Touch

by Francine Prose

  We awoke surrounded by faces. We opened our eyes just in time to see Beef and Lamb and all their friends looking down at us and making remarks. I felt my own face turn stoplight red. Shakes must have looked as guilty as I did. From the way everyone was acting, you’d have thought they’d caught us having sex in the backseat of the bus.

  Gradually, I remembered where I was and figured out what had happened. By now everyone had turned around and was looking at us. They must have been watching us for a long time. I saw a blur of smiling, smirking faces. Only two were in focus. Kevin and Chris were staring at us, as if we were strangers, or as if we were kids they knew and didn’t like. I felt as if we’d been taking little baby steps away from each other ever since I got back from Wisconsin, and now we’d each taken a giant step back and nothing could ever fix that.

  Chris and Kevin were waiting for us when we got off the bus at school. Daria gave me a huffy disapproving look, as if she’d caught me being a total ho, when the truth is that Shakes and I had done nothing, nothing, compared to what people were saying she did with Chris.

  “So…are you two, like…hooking up?” Kevin asked me and Shakes. “Are you guys, like…dating? And you didn’t bother to tell us?”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “That would be like dating your brother!”

  Now Shakes was looking at me weirdly, too, and I knew I’d hurt his feelings. I wondered if he’d been thinking about me the way I’d been thinking about him. And now I’d gone and ruined it.

  “Come on,” said Chris. “Don’t lie. Everybody saw the two of you making out in the back of the bus.”

  “Man,” said Shakes, “I feel sorry for Daria if you don’t know the difference between sleeping and making out.”

  What a brilliant answer! It shut them up for a moment, during which I started to wonder why Chris and Kevin cared so much about what Shakes and I were doing, even if there was something going on. Which there wasn’t. Chris had Daria, wasn’t that enough? But it was as if they thought we’d done something to them. As if we’d cheated on them with each other. As if I’d broken up the four-person gang we’d had since we were little. As if I’d chosen Shakes over them, and they would never forgive me.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Nothing was ever the same after Kevin and Chris saw me and Shakes sleeping—or making out or whatever they thought we were doing—on the bus. The divide that had separated us when I came home from my year in Wisconsin had widened into the Grand Canyon.

  Chris and Kevin acted as if I’d stolen their best friend. That didn’t seem right. Another unfair thing was that they seemed to blame me more than they blamed Shakes. I guess that was sort of like everyone blaming Eve instead of Adam for eating the apple and getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden. I never understood that part of the Bible. Wasn’t it Adam’s fault, too? But she was the temptress, the evil woman who’d led the fool astray.

  I knew it must have been hard for Shakes to be leading a double life. The sweet, tender guy he was with me when we were alone on the bus, and the silent kid who went along with his friends when they acted as if they hardly knew me. Every time I’d go up to Chris or Kevin at school, they’d turn and walk away. Or they’d look at me as if I’d just said the stupidest thing in the world, and then they’d act as if I wasn’t there. At first Shakes would seem as if he didn’t know what to do, and then he would do what they did. You’d think I would have got used to it after it happened often enough, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  I kept trying to understand: Why couldn’t they handle it if Shakes and I fell asleep on each other’s shoulders? Sometimes I felt as if they blamed me personally for the fact that we all had to grow up and turn into men and women. That we couldn’t be little kids anymore. Which didn’t seem right, either. I mean, Peter Pan didn’t blame Wendy or Tinker Bell for the fact that most kids (except for him) wound up becoming grown-ups.

  Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I told Shakes that he had to choose between them and me. Choose between what and what? We never talked about what we did on the bus, and we certainly didn’t talk about the freeze-out I was getting from Chris and Kevin. Or about the fact that Shakes ignored me when he was with them.

  So of course I didn’t tell Shakes that he had to choose.

  Which turned out to be the right move. I guess Shakes must have forgiven me for saying that dating him would be like dating my brother. Because our thing in the back of the bus—I still didn’t know what to call it—was getting more intense. A lot more intense.

  Now, instead of just letting his head droop on my shoulder, he’d kind of scrunch up against me with his hands clasped in front of him, almost like paws. I never stopped being surprised by how calm he got when we were sitting like that, how all his tics and twitches disappeared.

  On the morning when he first brushed against my chest—when, for the first time, the tips of his knuckles just lightly grazed the side of my breast—he pretended he’d had a spasm.

  He said, “I’m sorry, Maisie. Sometimes it’s like, I don’t know, my hands do what they want without asking me.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. I knew what it was like to feel as if your body were leading you in a direction you weren’t sure you wanted to follow. The truth was, I’d liked him touching me. It had felt really good. I knew it was sort of retarded. I mean, lots of kids my age had sex—on TV, and in my school—and here I was going nuts about some guy pretending not to know he was ever so lightly touching one of my boobs. Still, that first time, each of Shakes’s knuckles felt like separate electric shocks running down through my whole body. We were still pretending it was an accident, that we didn’t know what we were doing.

  The second time, he let his hand linger and slightly rotated his wrist so that now it wasn’t his knuckles but rather the base of his palm touching my breast. It still could have been accidental.

  I guess it was right on the edge between accidental and on purpose. That light touch, that brief contact—who knew? And yet that touch, if it was a touch, felt as if it were magically rearranging the molecules, the flow of atoms and particles between his hand and my skin.

  Pretty soon, there was no way of even pretending that it was accidental. We were kissing and making out for real, and Shakes was touching my breasts. All that time that he and I were making out in the back of the bus, Shakes must have been under pressure from the other guys because he was still sitting with me and not with them.

  I kept trying to imagine what that was like for Shakes, being caught between the guys and me. Later I would realize I hadn’t known him as well as I’d thought. But for the moment I really believed that I understood him because we’d grown up together, and then because we took those bus rides together, his head pressed against mine. I must have imagined that personal thoughts were flowing back and forth from one of us to the other. But we didn’t know each other at all. I couldn’t have imagined what it was like to live inside his body.

  It was hard for all of us, figuring out all the weird new stuff our bodies were doing. But it must have been harder for Shakes, since his body wasn’t like anyone else’s—or anyway, like no one else we knew. His body had always done what it wanted, regardless of what he might have liked. And now he had to get used to it telling him to do even more things he wasn’t sure he wanted to do.

  For example, touching me. Probably, it would have been easier for him not to. Chris and Kevin wouldn’t have resented him, they wouldn’t have been so amazed that a kid they’d grown up with—me!—was now a girl who preferred messed-up, twitchy Shakes over perfect, healthy them. I couldn’t explain it, myself. Not that they asked. No one could talk about it.

  Anyway, Shakes and I thought—or at least I thought—that we were safe. After that one time we got caught, we never slipped up. By the time one other kid got on the bus, Shakes and I were sitting bolt upright, and as far from each other as the narrow seat would allow. We were so silent, we sat so straight, we could have been at church.

  What we did
on that bus was our secret. A secret that, I guess, we shared with Big Maureen, who must have seen us in her rearview mirror. But, as everyone knew, Maureen was a widow with five kids. She was too overwhelmed and depressed to want to look for trouble. And it wasn’t as if we were having sex or smoking or doing something illegal. One of her kids had been born handicapped, too, so maybe she secretly liked to see Shakes getting some low-level action.

  On those mornings, with my head next to Shakes’s, I felt less like a girl or a boy, and more like…well, more like a person. That’s how close it sometimes felt we were—like two halves of the same creature. Together we made up one normal human being: I was in pretty good physical shape, if you didn’t count the oversized boobs. Shakes had the physical problems, but he also had something I wanted and needed, which was a way of looking at the world that was cool and smart and courageous.

  I was glad to be his friend, and glad we made out on the bus, and glad for how good it felt when he touched my breasts and we stopped pretending it was accidental.

  And then all that ended in one day—one morning, to be exact. I can tell you exactly when. It’s all recorded in the papers Joan’s lawyer, Cynthia, filed. But even if I forget it, I could just look up the date of the January senior class trip to Washington.

  It was a gray, sleepy morning. A frozen mist rose off the dirty snow, but it was jungly and hot on the bus. Shakes and I dozed off and kissed, dozed off and kissed some more.

  After a while, I began to notice that Maureen was driving past the houses where the seniors lived, and she wasn’t stopping. And then I remembered they were in Washington for the week, along with the junior honors group that was down in D.C. pretending to be the United Nations. Shakes and I had more time than usual, but even so, it was sad when the bus slowed down and we had to separate and sit up straight.

  When the ninth and tenth and eleventh graders got on, they seemed confused. How come the bus was so empty? Then they figured it out. Party time!

  Having the older kids off the bus changed the entire mood. All the seats were up for grabs, everyone just sat where they wanted. A seating free-for-all. It was anarchy, I guess you could say, and we liked it. Because for one day, that day, on that bus, we were free.

  Even though the normal rules were obviously suspended, the younger kids still couldn’t get up the nerve to go for the very last rows. So Shakes and I had the back to ourselves for a while. The seat in front of us stayed empty, and the seat in front of that.

  When Chris and Kevin got on the bus, Shakes and I waved and yelled out to them to come back and sit with us.

  What an idiot I was! When I think of it now, I feel like some fool saying something friendly and nice and then someone insults her, and she’s left standing there with a big friendly smile on her stupid, innocent face.

  Chris and Kevin took the seat in front of us. I was so happy, at first. All four of us were together again. It was as if they hadn’t decided I was a different person because I had breasts. As if they hadn’t made up their minds that they had to stop being friends with me because they’d seen me with my head on Shakes’s shoulder. I remembered how it felt in sixth grade when we were the kings of the grade-school bus! It had been so much fun. I was always sorry when the bus rides were over—first when we got to school, and then when we got home in the afternoon.

  But it wasn’t like that now. It couldn’t be. I was crazy to think we could just travel back in time to the way things were before.

  Chris and Kevin sat down. They turned and lightly high-fived Shakes.

  Chris and Kevin said hi to me. Not warm or friendly in the least. They were just being polite.

  When Daria Wells got on, she runway-walked straight to the back and took the seat in front of them. Chris half stood and leaned over to talk to her. I don’t think he consciously knew that he was sort of squirming around, humping the back of the seat. I thought, He wouldn’t do that if he knew how he looked from behind.

  Big Maureen crawled the bus between banks of steaming snow. Chris and Kevin settled down, and after a while they started whispering. I was really curious about what they were saying, because I could watch their shoulders and the backs of their heads get all jumpy and tense and buzzed. They seemed as if they were plotting something, and from the way they kept nodding their heads, I sensed that it was a plot they’d been thinking about for a while.

  Chris and Kevin turned around and leaned back over the seat so they were facing me and Shakes. They kept giving each other funny looks, as if they had something to say, something they’d known they were going to say even before they got on the bus.

  Maybe they hadn’t known that it would happen today, that the bus ride and the seniors’ absence would give them the perfect chance. But they’d had it in mind. Motive and opportunity, as they say on the crime shows. They’d been planning to do it sooner or later, and now they were both figuring out it could be sooner. Right now.

  Kevin said, “So how about it, Maisie? Can we do it, too?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Chris said. He didn’t want Daria hearing.

  “Do what?” I asked.

  They laughed. They both looked high. But they weren’t.

  Kevin looked at Chris. Chris nodded.

  “Come on, Maisie. Be fair,” Kevin said. “Aren’t the four of us old friends, didn’t we always divide everything up equally between us?”

  “We used to be friends,” I was mortified to hear myself say.

  “Share and share alike,” Kevin said.

  I said, “What are you two guys saying? Would you please make sense? I don’t get it.”

  Kevin said, “Don’t we get to touch your boobs? Like Shakes does, every morning?”

  Well, that wiped the smile off my face.

  I looked at Shakes, but he wouldn’t look at me. I could feel him twitching like mad. I couldn’t believe he’d told them, and even if he had, I couldn’t believe he wasn’t sticking up for me now. I couldn’t believe he was letting the guys talk like that to me. There was so much I couldn’t believe, it was hard to breathe, for a second. I probably should have lost it and gone off on them—especially Shakes—right then and there. I should have yelled at them, especially Shakes, How can you do this? I could have saved myself a lot of future problems if I’d confronted them right there.

  But I was just too shocked, too freaked out.

  I looked from Chris to Kevin to Shakes. I told myself: Be cool. Total coolness was never as important as it was at that moment.

  “What about it, Maisie?” said Chris.

  “Gee, guys,” I said. “That’s an interesting question. Can I think about it for a minute?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Doctor Atwood says, “Maisie, do you think we could revisit the incident on the bus?”

  “Revisit?” I say. “Revisit as in you want me to tell you the story that I’ve already told a million times because you don’t believe me? I thought you were supposed to believe me. I thought that was part of your job.”

  “I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” says Doctor Atwood. “Because the fact is, Maisie, I think you believe what you’re saying happened. But memory’s a funny thing. It can distort things. People tell themselves a story about what happened, and they start to believe the story, and then they start thinking that the story is what actually happened. And it becomes the truth. Or a truth. Whether it happened exactly that way or not. The mind’s a funny thing.”

  “Your mind, maybe,” I say.

  “Don’t be like that,” Doctor Atwood says. “I’m trying to help you.”

  It’s something she says so often, I’m almost starting to believe it. “You want me to tell it again?”

  Outside the window behind her chair, it’s winter, winter, winter.

  “Please,” she says. “I think it could be really helpful at this point. It’s been a while, after all.”

  “Okay,” I say. “If that’s what you want.”

  I’m so bored with the story. I’ve told it
so many times. To Joan and to the principal, to the school administration, and to Cynthia, our lawyer. At first it was hard to tell. In the beginning, it was really embarrassing. But each time, it got easier. And eventually it got boring. Now I can basically tell it as if it had happened to someone else, to a girl named Maisie who had a bad experience on a school bus. Every time I mean a girl named Maisie, I just use the word I.

  I say, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

  “Maisie, please.”

  “Okay. The older kids were away. Chris and Kevin sat near us. They started saying that Shakes told them I let him touch my boobs, and since we’d been such good friends, it didn’t seem fair. I should let them do it, too.”

  “Why do you think they said that?” asks Doctor Atwood.

  “I think they wanted to touch my boobs.”

  “You know it’s more than that, Maisie. You know perfectly well that the boys didn’t say that to make you feel comfortable or good. They didn’t say that to make you think it was something you might enjoy, something that would feel good to you.”

  Well, obviously. I didn’t think that. But it was better than thinking they wanted to hurt me and make me feel bad. Why would they want to do that? They blamed me for their growing up and for turning into a girl with breasts. Chris and Kevin blamed me for having chosen Shakes over them. And I still didn’t know what Shakes blamed me for. Maybe for confusing him, for making him feel he had to choose between me and Kevin and Chris. But I wasn’t the one who’d made him choose. Sometimes I wanted to corner him, and confront him, and ask how he could have done it. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Maybe I was afraid that I’d get my heart broken all over again.