A Curious Affair (22 page)

Anyway, after the others saw that I wasn’t laughing,
they seemed to get bored and laid off. I think
Maureen saw that I was the reason they stopped, and
that may be the reason she wanted to give me something
now. To say thanks. But a kiss? Why not a
Matchbox car or a neat marble she found on the way to
school? Anything but a kiss
.

“Steve, you can’t do it,” said Jimmy Satz, looking at
me like I had just been condemned to the gas chamber. I
returned a look that showed that I fully agreed, but
threw my hands out to show that I didn’t know how to
avoid it, not wanting to be a welcher. I did the mime act
because I couldn’t speak yet. Jimmy acknowledged my
dilemma with a nod, then got an excited look on his face
and blurted, “Maybe you can kiss her but be wearing
wax lips. I got a pair last Halloween.”

It seemed to me that Jimmy was onto something with
this advice. After all, using wax lips to kiss a girl made
sense the way that a drop drill makes sense. Drop drills
are something teachers make us practice once a week just
in case the Reds decide to drop the big one on us. They involve
dropping onto all fours, crawling under your desk,
and throwing your arms over your head to protect
yourself—and doing it all as quick as possible. And the
teachers always holler at the kids about keeping their
backs to the windows so flying glass doesn’t get poked into
their faces and eyes. Now, I view drop drills as a good
thing; after all, if the Reds are in such a hurry to bomb
my school, then I want to be ready for them. But I’ve always
wondered how good a wooden desk could really be at
protecting you from an explosion strong enough to knock
all the windows out in your school. Heck, the Pattersons,
who live three houses down from us, built a concrete and
cinder block bomb shelter in their side yard to protect
them from the big one. What chance did I have hunched
under a flimsy, wooden desk? And besides, wouldn’t there
be other bad stuff going on if the commies did try to
bomb our school? It seems to me that handing out guns
might be a better way to protect ourselves from attack
than learning how to climb under our desks fast. Anyway,
the point is that I was willing to hear Jimmy out,
but with what my dad calls reservations
.

“Okay, Jimmy, I like your idea,” I responded
.

“Aw nuts,” Jimmy interrupted before I had time to
urge him on. “I think I ate my wax lips last week,” he
explained. I was crushed by the news. After a short exchange,
round-
table fashion, I found that no one else
had a pair of wax lips and that this was the only plan
that made any kind of sense that anyone could think of
to avoid kissing Maureen. I hung my head in defeat
and despair
.

“You’re gonna get cooties,” said Henry Barnes, staring
up at me with eyes that always looked too big for his
head but now looked like they might pop right out.
Henry is a second-
grader, so technically he shouldn’t
speak directly to me. Instead, he should have given his
two cents to someone in the third grade, maybe fourth,
to be considered and then forwarded if it made sense.
However, realizing that this breach of command structure
probably had more to do with concern for my wellbeing
than a need to challenge tradition, I decided not
to give him a wedgie on the spot
.

By the way, a wedgie is what happens when someone,
usually someone a lot bigger and stronger than you,
reaches down the back of your pants, grabs your BVDs,
and gives them a yank. Depending on the seriousness of
the reason for the wedgie, it can be used as a mild reminder
or a major reprimand, actually lifting the target
clean off his feet or even tearing the underwear if
they’re an old, favorite, heavily worn pair. Depending
on the hygiene of the guy getting a wedgie, the wedgie
can cause a monster skid mark in the underwear that
Mom can’t even get out with Boraxo
.

One final note: It’s worth mentioning that no one
ever gives a girl a wedgie. I think this is either because
no one wants to put their hand down there since they’re
afraid of what they might find, or because girl’s panties
don’t work like guy’s underwear so that you couldn’t
give a girl a wedgie even if you wanted to
.

“There’s no such thing as cooties, numbnuts,” said
Randy Smith in reply. Randy was the member of our
group who was always coming up with neat new expressions
he heard from his two older brothers, Hiram
and Lenny. I had heard the numbnuts one before, and
although I knew what nuts were and what could make
them numb, I still wasn’t sure what accusing a kid of
having been kicked in the “family jewels”—another of
Randy’s expressions—had to do with anything
.

In any case, Randy had in a roundabout way supplied
support for my own feeling that cooties were like
Santa Claus: fun to believe in but a bunch of malarkey.
That word is a favorite of my dad’s
.

“He’s right,” I stated confidently. “There’s no such
thing as cooties.” And with that, I turned away further
discussion of the topic
…
only to be brought up short by
my second best friend, Billy Moony
.

“They do have The Siff,” Billy announced
.

All eyes turned his way. I knew I needed to regain
control of the conversation fast
.

“The Siff,” I said in disgust. “What’s that supposed
to be?”

Billy seemed hurt by my response, but had obviously
come prepared to defend his beliefs
.

“It’s something girls get on their lip from the toilet
seat,” he replied confidently
.

“How do you get something on your lip from a toilet
seat?” I asked
.

Billy looked a little uncomfortable about my challenge,
but then he explained
.

“My oldest brother told me he got The Siff from either
being with a girl or the toilet seat,” he began. I accepted
this as fact, but still felt like he had fallen short of a full
explanation. Apparently Billy was only beginning to outline
a string of well-
thought-
out facts because he soon
continued. “He told me that being with a girl means
kissing and stuff. So, he could have gotten The Siff off a
girl’s lip. Since girls don’t kiss girls, that means that girls
can only get The Siff from a toilet seat.”

It took a while to mull this over, but in the end I
couldn’t argue with the facts as he’d laid them out. Besides,
Billy always gets better grades in everything than
I do. Also, I could tell when Billy was lying, and this
time, he wasn’t lying
.

“So, how can you tell if a girl has The Siff?” I asked.
“I mean, what does it look like?”

“I’m not sure, but it’s supposed to itch and I think it
doesn’t smell very good,” Billy responded, throwing up
his hands to show that the well was now dry
.

“So, all you gotta do is watch to see if she scratches a
lot and pull back quick if she smells funny,” Johnny
Westbrook offered
.

“That’s no help,” Alex Bateman replied. “All girls
smell funny.”

With this, an argument broke out. I lost track of
what anyone was saying, but in the end was told that no
one had seen Maureen scratching at her face and I
should turn tail and run if I found out she smells worse
than Eddie Randle’s older sister’s bedroom—a place
Eddie and I sneak into to use her makeup to make realistic
war wounds on our G.I. Joes
.

It still didn’t make sense that a girl could get
something on her lip from a toilet seat, but then I remembered
the time in fourth grade when Jimmy Bolton
was thrown into the girl’s bathroom. Jimmy is the
smallest guy in our class and I guess it was just his bad
luck to be walking past Mike O’Reilly the day Mike
failed his math test. Mike hung out with a bunch of the
bad boys in his sixth-
grade class, and seeing Jimmy walk
by, they decided to work out some of their anger by grabbing
him and chucking him into the john. Jimmy stayed
in there a long time, at least long enough for the catcalls
to end and the sixth graders to get bored and wander off.
After he came out he seemed confused. I asked him what
happened and that’s when he told me: There are no urinals
in the girl’s restroom. Since they have to use the toilet
for everything, it seems to make sense that they are
doing some strange stuff in there. Thus, what ever
they’re doing may result in lip-
to-
toilet contact
.

At this point in the debate the bell rang, putting an
end to both recess and further discussion. Although I felt
that more information could only help, I was also pretty
glad to stop talking and head back to class, disappointed
that it took so little time to learn all that my pals knew
about both kissing and girls. So, I joined the stream of
kids marching back to their classrooms. Sitting down at
my desk, I was without a plan and running out of time.
But at least I would be running out of time slowly, since
this would prove to be the longest afternoon of my life
.

The hands on the clock across the room slowed to a
snail’s pace. School clocks don’t have second hands, probably
to keep kids in predicaments like mine from simply
watching the them go round while attempting to psychically
speed them up—like Dr. Strange in that comic
book. Time was definitely crawling
.

Mrs. Hanson began the afternoon with spelling. I
hate spelling, probably because I can’t spell. To hear Dad
talk about it, I would guess I inherited it from him
.

Of course, my favorite part of any school day is when
Mrs. Hanson reads to us from a book. We’re currently
doing
Charlotte’s Web,
which is kind of a girl’s book,
but pretty good anyway. It’s about a talented, loving spider
and a pig. I was excited to make it to the ending when
we got to hear about Charlotte, the spider, and Wilbur,
the pig, going off together to live happily ever after. Unfortunately,
I was going to have to wait two more days,
for Friday to arrive, before hearing the next installment
of the story. In the meantime, I had to endure spelling
along with waiting for the school day to end
.

I was glaring up at the clock, trying to psychically
will it back to its normal speed, when Mrs. Hanson
called on me.

“Stephen?” she asked, and from the tone of her voice
I could tell that she already knew I hadn’t been paying
attention
.

“Sorry, Mrs. Hanson,” I replied. “I wasn’t paying
attention and didn’t hear the question,” I confessed
.

Possibly due to the hangdog expression I was wearing,
but more probably due to the fact that she had already
caught word of my plans for this afternoon, Mrs.
Hanson decided to take pity on me rather than read me
the riot act
.

“That’s alright, Stephen,” she replied, flashing me a
really convincing concerned look of her own. Mrs.
Hanson could sometimes be unexpectedly kind. “It’s obvious
that you have important things on your mind. So,
we’ll move ahead to Joey Beckman,” she continued,
finding a new victim to drag from his daydreams into
her dreary world of words
.

Of course, being left out of the spelling and vocabulary
milieu—which proves that I’ve paid enough attention
to pick up some pretty big words along the
way—also left me to stew in my own juices. And boy,
did I stew. As I came to terms first with the fact that
I was indeed going to be kissing a girl in a little under
an hour, I then found that I needed to consider just how
to go about it. I mean, I didn’t want to come off like a
complete ignoramus in front of Maureen and who
knew how many other kids. As I started considering the
finer points of kissing—whether and where I should
touch her, how long to kiss her, whether to wet my lips
first, and if so how wet, and if not, what to do if our lips
stuck together—I felt my intestines seize up, and I wondered
if I would need to emerge from my comfy classroom
exile to beg permission to run to the bathroom
.

Uncoiling my legs from around the legs of my chair,
I was preparing for a potential dash when I noticed first
that I’d had my legs tightly coiled around the legs of my
chair, and second that my heart was racing like a stallion
running the Kentucky Derby. (Dad’s phrase again.)

I tried to steady my heart, but the more I tried I realized
I just wasn’t going to pull it off. I would never
have admitted this to another guy, but had to admit it
to myself—I was excited. I was curious about what it
would be like to kiss Maureen. I was scared that I
might not do it right. I had short fantasies of sweeping
Maureen into my arms like in the movies and then
leaving her yearning after me as I went off to war. I
wondered if she’d taste good, like candy, or bad, like
liver. In the end, I wondered if she’d like it or hit me in
the face after I was done
.