Becky's Kiss

by Fisher, Nicholas

  Then the burning smell, thick with smoke and gas.

  Becky jumped up, banging her knees on the bottom of her reading desk—only three blunders today, not bad, not bad—and ran to the hall. They had one of those ‘Rancher’ houses, all on one floor, no basement or attic, and Becky made the span of the place in about two and a half seconds, flying past the living room, through the kitchen, and out to the back porch, where the wall facing the back yard was a set of sliding glass windows.

  She stopped.

  It was Dad, standing with his back to her on the concrete pad in front of the tool shed at the rear edge of the property where the tall evergreen bushes made a slow spreading curve, separating their yard from the McKenzie’s. Brett Michigan was a big man, six-foot-seven, half Cherokee and half Dutch, giving him a Buffalo nickel pow-wow face and square head that had earned him the nickname ‘Flintstone’ so far back Becky didn’t even recall who had said it first. For some reason, he’d always kept his hair to match the cartoon classic, shaved up the back and close on the sides, with that little German flip in the back. Now it was up like a farm-hand’s cowlick, like he’d been running his fingers over the top of his head in reaction to some kind of desperate emotion, and there were flames in front of him on the concrete.

  Under one arm, he had a bag of sand, ready to throw on the blaze, and that was a good thing, but in his other hand was the bottle of Old Grand Dad booze that he’d sworn he kept around only for guests. He raised it to his lips and took a drink out of it like it was filled with Gator Aid.

  Becky ran to the porch door, also glass, and fiddled with the lock she wasn’t quite used to. Dad had stopped drinking last week—for the millionth time—and he’d promised he’d never go back, also for the million-millionth time. Outside, it smelled of the blaze, and Becky held her nose as she made her way over.

  Dad turned slowly, the reflections of the flames dancing in and out of the contours of his face, strobe-lighting the Florida-shaped birthmark under his left jaw. He looked down at her with red eyes, shocked and glazed.

  “Maggots,” he said. “It was crawling with maggots.”

  Becky looked at the burning pile and saw a fleck of yellow material curling, twisting, and turning black. It was the boy’s tournament shirt, and she put both hands up to her mouth.

  Brett Michigan brought the bottle to his.

  Chapter Three

  Becky slid the glass porch door shut behind her and marched to the utility room. There were tears brimming up, and she fought them. There were a million questions in her mind, but she buried them. You couldn’t talk to Dad when he was drunk, because he started making about as much sense as a square peg in a round hole.

  Tears suddenly did run down her cheeks, but it wasn’t the frustration, the fact that her father had slipped back into the bottle, the idea that she had no choice but to tell this boy she had lost his tournament shirt or some other excuse that would make her look thoughtless and stupid. It was the utility sink filled with ammonia, and the rest of the load of laundry floating in there like victims.

  She held her nose, bent closer, and of course, there were no bugs, not one, and why was she looking anyway? Clearly her father was coming up with random excuses for oddball behavior that covered up the fact that he wanted to drown out the world again.

  Becky opened the window facing the driveway for ventilation, gas-tainted from the back yard or not. There was a cardboard box on the low table by the washer, and she turned to paw through the tangle of cords and drills and hand tools that hadn’t been put up on the pegboard yet. She finally found the flashlight and, after slapping the rim a couple of times, got a spill of weak, yellow light from the thing. She played the beam into the mouth of the dryer, just to be sure. I mean, maggots were ultimately gross, and if there was a remote possibility that they had been in the machine to begin with, she wanted to do more than soak her clothes in ammonia. Can you say shopping spree?

  Bone dry, no creepy-crawlers, no hint of any kind of infestation, not even a ball of dust!

  “Where did you get it?” her father said from the archway. She started and spun with a short shriek. His eyes were still bloodshot, but they were focused. He was still holding the half empty bottle. Becky shook her hair out of her face.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The shirt.”

  “I found it.”

  “Where?”

  “By the school…I don’t know.”

  He raised the bottle up to his mouth and took a long pull, those road-mapped, bloodshot eyes never leaving hers. He finished and wiped off with the back of his beef-bull forearm.

  “It was in tatters and dirty ribbons,” he said. Then he looked off in the general direction of the back yard shed, pointing that way with the index finger of the hand holding the bottle. “It was crawling with vermin, and smelled like death.”

  “Why are you drinking again, Daddy?”

  The words hung in the air. His shoulders slumped and he looked at the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’ll…I’ll stay in here for a while.” He pushed past to his bedroom door. “Make yourself a Stouffers or a pot pie.”

  Becky wanted to point out that frozen lasagna and microwave pot pie were lonely dinners that made you feel like a fat failure, and that her father was drinking again because his job as an expediter had been just as bad at Syracuse Tool and Fastener as it would surely be here, and he already had high blood pressure, and just because they found this house for a song, it didn’t mean that he’d ever get used to the outside salesmen complaining that he’d forgotten to add stuff onto an order, or all the customers shouting that the sleeve anchors were M.I.A., or the firesafe was past its expiration date, or the rebar hadn’t gotten there yet.

  Becky wound up saying nothing at all, just standing there for a moment looking at his bedroom door closing slowly behind him. Finally, she just gave a sigh and shuffled off to make herself some chicken noodle soup, remembering to leave a turkey sandwich in the fridge for her father. He’d grown up here, about two miles down Route 9 in one of the few poor sections of Lower Medford Township called Lewiston. Now, he’d returned to the general area, and it hadn’t been a homecoming he’d celebrated. In fact, from the conversations Becky had overheard, it was more like a last resort, the slim pickings left from a bad housing market, the closest buy in a good school district less than ten miles from the tool house in Philly.

  She took her soup to her room and sipped at it. He hadn’t had a great childhood, but the reasons had never really been explained—spotty mentions, through the years, of a quiet mother and a domineering father, both of whom Becky had never met, both long passed. Evidently, there had been nothing for him here, and he’d left at eighteen, joined the Navy, moved to Syracuse, met Mom, and sold tools. Nothing special. He was good old “Regular Brett,” and she had really been looking forward to their time together tonight when they were supposed to watch the game on TV, joking about how much they missed the Bronx Bombers and trying to find something to like about these crumbling Phils.

  But when Daddy drank, he went into his dark man-cave of a room and took the I-pod for himself, listening to the old-time trippy music he’d stuck on there, like The Moody Blues and The Doors. He’d be snoring loudly by the time Ma got home, and in the morning he’d be sad and apologetic, calling her “Miss Rebecca,” like he was addressing his elder. That was the worst part of it all, she supposed, because she wanted him to be consistently as strong as he looked. She wanted him to be the dad who had scrubbed her feet with a wire brush and alcohol when she was nine after she’d gone out barefoot to the street popping tar bubbles, then tracking the mess on their pretty white rugs…the dad who’d never let her lie to herself with excuses…the dad who taught her to love the game of baseball but was man enough to admit that he couldn’t play worth a lick. She’d asked him to have a catch once, and he’d laughed long and a bit too loud.

  Where do you think you get your klutziness from, Blossum? It a
in’t just your ma, I mean, how many windows do you want to go breaking? Now come here and look at this. The Yanks are bringing up a young right-handed bat from Scranton/Wilkes Barre, and they got a lefty for the pen from Chicago for cash.

  Becky studied as much as she could stand and slipped under the covers, trying her best to think of what she would possibly say when she ran into this boy tomorrow. The washer ate the shirt. Her Mom gave it to Goodwill. Terrorists stole it. It was abducted by aliens. It was…

  That night, Becky Michigan dreamed that she had a baseball in her hand. She was holding it up, looking at it as if some odd specimen in a chemistry beaker, and then a hand pressed softly on top of hers from behind, moving along her knuckles, gently pressing forward across her skin until it was finger on top of finger. It was the mystery boy.

  “You grip it this way,” he whispered in her ear. It should have felt weird and inappropriate, like one of those Lifetime warning movies where the big dude in flannel gets behind the girl in the sleazy bar all smooth, “teaching her to shoot pool,” but it wasn’t gross. In fact, it was totally warm and snug, like a cushy chair, like peas and carrots. “Here,” he said, moving her index and middle fingers perpendicular to the seam at the top side of its horseshoe shape facing away to the right. Then he pushed her thumb directly underneath the ball, resting on the smooth leather, touching the seam on the underside.

  “Three strikes and you’re in,” he said in her ear then. “Three strikes and you’re in.”

  She woke up breathless, and her face was hot. She knew that she had dreamt about a four seam fastball of course, but hadn’t a clue as to why her ‘dream boy’ was interested in her knowing how to throw it in the first place. Heck, the idea of Becky Michigan actually chucking a baseball was directly linked to cliché phrases like “She throws like a girl” and the broad sides of barns. Just ask Dad!

  Still, it was far worse and completely strange that her ‘dream mind,’ or ‘subconscious,’ or whatever you called it, had concocted a vision where a boy she clearly liked went and screwed up the most well-known phrase in baseball history. Three strikes and you’re out, of course.

  This was simply unforgivable, and considering the way night visions tended to linger, she had to make extra sure she didn’t let the real boy know she had ever doubted him, even in her wildest dreams.

  Chapter Four

  Becky Michigan’s second day at Rutledge High School started with a search all over the place for ‘Baseball Boy’ before homeroom, having no idea what she was going to tell him about the shirt but looking high and low just the same. He was nowhere to be found. Of course, she tried to act all nonchalant while she was doing the looking, wandering through the crowds, walking like she was calmly finding her way around, searching the sea of faces ready to flick her eyes away if someone caught her staring.

  It was as if he didn’t exist. Of course, Becky knew that in a school this big, there was just as much of a chance that she’d miss him in the flow as there was that she’d bump into him straight up, but she’d sort of been hoping he’d be trying to find her too, real casual on the down low.

  But he wasn’t hanging out at the rotary where the busses pooled, and he wasn’t in the foyer in front of the auditorium where there were tons of kids standing and chilling, sitting with their backs against the walls, forming little hacky sack circles, one kid selling energy drinks out of his back pack, another with hair in his eyes, skateboarding little paths through the mass and annoying everyone.

  She checked her cell—7:10 a.m.—and she used the twenty minutes before first period to try the halls. Talk about entering the labyrinth! She got lost twice, once going over a glass-enclosed bridge between the main building and the shop, and the second time, when she took two lefts, the second past a storage area where there were a bunch of old text books and overhead projectors on roller racks. She wound up dead-ending by the choir room. The school was basically a pair of connected octagons it seemed, with a few funny offshoots. And there were lots of lockers, especially in the second building where the back wall was a long hall of them leading to a security office.

  Becky peeked into room after room, seeing teachers putting stuff on the white boards, setting up projectors for PowerPoint, and arranging chairs.

  Her next turn brought her to a place where the stairwell looked vaguely familiar. She hurried along and passed a trophy case, certain it was the gym area from yesterday, just seen from a different angle, and she thought she heard the hollow echoes of something bouncing on a polished wooden floor.

  Kickball maybe?

  Made sense. He was a jock after all, and maybe he was in there passing the time.

  She pushed open the gym door, and the ball bouncing stopped. Five girls. Amazons playing volleyball. Looked like seniors who could have cared less about making it on time for homeroom, therefore reminding Becky of her own obligations. Her cell said seven-twenty-four. She had English first period, and she certainly didn’t want to be late on her second day.

  “Sorry,” Becky said. She ducked out her head and did her best not to run at this point.

  The bell went off just as she was passing room 129. The halls cleared immediately, and she heard her own footsteps echoing. She passed the photography lab, the tech support room, and then slowed and steadied her breath. Room 245.

  She pushed inside.

  “Meyers…” Mr. Marcus called out.

  “Here,” some guy said, his voice cracking a bit on the first ‘e,’ and the class laughing back at him. The chairs were arranged in the ‘U’ shape like yesterday, with Becky’s seat at the far corner under a Salinger poster. But today, all the desks had been pushed back farther, so close to the wall that she had to make kids shove in as she passed. Teachers were insane and cruel, they really, really were.

  “Messersmith,” Mr. Marcus said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Messersmith?”

  “What! What?” She was had short, butch hair and a ton of bracelets going up her arm. Mr. Marcus looked up with a thin smile.

  “Take out your ear buds, and you’ll better know the volume of your voice.”

  The girl was a statue. The smile on the teacher’s face vanished.

  “Take…out…those…ear…”

  “I hear you! Whatever! She took them out and folded her arms. Becky rounded the near corner of the ‘U’ and banged her book bag on the laptop cart parked behind her, blunder number one of the day. Slow down! she thought. One step at a time, and of course, her bag swung back a tad and brushed the crown of this muscled guy in a black t-shirt, blunder number two and counting. He hunched in and rubbed the back of his crew cut.

  “Head shot, dude. Hit in the head. Can I go to the nurse?”

  “No,” Mr. Marcus replied.

  “I gotta see the counselor,” someone else chipped in.

  “Not today.”

  “I left my calculator on the bus,” another tried.

  “Buy another.”

  “My cell buzzed. It’s my mom. Can I take it?”

  “No.”

  “What’s for homework?”

  “It’s on the board.”

  “Where’s the pencil sharpener?”

  “Michigan,” Mr. Marcus said.

  “Here.” She had arrived at her seat, and she’d also pretty much solved the mystery of the little rebellion going on. The guy sitting in the chair next to hers had been absent yesterday, and he was clearly establishing himself as the class troublemaker—tall and wiry, knees and elbows everywhere, flannel shirt with a rip in the elbow. He had chin-zits slightly covered by a peach fuzz goatee, haphazard hair curling up a bit on the sides, and a big mole under his left cheekbone. And all through Becky’s awkward entry, he’d been rocking back and forth in his chair, hooting at each outburst, and adding a little “Ooooh-ahhh” at each of Mr. Marcus’s retorts. He wasn’t even the one misbehaving, at least not in any provable way. He was just the instigator, sitting back and prodding.

  He also had his foot up on B
ecky’s chair. Black Converse high top. Dirty too.

  “Move your sneaker, please,” Becky said quietly. He squinted over his shoulder at her, laughed through his nose, and turned back.

  “Give me a dollar and I’ll think—“

  Becky cut him off by lifting the chair from under the back support and giving it a healthy shove forward. His foot shucked off and he swiveled with it.

  “Yo!” he cried.

  “Enough,” Mr. Marcus said. He’d moved forward. The kid had his elbows on the desk now, and his hands were outstretched in pleading mode.

  “Did you see what she did? That was physical contact! That’s a suspension! You gotta write her up—“

  Becky cut him off for a second time, blushing hard.

  “Mr. Marcus, I am so sorry, but could I have a new chair? This one is dirty.”

  The class erupted in whispers and cat-calls, some shaded against Becky, but more in a primitive celebration of the chaos she’d caused. Her heart sank. She hated classes like this, where the students bull-rushed the teacher with dumb stuff, but she had worn her best shredded boyfriend jeans today, and she wasn’t going to sit in filth, not two days in a row. And she’d never backed down to someone just because he was a guy or anything.

  “Sit at my desk,” Mr. Marcus said. “We’ll work on the seating chart tomorrow.”

  Groans of disapproval sounded, and bully-boy screwed his face into a question mark, shrugging up his shoulders like, “Are you kidding me?” Becky moved the rest of the way around the ‘U,’ feeling any chance at being accepted dipping below the poverty line further and further with every “excuse me.”

  Mr. Marcus used the silence to tell them to do a pre-class writing assignment: “Tell me something about yourself in a paragraph, and make it appropriate, yet truthful. Take a risk. And I’m calling on people to read aloud, so please do your best.”