Kiss Crush Collide

by Christina Meredith

  “I’ll get Shane,” I say, looking around the table to be sure everyone understands the terms of my surrender. “Shane will drive me.”

  “What about his two-a-days?” my dad asks, needing to be sure that all bases are covered before he signs off on this plan.

  “They’re done by then,” Freddie says.

  I know that Freddie knows the summer practice schedule because Evan played football even though he was only the kicker, but I think she is really just trying to make up for her car comment.

  “Okay then,” my dad says, rubbing his hands together briskly and giving a little clap. He seems pleased. “Okay?” he asks, looking at each one of us expectantly.

  “Okay.” Yorke agrees with a nod.

  Freddie nods, too, but we know it all hangs on my mother.

  She agrees reluctantly, pointing her fork at me, punctuating each word. “Tomorrow. Four o’clock. Sharp,” she says.

  I nod. It seems that this meal, like everything else in my life, starts and ends with her approval.

  Yorke is looking for something princessy with an empire waist. “Not too ornate, but definitely with beading,” she says, lifting the silk skirt of a sample dress limply between her fingers. “And white. Definitely white,” she adds. The bridal shop ladies scatter in every direction, hell-bent on being the one to find the perfect dress for the perfect bride, and make the commission, too.

  My mother and I are sitting on a cream-colored chintz love seat kind of thing with a bony, curved spine made of wood that presses into your back right where you want to lean in and get comfortable.

  The entire bridal shop is white, ivory, and cream. The walls are covered in a white-on-white flowered fabric, or maybe it’s velvet wallpaper, if there is such a thing.

  There are no sharp edges or harsh angles, everything is curved or soft or poufed. An ornate coffee table, loaded with lilies and every other kind of white flower imaginable, sits between us and the dresses that Freddie and Yorke are flicking through indiscriminately.

  “Explain to me please, Leah,” my mother says, smoothing her hand lightly across my back and lowering her voice, “why you are wearing a bathing suit under your dress?”

  She fingers the lump between my shoulder blades where I twisted the straps of my red suit together with an elastic band to make it shorter, less boy cut, and more user-friendly.

  “I don’t like to change at the pool,” I say, sliding out from under her grasp and developing a sudden interest in wedding dresses. “All those girls stare.”

  “Get used to it,” Freddie says, her head poking out of a slinky, long, super-low-cut satin dress.

  “Why aren’t you used to it?’ Yorke asks.

  She is standing on a raised dais that is covered in thick creamy shag and sits in front of three gilded full-length mirrors. She rotates slowly, checking her reflection in each mirror before she looks at me.

  “You do have a lot to stare at,” she says.

  Freddie laughs from somewhere behind yards of tulle, and Yorke turns back to the mirrors. I look at her double A chest reflecting back at me. Even in triplicate it still doesn’t amount to much.

  “I’m not trying on dresses today anyway,” I say. “You are.”

  “But if we find a bridesmaid dress that I like, you’ll need to try it on,” Yorke says, her eyes searching the mirrors for my mother. They nod together.

  “Freddie can do it,” I say, inspecting the lace on a hideously ugly dress with a hoop skirt and some kind of boning inside. “You can just pretend it’s me, but, you know, without any boobs.” I grin.

  Freddie drops the dress she is holding and stalks past me.

  “Besides,” I say to Yorke, watching the assistants marching down the hall toward us, their arms laden with white gowns zippered away in clear plastic bags, “it is going to take you a hundred years to find your dress.”

  Freddie turns to me. “She doesn’t have a hundred years,” she says.

  “Girls, girls.” My mother shushes us in a low voice. She clears her throat and sits up straight on the little love seat, tucking her feet primly underneath her. She angles her head toward the arriving assistants and smiles. “The dresses are here.”

  It’s sad but true—Yorke must buy off the rack. Her wedding date is too soon for anything custom made. I settle in and watch my mother and Yorke slowly coming to terms with the true meaning of these words and then lean back, ready for the show.

  Yorke steps onto the pedestal, wearing the first off-the-rack option, her politely disguised look of disgust reflecting back at us from every angle.

  “Oh, Yorke.” My mother gasps, turning away from the dress in horror. Lifting her hand to shield her eyes, she says, “That one is too . . . Gone with the Wind.”

  It does have incredibly big shoulders. My mother dismisses Yorke, and the dress, with a brisk wave of her hand, and Yorke disappears into the dressing room to try again.

  Freddie takes Yorke’s place on the pedestal, forced by my mother to try something on since all gown-related decisions have been switched into high gear. She steps up in front of the three mirrors, slumping her shoulders and taking my breath away.

  I know what my crime was. I was found guilty of wearing a bathing suit as an undergarment to a dress fitting and am serving my time here, sitting next to my mother on the smallest of sofas. I am not certain of Freddie’s offense, but the punishment is clear. She is wearing the ugliest tangerine satin dress ever, with a low-slung bow at the waist and satin pumps, dyed to match.

  Choking on my tea, I manage to say, “All you need is a corsage of carnations and baby’s breath.”

  My mother raises her arched brows at me and lifts her teacup to take a sip. There is only one coral lip print on the rim. She hits it exactly, every time.

  “You look like a prom reject from 1982,” Yorke says as she sweeps back into the room wearing a tight white mermaid gown, pulling a long train behind her. “Take it off.”

  “Jinny has that particular dress available in a variety of colors,” my mother explains, smiling at Jinny, the shop owner with the bouffant black hair, who is discreetly orchestrating her assistants from the edge of the room.

  My mother clasps her hands together and suggests, wistfully, “Leah could wear it in pink, and Freddie could wear it in yellow.”

  Freddie is a citrus blur against the velvety white walls as she spins toward my mother, shouting, “No!”

  “Mother,” Yorke snaps, as she steps up onto the dais, “no!”

  Knowing that I am most likely prolonging my time in the chintz-covered penalty box, I look over at Jinny and ask, sweetly, “Does that particular dress come in a light blue?”

  Her assistants are ready to scramble, eager to break the tension that is rising in the showroom, happy to find a blue dress or any dress at all.

  My mother shakes her head at Jinny, admitting defeat, calling off the color-coded wedding and the assistants without a word. She wraps her fingers around my leg and presses down, squeezing. “Yorke will be wearing something borrowed, and something blue, and a beautiful white gown,” she explains to the room as if Yorke, preening around in front of the mirrors in the tightest wedding dress ever made, her nonexistent chest squeezed right up and almost out of the top to touch her chin, were the epitome of the vestal virgin bride.

  “But not that one.” My mother sighs loudly. “It’s too tight,” she says. She lays her hands lightly across her girdle-wrapped middle. “I can practically see your lunch.”

  One pot of Earl Grey and fifteen white dresses later, we are still searching for “the one.” Well, really, my mother and Yorke and Freddie are searching. I am staring out the front window of the bridal shop, sipping my tea and watching the street for a car to pull up and take me away. The room is full of hot air and high tea, and I am steeped.

  I see Shane driving up the street toward us, right on time for once.

  The sun gleams off his chrome vanity plate as SHN ROX swings out wide, comes in fast, and angles against
the curb. He checks himself in the rearview mirror, flicking his bangs to the right before he steps out of the car and into the perfumed bridal shop. The clatter of the bells hanging over the door and the rush of the bracelets down my mother’s arm announce his arrival.

  “Well, there he is.” My mother laughs, stretching out her arms to greet him.

  “Any luck?” Shane asks as he leans down to receive my mother’s kiss.

  Yorke strides out of the dressing room, toes lost in the thick cream carpet, wearing nothing but a strapless bra under a loosely tied short satin robe.

  “Nope,” she says.

  Shane’s eyes bulge out of their sockets as her robe slips open when she slides down onto the love seat, shoving me over and squeezing me out.

  “I’m ready,” I say abruptly, standing and blocking Shane’s view.

  “And Fred?” Shane asks hopefully, his eyes searching the room.

  I point to her feet, just visible under the curved door of a dressing room.

  Shane stares at the door, his dreams dashed. I guess he was hoping for three Johnson sisters in a state of undress today. He is totally pissing me off, so he will be lucky if he makes it to two.

  “So, we’re good to go?” Shane asks, looking past me and doing the standard double check with my mother before he reaches down to grab my bag.

  “You can take her away,” my mother replies. “We are done with her.”

  Sliding into Shane’s car is the same as diving into a pool of warm water on a hot day. It feels thick, soupy, and unsettling. He shifts into drive and automatically drops his hand onto my leg. I lean my head back and close my eyes tight against that heavy feeling, but it glows burning and red against my lids, no matter how hard I try to shut it out.

  I stand with my knees locked, my bare legs pressing against the metal seat behind me, my eyes on the grade schoolers.

  Having spent the afternoon navigating the crowded, choppy waters of the pool, they now hang limply from the chain-link fence while the sun sets over their freckled shoulders. They look wrung out. I can relate.

  Balancing on their rusty three-speeders in damp bathing suits, they sit out the hour while the pool is closed between the afternoon and night swims. They live here all summer, like refugees. It’s not just a pool; it’s a baby-sitting service with free chlorine.

  Finally Troy climbs onto his chair, and bicycles drop to the ground like flies. The refugees are ready, good for another go. I, however, am not so sure I have it in me.

  When the sharp sound of Troy’s whistle finally splits the soft evening air, I buckle. I pull my legs in close to my body and lean back, with nothing more to do than watch little kids and their parents paddle around for the next two hours while the sun goes down and the temperature sinks.

  The greased-up girls of the afternoon, lying side by side on thick beach towels with their bikini straps lowered, are gone. The guys in dark denim and worn baseball caps who sweat in the sun as they flirt and chat with the sunbathers have long since disappeared. They hopped into their cars for a smoke before heading off for a night at the lake.

  Tonight it’s mostly families, little kids and parents who have put on a few pounds since their dating days. They do this thing—I remember it from last summer—where they take the first few embarrassing steps, the ones after they drop the beach towel but before they hit the water, on their tiptoes. Like that makes them look skinnier or something.

  A breeze lifts the branches that dangle over the top of the fence, and I take a deep breath. It feels like the first one of the day.

  Lights are popping up all over the park. Bright circles of white light suddenly appear over splintery teeter-totters, dusty home plates, and empty grass lots, making the night seem instantly darker, the sky more indigo.

  The overhead lights around the perimeter of the pool buzz and flicker to life just as Valerie Dickens steps out of the changing room, momentarily caught, all pink and bookish, in her very own fluorescent spotlight.

  After yesterday’s outing I thought she would need to stay in the shade and administer cold drinks. Instead she’s back, and she’s wearing some kind of shiny Ravi Shankar caftan that sways around her ankles as she slowly makes her way from the changing room to my side of the pool.

  Freddie went through this totally annoying Beatles phase, so I know who Ravi Shankar is. Freddie and Evan would sit in her room with a lava lamp on and listen to Yellow Submarine over and over and over. Yorke told her it was worth it only if she was going to get high, or at least listen to Sgt. Pepper’s, but at the time Freddie was not willing to risk any brain cells or her chance at being valedictorian.

  I’ll bet that is what next year is for—illicit drugs and sex abroad. Although I know Freddie and Evan already do it. I guess he talked about it in the locker room after practice, so everybody knows, but the idea totally grosses me out.

  I just don’t think Evan is cute, although that really doesn’t make sense since he is just a lankier version of Shane, who is just a younger version of Evan, who kind of looks like my dad, and Roger looks like them all but just a bit more pinched and trimmed. Merde.

  Valerie walks by my chair, a scuffed and scraped canvas tote bag heavy with books slung over one bony shoulder and the edge of her striped beach towel swiping along behind her on the deck. I can’t resist.

  I lean down, smiling fakely, my Lycra-covered boobs pressing warmly onto the tops of my knees as I ask, “Can I expect this pleasure every day?”

  “I bought a season pass,” she replies, slowing for a moment to grin back at me with a smile just as fake as mine, before she continues on, pulling at her beach towel in an ongoing struggle to drag it up onto her book-free shoulder and walk at the same time.

  Watching her go, the towel trailing over her shoulder like a terry-cloth boa, I lean back and think, Well, there goes her science fair money.

  Troy clicks on the office radio, and classic rock rolls across the surface of the pool, filling the spaces between the lazy splashes and soft laughter and the occasional odd remark from Valerie.

  “That man is absolutely rotund,” she says suddenly, to no one apparently, and I look over to see her examining a fat man waddling across the deck near the shallow end in a disturbingly tight madras suit.

  I can practically hear her bones grinding against the cement from way up here when she rolls onto her stomach, pulls a pink highlighter from between her front teeth, and watches a diver arc off the high dive.

  “Not a good angle,” she comments like an Olympic judge, lowering her eyes back down to her book.

  The diver is still underwater, making his way through the glowing water of the diving well, so I am guessing the ongoing dialogue is meant for me.

  When she calls out, “George Washington Carver was an excellent swimmer,” I have no doubt. She is trying to lead me astray educationally and drive me bat shit at the same time.

  I decide to ignore her completely. First because I don’t think her views regarding the swimming skills of the preeminent inventor of peanut agricultural science are true or in any way verifiable, but mostly because I think it should cost anyone, and especially her, way more than fifty-five dollars to get to torture me for the entire summer.

  At the stroke of nine, mostly everybody packs up and heads for the exits, weary and wet—everyone except for Valerie.

  She is attempting to wedge an entire library full of books, probably according to the Dewey decimal system, back into her bag and is temporarily rendered speechless by the effort.

  I am cleaning my side of the pool, stretching out as far as I can to reach the middle with the long-handled skimmer, straining for a bug or a Band-Aid or something that is floating just beyond my reach, when, from right behind me, Valerie asks, “So . . . Shane got a new car?”

  I jump and sink the bug or whatever it is to the murky depths. I look over my shoulder, struggling to see past the bright headlights as a car pulls right up onto the grassy slope next to the pool.

  It is a big, black
, shiny SUV, the kind with dark-tinted windows and those fancy rims that spin. I move toward the fence, dragging the skimmer behind me.

  The lights flash once. Twice. Off. I reach up to put the skimmer away, squinting into the deep darkness, and catch my finger in the skimmer latch. I inhale sharp and fast.

  “That’s not Shane,” I breathe as the driver’s door cracks open.

  “Hey, lifeguard.”

  He walks toward the pool, hair messy, a blue T-shirt that says RAY’S MIDTOWN CYCLES half tucked into faded jeans that are held up by a thick worn belt. His belt tweaks up at the end with a little leather curl instead of behaving and lying flat.

  “Hey, Porter.”

  He looks me up and down as he hooks his fingers into the fence just above his left shoulder and then says, “Nice whistle.”

  My pulse starts to race. I am vibrating. Like the little summer bugs circling the lamps above our heads, I know I am about to get burned, but I am still kind of looking forward to the sizzle.

  “Thanks,” I manage as the sound of a heavy canvas bag being hoisted onto a razor-sharp shoulder stops the buzzing in my brain and brings my attention back to Valerie.

  I try to ignore her, but I can feel her gaze burning into my back as she walks away, measuring, dissecting, parsing, syllabicating.

  Troy clicks the underwater lights off, and the smooth pool water goes dramatically dark.

  Porter leans away from the fence and stuffs his hands into his pockets.

  “Are you done here?” he asks.

  “I guess,” I say with a shrug.

  I can hear Troy behind me, digging around on the desk, swearing and shuffling newspapers and sign-in sheets with his burly man hands, searching for his keys, the way he does at the end of every night swim, so he can lock up.

  “Okay,” Porter says, and I don’t know what that means.

  Is it like, Okay, I’ll see you later, or Okay, I’ll wait, or Okay, I gotta go, ’cause my girlfriend is waiting in the car?

  “Okay,” I say.

  His smile slides open, and I feel his eyes following me as I walk away, my bare feet padding softly on the cement. I am glad that I am wearing this suit, glad that I can fill it out, and glad that I am not wearing a caftan and carrying a prehistoric book bag like Valerie.