by Lisa Super
Two.
One.
Some random guy kissed Daphne on the mouth. Before she could object, he moved on, kissing the next person over, male or female. His lack of discrimination meant she could neither be offended nor flattered.
Janine crashed into Daphne with a hug. They said their Happy-New-Years, dancing as the music faded up. Janine leaned near Daphne’s ear.
“I’m going to go…” Janine was confused about how to end the sentence. “I’ll be back.”
“Okay, Mysteriosa.”
Janine stuck out her tongue and headed toward the kitchen.
“He got you.”
His voice. Daphne was so happy to hear it, she forgot to feel relief. Now that he was watching, she swirled her hips in a greater circumference and turned around to face him. “Yeah, the kissing bandit got me.”
Oliver bobbed and swayed, moving with her. “I didn’t know what crime to charge him with. You’re going with theft?”
“Petty theft. Stealing closed-mouthed kisses is a victimless crime. Unless he gives me the flu. Then I’m suing.”
“You can’t mess around with people’s mucus.”
“I love New Year’s. New year, new possibilities, new lips.” She stepped closer, cutting the distance between their own lips to six inches.
His neck tightened, but his feet didn’t shift. “You’re a pretty good dancer.”
“Pretty good?” She spun around, careful not to touch him. “I’m fairly awesome.”
“Ugh!”
Out of nowhere, Oliver was shoved from behind and flew forward, crashing into Daphne. Drunk laughter erupted behind him, and she recognized the face from the football game when she’d met Oliver. It was the meathead.
“Just helping you out, man.” He grinned at Oliver.
Oliver played it cool. “Thanks, Mitch.”
All of a sudden, recognition sparked in Mitch’s eyes. “Hey, that’s Emily Bowman’s little sister.” Mitch lumbered off the dance floor, no response necessary.
“Good friend?” Daphne asked, attempting to mute her sarcasm.
Oliver shrugged. “I guess.”
She phrased her question as a statement. “He said that on the football field, the night I met you. ‘Emily Bowman’s little sister.’”
“Sometimes I think Mitch is a robot and he’s only been programmed with a certain number of phrases and he says them over and over again.”
Daphne laughed. “How does he know who I am, though?”
“Facebook.”
She held her face steady, kept it from falling, but he heard her silence.
“I haven’t told anyone about the list.” He swallowed. “It’s ours.”
The pressure pulling her face down now lifted her cheeks. Ours. It was the best word he could say.
The fast dance music dissolved into a slow song. The moment of truth. He would put his hands on her waist. Or he would go get a drink or run to the bathroom or some other form of translucent rejection. Daphne decided to complicate the situation. She clasped her fingers behind his neck and pulled herself six inches closer to him.
He didn’t cringe, for that she was grateful. His eyes searched in unease, but his hands came to rest on her hips.
“What do you think Emily and Jason’s New Year’s together was like?” she asked.
He glanced upwards, as if words were illuminated on the white ceiling and he was carefully choosing which ones to use. “Probably romantic. Alone. Intimate. The exact opposite of this.”
“I bet we’re having more fun.”
He shrugged, doubtful.
“What? You’re not having a good time?”
“I am. It’s just…”
The seriousness in his eyes worried her, but she kept dancing, hoping it would dissipate after a few more blinks.
“Daphne…don’t.” He stopped moving and she stopped with him. The darkness in his eyes thickened. He took another breath. “Don’t fall for me.”
“Someone took their cocky pills today.”
“It just happens, and it never ends well. So don’t do it. You’re too good of a friend.”
The alcohol swirled around her head and disoriented her emotions, rendering her unable to shield against their sabotage. Crying was unavoidable. The compression built on all sides of her eyeballs and tingled her jaw. She did what she did best and sucked it all in. She had about ten seconds before the bomb of tears would explode.
“I think you’re afraid,” she said.
The darkness drained from his gaze and exhaustion filled in its place. She didn’t have time to decipher the meaning behind his crooked squint. She stepped close and put her lips to his ear.
“You’re afraid of falling in love with me. Happy New Year, Oliver.”
He wouldn’t be able to tell if she was serious or joking. To further confuse him, she put her hands around his neck and planted a fat kiss on his cheek. It left no mark, her lipstick gone hours ago. Daphne swaggered away and prayed with her entire body that he wouldn’t follow her. He didn’t.
Time expired down to zero. The tears detonated and combined with her eye makeup to make a Jackson Pollock of her face. Wiping the moisture would only make it worse and spur the production of more tears. Luckily, everyone else’s level of drunkenness exceeded her own and she was able to waltz from room to room unnoticed. The search for Janine took her through the kitchen, the hallway, poking her head into bedrooms, seeing things she desperately wished to file off her retinas. Teetering back and forth between alarm over Janine’s potential kidnapping and fury from Janine’s (more likely) bailing on her, Daphne was ready to make a bed in the bushes against Penny’s house and call it a night.
She was trudging toward the front door when Janine tumbled out of a closet in front of her, falling back against the door so it slammed closed behind her. Janine’s ponytail was a gathering of static-charged, matted lumps, and her cheeks bore a flush from guilt or exertion.
Unaware of her own dishevelment, Janine beheld Daphne. The whites of Janine’s eyes blazed with sympathy. “Whoa, what happened?”
“Holidays are a bitch. Why were you in a closet? Are you high?”
“No.” Janine cleared her throat. “Maybe, a little. Just a pinch.” She squeezed together her forefinger and thumb.
“I need to leave.”
“It looks like you needed to leave fifteen minutes ago.”
“Well, I’ll always know where you land in the nature versus nurture debate.”
“Look up.”
Daphne obeyed. Janine smoothed her thumbs over the puffy bags of Daphne’s eyes, erasing the raccoon smut. “Do I need to kick his ass?”
“No, you need to kick my ass for crying over a boy.”
Janine bent her knee and kicked her foot up and to the side, lightly tapping Daphne’s backside.
“Thanks,” said Daphne, her grief dissipating.
“Come on. Let’s bail. We can still go to The Drama Crew’s party.”
It was Janine’s turn to loop her arm through Daphne’s and weave among the mass of sweaty, buoyant bodies reverberating music and alcohol. Daphne pretended not to see Oliver dancing with Penny as Janine pulled her out the front door.
• • •
The next morning, Daphne crept into her house with an arch in her shoulders. She made sure the lock slid with little sound, the knob turned completely before its release, even though both her parents knew she was spending the night as Janine’s, giving her no reason to sneak in. She was ready to cross the hall with feline silence when she saw something glinting from the living room. She proceeded to the glowing triangle, the sun reflecting on the round corner of the half-empty whiskey bottle, the light shooting off in all directions. Her father slept next to it on the La-Z-Boy, his mouth open, softly snoring in last night’s clothes. Slept. That was the Happy New Year’s way of saying it.
Daphne towered over him, judging him with the ferocity only known to the helpless. Stomping down the hall, she made as much noise as possibl
e, hitting every creaky floorboard with echoing force. Regret guided her steps. She wished she’d thrown the bottle into the wall or done something equally dramatic that scared him into sobriety, even for a day. It wouldn’t make any real difference, but she might have somehow been absolved, bathed in the holy spirit of whiskey on the wall.
Daphne slammed her bedroom door with all the strength of her frustration. Even she jumped at the sound of the door meeting the frame. Surely, she had woken him up. But as she lay down on her bed, the weight of the previous night and the now heavy morning piling on her chest, she wasn’t sure of anything.
Skydive
Oliver sat on the bleachers watching the purple-orange of the setting winter sun. He hadn’t seen Daphne in two weeks. He’d sent her some vague texts, lame greetings that made him cringe while he hit “Send”:
“How’s it going?”
“How was the first day of your last semester?”
“Happy One-Week Post New Year’s! Why isn’t that a holiday?”
Each text had elicited equally vague and lame responses:
“Fab.”
“Meh.”
“You should lobby Hallmark.”
Whatever had transpired between them at Penny Layton’s New Year’s party, he was sure he’d messed up, but he wasn’t sure how. He wondered if even Daphne knew. If he asked her, would she tell him?
He replayed the dance floor scene every time he saw a girl with short, choppy hair or a girl wearing black. He’d never noticed how many of these girls existed. His mind was hitting rewind in all of his classes and in the hallway between.
He and Daphne had been dancing, no big thing. Before New Year’s Eve, he’d imagined dancing with Daphne would be like dancing with one of his ex-girlfriends, a relationship so far removed from his present that the memory felt like fiction. Tricia Grasso, to be exact.
Oliver and Tricia had dated in seventh grade for a month. They’d held hands and kissed a few times. One day he’d opened his locker and a note dropped down to his feet.
Dear Oliver,
I don’t think we should date anymore. I hope you understand.
Sincerely,
Tricia
Oliver still felt a pang in his abdomen whenever he remembered that note. In seventh grade, he was finally adjusting to athletic rejection in every sport he participated in besides unwanted baseball. With fifteen words and a carelessly folded piece of notebook paper, romantic rejection had fallen upon him as well.
He’d held it together at school that day, but he’d cried as soon as he hit the safe confines of his bedroom. It was the ironic Sincerely that tore him up, a heart dotting the i, all the other i’s dotted with the same paradox. What was sincere about breaking up with someone through a note? Sincerely would have been dumping him in person, or even the dignity of a phone call. Tricia would’ve been forced to accept his response, even if it was only dumbfounded speechlessness. A note held no consequence for her. There was no justice between those blue lines. And it didn’t help that she was dating someone else on the basketball team the next day. Someone who didn’t sit on the bench the whole game.
The years had passed. Other than a tinge of bitterness every so often, Oliver held little more than indifference for Tricia. From a distance, he half-admired the way she chose her boyfriends. The boys wrapped themselves around her little finger, silk ribbon eager to be twirled in whichever direction she desired. She gracefully discarded them when their edges frayed or showed resistance, same as she’d done with him. His interest in Tricia ended there. While undeniably pretty, he never checked her out as she swept down the hall, turning the heads in her path. The thought of kissing her, even touching her, repulsed him. It would be like kissing his sister, if he had one.
That was the sensation he’d expected to feel when dancing with Daphne Bowman. After resting his hands on her hips, he’d waited for her to become the imaginary sister. Instead, her body kept moving under his hands, warm and free, magnetizing his torso into sync with hers.
He’d tried willing her to feel like Tricia Grasso, but his body had kept moving, unobstructed, his heart pumping hot blood to the beat of the music. The odd feeling in his stomach wasn’t curdled milk. It was something more complicated, a mixture of complete joy, utter dread, and borderline hysteria. Daphne especially hadn’t felt like Tricia when she leaned over and purred in his left ear. Two weeks later and he still recalled her breath flowing into him.
When school had returned to session, Oliver had avoided the chapel. He could predict that future. He’d see her sitting there, not know what to say, and sneak away before she spotted him. Also, he was afraid to find her absent. He didn’t know what to do with an empty pew.
Two weeks had been a long time, the amount of time he needed to confront his cowardice. As far as he could tell, Daphne wouldn’t let a little intoxication and well-meaning warnings at a party cause her to abandon her homework haven. She was probably halfway done with her calculus assignment, and all the time he devoted to imagining the bare chapel was wasted seconds/minutes/hours of his life. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and bounded toward the cross, eye level with his seat in the bleachers.
Oliver stepped inside, confident she would be there, but the room was empty. His footsteps echoed against the stained glass windows. Jesus, Mary, the angels, and all the sheep mocked him. Oliver inspected the pew Daphne usually occupied. No grand prophesies or holy wisdoms trickled down with the dust through the beams of sunlight.
Oliver sat down in Daphne’s place, putting himself in her pew. He pulled the book Of Mice and Men from his bag and flipped to the dog-eared page. Concentration eluded him. He read the same paragraph over and over again, unable to absorb a single word. His vibrating cell rescued him, a text from Penny: “What r u up 2?”
The letdown that the text wasn’t from Daphne was quickly soothed by Penny’s adoration. A hot girl liked him. Nothing bad about that. Nothing bad at all. Before he could respond, she’d already sent another text: “Want 2 hang 2nite?”
He did. His whole body was in full smirk as he typed. Then it hit him. It was Thursday. He threw Of Mice and Men into his backpack and broke into a run. His steps echoed off the walls and the holy figures seemed to scowl at him.
He was halfway to Sweetie’s before worry slowed his steps. What if she hated him? What if it was going to be weird forever? What if she didn’t want to do the list anymore?
The last question brought him to a full stop. The last few months, the list had become shiny texture poking through the surface of dull days. Was he about to lose that? Had he already lost it? Would she complete the list without him? Had she already? He prepared for the worst: she never wanted to see him again. Oliver didn’t want to do the list alone. It would only make him sad. Depressed. Like Jason. And the last thing in the world Daphne Bowman was going to do was make him be like Jason.
He neared Sweetie’s doorstep, his feet leaden with doubt. Oliver was out of options, so he did something he never did with Daphne. He faked it.
Oliver pushed through the door, a deep grin on his face. She washed a set of ice cream scoops in the sink, glanced over at him without moving her head, and refocused her attention to her hands under the faucet. She still wore red lipstick. That had to be good sign, right? Or maybe she didn’t associate the lipstick with him, never had. His mind went blank, what he imagined a blizzard to feel like, never having been in one—cold, white, nothing. All the clever things he’d envisioned coming out of his mouth as he’d pushed open the door washed down the drain with the ice cream drippings.
Daphne turned off the water. “Of all the ice cream parlors, in all the towns, in all the world…”
At least she was speaking to him. His vocal chords unclenched, making conversation possible.
“I like yours the best.” He stepped up to the counter.
She tilted her head down and peered at him incredulously. “You’ve been in here before?”
He liked the way she forced honesty ou
t of him. Instead of a smooth injection, Daphne shoved truth serum down his throat.
“No, but I like yours the best out of all the ones I haven’t been in. Because you’re here.” It was the right sentiment tacked onto the wrong sentence. He broadened his smile to balance his inner cringing.
Daphne remained unmoved. “Lucky me.”
She wrung out a sponge and wiped down the counter, eager to do something other than tolerate him. The humming squeak of wet friction against stainless steel became the only sound between them. Oliver browsed the ice cream case.
Daphne acknowledged his perusal. “Cup or cone?”
“Cone.”
She rinsed her hands. “What flavor?”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Vanilla.”
Oliver gasped, “Vanilla? No one’s favorite flavor is vanilla. It’s so boring.”
“It’s timeless. And you never get a bad vanilla. My palate doesn’t like disappointment.”
“Well, my palate likes actual flavor, so I’ll have cookies and cream.”
“One scoop or two?”
“One, please.”
She dug the scooper in the black and white frost, “That will be three fifty.”
“Friends don’t get free ice cream?”
She stopped mid-scoop, leaving the scooper wedged in the cookies and cream. “Oh, we’re friends?”
And there it was, the dreaded rhetorical question. At some point in grade school, was there a secret session where the administration pulled all the girls aside on their way in from recess and gave them this valuable life advice? When a romantic interest offends you, but you sense that he or she doesn’t know how or why, instead of stating the offense, merely raise or lower the pitch of your voice and repeat some benign phrase that the offender has spoken. This will signify that you are offended, and the offender needs to scramble to fix it. If an amicable solution is not reached, repeat until desired outcome occurs. Or someone leaves the room.
Oliver found it best to use few words in these situations. “Yes.”
Daphne rolled her eyes. She expected more from him, like everyone else. “See, that’s what I thought. But on New Year’s we were acting like friends and having a perfectly civil conversation surrounded by our inebriated peers, and you started laying out guidelines for this so-called friendship. Friends don’t do that. Friends just be and then they stage an intervention when you need one.”