by Holly Bourne
There was no touching.
SITUATIONS THAT ARE DESTINED TO FAIL:
Prom Kings
+
Psychoanalysis
+
Long car journeys
Twenty-two
Kyle was already up when I woke.
Fully dressed. Reading another biography.
Why do boys look so sexy when they read? Somebody should really tell them that. I blinked a few times, the dank motel room coming into focus as my sleepy mind awoke to where I was, what had happened.
Kyle looked up from his book. “Morning, camper.”
I rolled over onto my front, so my full-of-sleep face wasn’t on show.
“Morning. How long you been up?”
“Not too long. You snore, you know?”
“I do?” The thought was so horrifying I actually covered my mouth. I’d never slept in the same room as a boy before. I hadn’t even really slept in the same room as many girls. The Spinster Club didn’t have sleepovers as Evie found them too difficult and Lottie and I didn’t want her to feel left out.
“Ha, only kidding.” He smiled, and I thought how nice it was, to be smiled at like that, by a boy, in your own room, after waking up together.
Why wasn’t I kissing him? Why wasn’t I kissing him?
“Not funny,” I grumbled. I kicked the covers off and quickly shimmied into a big sweater so he didn’t see much of my body. “Is the shower here okay?”
“It’s…umm… Well it works enough.”
I stepped into the bathroom and saw what he meant. It didn’t look like it had been redecorated since 1972. There was even wood panelling, with added spiderweb decorations in between the gaps of each panel. The shower was one of those small heads that dangles over the bath and it was covered in reddish rust. I sighed, and turned it on – waiting for the water to heat up, and using the sound of running water to cover the noise of me peeing in case Kyle could hear. After a vaguely unsatisfactory shower, I dressed best I could in the tiny bathroom and emerged to find him still reading.
“Who you learning about today?” I flopped down on my unmade bed. It was odd how comfortable I felt with him, even with all the kissing/no kissing yesterday. He just had this air of easiness, like a soluble heartburn tablet he could dissolve into the oxygen surrounding any social environment…or something.
He held up the cover of his book so I could see for myself.
“Al Pacino?”
“What’s wrong with Al Pacino?” he asked, his eyes still on the page.
“It’s just quite a leap from Van Gogh, that’s all.”
I hadn’t brought anything to read in the rush to leave the previous morning, so I just lay back down and watched him, wanting to kiss him whenever he turned a page.
But not kissing him.
“Why do you like biographies so much?” I asked, deliberately interrupting him to get attention.
He put his book down.
“I like reading about people who’ve had interesting lives. Who’ve done something that wasn’t expected…” He thought about it. “Who’ve broken the mould.”
I stretched my foot up in the air, stretching the back of my thigh out. It was all cramped from the previous day’s hike.
“Wouldn’t you rather live an interesting life yourself than read about someone else’s?”
His sad face came out again.
“I told you. I’m not like that. My life is just…blah.”
I flopped my leg down and glared at him.
“You say it like you have no choice in the matter, like you’re not in control of what you can do with your life.”
“I know, I get that. I try… But as I said, I end up just doing exactly what’s expected of me regardless.”
Like kissing Melody…
I felt a small surge of anger. So what if he was stuck in this whole perfect predictable storyline, why was he whinging about it? It was better than my storyline. Screwed-up girl with alcoholic mother has screwed up life because she can’t psychologically process her alcoholic mother… At least I had the strength to know I could try and change that inevitability…maybe.
“You must’ve done one thing that isn’t obvious. You must’ve done one thing that was just for you, because you wanted to do it, not because it was expected of you.”
He picked up his book again, and started half-reading.
“I did,” he said, practically into the book. “Yesterday. I kissed you.”
The sides of my eyes stung as his words launched tears into them.
“… And look how that turned out.”
He stared determinedly at his book, and I didn’t know what to say or think or do. I just stayed still, on the bed, desperately processing, but none of it helping. I felt guilty, and confused, and all the adjectives you use in shit poetry you write in your diary when you’re twelve and sad about something stupid at school. What did he expect to happen? Did he think he could just kiss me and then there’d be no consequences? When I live so far away, and I could so obviously and easily fall in love with him – if I ever got to understand who he truly was.
Finally, he looked up. “Sorry,” he said, and I could tell he meant it. “That wasn’t fair.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
“I guess we’ve not really talked about yesterday, have we?”
“No.” My voice was small.
“And I can tell you don’t want to talk about it…” I went to protest but he held his hand up, making him lose his place in the book. “No, don’t worry. I can see it all over your body language.”
I let out a deep breath.
“How long till we have to check out?”
Kyle glanced at the time on his phone. “An hour. Then it’s a bit of a drive back to camp.”
Camp. Claustrophobic little camp. With no privacy, and no time, and no space, and my mum there to cloud my brain from thinking about anything else. I’d almost forgotten about it.
I really didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay here, with him. Even though I wasn’t kissing him or touching him or doing all the things I really wanted to do and I didn’t know why.
I tried to smile. “Plenty of time then.”
He looked up. “Time for what?”
“For you to tell me who you are.”
The tarmac slipped by under us – the road empty apart from Kyle’s jeep.
“I still don’t get what you mean,” he said. “Who I am?” He adjusted his rear-view mirror.
“You were saying yesterday, you do things people expect of you. That means, if you think about it, that I don’t really know who you are at all. And, considering you’ve seen me a) cry, b) projectile vomit, and c) you know just how ill my mum is, it seems only fair I get to know stuff.”
“I told you, there’s nothing to know!”
I rolled my eyes. “So, what? You’re just a jock with a brain? That’s all there is?”
He barely nodded, but his hands gripped tighter on the wheel.
“You must have beliefs, you must have passions!”
“I dunno. Be a good person?”
“Everyone wants to be a good person. Unless they’re, like, the evil stepmother in a Disney movie.”
“I TOLD YOU, I’m just really normal…boring, like everyone else.” If he gripped any tighter, the steering wheel would come off in his fists.
I opened his glovebox and rifled around.
“What are you doing?” he asked, trying to keep his eyes on the road.
“Snooping.”
It was pretty neat, considering what most people’s gloveboxes are like.
“So, you’re tidy,” I concluded. “That’s something… That’s a personality quirk.”
“Yeah, a boring one. When have tidy people been any fun?”
“They’re very useful. You should see the state of my bedroom back home. I’m a pig! Honestly, you definitely wouldn’t have kissed me if you’d ever seen it.”
We fell silent at my attempt at a joke.
Kyle looked genuinely stunned.
“British?” I tried to explain. “We make jokes about uncomfortable topics to feel less awkward about them?”
And, thankfully, Kyle did start genuinely laughing.
“But this is why I like you,” he said, and his words melted further parts of me. He likes you! He keeps saying he likes you! “It makes sense that you’re messy. You’re creative, you’re passionate! All the best people are messy.”
“I’m not so sure about that. My friend Evie, back home, is all kinds of awesome, but she’s like the neatest person ever… Anyway, being neat and tidy is still a thing, it’s still a thing that makes you you.”
“It makes me boring.”
“God, shut up, will you? Why are you so insecure?” I carried on digging. At the back, was one of those old-fashioned CD cases. I hadn’t noticed before that the jeep only had a CD player, it must’ve been as old as he said it was. I unzipped it and started flipping through, commenting aloud. “Rap, rap – English people don’t really listen to rap…” I said, although maybe that was just my suburban hometown. I always used to call home a leave-the-lost-glove-on-the-wall town. You know? My town is the sort of place where people pick up a lost glove in the snow, dust it off, and leave it hanging in an easy-to-see spot in case the owner tried to retrace their steps and find it. When I went to London for the day once, an art trip to Brixton, right in the middle of winter, I saw, like three lost gloves trodden into the snow… I flipped through more CDs. “A-ha!” I said, just as Kyle spotted what I’d found and went to grab it. “The very best of Andrew Lloyd Webber?!”
“That’s not mine!”
I held it out of reach and flipped over another CD. “Then why is the full Phantom of the Opera soundtrack here too?”
He’d gone so red I thought his head might explode. The car wobbled, almost going over the centre line.
I laughed, hard. “Oh my, you are actually Troy Bolton from High School Musical, aren’t you? You secretly want to sing?”
“Shut it!”
He grabbed the CD case off me and stuffed it into the side compartment. “I don’t want to sing, okay? I can’t even sing. I never have been able to…I…I…” He sighed, and stared hard out the windscreen, slowly turning the wheel as we slid round a curve. “I just like music with stories in it, okay?”
I smiled harder.
“Stories?”
“Yes, like epic stories. But in song. I know it’s not cool, but I like musicals, all right? And, like, modern music is all ‘I wanna smack you, hoe’ or ‘I love you now I hate you, I hate how much I love you and I love to hate you more’.” He sang all this in a weird falsetto voice, and I knew he wasn’t lying about not planning to become a singer. “Where’s the narrative in that? And…” he continued. “I don’t, like, only listen to musicals, I listen to other stuff too. I just want it to have a story. Like, have you ever listened to The Mars Volta?”
“Mars whotta?”
“Volta. They’re a band. They do concept albums.”
“Concept what now?”
Kyle was finally smiling, his face all lit up like someone had put solar panels in his hair. “A concept album. It’s, like, not just a collection of songs. The whole album is a piece of art that you’re meant to listen to as a whole. The Mars Volta do incredible ones. But even albums by, like, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, they tell stories, you know? You’re not supposed to listen to random tracks in Let It Bleed. You’re supposed to sit down properly, get the vinyl out, pour yourself a glass of something, and then really concentrate on the whole record – start to finish – and listen to the story they’re trying to tell you.”
Another curve in the road; Kyle confidently steered us around it. We’d gone from mountains, into highway interstate tarmacness, through long straight stretches of parched desert, and now we were back to driving into mountains again. Camp felt so far away, though it must be getting closer. I didn’t want it to get closer.
“So you like stories, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Is that because you don’t think you have a story yourself? Or the one you do have is so overtold or something, that somehow it doesn’t count?”
Kyle took his eyes off the screen and really looked at me, his face all soft.
“Are you trying to psychoanalyse me, Amber?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course. I mean, I’m a seventeen-year-old art student. I’m so very qualified.”
He laughed. “And what kind of stories do you like, Amber?”
I thought about it, thinking through books I’ve read, books I’ve discarded – films I’d borrowed that made me happy, or annoyed.
“I think I like the stories that don’t try and sugar-coat the truth, you know? So, no fairy tales. I like the grim stories, where nothing really happens. At least they’re honest…” I trailed off.
“That’s funny…” Kyle said. “Because my favourite stories are the ones where everything comes good in the end, against all the odds.”
“You like a happy ending?”
He snorted. “Oh yeah, I’m an American. You know they reshoot bits of English films sometimes, to make them happier, and show us that version over here?”
“No way!”
“Oh yeah. Remember that Keira Knightley film of Pride and Prejudice? Well, I read somewhere that in your British version, they didn’t kiss at the end or anything. Whereas, in the USA version, it was a right-on happily-ever-after snog-fest. ‘Snog’? That’s a British word, right?”
I couldn’t stop smiling. Little bits of the smart guy who’d got an academic scholarship to college were beginning to shine through. I was starting to get him, even in just a day. The only problem was it made me want to kiss him more.
“Do you think maybe the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice is a microcosm of the differences between us?”
Kyle laughed. “God that would be depressing.”
“Evie, my friend back home, she would probably know that fact. She’s a massive film buff.”
The automatic car clunked into a lower gear as we wound up a sharp incline in the road.
“Your face goes all glowy, you know?” Kyle said. “Whenever you talk about your friends back home. Tell me about them.”
And I could feel my face glow, the muscles around my cheeks twitching, as I pictured Lottie and Evie – what they’d say if I told them about this weekend, how much they’d care.
“Well, the most important thing I guess, is that we’ve started a feminism grass roots campaign group called The Spinster Club.”
As the car climbed upwards, through clouds, past expanses of forest, I filled him in on the bits of my life that weren’t all just the crap between me and my mum. I told him about Evie’s relapse last year, about the constant academic bashings Lottie gave us at every Spinster Club meeting, teaching us all the big and important ideas she’d read about. I dug into my purse and pulled out my Spinster Club membership card – I’d made one for each of us, and Kyle even stopped the car on the side of the road so he could admire it properly. I told him how the college wanted to start it up as a proper club the next school year, inviting other students to join… They’d found out about us after we protested against a rape pop song being on the canteen’s jukebox. Kyle seemed almost proud of it all as I spoke. The way he looked at me made me want to freeze time so I would always be looked at like that for ever. And when I went off on one of my many rants about women’s issues, he didn’t try and get pedantic about the facts I was using, or say stuff like “Well, it’s hard for men too, you know?” and all the other crap I get thrown at me by guys whenever I dare bring up girl rights.
“It’s just so great you’re doing this,” he said, instead. “I have two younger sisters. I don’t want them growing up in a world where they’re leered at, or put down all the time.”
“You shouldn’t only care about feminism because you have sisters.”
“I get that. You should just care about feminism because
it’s the right thing to do.”
And again, I asked myself why I wasn’t kissing him. Honestly, why the HELL wasn’t I kissing him? Instead, I said: “You didn’t seem very feminist when Melody was dancing like a stripper around the campfire.”
It came out just as bitter as it was.
But, surprisingly, Kyle didn’t look ashamed. He just rolled his eyes.
“She pulled me out the crowd, Amber. What was I supposed to do? Humiliate her? Tell her I didn’t agree with why she was doing this? Tell her she was letting women’s rights down?” The car lurched into an even lower gear. “I know you’re pissed that I kissed her, I get it. I’m annoyed I did too, as it’s so obviously screwed things up between us. But, like, have you ever considered why Melody feels she has to do what she does?”
I didn’t answer at first. Initially because I was angry. Then hurt. Then angry at myself that he might be right…
I wasn’t very good at admitting I was wrong; my mother was my mother after all. So, when enough silence had passed to show I’d probably taken in what he’d said and understood it, I changed the topic of conversation.
“So what about you? What about your life?”
“I told you – what else is there to say?”
“That Andrew Lloyd Webber CD suggests there’s something.”
Another laugh.
“What’s your life like at Brown? What’s your family like?”
And it was his turn to talk. I learned how tough he found it to keep basketball up alongside getting the grades he needed to keep his scholarship. He told me about this creepy room-mate in his first year of college, Robbo, who looked like Gollum and essentially never left the room during the day, then would disappear at night. How he used to worry Robbo was out killing people or something. “Honestly, he was the type of guy you can imagine making a coat out of someone’s skin.” He liked how pretty the trees turned around campus in fall. He’d taken a photography class to try and capture the colours and then, “Discovered, sometimes, it’s best just to stick to basketball.” He had four siblings. He felt guilty every moment he wasn’t at home helping out his ma. His favourite biography was about Winston Churchill – “Honestly, that guy, he got stuff done.” Gradually, as I began to recognize the landscape, as I saw we were almost back at camp, the jigsaw pieces of Kyle assembled themselves next to me in the driving seat. He was warm, he was generous, he was insecure, he thought too much, he lived most of his life out of obligation, he liked the colour orange, he fancied Jennifer Lawrence, he wanted to grow his hair long one day, he always saw the best in everyone.