Soul Kiss

by Neil S. Plakcy

  But that afternoon it was like some kind of magic. Every problem Daniel threw at me, I was able to figure out. He was the same way, and by the time we split up to take our buses, I was confident we knew our stuff.

  And Geeks

  The next afternoon I had literary magazine. I hadn’t been writing anything for a while, so caught up with Daniel and in figuring out what was going on, not just between us but between our brains, and Miss Margolis called me on it.

  “Are you going to write a story for this issue?” she asked. “Because if you are, you need to get it in by the end of the week.”

  She wasn’t very pretty, and I wasn’t surprised that she was almost thirty and still a Miss. She had some old acne scars, and she kept her hair cut too short to be flattering. She also had kind of a wide bottom, though I know some guys like that kind of thing.

  “I don’t know, Miss Margolis. I just haven’t been inspired.”

  “Genius is only one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” she said. “Have you tried to write anything?”

  We were sitting in a classroom on the second floor, with Lashonda, Kate, and about a half dozen other kids. Lashonda was a pretty good photographer; she had already put in a bunch of nature photos for the next issue. Kate had written an essay about her grandmother’s oatmeal which was full of great descriptions. We also had a bunch of tortured poems on the table, and a science fiction short story about a planet with two suns where it never got dark so no one ever slept.

  “I’ll try tonight, I promise.” I wondered if I could write faster now, too—I hadn’t tried that. Would my reading and comprehension speed translate into being more creative too?

  Miss Margolis led us through how to edit the science fiction story. “This is a really interesting idea,” she said, to the boy who had written it, a nerdy kid in Robbie’s class named Frank Brewer. “But you could do so much more with it. What do these people do with all their extra time? Think about the eight hours or so that you spend asleep. What could you do if you didn’t have to sleep?”

  “I’d play Xbox,” he said.

  Kate and Mindy giggled. “I’d read,” Kate said.

  “But your body needs sleep to rest up and regenerate your cells,” Mindy said. “What do these people do instead of sleep to keep their bodies going?”

  “Interesting ideas,” Miss Margolis said. “Maybe they have a special diet.”

  “You know those lights they have, for people who live in Alaska and stuff, where they don’t get sunshine?” Kate asked. “Maybe these people have special dark machines that do that.”

  “Frank? Are you thinking about these ideas?” Miss Margolis asked.

  “I thought it was done,” Frank said, looking down at the desk.

  “Nothing creative is ever done,” Miss Margolis said. “Sometimes you get it to the point where it gets published, but those ideas are still in your brain, and maybe you keep coming back to them. Look at the great works of literature—some of our most famous authors keep revisiting their ideas and themes throughout their work.”

  I thought about that on my way home. The stories I had written so far were all about a misunderstood girl who felt isolated. But I didn’t feel that way anymore, now that I had met Daniel. Was it possible that my themes had changed?

  After dinner I sat down at the computer to write a story for the literary magazine. But every time I wrote a sentence I hated it so much that I deleted it immediately. Had whatever got into my brain from Daniel’s destroyed my creativity? Or was I just happy? Had all my desire to write arisen out of being miserable? Was I not really a tortured misunderstood artist, just an ordinary teenage girl whose body was now flooded with endorphins?

  I couldn’t consider those questions, so I went back to studying math. The next day, Daniel and I compared our answers in the library that afternoon and we both thought we had aced the test.

  I knew Chelsea was jealous of my relationship with Daniel but I didn’t realize how nuts she was until the next day in math class, when Mr. Iccanello complimented me and Daniel on getting every question correct.

  While we were all working on a problem, Chelsea got up and went to the front of the classroom, and told Mr. Iccanello she thought Daniel and I were cheating. I even heard her say there was no way I could have gotten a hundred on the test—I just wasn’t that smart.

  That really hurt. Partly that one of my oldest friends had turned on me, and partly that she thought the only way I could have gotten a hundred was by cheating.

  I had never been the best student in the class, but I had held my own, all through every AP class Chelsea and I took together. I never considered if I was smarter than she was, or if she was smarter than I was; we were both just smart.

  “Melissa and Daniel, I need to see you both after school,” Mr. Iccanello said just as the bell was ringing. “Please come to my office at the end of the last period.”

  Daniel had been busy with the problem Mr. Iccanello had assigned, so he hadn’t noticed Chelsea go up to speak to him. On the way out of class I told him what I thought was going on.

  “Why would she do that?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Because she’s a bitch. She’s always been one, it’s just she’s been nice to me because I’ve known her for so long.”

  “And now she turned on you because of me.”

  “Like I said, she’s just a bitch. Who knows why she does things?”

  At the end of history class we both walked upstairs to Mr. Iccanello’s office, a small room in a warren of similar ones behind the school secretary’s desk. “May I see your tests?” he asked.

  We both pulled our test papers out and handed them to him. He looked back and forth from one to the other for a while, as Daniel and I sat across from him in a pair of uncomfortable metal chairs.

  “Your answers are remarkably similar,” he said at last. “Not identical, but very close.”

  “We studied together,” I said, and Daniel nodded.

  “Explain this answer to me, Melissa,” he said, showing me a complicated proof.

  It was the one I had figured out on my own, and taught to Daniel, so I was able to talk my way through it. Mr. Iccanello nodded as I spoke.

  “Very good. Now, Daniel, this one, please?”

  He pointed at another answer. Daniel answered, a bit haltingly, as if he was searching for the right words in English. His accent was more pronounced, and I wondered if he was nervous.

  But when he finished, Mr. Iccanello said, “Quite right.” He made us each explain another answer, then he sat back. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m confident you didn’t cheat. If you’re studying together, you’re definitely doing something right.”

  We both stood up and thanked him, then walked down the hall to the library. “That was scary,” Daniel said. “I was worried he would make us leave school.”

  “No way. We didn’t cheat, so there was nothing he could penalize us for.”

  “You don’t know how it is,” he said. “When someone decides you’re wrong, they don’t stop until they find a way to prove it, even if you’re right.”

  The next morning before English class, I confronted Chelsea. “Why did you tell Mr. Iccanello that Daniel and I cheated off each other?” I asked. “You knew we didn’t.”

  “I didn’t know anything of the sort.” She tossed her blonde hair back over her shoulder. “You never get such good grades in math, Melissa.”

  “I’ve been studying with Daniel. He’s smart. And I heard what you said to Mr. Iccanello, that I wasn’t smart enough to do well. That was really mean, Chelsea.”

  “You’ve always been second-rate,” she said. “My father says so.”

  “Well, you can tell your father to kiss my ass. I’m sure he gets a lot of practice doing that with the sleazy clients he represents.”

  Mrs. Ash came in as Chelsea was about to say something, and we all had to take our seats. I felt Chelsea’s anger simmering at me all through the rest of o
ur classes, but I just smiled blandly at her.

  I saw Miss Margolis at lunch and she asked me if I had written a story for the magazine. “I tried,” I said. “Honest. But everything I wrote was just crap.”

  “All first drafts are crap, Melissa. The magic comes in the revision.” She smiled. “Don’t worry, you can do something for the next issue.”

  That afternoon in the library, I told Daniel, “I think we should go back to the first time that I felt something strange. It was after you kissed me.”

  “The first time?”

  I shook my head. “Not on the cheek or anything. The, you know, soul kiss.”

  He smiled. “Where you looked into my soul for the first time?”

  I elbowed him. “You know what I mean. French kiss, soul kiss. It’s a really intimate contact. Suppose you breathed into me or something, and some of your brain cells got into mine that way.”

  He looked dubious. “Like a virus?”

  “You have any better ideas?”

  He turned to his computer and started typing. I looked over his shoulder. I couldn’t read as fast as he could, but it was clear after only a few minutes that there was nothing online about people transmitting anything other than disease through a kiss.

  Finally he turned to me. “You started feeling different after we kissed that first time. Has it gotten worse since then?”

  “What do you mean, worse? I like kissing you.”

  He laughed. “I don’t mean that. I mean, can you read faster or think better after every time we kiss? Am I giving you more brain cells each time?” His mouth gaped open in mock horror. “You’re sucking my brains out every time you kiss me! You’re going to be a genius, and I’m going to end up a moron like Chelsea Scalzitti.”

  “Chelsea’s not a moron, she’s a bitch,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

  “But?”

  I thought about it. I didn’t feel like I had continued to improve my brain the more I kissed Daniel. But then again I hadn’t done any real study of the issue. “I guess we should set up an experiment.”

  “I like the sound of that.” Daniel smiled wolfishly. “We’ve read enough reports of brain studies. How would we set up our own?”

  We started coming up with ideas. “Suppose we find a couple of books on similar topics, of similar length and similar difficulty,” I said. “You can time me reading the first one. Then we’ll kiss for a while. And then I’ll read the next one.”

  “It might take some time for the effect to build up. We should control for that. Like have you read the third book a day later, and maybe even a fourth book a week after that.”

  “But that would mean we couldn’t kiss again between tests. You wouldn’t want to mess with the state of my brain.”

  “So scratch the long-term test,” he said. “What else could we do?”

  By the time we had to catch the late bus, we had an experiment set up for Saturday night. Instead of meeting for a driving lesson, we would go out into the woods near my house and make out.

  Then we would go back to my house and Daniel would time me reading a book. As long as my parents didn’t object, we could go to dinner after that, then he would time me again. He had to work on Sunday, but I thought I could recruit my dad to test me for the third book.

  “Should we include some kind of test for comprehension?” Daniel asked. “I mean, you could just read the book and not understand it.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way. If I read it, I understand it. Isn’t that the same with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  The rest of the week we had to prepare for a test in AP history. That wasn’t as easy to study for as math; it wasn’t like memorizing formulas and then applying them. We were going to have to write short answers to questions, citing examples from what we had read.

  “Is your writing as good as your thinking, Daniel?” I asked on Thursday afternoon. “I mean, like essays and stuff.”

  “I guess. I get pretty good grades on my writing assignments. How about you?”

  “I have good grammar and all, but sometimes my teachers say I don’t develop my ideas enough.” I turned to look at him. “How about stories?”

  “I can’t write stories,” he said. “Make stuff up?” He shook his head. “You can, though. I read that story you wrote for the literary magazine last year, about the girl in the cemetery.”

  I was embarrassed. That was such a teenage angst story. This girl was only at home in the cemetery, where the dead people didn’t judge her or try to socialize with her. “I don’t think I can do that kind of thing anymore.” I told him about how I had tried to write a story for the literary magazine and I hadn’t been able to. “Maybe I could only write stories because I was unhappy.”

  “And you’re happy now?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, I am. But how did you read that story? You weren’t even here then.”

  He looked down at the computer keyboard. “After we, you know, started dating, and you told me you were on the magazine, I went back and read the old issues.”

  That would have freaked me out more if I hadn’t known how fast Daniel could read. “That took you all of what, ten minutes?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I only read what you wrote. The rest was crap. Except for a couple of things Kate wrote. She’s smart.”

  “Don’t get any ideas about her, brain-boy. She doesn’t need you kissing her and spreading around your brain cells.”

  He looked up and smiled at me. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you don’t want me kissing any other girls?”

  “You’re probably losing brain cells all the time,” I said. “Just looking at me. I can almost see them falling out of your ears.”

  “Then we’d better study.” He opened his history textbook, and we started asking each other questions.

  When we were finishing up, I said, “Has your mother said anything more about having any injections when she was pregnant?”

  He shook his head. “I know she’s hiding something. But I’m going to wait until the right time to ask her again.”

  “Maybe when we have the results of our experiment this weekend.”

  “She’s always been cagey about stuff in Cuba. She’ll talk about growing up and meeting my dad, but anything after that, until we got to the States, she doesn’t say.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah. Parents. Could they be any weirder?”

  I had to agree with him on that one.

  Testing

  As we were filing into AP history for our midterm, Chelsea went up to Mrs. Becker. “I just think you should know that Mr. Iccanello had some concerns about Daniel and Melissa cheating, so you might want to separate them,” she said.

  I jumped up and hustled up to the front of the room. “The only reason he had any concerns was because you told him you thought I wasn’t smart enough to do well on the exam,” I said. “You’re just a jealous bitch.”

  “Melissa,” Mrs. Becker said.

  I turned to her. “It’s true. Daniel and I have been studying together, and we both got all the answers correct on our math test. Chelsea just wants to make trouble because she wants to go out with Daniel.”

  Chelsea turned bright red. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t want to date that freak.”

  The whole class was mesmerized. I was so mad at Chelsea I wanted to pull her hair or spit on her or something. Poor Mrs. Becker looked like she was some kind of chaplain parachuted into a war zone without any training.

  “Both of you take your seats,” she said. “And not that I believe any accusations without proof, but I would appreciate it if you and Daniel wouldn’t sit next to each other, Melissa.”

  “I could sit out in the hall and still do better than Chelsea.” I stalked back to my desk and picked up my crap. I glared at Mindy, even though she was only an innocent bystander, and she jumped up and switched chairs with me.

  I was so angry my hand was shaking as I picked up m
y pen. I swear, I wanted to kill Chelsea Scalzitti. I forced myself to focus on the exam, and with relief I saw that the first question was one that Daniel and I had discussed: “Analyze the ways in which other European monarchs reacted to the French revolution.”

  I knew from our reading that the other kings in Europe were freaked out by it. They worried that the same thing could happen in their own countries, so they tried to stay neutral, even though they had family and trade connections with the Bourbon kings. I started writing, and the words just flowed through me, about uncertainty in the face of change and fear of the unknown. I realized I was writing out how I felt about dating Daniel, in a way, and that inspired me even more.

  The other questions weren’t as exciting or interesting, but I had answers for all of them. Halfway through the period I looked over at Chelsea and saw her chewing on the end of her pen. Good for you, bitch, I thought. Let’s see who’s the smart one after this exam is over.

  I finished the exam before anyone else, even Daniel. I read my answers through one more time, correcting a couple of grammatical errors and adding support to one point. Then I gathered my stuff, stood up, and carried my paper up to Mrs. Becker.

  “I’m sorry I got upset before, Mrs. Becker,” I said, lowering my voice as I handed her my paper. “Chelsea has been having a lot of emotional problems lately, and I know that I should be more supportive of her.”

  I saw her eyes dart over to where Chelsea was staring vacantly into space, then look back to me. “I understand,” she said.

  When Daniel finished the exam, he joined me in the hallway. “What was that about?” he asked. “With Chelsea. You don’t think she really wants to go out with me, do you?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. She’s just jealous that I’m showing everyone that I’m smarter than she is.”

  “I’m worried about you, Melissa. You’re starting to sound just like Chelsea.”

  He was right. “Yeah, I know. I’ll have to work on that.” I kissed his cheek when we got to the bus dock and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”