On the back deck with coffee in the morning, the steam from Hull’s shower puffed from the open bathroom window and Kyla pictured the bar of soap sliding down his stomach and listened to the woodpecker who insisted on trying to jab at the metal antenna near the chimney. As the hollow tin peckings sounded out into the small yard, the shower shut off, and Jenna’s car turned onto the drive. She wore her hair in braids, and when Hull went out to greet her on the dirt and leafed gravel, he held the towel around his waist with one hand and one of the plaits in the other as he kissed her.
Kyla’s coffee was cold, but she sipped at it and thought about statistics class; regression to the mean, probability, medians, modes, and the swan’s-neck curve of Justin’s left hand and forearm as he charted cluster graphs or took notes. Usually, she arrived late to class and sat near the door. The chairs were modern versions of the ones in all classrooms—the tiny seat that connected to an even smaller cartoon-cloud-shaped desk. The first day Justin had made a remark about the desks being impossible for left-handed people, and she noticed he sat at an angle in the chair in order to keep his notebook supported.
Kyla decided that she would talk to Justin after class that night and stop wondering about the voice that went with the person, so she put on a skirt and black turtleneck to remind herself to do it. As Professor Michelson wrote problems on the board, Erin passed around the photocopied handouts that detailed false statistics in medicine. Kyla had arrived on time and taken a seat in the middle of the arch of chairs. The would-have-been-class-president Chris sat to her right, rechecking his homework. Slumped down, the stoner boy Roger slipped an unfinished American Spirit butt into a soft pack and let one of his sandals flop to the rug.
Even though Justin, who came in late and with his dog, sat next to her, Kyla was thinking about chickening out of talking to him. Her hair felt knotted at the back. The lights made even Erin’s ruddy cheeks glow the color of mold and highlighted each facial scar, making Kyla finger the pockmark near her left eye.
She knew if she stayed too long after class—or if Justin happened to invite her for a beer at Dougal’s Pub and she agreed—that she’d miss seeing Hull the entire week, since he and Jenna were driving to Burlington for the long weekend. She’d shrugged out of going with them, unable to cope with watching the small moments that reverberated their couplehood.
Right after Chris passed the photocopied sheets to her, she handed them on to Justin, who handed some to his left and took the extras to the professor’s desk and then dropped a quartered piece of yellow legal pad paper in her lap. The note read: “Since this is all so high school—want to meet me at the lockers after class?—J.” Kyla was sure the teacher had seen her open the letter, so she slipped it into her notebook and swiveled to let her feet rest on the rung of Justin’s chair; a wordless yes. Kyla’s back bumped up to the metal bar that connected her desk to the seat, and she pretended to share Justin’s textbook so he could lean in and whisper, “So, are you up for spending some time together?”
He let his lips graze her ear, or maybe she just wished they did, but she nodded in any case.
In the parking lot outside Dougal’s, they could hear the music from inside. Justin’s breath smelled like the hard cider they’d finished a few minutes before. He watched her, smiling as she lifted her hair from under the collar of her suede jacket. As if she needed to explain, she said, “It wants brushing.” As the words came out, she remembered Alice in Wonderland saying something similar and felt for a second like a verbal plagiarist, with Justin being none the wiser. She held up a lock of hair and then let it drop.
“Maybe I could do that for you sometime,” he said. His yellow Lab, Polly, pawed at his knees. From the glove compartment, Kyla produced a dog biscuit and fed it to Polly as she nosed up to her window. Jenna had baked organic dog treats for her customers several weeks before, and when she’d listed the ingredients, Kyla and Hull had tried them out, nibbling at the dense, oaty rectangles until their mouths felt gritty. Kyla’d kept the unfinished ends in the glove compartment, thinking that, if she ever broke down, the biscuits would get her through a couple of hours of waiting for a tow truck or a jump start.
Justin’s hands splayed out across the empty ridge where the window glass disappeared into the door, and Kyla looked to the empty spot where the top of his right pointer finger would have been.
“Got it stuck between a fishing boat and a piling,” he said when he noticed where her glance rested.
“Where?” Kyla asked. It was all she could think to say, having immediately decided that “ouch” was unsuitable, then regretted commenting at all, now slightly haunted by the image of an ocean-bound floating digit.
“Newport,” Justin said and put his hands in his pockets. Bending from the knees, he moved his face near hers. Kyla sat idling, hand on the gearshift, foot automatically set to press on the clutch, thinking he would kiss her, but he didn’t. He touched her face and asked if he could call her and if her number on the class list was correct. She nodded, and he backed away.
At seven the next morning, she helped Hull and Jenna load up Jenna’s car, slinging two duffel bags and a knapsack into the backseat while Hull bungee-roped the kayak to the roof rack and Jenna fixed toast for the ride. Hull insisted on taking his boat everywhere, envisioning time and motivation to fix it, but the thing remained unpatched and useless.
“You sure you don’t want to come?” Jenna asked. She looked at Kyla’s socked feet and added, “Hey—do you mind if I pack those socks? I was looking for them before.” The house had such a communal method to it, Kyla was surprised that Jenna wanted the exact socks she had on her feet, but she obliged anyway.
Kyla rolled the purple wool of them and handed the sock ball to Jenna, who played a game of minicatch with herself while Hull laced his hiking boots and brought his travel mug to the car. Her feet were now freezing.
“Have fun,” Kyla said.
“Did you?” Hull asked; his tone was casual enough that Jenna wouldn’t find anything suspicious. “Last night,” Hull clarified while Jenna shut the trunk of the car, mainly out of earshot. He took a sip of the coffee, then undid the lid to pour some out. Once they’d driven to pick Jenna up at the bakery and Hull had pulled to the side of the road to do the same thing just before hitting the brake and palming the back of Kyla’s head. A puddle of milky coffee ditched roadside, he’d kissed her hard, his tongue still coffee-warm. It was the only time they’d kissed outside the house, and Kyla kept the still shot of it in her mind like a page from a yearbook, faded.
Kyla held her hands up to encourage Jenna to throw the sock ball to her, but she didn’t. Jenna threw it high and then higher until she missed the catch and went to retrieve the socks from where they’d landed near the compost. Kyla dug her bare big toe into the dirt and thought of Justin’s lost finger.
Hull clasped his hands together and gave a small squeal like an excited girl. “Oh, my gosh—does he like you? What’s his name?”
“I did.” She reached over to pull a twig from Hull’s chest. “And his name is Justin.” She gave one foot a break from the cold by balancing in a yoga pose, one sole on the opposite calf.
“If you’re done prying into Kyla’s dating life, we should go,” Jenna said and got in the driver’s side door. Hull made a fake toast to Kyla with his mug.
“Here’s to a good weekend,” he said and then, “Jenna left fresh bread on the counter.”
Inside, Kyla tapped the bottom of the loaf. Jenna had taught her how the bread was supposed to sound hollow when it was done, and Kyla continued to knock on the loaf after she’d put two pieces into the oven to brown. They didn’t have a toaster; they used the oven broiler and placed the toast in a metal basket left over from the old barbecue that came with the house. Square with an envelope flap, the basket held the thick-cut bread perfectly. When one side was done, Kyla grabbed the wooden basket handle and flipped the whole thing over so the underside crisped, too.
She ate up on the counter wit
h her feet in the sink basin. The tap dripped onto the top of her foot as she looked out at the tracks Jenna’s car had made on the driveway. On one side of the bread, she’d slathered vanilla honey from Jenna’s brother’s bees. Everyone in Jenna’s family seemed to make or raise something useful. Either Jenna returned from her parents’ country house in Vermont with a flat of fresh-laid brown eggs or her sister-in-law would have made a new quilt for the back of their ugly beige sofa, or else Jenna would have created a whole new kind of bread—honeyed sesame walnut—and Hull would be tearing pieces off for himself and for Jenna as they parked out front. Kyla ate the honey bread first and left the buttery other piece for after she showered.
The roommates had chipped in for one of those magnetic boards to keep in the shower as well as two sets of word magnets with which to create bad poetry while they lathered. Kyla stood letting the water hit the side of her face and shoulders while she looked at the stray words—mountain, heave, pink, drunk, frantic, moans, burn, my, ly, gifts, ed, bitter, away, boys, drive—trying to put them into a sentence. She dragged the other tiny, wet pieces until they read: rust burned frantic moans my pink gifts drive away bitter boys.
Hull was always leaving dirty poems that she and Jenna would find, sometimes together as Jenna showered and Kyla brushed her teeth or if Kyla came in to pee while Jenna washed her face. They’d laugh and try to make even dirtier ones, but usually Jenna just ended up finding Hull on the couch or in their room and reciting his own words back to him while Kyla stood, damp and clothed, holding on to the shower curtain.
Hull found the magnet poems Kyla left cryptic or sad or both, and he would ask her about them. She never meant the words to have a double meaning, she just tried to string them together to be coherent, but Hull—even once when he was inside her—wanted a closer analysis. Thrusting, he’d said again and again, “What are you trying to say?” Kyla repeated the phrase now and wished Hull were with her, up against her in the water, the magnet words scrambled, dispersed like sparks.
The phone rang while Kyla was drying off, and Justin asked if she wanted to go for a hike up Mount Chocorua. They could take the Liberty Trail from the west and stay overnight in the cabin just south of the summit. She hung up the phone and shoved the rest of the bread loaf in a bag with some squeezable jam and a hunk of cheddar from the fridge, dressed herself, and rode out to meet him at the parking lot near the Paugus Mill parking area.
They ended up hiking the Brook Trail, with Justin carrying his daypack filled with the food she’d brought, a collapsible dog bowl for Polly, who followed them, and his water bottle, which clinked and swung as he moved. Kyla had her own water, and she’d stop with the pretense of taking a long drink, but really she just wanted to stare at the jut of ledges, the steep incline ahead, to think about the way Justin seemed to go through the hike as if he were part of the trees or stone slabs that edged out toward the nothing on the other side.
With her water bottle held between her knees, Kyla looked at Justin, who had the pack sandwiched under him for a cushion. Polly smelled something and went off in search of it, flaky moss clinging to her wet nose.
“Pumpkin seeds?” Justin handed some over to her, and Kyla ate them one by one, licking the salted coating off first and then chewing the husky outside. They talked about weather, about statistics and weather, and then, after he’d put the packet of seeds down, Justin wrapped his arms around her and they kissed. When Polly came back, they stopped and decided to head down, fairly rushing back to the cars in order to drive to his house to spend the night together.
Justin’s rented house perched lakeside, butting up against the other cabins, which were empty during the off-season. Gingerbread-style trim outlined the steep angles of the roof, and they entered through a sliding glass door on the side. In the entryway, Kyla kissed him and figured he’d race her up the stairs to his room or carry her there, desperate as in movie lovemaking, but instead Justin cut the kiss short and pointed her up to the living room while he put the hiking pack down and loaded his arms with cut wood.
Upstairs, set to the corner of the open-plan kitchen and living space, was a large cast-iron stove with a pan of water on top of it. The cabin was shaded and cold enough so Kyla’s breath showed in the air. Justin piled the wood next to the stove and lighted a twisted roll of newspaper with a match before sticking it inside with a log or two. Once he’d gotten the log to catch, he blew gently into the oven door to rise the flames.
Kyla watched with her jacket still on until she saw the refrigerator had one of those pull-down handles and wandered over to try it out and look inside. Aside from the beer, there was mustard, sliced deli meats sealed up in thin plastic bags, some asparagus, a cut butternut squash ill-wrapped in tinfoil, and several coffee creamers in different flavors: hazelnut, mint, and coffee.
“Coffee-flavored coffee?” she asked, pulling the carton out to smell the contents while gesturing with it to Justin. He sat crouched in front of the stove, looking out past the room toward the deck, where the torn backing of a folding chair flitted up and back with the wind.
“Hey—what can I say? It tastes like ice cream.”
“It’s funny that you have creamer here,” Kyla said and then tried to figure out how to explain why. She thought of Justin standing in the refrigerator aisle at the Foodliner, debating the merits of hazelnut over mint, and felt tender toward him, toward his ability to know what he wanted, if what he wanted was just fake dairy.
She smirked at him, closed the fridge, and went to where he was so she could crouch, too.
“My sister got me into it—the creamer,” Justin said. “She liked to drink it straight up.”
Kyla watched the log edge burn and made a face. “Yuck. Does she still?”
Justin poked at the fire with an iron rod, toppling one piece of wood onto another. “No. Not anymore.” Kyla waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He just tightened his grip on her hand and stayed like that until more logs caught, and Justin closed the small door at the stove’s front.
Justin’s sleeve still had jelly on it from when he’d squeezed some onto his finger during the hike, and she touched the sticky wool to her mouth. He took off her jacket and then led her to his room, where, when she looked up, she saw there wasn’t any ceiling—topless walls just sectioned off one room from the next.
In the morning, she peed knowing Justin could hear her in the next room and tried to do it softly, as if the act were somehow more secretive and intimate than the way he’d slept with his hand on her breast and his eyes not quite shut. When she came out of the bathroom, he was turned to the television, watching a man in camouflage unhook a fish from a pronged lure.
“What’s the point of the fisherman being in camouflage?” she asked.
Justin shrugged. “Smart fish?”
“Or really dumb—I mean, shouldn’t the guy be wearing blue or green, something that looks like water?”
She was a passenger in Justin’s car as he drove them toward Weirs Beach. Kyla had never been there but had been sent a postcard once from someone who had—a Tilt-a-Whirl spun its riders dizzy near a cotton candy booth while views of the Ossipee mountains were painted and airbrushed behind. She described the card to Justin as they drove into the almost empty parking lot.
Out across the bay was Stonedam Island, toward which Justin gestured and said, “I first kissed a girl out there.”
He took her pointer finger into his hand and outlined near the horizon as if he could show her the exact point where his boy lips met the girl’s, and Kyla leaned back into his chest until he moved them on toward the fried dough stand. The vendor wore a wool hat and sifted icing sugar onto the top of the dough before he handed it through the small window. Kyla took the first bite and walked while chewing. Near the dry waterslide, some kids played tag and chased one another with bright-hued tongues, the color left over from a flavored ice drink.
At the end of the boardwalk was the dark rise of Mount Cho-curua. Kyla tried to picture the h
ikers they’d been yesterday—far away in miniature form like figurines in a battle display at a museum—while Justin ate the rest of the fried dough, crumpled the waxed paper in his fist, and pocketed it. They spent the morning there, and before Justin could suggest getting a bowl of clam chowder or playing another round of Skee-Ball, Kyla told him she needed to get back.
Kissing outside his house, they stood near her car. Kyla noticed that when they’d come back Polly hadn’t barked, and though she felt bad for thinking about his dog while Justin bit and tongued at her mouth, the thought that Polly already knew who she was amazed her.
“When will I see you?” he asked.
Kyla thought for a second about asking him to come over, how he could probably fix Hull’s kayak in a matter of hours. Then she thought about having Justin in her room, how he would see the dust layer on her bureau, the fine coating on the shells Hull had brought back for her from a beach trip with Jenna. Kyla wished then she were overwhelmed by Justin. He was kind and attractive and tall, all the items she’d listed on paper in seventh grade with her semi-best friend, Lucy—Lucy had even added “has a dog” to her list of desirable qualities, words they copied from a magazine cover.
“I don’t know when I’ll see you,” Kyla said and tongued her molar, feeling where the cap met her gum, the warm gap of it. She liked not feeling needy for him. “In class?”
“Well, I’m here if you want me,” he said and turned to go inside. She could see him in the entryway, sticking a log under each arm and tucking one under his chin as he went up the stairs.
The Girls' Almanac Page 17