And Then He Kissed Me

by Various

I exhale in relief. “Don’t call me babe.” I fall into step beside him as we head towards the exit. I can see the curious stares, hear the intake of breath as people turn to gossip, but I don’t care. For the first time in months, I don’t care what anyone might think of me. It doesn’t matter.

  “What nickname would you prefer?” Charlie asks, teasing. “Pumpkin? Poochie? Fluffikins?”

  I glare. “You make me sound like a pet chihuahua.”

  “Fluffikins it is.” He drapes an arm over my shoulder, casual as can be, but the warmth, the weight of it, makes my pulse kick up, dancing in my veins. “So where does my fluffikins want to go?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie-pie,” I shoot back, breathless. “Anywhere. Nowhere.”

  “Helpful.”

  “I try.”

  He pushes the door open, and we step out into the grey, wet world. Rain drizzles down, cold under the collar of my coat, and for a moment, I’m tempted to just turn round – go and hide back in the library, in the warm safety of my secret carrel, with my books and homework and all the things I’m good at, the things I know for sure. Then Charlie turns back and holds out his hand, and all my second thoughts become irrelevant. Everything becomes irrelevant, save that thrill in my blood, and the shiver that has nothing to do with the crappy English weather.

  With a couple of short steps, I close the distance between us and take his hand.

  I want this, and I don’t care why.

  Jack Kelly isn’t my boyfriend. I wish he was. I have wished that for nearly five years.

  Jack is like this: tall, thin, shy, smart. He’s nearly sixteen.

  I am like this: short, regular size, also shy, smartish. I’m nearly sixteen too.

  Jack has a habit. He bites his nail. He has ten fingernails, but he only bites one of them. The one on the little finger of his right hand. He does it when he is nervous, or embarrassed.

  My habit? I blush. Not sweetly, as though I am in Pride and Prejudice. I blush as though someone has injected red paint into my skin. I do it in class if I’m asked to speak; I do it if a shop assistant says, “Can I help you?” Basically, I am pretty much red all of the time. I’ve learned to live with it. I wear my hair long to hide my face as much as possible. A perfect hairstyle for me would be Cousin Itt’s. Mum says my blushing is delightful. Sweet. All the words you use to describe, I don’t know, a doughnut. I don’t want to be like a doughnut. I’d like to be cool. Enigmatic. Aloof. With a mysterious past, like a French orphan. Not an actual orphan – I’d miss Mum too much – but something more interesting than my actual self. Mum tells me this is just a stage I’m going through.

  Mum’s thirty-six. Between us, I think that’s ancient, but one of her favourite sayings is: “You’re as young as you feel and I feel fantastic!” She not only thinks she’s young, she also thinks she’s cool. She completely ignores me when I try to tell her – really diplomatically – that the clothes she wears are, well, not quite right for someone her age. Jeans with studs on them. T-shirts covered in multi-coloured sequins that she has sewn on herself. “Oh, what’s wrong with a bit of individuality, darling? We can’t both go around looking gloomy, can we?” she says to me. I don’t look gloomy. I’m not emo or a goth, either. I just like how I feel when I wear all black. It’s like being in disguise. Or behind a shield.

  Mum’s always telling me she remembers her teenage years very clearly. She likes to talk to me about rites of passage and how one day none of my teenage torments will matter. She knows about peer groups and queen bees. But what she doesn’t realize is that actually these things do matter. Maybe they won’t matter in ten years’ time, when my high school years are far behind me, but sadly, right now, high school is where I am and I can’t just rise above it all.

  Especially not when I get as embarrassed as I did today. I mean it. If it was possible to explode from too-rapid blood flow to the cheeks, I would have been lying dead on the school canteen floor.

  And it’s all Mum’s fault. Mum and her clothes.

  It’s a long story. And to tell it properly, I need to give you some basic information about myself. I live in a country town in south-eastern Australia. Mum and I moved here from Melbourne after she and my dad got divorced. I was six at the time. I still see Dad. But he’s pretty busy in Sydney with his new wife and kids now. Mum is a busy person too. As soon as we moved to our town, she joined committees and volunteered for raffle-ticket selling. Before long we couldn’t walk down the town’s main street without lots of people saying, “Hi, Renee!” (Sorry, I should have said that earlier; that’s her name, Renee. I’m Lily. As in the flower. Mum says it was because I looked a bit blue when I was born. Good thing I wasn’t born yellow or I’d be Daffodil!)

  Mum’s also a really friendly and positive person. Too positive, sometimes. I read that book Pollyanna once, where the girl (Pollyanna) sees the bright side of everything (to a frankly alarming degree; I mean, she gets given crutches for Christmas one year and says she is GLAD because she DOESN’T need them!!). Mum’s like that, always so enthusiastic and generous about people, which is an excellent personality trait, I know, but it does mean she gets taken advantage of sometimes. Even though she’s a city person by birth, she’s not that streetwise. I always think I see through people much easier and more quickly than she can.

  Which brings me back to my main topic.

  Jack. Or more specifically, Jack and his mother, Shona.

  They moved to our town the year I turned ten. Shona was (still is) the same age as my mum. She hadn’t married Jack’s father so she wasn’t a divorcee like Mum, but she and Jack’s dad had split up and so she was a single mum too. If I was to describe Shona in one word, I’d pick “flighty”. I read it in a book once and it suits Shona perfectly. She is like a flighty, colourful butterfly, flitting from person to person, subject to subject and, as my mum learned to her peril, man to man. But I’m jumping ahead of myself.

  About a millisecond after they’d moved here, Mum was round at their house with a tray of cakes. I can imagine her saying, “Welcome! You’ve got a son the same age as my daughter, fantastic! Come for dinner!”

  So they did. That same night.

  I can still remember the first time I saw Jack. I was used to boys, of course. My primary school was co-ed. I’d had pop star crushes too. But – and this is no exaggeration – I felt something special the first time I saw Jack. A kind of shimmer inside me. I know I was only ten and this is probably fanciful (another of my favourite f words), but I remember thinking, You’re going to be special to me.

  Mum and Shona got on instantly, like two houses on fire. I mean that, despite all the horrible things that happened later. All through that long summer holiday, they laughed and gossiped and swapped single-parent stories. They also swapped clothes. Seriously. One person with Mum’s fashion sense was bad enough, but to have two of them roaming the town? That aside, it was good to see Mum so happy. Shona perked Mum up and Mum calmed Shona down. And while they became friends, so did Jack and me. I had other friends, but most of them had gone away to beach houses or relatives. That summer became my “Summer with Jack”.

  We spent hours together. I heard all about the different towns he’d lived in, and all about his grandmother, Shona’s mother, who had lived with them. But a year ago she died, and they had to move out of her flat, and to our town, where rents are cheaper. Jack told me that he’d really loved his grandmother and he still really missed her. Most of the boys I knew would never admit liking let alone loving their grandmother, but not Jack. He said his grandmother was not only kind, but also really funny. He told me she’d grown up in Ireland and had loads of brilliant Irish sayings. Sometimes, when we were playing a board game, or hanging out at the pool, or doing any of the things we did that summer, out of the blue Jack would use one of her sayings.

  “She’d shame the devil, that one,” if he saw one of the older girls prancing about in a bikini or skimpy shorts trying to get attention. Or if he saw a larger-sized girl, he’d say,
“What a fine strong agricultural girl.” Or if he was really hungry, he’d say, “I could eat a scabby child through the bars of a cot.” It used to make me laugh and laugh. He didn’t do it in an Irish accent either, just in his own Australian accent, which made it even funnier. We’d try and make up our own sayings. “I’m so hungry I could eat a three-legged horse.” “I’m so hungry I could eat a flock of mice on toast.”

  Sometimes Mum’s boyfriend, Pete (the town plumber), would come round too. He and Mum had met when he came to our house to do some work. He was divorced too. One thing (our blocked pipes) led to another (a drink with Mum in the local pub) and then another (dinner in the local pub). By the time Shona and Jack moved to our town, Mum and Pete-the-Plumber had been seeing each other for nearly a year. It was pretty serious. I think Mum had been about to ask him to move in with us. (She kept asking me how I would feel if he was around more often – a giveaway, really.) Which was why it was even more upsetting when Pete and Shona ran off together.

  But I’m jumping ahead again.

  That summer, Jack and I did mostly outside things – swimming, picnics. I barely picked up a book, which was unlike me. Usually I read two or three a week. Jack seemed happier being outside than inside reading. Which was why it wasn’t until we went back to school that I made my discovery.

  Jack couldn’t read or write properly.

  He was in my class (it was a small primary school) and I started to notice he could only answer some questions. Ones about numbers, yes. Words, no. At first I thought he was just shy. Then, one night after school, Jack came over to our house to do his homework. We did our maths homework first. All fine. Then science – drawing cells – also fine. Then English. That’s when I saw it. His writing was mad! All back to front and none of the words made sense.

  I thought he was joking at first. I said, “It looks like a hen dipped in ink ran across the page.” (I was actually trying to mimic his grandmother.) But he didn’t smile. He reacted strangely. He started biting his nail. He wouldn’t look at me. Then he got up and said he was going to get a drink. While he was gone, I picked up his English notebook and leafed through it. Every page was covered in his strange scribbling.

  Some people say it’s bad for kids to watch too much TV, but sometimes it has its positive sides. This was one of those occasions. The previous week, I’d seen a documentary on MTV about Tom Cruise, and part of it was about him being dyslexic. I’d never heard the word before then. (I actually thought at first that it meant very sporty, because in his films Tom Cruise is always running and jumping and leaping out of planes.) The TV show explained that it’s a kind of learning disorder. They interviewed a dyslexia expert who said that people who had it just saw letters differently; it didn’t mean the dyslexic children or adults were stupid, far from it – in fact, often they were very, very bright. Leonardo da Vinci was dyslexic; so is Steven Spielberg. It’s also treatable, the TV show said. People with it just have to be taught in different ways.

  I told Mum about Jack’s notebook and my suspicions. And Mum, being the world’s most enthusiastic fixer of any tiny problem, went over to Shona’s that same night to talk about it. Mum told me later that Shona got really defensive at first, but then she got weepy and eventually confessed that she had trouble reading and writing too. Long story short, Mum and Shona sat down for a long chat and it turned out Shona was dyslexic too, and her mother had been as well. One of the reasons they’d moved so much was that Jack was always getting into trouble at school, and of course he was, because he’d never had the right attention or extra tuition he needed. Shona had thought it just ran in the family and there was nothing they could do about it.

  Mum was in heaven. A problem to solve! She got on to the school the next day. Within a week, Jack was getting extra help. Within a couple of months, he got a bit more confident in class and even started reading his work aloud sometimes. When we did our homework together, I noticed his handwriting was bigger than mine, and he took longer, but his letters were nearly always the right way round now.

  I was so proud of him. I never said anything to anyone else at school about the dyslexia – that was Jack’s business – but I would always say, “Great story, Jack!” after he’d read it out loud during English class. One of my friends, Mandy (whose nickname is Mouth; you’ll understand why soon), said to me once, “Why don’t you marry Jack if you love him so much?” And I had all sorts of retorts ready but then I thought, I would marry him, actually, so I just blushed and said nothing – except, of course, the blush was my answer and Mandy knew it. She watched Jack and me like a hawk from then on.

  Shona was so grateful. She kept going on and on about what a wonderful friend Mum was. It was all a bit over the top really. Now, of course, I get it; she was obviously covering up her guilt with all that gushing, because she was already having the affair with Pete. Jack, however, didn’t make a big deal about the whole dyslexia thing. He and I just kept being friends as normal, after school, on weekends. Except one night he passed me a note, when we were at my house doing our homework. It said “Knaht uoy.” It took me a second to realize it was a kind of dyslexic joke. Thank you, backwards.

  “Any time, Jack,” I said.

  And I got that shimmer again, and I blushed. And there was a second, just a second, when I thought he was going to lean across and kiss me – only on the cheek or something – but Mum came in and it didn’t happen, which was just as well because that would have made what happened next even worse.

  What happened was Mum caught Shona and Pete together. (Not that I heard all the details at the time; back then she just told me that it was all over between her and Pete, and her and Shona. I was only ten then; I didn’t need or want to hear about adults being caught in bed with each other when they were supposed to be seeing other people, i.e. my mum.)

  For the next two weeks, Mum cried and cried. She told me she never wanted me to talk to Shona again, or to Jack. She said he must be cut from the same cloth, not to be trusted, two-timing, treacherous, lots of t words. I liked Jack so much, but I loved my mum even more. So I did what she told me. I stopped talking to Jack, stopped inviting him home after school, stopped looking at him, even though I missed him so much it actually hurt. I’d see him in the schoolyard, on his own a lot, reading – he seemed to be reading all the time now that had got sorted out – but I didn’t talk to him. I couldn’t. One day I saw him coming towards me, but I turned my back on him. I had to. For Mum’s sake. He didn’t come over again.

  Mandy-the-Mouth noticed, of course. “He’s thick, anyway,” Mandy said, thinking she was being a friend, I guess. “You know he has to go to remedial reading classes, don’t you?”

  “He’s not thick,” I said, defending him before I knew what I was doing. I told her everything, because I wanted her to know the truth and also because it felt good talking about Jack, a way of keeping him close. Mandy listened, but then all she wanted to do was talk about Tom Cruise, so I didn’t get to talk about Jack as much as I’d hoped.

  Meanwhile, Shona was still trying to be friends with Mum, even though she was now with Pete. She kept turning up at our house but Mum wouldn’t answer the door and nor did I.

  “She’s absolutely brazen,” I heard one of Mum’s friends say. They’d all flocked around her, each with an opinion of Shona. “Morals of an alley cat.” “I never trusted her from the start.”

  Shona and Pete obviously got sick of the gossip pretty quickly, because within a month word got around that they were moving as soon as the school term finished. All three of them. I secretly hoped Jack would come and say goodbye before he left. He didn’t. Then I thought he’d leave a note for me in the letter box instead. He didn’t. I felt really sad about it, but there was nothing I could do. His mum must have banned him from me just like my mum had banned me from him.

  Fast-forward five years, to exactly three months ago, when Mum came home with the news. “Guess who’s back in town!”

  You guessed it. Shona. Without Pete.
It turned out that Pete had run off with someone new. And yes, Mum’s source had told her, Jack was back too; and yes, he would be going to school. Into year eleven at the high school, like me.

  I asked Mum outright. “Am I still banned from speaking to him?”

  “You were never banned from talking to him. It was Shona who did the dirty on us, not Jack.”

  “But you told me never to talk to him again.”

  “Lily! I’d never have done that. I knew what good friends you and Jack were.”

  That’s called “selective memory”. I’ve read about it. But what was the point in making a fuss about it now? What would it change?

  The first day of the new school term came around. Our high school was big, with more than five hundred kids in it. Yet I saw Jack within minutes of arriving. He was sitting on his own, in the quadrangle. Reading. If I’d got a shimmery feeling when I first saw him as a ten-year-old, it was now a starburst feeling. I was nearly sixteen now, after all. A woman, not a kid. I’d even had my first boyfriend. It only lasted a month (my decision – he was nice, just not really my type). But I’d been glad to get my first kiss out of the way. I liked kissing very much. I was very interested in doing more of it. Just not with that boy.

  Even though Jack was sitting down, I could see that he had grown tall. But he was still skinny. He still had really black hair that stuck up at the back. And he still bit his nail when he was nervous. I noticed him do it as we lined up for morning assembly. I noticed him do it as we waited outside our different homerooms. I couldn’t stop noticing him. I wanted to say something to him, but even thinking about it made me glow red. I didn’t know how to approach him, what to say. And if he wanted to talk to me, he could make the first move, couldn’t he? But he didn’t seem to see me. Or so I thought.

  Three days later, I was sitting outside at lunchtime with a group of my classmates when he came across the yard towards us. Mandy was sitting beside me. She still had a big mouth. She also had a good memory. Too good.