Becky's Kiss

by Fisher, Nicholas

  “Where’s the pizza?” his voice said. “I thought I had a piece of pepperoni from the other night wrapped up in tin foil.”

  “Mom ate it.”

  He backed out and straightened. He was wearing his favorite work t-shirt with the Philly Tool logo in green and the bumble bee working a jack hammer. He opened the freezer.

  “We’re out of the Friday’s Burger Sliders,” Becky said.

  “Oh,” he said. He shut that door and bent back to the fridge. “Had to skip lunch because Drisedale Wrecking needed a demonstration of an electric chop saw over at Children’s Hospital. Sold ten of ’em. Probably get a good Christmas bonus for that one, but I’m starved.” He reached for something and came out with a plastic tub that had a lump of chicken salad left at the bottom. It was a half-pound container yet looked tiny in his monster hands. He squinted at the expiration date.

  “You do your homework?” he said.

  Becky crossed her arms and looked up off to the left. She blinked a few times.

  “Yes.”

  “What you learn in school today?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Dad!”

  “What?”

  “Look at me!”

  “What do you want me to…?”

  He flicked up his glance, registered what he saw, and promptly dropped the plastic container. It hit the floor, kicking food onto his boots, and Becky backed off a step with a squeal.

  “What is that?” he said slowly, pointing at her head, eyes flat like tombstones. Becky squirmed a bit. Of all the reactions, this was the last she had expected.

  “A Rutledge Tigers baseball cap?” she said.

  “Right,” he said. He turned away to bend back into the fridge, and when he came up to rest his forearm on the open door this time, there was a beer in his hand. He dug into his pocket and got out his key ring with the booby prize bottle opener he’d won at one of those Syracuse Tool golf outings. He pawed it across the bottle-top for the pop-n-snap, and let the cap bounce down to the floor by his Wolverines, still spattered with chicken salad. “Go study something, blossom. Get busy now.”

  “Daddy?” she said, voice really small now.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s just one little blunder…”

  “Yeah.”

  “You had a great day otherwise.”

  “Check.”

  “Do you think I’m pretty?”

  He was still staring into the fridge, and he tipped the bottle to his mouth, drinking with big gulps that made his Adams Apple go up and down like a buoy in a storm. When he finished, he bent and reached in for another.

  “Of course you’re pretty,” he said into the refrigerator, all deadpan and hollow. “You’re the prettiest girl in town.”

  Becky turned and ran back to her room, knowing he didn’t mean a word of it, that he had probably wanted a boy all along, that he was no more than a drunk who would always think she was plain. She locked the door and buried her face in her pillow. Aaron Nola was pitching for the Phils tonight, and they were going to miss it. Ma was pulling back-to-back late shifts and remained a permanent no-show. Becky was trying her best to become a young woman, and even though she was doing it right here in front of her father, he preferred to look in the fridge.

  She rolled over and stared at the ceiling, face wet.

  Tomorrow, she was going to have the opportunity to actually participate in the game she had loved as a fan for longer than she could even remember. And she was never going to tell her father about it.

  Not now, or as long as she lived.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Becky hoofed it to school the next morning.

  Run, Forest, run!

  Of course, she’d already considered the disaster of a ‘sighting,’ so she was ready to duck down a side street or dive into a bush if she heard anything even close to resembling a bus engine. Paranoid? A bit. It was 6:02 a.m. when she left the house, but there were early busses, choir, and bandfront, and she didn’t need anyone hazing out the window, or worse, getting a cell phone and recording the weird running girl, hair flying, arms pumping, her backpack stuffed so tight it looked like something an astronaut would wear.

  She didn’t have any bricks, so she’d found a couple of pieces of slate from her neighbor’s stone garden barrier and put them in plastic with a whole pack of cotton balls in there as a buffer. On top of that, she had her old gray sweat pants, a t-shirt, and a pair of blue sneakers for practice, then her slender boot-cut jeans, her Heathered Pima cotton sweetheart blouse, and her Air Bacara Ballet’s, all jet black, meant to bring out the shock blue of her Rutledge Tigers baseball cap, that is, if she had the courage to put it on at all before practice. On top of that stuff, she had a shower kit wrapped in a beach towel, and a trash bag for her current running clothes. Oh, and of course there was her three-ring binder, her pencil case, and her two textbooks. She’d almost busted the main seam of her bloated backpack sitting on it and working the zipper around!

  Danny was right, though. Strangely, magically, she was in better shape than yesterday. Her breathing came easier, a routine instead of a chore, and her legs were stronger. She made it up and down two full rises before she slowed to a jog, and she never gave up to a walk until she had already passed the elementary school, with the high school’s roof poking up over the rise before her.

  She was an absolute sweatball, but thankfully, the place was really empty: a few teachers walking around, a tech support guy with a tool belt, and a janitor with a broom cart. By the time she was done showering, however, her cell said it was 7:10 a.m., and she actually had to hurry a bit. Of course, her clothes took longer than usual to slip on since these were her tightest jeans and she had to sit, work in her feet, then rise to do the wiggle-dance, hips one way then the other. And on top of that, her back pack was still pretty much stuffed to the brim, forcing her to re-pack it twice to make everything fit right.

  She walked into the hall now starting to crowd with students, and of course no one noticed her. She was ‘Invisible Becky’ with the nerdy, overstuffed backpack. She weaved through to the far side of the hall and made her way to English class, bumping shoulders with kids going the opposite way a few times.

  Then, in front of room 245, there was a knot of girls spilling over into the doorway, all talking about some other girl who’d puked in a trash can during gym class yesterday.

  “Excuse me,” Becky said.

  They ignored her. The one with the longest hair Becky had ever seen, falling down past her waist and tied up in a series of lime green bows, took her warrior lock and flipped it all casual, catching her girlfriend in the eye with it. There were peals of laughter and Becky said, “Excuse me,” again.

  Nothing.

  Becky shouldered off her backpack, squatted down, and got out her Rutledge Tigers hat. She made a stalk with her hair, stuck it through the hole, and pulled the brim forward. There. Just to see…

  She stood, backpack straps gathered in one hand, and one of the girls looked at her sideways, a fleeting glance.

  “What?” she said. She was chewing gum like a horse, hair tied up in a flip down one side. Her expression was freezer cold, but there was something else there in her eyes as well. Looked like fear. Or jealousy. Or both.

  “Move,” Becky said.

  The girl altered her position abruptly, and in doing so, shoved her friend next to her. Becky pushed past and heard one of the girls mutter, “Witch!”

  But it was said in awe, like a compliment, somehow.

  Becky walked into the room, and all the pre-class chatter stopped cold. Mr. Marcus was at his desk reading a book titled “The Weird Fiction Review.” He glanced up, looked back down, then flicked up a real glance, just for a second. Then he was buried back in his book, flipping a page.

  “Take a seat, Michigan,” he said dryly.

  Still, he was the only dead battery. Everyone else’s focus stayed trained all over Becky Michigan, and it was t
he oddest sensation she’d ever felt in her life. The smiling eyes of the boys were greasy somehow, and she could feel the various scans going all over her body, north to south…perverts! And the girls were worse. Their eyes were absolute lasers, wide-brimmed and angry. They hated her! But it was a hatred that had surrender in it, like they all had to recalculate things, include her, pretend that they liked her. It was like a bite of dark chocolate with a super-tangy orange flavor—long deserved, bitterly sweet, bad as heck for you, but delicious.

  Cody Hatcher’s mouth was open. He still had a spot on his forehead from yesterday, a dull, sickly blue, and his hair looked tangled, like he had forgotten to shower. His big friend sitting next to him punched him in the arm, and Hatcher bit down on his tongue, then crossed his arms on the desk and put his head down rather ashamedly.

  Becky looked at Joey on the other side of the ‘U’ and waved, just the fingers, real subtle. He smiled foolishly, blushed, and waved back. Eyes across the room went back and forth, measuring the exchange, clearly indicating that Joey Chen’s stock just went up. Tabitha Messersmith looked down hard at her desk. She was having none of this, and there were a couple of other students that appeared to feel the same way. Still, they were the minority. Heads were leaning toward each other in little whisper-knots, and it was clear Becky had become far more interesting than the pre-class work up on the blackboard.

  The bell rang, and Mr. Marcus got them engaged rather quickly, performing a short read-aloud of the first few pages of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” next pointing out the stuff in there similar to the Garden of Eden: the beauty of the forest, the snake in the water, the rude invasion of the human presence. He made them write in their notebooks what he called the “gender contradiction,” as Steinbeck had introduced two guys, George and Lenny, as opposed to a man and a woman. He called this “foreshadowing,” and said he’d give ten bucks to the student who could connect it to what happened later in the text when they got there.

  So cool, Becky thought. She had seen the movie back in Syracuse and knew George was going to kill Lenny in the end. The connection here wasn’t Adam and Eve. It was Cain and Abel. Oh, Mr. Marcus wasn’t just good…he was awesome.

  “Paradise,” he said. “What is it really? Can it be defined?” He put the book down on his desk and looked at them all.

  “Draw a line in your notebooks, and underneath it, write me a response, from your heart, from your gut. What is your paradise? Don’t worry about grammar, this is a free-write. And don’t stop to adjust for spelling, heck, that’s what spell-checkers are for later. Once cars were invented, we didn’t worry about the condition of the carriage house and the horses inside…c’mon, move!”

  He stopped still. Put a finger up and waved it back and forth like an old granny.

  “Windshield wiper moment,” he said. That got a laugh. He raised his eyebrows. “Let’s keep it appropriate for the ninth grade classroom, hmm? You can get tropical with a significant other, but I don’t really need to hear the gory details. I think we are all well aware of how all the moving parts work.”

  That got a bigger laugh, and everyone, even Tabitha Messersmith, got down to it. Five minutes later, they were told to stop writing, and Marcus had people read their responses out loud. Most of them were those good old fashioned beach get-aways—no work, free food, a lot of “significant others,” without the gory details of course. Some mentioned a specific person, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, Megan Fox, Taylor Laughtner, and a kid named Ted described an endless line of Playboy bunnies.

  The girl next to Becky, with the red librarian glasses, stopped waggling her pen to make it look like a piece of spaghetti and said, “The chorus line would make you feel cheap after a while.”

  “Not me,” one of the guys said.

  “Shut up,” Tabitha Messersmith said back. “She’s right. That’s why we don’t do it in real life, or not often anyway. No one wants to be called a slut.”

  “Guys can be sluts and no one cares,” the boy next to her said.

  “Pimps rule!” someone said a bit too loud.

  “Quiet,” Marcus said. “Let Miss Messersmith continue, please.”

  “Yeah, shut up,” she said, eyes narrow. Then, she sat back and bent a paper clip in all sorts of directions, speaking at her fingers as if angry that she wanted to talk, and angrier at herself for being angry. “What I mean is, this whole “significant other” thing doesn’t make sense in the first place. It works for a while, but then you get used to each other…sick of each other, just look at our parents.” She dropped the paper clip, glanced up, and ran her fingers down the corners of her lips. “It’s the newness that you love, not the person. And here, when the sick-o, endless line of perfect bimbos gets old, you’ll want the girl or boy next door. When that gets stale, you’ll want someone from a foreign country. When that becomes habit, you want something else.”

  “But that’s the point,” Cody Hatcher said. “In the endless line, it’s a different babe every time. And they don’t get old. It’s a magic line. That’s why our parents get sick of each other. They get old and wrinkled and broken down.”

  “You miss the point!” Joey Chen said, Chinese accent thickening along with his emotion. “Old doesn’t mean old here. It means mundane, expected, status quo.”

  Hatcher squinted his eyes and took on an exaggerated, mock accent.

  “Sorry…no speakie Engie.”

  “You understand me fine,” Joey said. “And next time I shove an eraser up your throat!”

  “Enough, both of you,” Marcus said. “Besides having this junior moment when it looks like you two can’t play in the same sandbox, this is impressive. I like the idea that “new,” or rather “different,” is what we desire.” He started walking back and forth before them, and it seemed they were in college, or being addressed by a famous politician. “’Of Mice and Men’ isn’t about men and women. The only female is this tramp no one wants anything to do with, but that’s not finally the point. George and Lenny want paradise, a place of their own, a home, the original American dream, you’ll see.” He paused. “But that’s not the point either, at least not this morning. In fact, we’re not really talking about Steinbeck anymore, are we?” He looked around the room over his glasses, playing the silence. “So let’s go with this,” he continued. “What you’re all telling me here, is that paradise is itself an illusion, because we change, because we want the new, because we’ll never be satisfied.”

  “Yeah,” Tabitha said. “Because once we’re satisfied, it’s over and we’re looking for paradise again. We raise the bar.”

  Marcus made a loose fist and put a knuckle against his bottom lip.

  “So, we’re tragically wired to deny the here and now, no matter how perfect it may be.” He looked up. “Then is there any such thing as happiness?”

  “No,” the girl with the red glasses said.

  “But what about love?” Becky said. “Isn’t that paradise?”

  “More like hell,” a girl across the room said. People snickered and Mr. Marcus interrupted.

  “Love is a different animal altogether, taking many forms, and we’ll look at it more closely when we study ‘Romeo and Juliet’ after Christmas. Stick with the idea we’re unpacking. Can we ever be happy? Is there anything in this life that we confront or engage that, without change, can sustain real pleasure over time?

  “There’s got to be,” Becky said.

  “What then?”

  She tried to think about it deeply, but to tell the truth, she was still kind of burning inside about the way Cody Hatcher had imitated Joey’s accent. She was proud of her new friend for standing up to him, but she hadn’t liked the smiling hatred burning back in Hatcher’s stare. And while it was safe for Joey to say it in front of Mr. Marcus, what was he going to do after class? Maybe Hatcher needed a message, something on his terms, something better to think about than cornering Joey Chen later in some remote corner of the shop area or the boy’s bathroom. She folded her arms an
d sat back.

  “Maybe paradise is competition,” she said, “like the big game that we want to win, that we need to win, that we’ve been dreaming about since the age of five and practicing our whole lives for. And maybe it’s only a true paradise if…if somehow, when we lose, we could have been rooting for the other guy in our hearts all along. Then we’d get a second chance, a magical second try, like the loss never happened at all. And the game would go on forever.”

  She looked over at Cody Hatcher, and batted her eyelashes.

  “But this isn’t paradise, and there’s no two ways about losing, at least not here at Rutledge. Listen to me, Hatcher. I’m pitching batting practice after school today, and I’m going to strike you out in front of everybody. That is, if you don’t chicken out and say that the mark I put on your face is giving you a headache or something.”

  The room erupted.

  Marcus got everyone back to order and put them on S.S.R.—Sit down, Shut up and Read—until the bell. Unfortunately, he had to quiet the class multiple times for whispering about the coming confrontation.

  By the time Becky got to art, half of that class had heard about it in one form or another.

  By lunch time, it had spread through the entire school.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At first, the hobbled table by the Frederick Douglass poster seemed too crowded for Becky to even think about finding a seat, especially with the extra chairs students had slid over, blocking the main aisle and driving the lunch monitors insane. There were popular kids and nerdy kids, Emo kids and Goth kids, straight-edgers shouting stuff to their old stoner friends, and retro-freaks wearing Pink Floyd and Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts. Around the outer edge were assorted members of the girl’s field hockey team wearing their colors and kilts, and behind them, various student council members, preppies, and upper classmen.

  Becky approached, and this time she didn’t have to say, “Excuse me.” They made a path for her, and the parting of the Red Sea came to mind, quickly joining the odd connections Mr. Marcus had hinted at in terms of the Garden of Eden. So who was she supposed to be in the middle of these weird, displaced biblical pop-ups? Mary? Jezebel? The Angel of Death? It was surreal. It was a carnival, and in the middle of it sat Shane, Beth, Jill, Justin, and Fluffy, all looking rather bewildered, while Joey was clearly saving Becky a seat, arm draped protectively over the back of her empty chair. Thank goodness Mr. Ladd came over to break up the party, much to the disappointment of the growing crowd.