Kiss Crush Collide

by Christina Meredith

  She waits for an answer, as if I could somehow forget to wear a bra to my sister’s wedding rehearsal. I haven’t been out of the house without these things strapped in and hoisted since I was twelve years old. She knows that.

  I lean my hip against the counter, cross my arms, and breathe, “Yes.”

  “I want to be sure. We can’t overlook anything.”

  She digs through the entire bag again, down to the bottom.

  “I can’t believe you have to work today, of all days. You and your father,” she huffs, flustered.

  My dad is at work today, too. He left early this morning, having filled his travel mug full of hot coffee and driven off in his dew-covered truck well before the wedding insanity began.

  “And you told them about the rehearsal?”

  My mother seems to think there is a big corporation running the public pool, not just Troy and his clipboard.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?” She pauses again and raises her perfectly penciled brows, questioning the contents of my bag one last time as her fingers hover over the zipper, afraid to pull it shut and zip up her last chance to fret and worry.

  Believe it or not, I have packed a bag before.

  “Yes, it’s all right there,” I say with a confident nod.

  She finally zips it shut, and I pull the polished round bamboo handles from her grip and hook them over my arm.

  “I am putting the bag into your trunk on the right side, near your golf clubs, and hanging the dress, in the plastic bag, in the back on the passenger’s side,” I say, reciting the directions back to her exactly as they were dictated to me when she found me fifteen minutes ago standing in the kitchen and realized that she was on the hook to give me a ride to the pool for my afternoon shift.

  “And don’t, for any reason, get your hair wet.” My mother hovers behind me as we walk across the foyer to the front door, car keys jangling from her fingers, the quilted bag over my arm, backpack over my other shoulder, dress, in the bag, swinging from my fingertips.

  “Even if somebody drowns!” Yorke yells over her shoulder as she disappears up the stairs behind us with rollers the size of soup cans in her hair. I pull the door shut on her with a bang.

  “I just don’t know if this lifeguarding thing was the best decision for you,” my mother says as she bears down on the gas, hooking into the park with a sharp right. She looks over at me, eyes completely unreadable under her dark Jackie O glasses. “I don’t know what you and your father were thinking.”

  I grip the seat, bracing myself for the descent downhill, knowing no reply is necessary. My mother is not the most attentive driver in the best of situations, but one day before her first daughter’s wedding? Forget about it. We are a white gold blur, whizzing past ten-speeds and strollers and dogs on the run.

  “Did you talk to Shane today?” she asks.

  “No.” I sigh.

  I know what she wants. I can feel her pressing down on me all the time. The nonstop pro-Shane propaganda is not really necessary.

  She wants me to put on my pink blinders and follow the path that she has planned for me. She wants me to pretend I didn’t see all those things and do all those things and feel all those things I felt with Duffy. Sometimes I wish I could. It would be so much easier.

  “His tux should be ready,” my mother says, her sharp tone competing with the bing, bing, bing of her turn signal. “Remind him to pick it up early tomorrow. Did you remember his corsage? Did Roger get him a gift?”

  The questions pop in my direction like maternal machine-gun fire as she revs the engine and makes the final turn into the pool parking lot, angling randomly across four spots, scattering a gang of big boys on tiny bikes. They roll away like Skittles, glaring at us from under the brims of their baseball caps.

  I push at the door.

  “He may only be an usher,” she continues, “but he is part of the wedding party after all. He’ll sit next to you at the head table. It only makes sense.”

  I grab my bag and get out of the car.

  “Someone will pick you up.” My mother waves at me, not waiting for my response. She is already turning the car away, driving off, flipping her cell phone open as she zigs away.

  I glance through the links of fence on my way toward the pool, hoping for a light crowd, an easy afternoon, and maybe even a chance that Duffy might be somewhere on the shady side, resting on some hood, waiting for me.

  No such luck.

  Most of the middle school is milling around outside the fence. Towels draped around their necks like prizefighters, they wait for the gates to swing open.

  Heat shimmers, waves of it rising off the empty concrete deck as I grip my bag up against me and swim against the Coppertone-scented tide, pausing on my way past the kiddie pool to let two little girls with water running in little rivers down their backs pick their barefooted way across the blacktop path in front of me.

  They pass by carefully, balancing on their tippy toes while I push past a knot of boys in board shorts with sporadically hairy upper lips. So totally thirteen. I can feel their eyes trailing me as I sneak in the side door marked STAFF ONLY in stenciled spray paint.

  It’s so different to be here during the day after working a calm, quiet night shift. The water glares at me in the afternoon sun, blinding and bright. White caulk fills the cracks on the deck. It oozes up, warm and soft, like marshmallow filling in a concrete Pop-Tart.

  Valerie is outside the gate, her skinny legs poking through the slit in a saffron sarong that could almost be in style if it didn’t look like it came straight from the Goodwill.

  She is sitting with her usual perfect posture, her legs crossed at the ankles. She looks expectant, but not in a Yorke kind of way. I watch her licking at a melting Drumstick, the paper wrapper, next to her on the concrete, neatly folded like origami, and I am struck by her stillness. She looks almost beautiful from here, in a bony, brown-haired, bookish kind of way.

  Watching the clock over the office doorway, I swing myself into my chair. It is the exact same clock that hangs next to the flag in each and every classroom in my school.

  I sit and stare at it ticking for a few seconds, enjoying the irony that this same clock is the one we stare at desperately for three seasons of the year. All day from eight to three, we will it to tick faster and run down the school day as quickly as possible. Here it silently steals summer away in splashes and seconds.

  It clicks to one o’clock.

  Then Troy blows the whistle, long and hard, and unleashes the frenzy. Valerie walks in, three minutes later, with her blanket and overworked tote bag, and settles in next to me. I watch her spread out, and my equilibrium, temporarily shaken last night with her unexpected absence, returns to normal.

  “You know Mr. Ridley?” Valerie asks out of the blue sometime that afternoon. She stops reading and props open the encyclopedia she is skimming.

  Her sunglasses—not the cat-eye ones from before, these are rounder—perch on the end of her nose. She looks over the top of them to see if she has my attention.

  “The one with the Porsche?” she prompts.

  Oh, yes, I know that Porsche.

  “Yeah?” I ask, my eyes on the clock again, wondering where this is going.

  “Well, it seems that Mr. Ridley was working out at the gym at the club, your club, you know, lifting weights, doing lifts or dead squats or whatever they’re called.”

  Dead lifts. Shane does them for football.

  “What are you talking about?” is right there, rudely on the tip of my tongue, but I stop myself.

  “Well,” she pauses dramatically. “The whole front of that gym is glass, a huge window, you know.” She looks at me, and I nod. “So, Mr. Ridley is lifting,” she pantomimes lifting a heavy bar over her head, her arms actually straining under the imaginary weight, “when all of a sudden, right in front of him, you know how it is,” she pauses again, “his Porsche goes squealing by. And he’s not in it.”

  “Oh, no.�
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  “Oh, yes. It just drives off. Racing toward the lake. Good-bye,” she says, squinting and waving into the distance.

  She leans back against the fence, and I wait for her to adjust herself. When she’s sure she’s comfortable, obviously enjoying my frustrated interest, she continues.

  “And the whole time the Porsche is driving away, it’s supposed to be in the back lot at the club getting washed and detailed, but somehow it’s absolutely roaring down the lake road.” She scoots herself forward. “Or so I heard.”

  I imagine the Porsche, the spoiler lifting as it gains speed, popping over the little hills that dot the golf course.

  “So what happened?”

  “Oh,” she says, her voice muffled as she tucks her head under her arm and reaches over to grab the book she was reading when she started the story, “he dropped the weights.” Looking down, she continues. “Heard he broke his toe.” She drops the heavy book into her bag with a thick thud. “Threatened to sue the club.”

  Troy taps at his watch, looking over his shoulder to be sure the clock on the wall is right. It’s 4:59. He looks around at every chair, catching the attention of each lifeguard with a small lift of his chin, and I stand, distractedly, wanting Valerie to finish the story before the commotion of closing time begins. I know that she is toying with me, that she knows what I want to know.

  “And?” I ask urgently.

  “Oh, and Jon Duffy got busted,” she says, stopping her book packing long enough to make annoying air quotes around the word “busted.”

  Troy blasts his whistle and catches me completely by surprise. I try to exhale, but all my air is gone, my lungs empty as my head fills with the tinny shrill of the pool at closing time. My whistle drops from my lips.

  Valerie walks over to me and slings her bag at the base of my chair. It knocks up against the metal leg with a clunk. I look at her, my eyes glazed, unable to focus.

  I know in my heart that Valerie is trying to redeem herself. It’s in the way she leans forward, looking up at me beseechingly, talking urgently and as privately as possible in this public place as the crowd mills around us, shouting and waving to one another, making plans and saying good-byes.

  “So,” she continues, resting her elbow on the platform near my ankles, “Big Duff worked a deal. Jon Duffy can still park cars at the club, but he can drive them no farther than the painted lines at the edge of the lot.”

  She rises up onto her tippy toes, motioning me to come closer.

  She whispers into my ear, “I’m sure he doesn’t like to talk about it.” She settles back on her heels and says, “But he’s probably grounded for the rest of his life.”

  My brain is buzzing. Reeling. I sit back down stunned. God, do you know what this means? He didn’t disappear. I didn’t get dumped. He just drove off in the wrong car.

  I look over at Valerie, realization dawning in my eyes.

  She smiles up at me, then reaches down to grab her bag.

  She pauses. Breathes in.

  “Are you going to get him back?” she asks shyly, and I realize that she is not being petty or vindictive.

  She is being genuine and true, and unlike everybody else in my life, the ones who think they know exactly what they are going to get, Valerie might actually expect something more from me. She’s raising the bar.

  “I’m gonna try,” I say, and she smiles at me, bold and bright.

  The fence shakes behind me, jarring me back to the present tense.

  “You call this a job?” Yorke’s voice chides, and I jump, twisting in my chair, surprised to find both my sisters, overdressed for almost any occasion in short summer dresses and high-heeled sandals, standing on the worn grass under the smokers’ tree.

  I scramble down from my chair to face them, and Valerie scurries out of the way, like a bug. She hovers about three feet away but doesn’t leave.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” I say to Yorke.

  “Neither can I,” she replies coolly, lifting her sunglasses to stare at Valerie, giving her the look of death.

  Valerie stammers without saying a word and stoops to pick up her stuff. She crosses between me and Yorke and Freddie with her eyes locked on mine. I stand stock-still and watch her go, silently trying to stop her.

  I am torn, hating and loving Valerie, desperate to chase after her and dig for details, and dying to get away, to ditch my sisters and find Duffy. She can’t just drop a bombshell like that and then walk away. I can’t decide if I want to vomit or knock her teeth out.

  “I had to get out of the house,” Yorke says, her eyes following Valerie. “Roger is driving me insane.” She looks over at me with a pained look on her face. “Literally insane.”

  “Or figuratively,” Freddie adds. “What was that all about?”

  “What is she all about?” Yorke sniffs with a flick of her long blond hair. Valerie’s shoulders crawl up around her ears protectively, and she stops, hunched, and gives the three of us one last look before disappearing into the girls’ dressing room.

  I don’t answer.

  I am ashamed that my sisters see only the worn swimsuit and the bony shoulders, the wrong color toenail polish and the less than perfect smile. They don’t notice that her slight overbite hides an awesome laugh and that Valerie’s brain might be even bigger than Freddie’s.

  I start to unwind the heavy green hose from the fence.

  Yorke rolls her wide eyes and asks impatiently, “Can we go?”

  “You’re early,” I say, with a nod toward the clock hanging over the office. A little gurgle of warm water leaks from the tip of the hose. “I’ve still got work to do.”

  Yorke cocks her hip and crosses her arms. Her toe taps up a little puff of dust. She is evidently displeased with the idea of waiting.

  “Is that your boss?” Freddie asks, lifting her chin toward Troy and the office.

  I nod, looking at the sign propped in the corner of the office window that says WE DON’T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET. DON’T PEE IN OUR POOL.

  “Whoever he is, he’d better not make me late,” Yorke says, acting like she doesn’t even know Troy, like that one year of college she’s got under her belt somehow wiped her memory clean.

  It’s tragic, since Troy and Yorke were in the same class. They probably napped next to each other in kindergarten or shared a knuckle-bending slow dance in the middle school gymnasium. Probably passed each other in the halls every day.

  Yorke and Freddie do not acknowledge his presence in any way. My sisters stand shoulder to shoulder on the far side of the fence, watching him from a distance, their designer sunglasses not quite large enough or dark enough to hide their indifference.

  “Just go,” I say, the heavy hose drooping in my hand, the weight of the words I wish I could say sitting like lead in my mouth.

  Freddie backs away, her face surprised.

  “Fine,” Yorke says, with a dramatic shove from the fence. “You can find your own way for once.”

  “Fine,” I say, bolder than she is for the first time, breathing deep, full of myself, till they do turn and walk away. With a trailing wave from Freddie, I feel my shoulders start to shake.

  “I got it. I got it.”

  Troy’s bare feet are slapping toward me. He looks troubled, something I didn’t know he knew how to be.

  “I got it,” he says again as he jogs up next to me and takes the hose from my hand.

  I think maybe this is the only thing he can think of to say, that maybe his brain is stuck on repeat, that he is stunned senseless by the sight of me tearing up.

  We both stop and stare at Yorke’s car rolling off down the road. He must have seen the whole thing.

  I walk over to my chair to collect my stuff, shaking my head because I don’t know what he thinks of me. Well, actually I do. He thinks I am just like them.

  “Thanks, Troy,” I finally stumble and say.

  He smiles, and I feel slightly forgiven as the cool spray from his hose dances across my toes as I go.r />
  “Will you help me?”

  The car door is already swinging shut when I catch up with her. I stand, alone in the grass, knowing that the girl who has spent the summer trying to trump me is the only one I can trust.

  She turns and asks, “Help you try?”

  I nod.

  Her eyes light up, and I open the passenger door open and slide into a worn bucket seat.

  “What exactly did you have in mind?” Valerie asks as she rattles the engine to life.

  “Find Duffy,” I say, staring straight ahead as we rumble out onto the street. It’s that simple.

  “A quest,” Valerie says excitedly, grinding the gears.

  I can live with that.

  “I have things to say,” I explain.

  “You will not just be noble in thought but in action.” Valerie lays it on thick as we leave the park.

  Sure, I think, trying to see past the petrified bug remains on the windshield. But she’s right.

  We try the minimart first, then the Gas n Go, followed by Fosdal’s bakery on Main Street, basically any place that sparkles with sugar, spots that Duffy frequents for sweet fixes and gallons of juice. At the corner I consider trying the auto parts store, knowing it is a stretch, but my knowledge of his life outside the confines of a car is pretty limited.

  “What are we looking for?” Valerie asks, her eyes scanning the street.

  The light changes. I realize we have it all wrong. There is only one place he can be.

  “Head for the club,” I say, certain, as Valerie floors it and we head for the highway.

  Valerie’s VW shakes and shimmies at anything over sixty. You can’t hear the radio or the road or the books dancing on the backseat, only squeaks and metal and the engine bearing down.

  “Is this top speed?” I ask, watching the gearshift wiggle between us.

  “It is the people’s car,” Valerie answers haughtily as she turns onto the lake road.

  “Well, tell the people to step on it,” I say, ignoring the buzz of my phone for the five hundredth time. My sisters have obviously made it to the church, and my mother is in panic mode.

  The parking lot at the club is pretty empty. A few cars sit in the sun, but it’s too late for a good tee time and too early yet for dinner.