre showing through high school. Emily, though, is minoring in Spanish and can carry a basic conversation with her professors. She claims her parents only taught her slang and enough to bargain at markets when they visit her grandparents in Tijuana, but I have begun to doubt that. And despite her tutoring me at least twice a week since high school, I am still trying to figure out how to properly pronounce “I play soccer and like eggs.”

  After a few more bites of my cereal and reviewing the past tense verbs Professor Jimenez gave us last week, my mind drifts to the team. Specifically, to Jax. At first, the visual of her jogging along the sideline in warm-ups makes me bite my lip. I realize that despite seeing her at practice all the time, I haven’t had an actual conversation with her. Not since the ice cream shop, and that had been mostly me trying to not panic.

  Somebody drops a fork on to the tile floor. The clang parts my muddled thoughts slowly, like a winter fog lifting. Before I can help it, Joey and everything from last week is at the forefront of my mind. My stomach gives a jolt at the memory of us at Alex’s party, and I smile into my OJ.

  I run the word jugo through my head to practice the pronunciation when everything suddenly goes black. I’m about to panic, wondering if the lunch ladies are revolting and poisoning the cereal but realize it’s only a pair of hands that has left me blind. The hands press slightly against my eyelids, and I feel a body against the back of my chair.

  “Guess who.”

  I smile. “The reigning beer pong champ?”

  Joey laughs and moves to my right, removing her hands. My eyes flutter, readjusting to the light before they fall on Joey taking a seat next to me at the table.

  “Hey,” I say, poking at my cereal. My eyes flicker back to the milk floating between the flakes in my bowl. The momentary exaltation at seeing Joey again is replaced by sudden nerves.

  “Hey, yourself,” she says. “I feel like I haven’t seen you much lately. Aside from practice that is.”

  I shrug, my eyes moving between her and the trees outside. “Yeah, you know how it is. The first couple weeks of school are so busy. Long lectures. Buying overpriced books. An insane amount of reading to do.”

  Joey nods. “That’s true. I used to read for pleasure. But I haven’t enjoyed any of my reading since having to push through two hundred pages a night.”

  “Seriously,” I reply. “I had no idea Intro to Geology would require three textbooks.”

  “Intro to Geology?” asks Joey, her brow raised.

  I grimace. “Yeah. I apparently need two science credits for my major.”

  “So you picked rocks.”

  “It was rocks or stars.”

  Joey watches me, her mouth fixed in an amused grin. I resist the urge to let my eyes linger on her lips.

  “I’d have gone with stars,” she finally says, propping her elbows up on the table to rest her chin on her hand.

  “Well,” I say, taking a sip from my juice, “I actually know a decent amount about astronomy already. My dad was fascinated by all of that. He would buy me and my brother books on the universe each year for Christmas. I remember being in the car with Kevin in the back seat, our dad driving us out to fields to watch meteor showers at two a.m.” I clear my throat, Joey’s gaze still on me. “So, I’m familiar with the constellations, how stars are made, how the solar system works, all that. But rocks…I mean, I feel like they get the bum deal, you know? Like, if you see a rock on the sidewalk, what do you do?”

  Joey shrugs.

  “You probably kick it, right?”

  She nods and picks up my banana, beginning to peel it.

  Watching her, I continue. “Right. It’s an instinct. People kick them. Hundreds, thousands of years ago, rocks were used as punishment against criminals. Creepy things hide under rocks. They’re what crooks use to break through glass. But if you think about it, rocks are a lot more than that. I mean, they’re essentially where we come from. In a way. We started as a big rock. And gasses and microbes and things, of course. But we’re all just hanging around on a big floating rock in a galaxy of other floating rocks. And within our rock are billions of other rocks, all different types and sizes and colors. Everything began with rocks. We used rocks to build a cave door. The first wheel. Castles. And now we carve them, clean them, and wear them on ou
r fingers. Rocks are kind of a big deal. So, I figured I owe it to them to at least learn a year’s worth of information.”

  When I take a breath, Joey’s taking another bite out of my banana. I’m not entirely sure what her eyes are saying, but heat rushes up the back of my neck. The air grows thick around us, and I fall once again into the memories of last week.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, taking a quick bite of my cereal. “I got a little carried away.”

  “I saw that.”

  I gulp and take a swig of my juice.

  She chuckles. “Now I know what to get you for Christmas. I’ll be sure to gift-wrap the next pebble that gets lodged in my cleat at practice.” I laugh. The tension that I felt before vanishes. “Well, short stack,” she says, stretching, “thanks for that brief but very thorough insight into your take on rocks. It was, um, educational. However, there is actually a reason why I came in here.”

  “To start your daily hoarding of people’s breakfasts?” I ask, eyeing my now half-eaten banana.

  She smiles and takes another bite. “No, but good guess. Actually, I was hoping to talk to you.”

  My cereal is gone now, so I swirl the milk around in my bowl. I don’t dare look up at her despite the fact that I can feel her eyes on me.

  “Oh?” I say, my gaze still down. “What about?”

  She’s quiet, and I can practically hear the “Really?” that bounces around the air from her to me.

  Okay, I’m playing dumb. But how the hell do you even start a conversation after a night like that? What do you even say?

  “Kyle, we kissed.”

  I guess that’s one thing you could say.

  When I finally look up, she’s folding the empty banana skin down onto the table in front of her. Her fingers fumble with it, and it gives me the slightest dose of courage to see that she might actually be nervous, too.

  “We did,” I eventually say.

  “Well,” she says, shifting in her seat, “I feel like we ought to, I don’t know, clear the air about it. I feel like you’ve been avoiding me since that night at the party. I mean, you ran out the back door of our dorm hall the next morning when I walked out of the bathroom.”