Pucker Up

by Sara Hubbard

  I check my calendar and tap today’s date before sliding my finger down the page. Crap. I almost forgot Mom was coming to town to take me out for supper. She tries to come at least once a week—just to catch up. And while I love hearing about what my family is up to, I have so much work to do.

  Mom texts me just before four o’clock to meet her at The Italian Bistro on Dutch Street. It’s a nice day out. The sun is shining and it’s warm enough to wear just a sweater outside, so I decide to walk. It’s only fifteen minutes by foot. I have the same car Mom bought me for my sixteenth birthday parked here at school, but I only really use it when I go home for the occasional weekend.

  The restaurant is a hole-in-the-wall place that you’d miss if you didn’t know it was there, but the food is authentic and probably the best Italian food I’ve ever had. I’ve tried everything on the menu but, by far, my favorite item is the tiramisu. Desserts are hard to ruin—in my opinion—but some restaurants take them to another level. The cream in this dessert is thick and rich and it practically melts on your tongue. Just thinking about the restaurant has me salivating. I walk inside, the bell above the door jingling to announce me. A girl in a white T-shirt and black pants is cleaning a table. Surprisingly, I haven’t seen her before. She must be new.

  “Just a minute,” she calls out to me.

  I glance around the room and find Mom in the corner. She’s so easy to spot because she has a hat fetish. Today she wears a wide-brimmed white one with a red sash to match her red-checkered scarf. She waves to me, beaming, and I smile back.

  “I’m meeting my mom,” I say to the girl and point to Mom.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  Mom stands as I approach. She wraps her arms around me and hugs me tightly, like the first hug we’ve shared in years but, in reality, it was last Tuesday. I don’t mind, though. She constantly reminds me I’m loved and appreciated. Sometimes a girl needs that. She needs her mother.

  “Hey, Mom! Were you waiting long?”

  I pull away, and we both take our seats opposite each other.

  “You look pale. Are you eating enough? I worry about you. You’ve lost enough weight. I hope you’re not still losing.”

  “No, Mom, I’m happy the way I am now.”

  “Well, maybe you should take some multivitamins.”

  “Sure.” I probably won’t, but I don’t want her to worry.

  “How was class?” she asks. A glass of soda sits on the table and she grips the straw, gently stirring the liquid.

  “Good. The same.”

  “And Emily? How’s she doing at school?”

  I make a face and kind of shake my head side to side, gesturing to say so-so.

  “Well, you’re a wealth of information. I come here to see you, and you never have anything to tell me. What about boys? Are you dating yet?”

  I sigh and turn to see what the waitress is doing. Our eyes meet, and she strolls over, pulling out a notepad and pencil from the apron tied around her hips.

  Saved by the bell.

  “Anything to drink?” she asks.

  “Sure, water with lemon in the glass, not on the side, and two straws. Also, I think we’re ready to order. Right, Mom?”

  She nods. We always get the same exact thing every time we come here. We don’t need menus anymore, though they always give them to us.

  “Lasagna for me,” Mom says.

  “Eggplant parmesan for me,” I add.

  “Great.” The waitress takes the two menus still lying on top of each other on the side of the table. She walks away.

  I hope Mom forgets where we left the conversation, but my mother’s memory is keener than mine.

  “Boys?” she repeats.

  My sigh turns into quiet laughter. “I don’t have time for boys.”

  “Of course, you do.” She rolls her eyes and sips her soda.

  “I have to maintain my average, Mom, or I’ll lose my scholarship. And the editor of the paper is giving me a chance to write for him. He’s even agreed to give me a spot on the front page for the next paper if I can get the story he wants.”

  She stares at me blankly. I thought she might be impressed, but apparently not. My mother has never really appreciated my interest in becoming a journalist. I suppose I can’t blame her. My dad is one—and he’s well-known, at that—but his job ultimately broke up their marriage so she’s never been supportive of my interest in living a life like my father’s.

  “You could congratulate me. I’ve been trying to get him to give me a chance since September.”

  She lets out a heavy sigh.

  The waitress returns and puts my drink down on the table. I remove the straw right away because I don’t know if she’s touched the end or not. I only drink from straws when I get to take them out of the packaging.

  “Charlie...that’s great. I’m happy if you’re happy.”

  “Well, I am happy.” I take a long drink.

  “I just...”

  “What?” I say.

  “Well, it’s just that...I worry sometimes that your interest in journalism has more to do with your father than you.”

  I lean back in my seat and press my hands on the table on either side of my place mat. “I want this.” She doesn’t get it. I love writing and I always have. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s fiction or nonfiction. Well, okay, maybe it does. But I can do both.

  As a kid, I gobbled up romance novels and wanted to write my own stories. So I did. A lot, actually. The longest one, the one that I was most proud of, came shortly after I turned sixteen. I wrote a 28,000-word love story about two high school students. As a kid, I thought I had written a masterpiece. When I showed it to my dad, he told me it was “trash.” If I wanted to write and be taken seriously, he encouraged me to follow in his footsteps. Journalism pays the bills. Then he rhymed off statistics about writers and income and how I could never survive on it—even if I made it. Then he told me, “You have the talent to compose beautiful sentences and your vocabulary and grammar are exemplary, but honey, you don’t weave a story good enough for fiction.”

  And that abruptly put an end to my interest in fiction writing, even though Emily couldn’t praise that story enough. Because my dad was a hotshot writer and photographer, and he knew so much more about publishing than I did. Because he’s successful and has won awards so he knew what he was talking about.

  “As long as you’re sure,” Mom says, ripping me from the memory.

  When I return to the dorm, Emily is lying on her bed with her feet on the wall as she balances a text book on her legs. The sun is still in the sky. It casts a beam onto our beds on a slanted angle. A million dust motes dance in the golden light. I slam the door behind me and sink onto the thin mattress on my bed across from hers. The heat from the beam washes over me, and I close my eyes to avoid the glare of the sun. The room smells like old socks. Emily’s laundry basket sits on the floor, filled with dirty clothes that she still hasn’t taken to the laundry room yet. It’s been there for days.

  As I sniff the air, I crinkle my nose. Not sure why the smell surprises me. I already know it smells bad. But then, amid the stench, I’m hit with something more fowl. Old pizza. Rotten cheese.

  “I’m taking them to the laundry room after I finish this chapter,” she says.

  Emily plays intramural soccer three evenings a week but only does laundry when all her underwear is dirty. Sometimes not even then. I often find her stuff in my basket, and I end up cleaning them with mine since I’m already in the laundry room when I find it.

  I prop myself up on my elbows and stare at the clothes in a pile by her closet. An old pizza box sits on its side to the left, too big to fit in the wastebasket. When did she have pizza? As far as I can remember, and my memory is top notch, she hasn’t had pizza since last Thursday, a whole four days ago.

  “Stop!” she says. “I’ll drop it in the garbage in the laundry room. You’ll never know it was here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, feeling the
need to apologize for being the cleanliness police. “I can’t help it.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She tosses her book on the bed and pushes herself up, sitting on the bed with her legs crisscrossed. “Did you have supper with your mom tonight?”

  “Yeah, at the Italian Bistro.”

  “Mmmm. Love that place. What’s up with Marlene?”

  “Nothing. She’s good. But Grandma got caught skinny-dipping in the Fowler’s hot tub. They thought she was a burglar when they heard her splashing in the water. Thankfully, they didn’t call the cops. Mom keeps telling the neighbors she’s senile, but I think she’s just bored.”

  “I fucking love your grandmother. Who else has a grandmother with tattoos and swears in not one, but two languages? She once told me she dated someone in the mob.”

  I laugh. “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “I haven’t seen you all day. How was the meeting with Jack?”

  “It was…better.”

  Emily reaches out to congratulate me with a slap to the shoulder. “There you go. Persistence pays off in the end, I guess. I wish I had your motivation. Maybe I’d be passing biology.”

  “I can help you. Don’t forget I took advanced biology in high school and was first in my class.”

  She rolls her eyes, but a playful smile crosses her lips. “I haven't forgotten.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to sound conceited.”

  “I know you didn’t. And I didn’t take it that way. Forget that, tell me about your meeting.”

  A big smile covers my lips, and my cheeks flame with heat. “He’s going to let me join the paper and feature my first article in the end-of-year issue…if I can get it.”

  “That’s amazing!” She reaches over and squeezes my hand. “What’s the story?”

  “Do you know who the captain of the hockey team is?”

  Her eyes widen a little. Her smile grows as she shakes her head at me. “Who doesn’t know who he is? He’s like the guy on campus everyone wants a piece of—girls and guys.”

  “Really?”

  She shrugs. “Probably. If I was single, I’d be dreaming about him.”

  “I need to track him down and get an interview. That’s it. Jack wants me to do a human piece on him, about where he comes from, who he is, why he sat out for the playoffs...” Benched: to sit out, to sideline, to cut. Of course, I looked it up, and it meant exactly what I thought it did.

  “Good luck with that.”

  I crook an eyebrow. As far as I know, she doesn’t know this guy, yet she doesn’t seem to think I can get the interview either. “What do you mean by that?” I’m trying not to be offended.

  “Well…I heard some girls on the floor talking about him a few months ago. He was dating Sam.”

  Sam lives down the hall by the common room. She and Emily are friends, but for some reason we’ve never really clicked. I never hang out with her if Emily isn’t around. She's kind of cold to me, answering my questions with one-word answers and never asking me anything directly.

  “They were together all first term and she was getting frustrated about him not opening up to her, so she started digging around on the internet for information,” Emily says. “Apparently, he found out and lost his mind. Broke it off with her—ugly scene, by the way, in the cafeteria.” She frowns at me. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it. He totally avoided her after that. Sam talked to some of the other girls he’s dated since he started university here—he’s a senior—and they all said the same thing, that he’s awfully tight-lipped about his family and his past.”

  “That’s odd,” I say quietly. “He’s obviously hiding something.”

  Emily nods. “I'd say. I’m pretty curious to find out what. Aren’t you?”

  “Very.” I hop off the bed and take a seat at the desk, opening my laptop and firing it up. Emily shimmies over on the bed so she’s close enough to see the screen.

  “What’s his name?” I ask.

  “Clayton Ozmore. Everyone calls him Ozzie.”

  I tap his name into Google’s search engine. A handful of hits come up, but none are for him. At least, it doesn’t look that way at first glance. I go to the next page and find some hockey stats and some stories about games over the years, but I don’t see a single picture, and there are no details about him off the ice. No Facebook page. No Instagram or Twitter. No social media at all.

  That’s kind of odd. Who in this day and age doesn’t use social media?

  “Who are you, Clayton?” I ask myself quietly as I drum my fingers on the desk.

  “The only thing I can get from all of this is that he went to a private school in Blandford,” I tell Emily. There are pages on the Blandford Preparatory School website that are dedicated to sports. They have photos of the hockey team posted here from the last twenty years. I scan the photos and the names attached to each image. Wouldn’t you know, Clay isn’t present for any of his photos. Coincidence? Maybe, but he’s absent for both his junior and senior year photos. Apparently, he wasn’t on the team in freshman year or sophomore year either. Jack said he started at a private school at seventeen, so…that makes sense.

  “Well, that’s a start.” When Emily leans forward, I move back to allow her to type in the word Facebook. Mine automatically comes up and I’m signed in. She types Sam Moore’s name in. Although Sam and I aren’t close, we’re friends on Facebook.

  Emily scrolls through some images until one of her and a guy pops up. He has his arm around her. She’s facing the camera, taking a selfie, and he’s looking off to the side. He wears a hat, pulled low, so you can only see his nose and a square, wide jaw. The ends of his dark hair curl up around the edges of his cap. Sam’s head is tilted as she smiles, her head resting against the tip of his shoulder. Sam is tall to begin with, at least 5’9. This guy must be a beast. The sleeves of his T-shirt are strained from his muscles. His flesh is covered in a tattoo sleeve of a skull, flames, and a dragon with feathers that goes from up under the hem down to his wrist.

  “Huh,” Emily says, surprised. “You can barely make out his face. Maybe he doesn’t like pictures?”

  “Maybe.” But I can’t help returning to my original thought: he has something to hide.

  “Well, if he doesn’t like pictures, I don’t understand why,” Emily says. “He’s frigging beautiful. He’s got these big dimples in his cheeks when he smiles, and I have to be honest, he has an amazing smile. He has these big blue eyes—dark, like the ocean—and they light up. Girls just trip over their words when they talk to him. At least, every girl I’ve seen that talks to him—except Sam.”

  A leggy blonde with double Ds, pouty lips, and wavy blonde hair that almost reaches her perky ass cheeks? No wonder she’s confident. I would be, too. No man could intimidate me if I looked like her.

  “Well, his appearance isn’t of interest to me right now, only the information I need to tell a killer story.” This is the truth. Jocks have never attracted me. They’re nice to look at, sure. But I’ve never had a conversation with a jock that hasn’t been uncomfortable. Never. Either because they’re too good to talk to me—and I can feel it—or they say nothing of interest to me, and I bide my time until I can walk away.

  “You’re such a snob,” Emily says, chuckling. “Don’t judge the poor guy because he plays hockey. He actually seems like an all right guy.”

  I ignore her. Past experience dictates otherwise, and I’m not budging from my opinion without solid proof. “He’s like a ghost.” I keep scanning through the hits on Google, but most of them lead to dead ends. “I don’t have anything to go on here.” The only thing I can find is hockey game reports and stats. He seems to be a big scorer, but that gives me nothing for my story. Absolutely nothing.

  “You know, you’re not going to get your story from stalking him on the internet or driving to Blandford. You’re going to have to talk to him.” She lays a hand on my back, patting lightly.

  I’d rather chew nails than strike
up a conversation with this guy. Why couldn’t I interview someone I relate to on some level? Ugh.

  An image of a grinning Steven Grobin enters my mind. He’s a guy from my past I’d rather forget. God, I hated that turd. He used to hang out with my sister in high school. He came over to my house for a pool party one day, and I was getting out of the pool. I wore a pink bathing suit, one that rode up a little on my thighs because I had gained weight over the winter—and I was heavy to begin with. He snapped a picture and smiled wickedly at me. The next day the image with pig ears drawn on my head was all over social media. He was a jock. And him and all his followers called me Miss Piggy when I walked by them until I finally lost weight before graduating from high school.

  “This isn’t high school, Charlie. Forget about all the losers who made your life awful. You’re not the same girl. You lost seventy pounds, for crying out loud! You’re gorgeous. And you were gorgeous before. Don’t let anyone intimidate you.”

  I nod, but I don’t feel confident. A crushing pain in my chest makes me tense, the same one I always feel when I think of the shit I put up with in high school. Emily rubs my back and leans forward to rest her head on my shoulder. I don’t know what I’d do without Emily, or what I would have done in high school. She’s always my champion, and I try hard to do as much for her as she does for me.

  “You’re right. I know you’re right,” I say. “But this isn’t just about talking to some guy. This is about getting a guy to tell me his secrets when he doesn’t want to. How the hell am I going to do that? If he’s not talking to girls he supposedly cares about, he’s never going to volunteer personal information to me. Jack said he refused to talk to anyone on the paper.”

  “Well, there’s your game plan. Don’t tell him you’re doing a story.”

  “Lie to him?”

  She nods, her expression serious.

  I don’t even consider it. Well, not really. Misrepresenting myself is not something I want to do for a story—especially one like this. I mean, it’d be one thing if I was getting the story for the greater good, but for personal details? Skeletons in a university hockey player’s closet? Morally, I can’t get behind that.