The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories

by A. C. Wise

  Your breath catches. You swear, on the hundredth, or the thousandth view that she reaches out a hand and presses it flat against the glass—not the camera lens, but the screen.

  So close you could touch her.

  You want so badly for it to be true.

  But it isn’t for you. It can’t be. Except it has to be, because Ray—if he ever existed—is dead. And the date in the corner of the screen says it’s been weeks since she disappeared. This can’t be her, calling him home, binding him in her flesh, holding him against his will, and forgiving him. Time can’t work that way.

  You don’t want it to.

  You are lost, too. She must see that. And you want so badly for her to call you home. To forgive you.

  She cups her breasts, small as they are, before sliding her hands over her belly, down to her hips to tease the edges of her panties. She slips her fingers beneath the waistband, and lower, where the fabric meets the soft flesh of her inner thigh. The camera doesn’t show her face, but you swear she smiles.

  Slow then, agonizingly slow, she peels the silk away, stripping, but not completely, letting the material rest around her thighs. You can’t help but think of rope, silken and black. Binding. You squirm, knowing you shouldn’t watch. But you can’t look away. You never could.

  You can’t change anything that’s happened. Or will happen. So that makes it okay.

  “I want you to want me so badly that you can’t resist. I want you to come.”

  Her hand slides between her legs, brushing soft and slow at first, then stroking faster, more insistent. Her rhythm quickens with your breath. The silk strains around her parted legs.

  The image shifts, flickers. The light turns strange. Stranger. At the edges of the screen. A shadow resolves, a face—half seen—just over her shoulder. It smiles.

  “I want you inside me. I want to hold you, even when you don’t want to be held.”

  The frame judders. Her hand, between her legs, doubles, until it isn’t her hand anymore. Someone else strokes her, sliding a finger between her lips, parting her so the camera almost, but not quite, sees. The fingers extend, tendrils of shadow leaking away from themselves. One slips inside her.

  You can’t see her face, but you imagine she bites her lip. Her legs part wider, straining silk to the limit. When her breath hitches this time, it is real. That animal sound, the low growl echoing the image of her bound on the bed and aching toward a figure, half-seen. It is not fear. It never was.

  “And I want you to know I forgive you.”

  The screen flickers. Shattered light reflects on her body, on her hand as her fingers/not her fingers move between her legs, as her hips buck towards the camera, rocking beneath the touch.

  A tendril of shadow slides around her throat. Her head tilts back. A bruise that it not a bruise appears against the whiteness of her shoulder. She gasps.

  And sometimes, only sometimes, on the dozenth-hundredth viewing, the tendrils of shadows draw her arms behind her back, binding them, so you know it can’t be her hand between her legs. Those ribbons of darkness, ethereal and insubstantial, circle her hardened nipples, teasing, pinching. They are hands, lips, tongues, and none of those things at all.

  Crack. A sound like a whip, and welts appear on her skin.

  Her head snaps forward, and she smiles, razor-blade sharp.

  You think she says, “Want me.” But you can’t be sure.

  She shudders. Hands that are not hands, and certainly not her hands, cup her breasts. Shadows become solid. One strand of darkness curls upward to trace the fullness of a mouth you can’t see. You imagine parted lips; beneath the hot impact of her breath the tendril of darkness shudders. You imagine gooseflesh rising on insubstantial skin. You understand.

  How much of this is real?

  The screen flickers again, and you can almost her feel her tongue, wet and warm, on the shadow tendril, drawing it in, swallowing it whole.

  Her nipples, hard, hard, hard, are darker than they were ever meant to be. Who is restrained; who restrains? Who binds, and who is bound? Who is in control?

  Almost substantial, something, someone, traces the line of her belly, tastes the slick wetness between her legs. Again, she makes a little sound, but it is not surrender. It is victory. The darkness thickens, penetrating and not penetrating. Called. Absorbed. Summoned. Her head snaps back.

  “Yes.” A whisper, only half heard.

  The shadow envelops her.

  “Yes.”

  And she takes it all in.

  The shadow fills her, pulsing between her legs.

  Her hand moves, but it is not her hand.

  She soaks darkness into her being. She takes it inside of her in every way, and at the end, there is a scream—not hers. The thing surrounds her, loving her, fucking her. Then it is gone.

  It is her.

  And she comes.

  The screen goes dark.

  But it isn’t always the same.

  Sometimes, you see what you can’t possibly see. More than a shadow stands behind her. And for just an instant, its arms spread wide, skeletal-razor grin stretched across sunken cheeks, something bright held in its hand. Its eyes are fixed on you. Watching.

  Lucy came to the Blessed Diving Order of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew in the usual way: her parents abandoned her as a babe in a little woven basket on the shore. Her first lullaby was the hush of waves rolling smoothed stone over stone and stringing tangled seaweed around her cradle. But with seaweed and stone, the waves brought something far more unusual as well. Drawn from the depths by the uncanny ability to sense an unwanted child crying, they brought a nun.

  Sister Francine of the Eternal Abalone emerged dripping onto the sand. The first part of her to appear was the rounded curve of her copper diving helm. As she broke the surface, the tubes hooked to her oxygen tank hissed. Her breath clouded the glass of her faceplate as she leaned over Lucy in her basket and cooed.

  “Who’s a darling little girl? Who’s a little darling abandoned by Mummy and Daddy? You are! Yes, you are!”

  With one finger covered in a thick rubber glove, Sister Francine touched the tip of Lucy’s nose. The baby gurgled and kicked her chubby little legs happily. Her eyes were as blue as the sea.

  Sister Francine carefully fitted a tiny diving helmet—kept by the order for just such occasions—over Lucy’s head, and wrapped her in a thermal, waterproof blankie. Then she turned with the babe in her arms, clumping heavily in her massive boots, and submerged, her bright copper helmet sinking like a setting sun.

  Upon her arrival at the drowned chapel of Our Lady of the Waters, Lucy was given a new name. She was christened in salt water as Sister Amelia of the Holy Conch. Still, in later years, when she learned to think of herself as an independent being, she thought of herself as Lucy. It was the name left pinned to her chest by her absentee parents, and she kept it carefully sealed in a clear but impermeable bag, taking it out to look at it when no one else was around.

  “A new name is a new life,” Sister Francine had explained to her once when Lucy asked. They were sitting on the chapel roof, watching schools of bright fish graze among the carefully tended kelp gardens.

  “It’s like being born anew. Whatever troubled you in your life before the waves can’t touch you anymore. It’s a second chance. It’s freedom.”

  There was a faraway look in Sister Francine’s sea-gray eyes, which were like the waves just after a storm, as she explained this. The expression was one of wistful sadness, or regret for something long since passed. At the time Lucy had not thought to ask about it, and in later years it seemed too late. But she always regretted not asking.

  Despite Sister Francine’s explanation, Lucy liked having two names. To her mind it meant she had the freedom to choose exactly who she wanted to be when the time came to decide such things.

  As Lucy grew under the order’s care, she learned. The first thing she learned was how the Blessed Diving Order of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew had come to be form
ed. It was a vague, somewhat mystical tale, involving a boatload of nuns bound for the new world, a deep-sea-diving expedition on a mission to explore the waters off the coast of Greece for the lost city of Atlantis, and a terrible collision mid-sea during an epic storm.

  The second thing Lucy learned was how to care for the drowned chapel. As a junior sister, it was her duty to replace chipped shells in the mosaics depicting, variously, the sainted lives of Peter and Andrew, the parable of the loaves and the fishes, and Christ walking on the waves.

  She polished the pearls in the eyes of the Drowned Virgin until they glowed with an eerie, beautiful light, and she kept algae from growing in the baptismal font. She tended the bright garden of anemones and kelp surrounding the chapel, and cared for the long, green-white bones of ships and unnamed sailors in the graveyard.

  She sang the strange, warbling masses that echoed through the waters, which in times past had been taken for the song of mermaids. And when she was finished with her chores, Lucy swam up onto the chapel roof, and fed the fish that flocked like pigeons to roost in its walls. In these moments of stillness and solitude, Lucy learned the greatest lesson that the Sisters of the Blessed Diving Order had to teach her—how to listen to the waves.

  By the current, Lucy could tell the mood of the sky. She could guess the color of the sunset and the direction of the wind, or know when a storm was brewing. When she was thus listening one day, Lucy heard the waves groan.

  Cocking her head inside her copper helmet, full-sized now, Lucy listened as something shifted in its sleep. The dreaming rumble was followed, after a moment, by the oddest and most beautiful sound she had ever heard. It was singing, but a song far more lovely than even whale song, or the entire choir of the drowned chapel singing Ave Maria in perfect unison.

  The brightly colored fish that had been nibbling at the tips of her gloved fingers darted away. The light filtering through the blue-green waves overhead darkened, and for a moment the ocean was hushed, almost still.

  Lucy braced one hand against the bell tower and peered out through the sea. Through the newly dark waves she could see nothing. A shiver of fear traced her spine, and a sharp intake of breath, followed by a quick exhale, fogged her faceplate. Very slowly she pushed away from the bell tower and let herself drift down through the waves.

  The song was softer now, but she could still trace it—a tangible vibration, shivering through the water. It was coming from the boneyard where the drowned ships creaked and sighed behind their beards of barnacles and seaweed—grumpy old men disturbed in their dreams. As she drew closer, the waves groaned again and a hollowed ship that was all but rotted away rocked upon the ocean floor. There was something trapped underneath.

  The thing was roughly human and almost luminous in the slanting shafts of light piercing the murky fathoms of water. Tatters of flesh hung from long, wave-polished bones and eyes the very color of the oceans’ deepest depths gazed up at her. The mouth was open and he was singing.

  Lucy gasped, and swam towards him, crouching beside him where he was pinned beneath the remains of the ship. She could see the dead man’s face more clearly now. There was a longing in his sunken expression, a lost quality to the dimmed lights of his eyes. A curious fish, one of those that Lucy had so recently been feeding, darted close and nipped experimentally at the dead man’s arm, and Lucy saw a chunk of flesh rip away.

  “What are you?” Lucy whispered.

  The man turned his watery eyes upon her and answered simply. “I am dead.”

  “Oh.” Lucy rocked back on her heels a bit and considered.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked after a moment.

  “I want to go home.”

  There was an ache in the dead man’s voice that wasn’t exactly fear, but more like a memory of longing. Lucy considered the ship pinning him down. Even hollowed by years of waves its bulk was too much for her to shift alone.

  “Will you wait here for me? I’ll be right back.”

  The dead man nodded, though in truth he had little choice. She kicked off, and her long, powerful legs carried her back to the drowned chapel. She touched down lightly, and white sand rose up around her in a shimmering cloud.

  Once more she swam up to the bell tower, and peered in through one of the many ragged holes in the roof. The waves had lightened again, but the sun was setting so burnished gold shafts gleamed through the sea-colored glass in the chapel’s windows. Sister Francine, who was now Mother Superior of the order, was humming to herself as she prepared the sacraments for evening mass.

  Lucy drifted in through one of the drowned chapel’s empty windows.

  “Mother Superior?”

  Sister Francine turned. Blue and green light dappled her copper helm, and she smiled behind her faceplate.

  “Yes, my child?”

  “I’ve come to ask a favor.”

  Lucy bowed her head and folded her hands, trying to look demure and modest. But she couldn’t help peeking up at the Mother Superior to gauge her reaction.

  “There’s a man…”

  “Oh?” Sister Francine arched an eyebrow, a gently mocking smile ready to play at the corners of her mouth.

  “A dead man,” Lucy continued, and behind her faceplate the Mother Superior sucked in a sharp breath.

  “He needs our help,” Lucy finished, raising her head to plead silently with her eyes.

  “Sister Amelia.” The Mother Superior’s tone was warning, but if she noticed Lucy flinch at the name, she was kind enough not to draw attention to it.

  “The dead are unclean things. We have no business with them.” She set her mouth in a line to match the firmness in her voice, her arms crossed before her, already bracing herself for Lucy’s retaliation.

  “He isn’t unclean! He’s lonely, he wants to go home.”

  “The dead aren’t lonely, they are simply dead. Once they have passed through the veil, there is nothing more that they need from us, or we from them.”

  Through Sister Francine’s faceplate, Lucy could see two spots of color—bright as coral—blooming high on the Mother Superior’s cheeks.

  “He’s hurting,” Lucy plead.

  “And what would you have us do about that?”

  “I thought…I thought maybe you could give him a new name, christen him the way you did me.”

  Lucy looked up, hopefully. The coral blush was gone, and now Sister Francine’s face was very pale. Her eyes shone, and her mouth was set in a grim line.

  “The dead are not baptized, they are shriven. What you’re suggesting is not only unclean, it’s unholy!”

  Sister Francine trembled a little inside her heavy diving suit. Lucy had never seen the Mother Superior so upset before, but she couldn’t help herself. The dead man’s song, the longing in his eyes, had worked its way inside her bones, and she plowed on.

  “But, Mother Superior, he was singing!”

  Sister Francine threw her hands up, whether in exasperation or silent prayer, Lucy couldn’t tell.

  “Of course the dead sing, child! Do you think we’re all deaf except for you? It doesn’t change anything. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “But it isn’t right. We can’t just…”

  Sister Francine held her hand up to stall Lucy’s words. Her sour expression and the quirk of her mouth suggested that she knew the truth of Lucy’s words, but that any reasonable person should know better than to parade such truths around in polite company.

  “Hush, child!”

  Lucy bowed her head again, looking properly abashed. Over the Mother Superior’s shoulder the polished pearl eyes of the drowned virgin shone serenely. The faint smile on her marble lips suggested a secret, maddeningly out of Lucy’s reach. Lucy forced herself to take a deep breath, and keep her voice calm.

  “Mother Superior, isn’t it the duty of the Sisters of the Blessed Diving Order of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew to help and give succor to all those stranded by the sea?”

  Lucy raised her head, sea-blue eyes meeting Siste
r Francine’s sea-gray ones. After a moment Sister Francine sighed, a frown tugging her lips downward as though she had tasted something bitter.

  “Listen to me very carefully, child. The good book promises salvation for all christened souls, and we must trust in that. Only children and ships can be christened, not dead men, do you understand me?”

  Sister Francine’s eyes shone like the pearls of the drowned virgin. Lucy stared at her, trying to fathom the meaning behind her words. She was about to speak again, when Sister Francine spun in place, an oddly graceful movement.

  “It is a lesson you must learn well, child,” she called over her shoulder and then, with a swift kick, she disappeared through a window.

  Lucy stared after the Mother Superior, through the broken window where she had disappeared. After a moment Lucy kicked off as well, and swam through the darkening waves back to the boneyard. Above the waves the sun was sinking further, tinting the water a deep gold, warped by the ebbing tide. Lucy swam under a mirror of beveled glass like polished bronze, and all around her rainbow-hued fish darted close to tease her fingers, though she barely noticed them.

  She touched down again by the hollowed wreck of the ship, and the dead man turned his face towards her. She wondered what it must have been like for him to wake up under the waves. Were his last memories of the touch of wind on his cheek, the sunset playing in his hair, and the roll of the deck beneath his feet? All those things that she herself had never felt…

  A sudden ache, a sudden longing, rose in her—quick as a swell. More than ever now, she wanted to help the dead man. Carefully she took his fragile fingers in hers, feeling the bones shift beneath his soft, waterlogged flesh.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I thought I could help you, but I guess I can’t.”

  The dead man said nothing, and Lucy let herself sink until she was sitting on the ocean floor beside him, her legs crossed and his hand still held in hers.

  The waves shifted, like a cool breeze that might have stirred her hair up on land. Beside her the hollow bones of the ship swayed and groaned, and beneath them the dead man’s bones lengthened in the waves. Absently, Lucy reached out with her free hand, picking at the frayed and splintered edges of the ship’s hull, peeling large strips away and worrying the boards back and forth until whole chunks of the ship came away in her hand.