Evidence of Things Not Seen (8 page)

Then Tim hung his arm around her neck and went silent. This new development happened as soon as they left the prom and were walking back to his truck. It puzzled Izzy. Somehow he felt comfortable enough to put his arm, which felt like a dead lab animal, on her shoulders, but he couldn’t talk at the same time. Izzy dug up a stats-related question to see what would happen. Tim lifted his arm off her shoulder and started talking about free throws and percentages. Izzy nodded and listened until he stopped and then, plop. Arm on shoulder. What was going on? When they got to the truck, Izzy looked up and saw him glance at her, smile, and look away. An arena-sized LED banner scrolled across Izzy’s brain:
He wants to kiss me.
Izzy looked up one more time. Tim glanced at her and looked away. She could see beads of sweat on his nose. That’s when she knew she was responsible for the kiss, too. When Tim finally looked down, she gave him a kiss. Not a big one. Just lip to lip. But it sure changed things. All of sudden, Tim was smiling again. By the time they pulled up in front of her house, all Izzy had to do was look up and smile and then he kissed her. But she was in control of the talking, the looking up, and the kissing. It was like behavioral science.

“So what happened?” Alex asks.

“Not much. If I didn’t ask questions about sports, we didn’t talk.”

“Figures.”

Izzy hesitates a moment before she says, “I let him kiss me.”

Alex doesn’t say anything.

“It was okay.” Izzy wishes she could see his face better so she could tell what he’s thinking. She doesn’t know whether or not to tell him about her hypothesis or just test it. As a scientist, she knows telling him would foul the experiment. But considering where she got the idea—the girls in regular physics—maybe she should run it by him first.

“Are you still a virgin, Alex?”

“Umm, Izzy? Why are you asking?”

“Because I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole virginity thing.”

“Huh?”

“You know, losing your virginity. Doing it with someone.”

“Did you do it with Tim?”

Izzy laughs, surprised that Alex asked. “No way.”

This conversation isn’t going the way Izzy wants it to. Maybe Alex isn’t as easy to manipulate as Tim. Maybe the blind approach is best.

“You like me, right, Alex?”

“Uhh, yeah.”

“As a friend, right?

“Yeah…”

“Have you ever thought about kissing me?”

“Umm, maybe. Sometimes. Yeah.”

Izzy hesitates. Should she ask or not? “I was wondering if you would kiss me.”

“What?”

Izzy can’t believe it. Asking isn’t working either. What is the problem? Izzy turns around on the hood of the car and faces Alex.

Alex sits up a little. “Here?”

“Yeah, here.” Izzy leans into Alex and puts her lips on his. She presses into him a little. He doesn’t budge. “Are you okay?”

“Iz, this is weird.”

Izzy leans toward Alex again, not pressing against him but stopping a half a millimeter from his lips. This time, he kisses her back. His tongue touches the edges of her lips. Izzy smells peppermint soap on his skin. Or is it peppermint toothpaste? She opens her eyes. His are closed. She can’t guess what he’s thinking but from the way his tongue is working inside her mouth, he seems to be into the kiss. Izzy reaches over and puts her hand on top of the hard knot in the crotch of his pants. Alex flinches and stops kissing her.

“Izzy, what the hell?”

Izzy presses her lips into Alex’s again and strokes him through his jeans.

“Jesus, Iz.” Alex relaxes back against the windshield. Izzy leans above him. As they kiss, she unbuttons his fly.

“Izzy…” Alex tries to sit up but Izzy keeps kissing him and reaches inside his jeans. Alex leans back again. He lifts his hips slightly and slides his pants down a little. Izzy wants to look and see the thing she is touching but Alex’s tongue is deep inside her mouth. Tim’s kiss hadn’t felt like this. His tongue barely went past her teeth. Alex’s tongue is probing and insistent. And soft. Izzy notices how Alex’s penis is as hard as his tongue is soft.

Izzy lifts her skirt up and straddles him. Still kissing, she presses herself on top of him. On impulse, she kisses Alex’s neck below his ear. She hears him groan a little and her name slip out in a kind of sigh. His back seems to arch as he pulls Izzy closer to him. For a split second, she wants to ask why kissing him in this exact spot makes all those things happen but she doesn’t. Instead, she reaches between her legs. When she touches his penis again, it stiffens more, bucking a little in her hand. She hears Alex suck in his breath.
Is that good?
She doesn’t know.

She also doesn’t know how she is going to get the condom out of the pocket of her skirt and onto his penis. She hadn’t anticipated how she would navigate this part. Putting a condom on seems like one big delay. Maybe she can put his penis inside her a little bit and that would count.

With one hand, she points his penis up between her legs. With her other hand, she moves the crotch of her underwear aside. This has to be like those tampon diagrams. She pushes herself down onto him, daring herself not to flinch even though it hurts and pinches all the way in. Alex isn’t moving. Izzy sits up a little and tries to see Alex’s face but the dim light from the moon is behind her and she is casting a darker shadow across Alex’s face. She leans forward and tries to kiss him but his lips don’t open. She raises her hips up and tries to move up and down but she can’t. It hurts. This isn’t going the way she thought it would. Alex isn’t into it like she thought he would be. His whole body seems kind of rigid. She doesn’t know what to do. Alex is supposed to like doing it, the way Tim had liked kissing her. Maybe she should try kissing him again. He seemed to like that a minute ago. She leans toward him and tries to kiss his neck. He flinches and jerks away from her a little.

“Alex, I want to do it.”

“Izzy, get off me.”

“But Al, let me explain’

“Izzy. Get. Off. Me.”

His voice pushes her off him. As soon as Izzy sits on the hood of the car, Alex slides off and stands with his back to her. It looks like he is buttoning up his pants.

He’s breathing hard. She doesn’t know what to say. Saying something might make him walk away. What had gone wrong?

The girls she tutored made it sound like all guys want to do it. They said that as soon as you kissed a guy, he wanted to do it. That’s why the girls were so stressed out about their virginity. If guys want to do it all the time, girls need to figure out when to lose it, who to lose it with, where to lose it, and what age is the right age. Losing one’s virginity seemed like this nerve-wracking, big deal.

Which made her wonder, after her experiment with Tim, if she could control when she lost her virginity. What if she made it
not
such a huge deal? What if she did it with Alex, her best guy friend? It should have worked. If all guys want to do it, it should have worked. Only the way Alex reacted, it seemed like the experiment had gone way wrong.

She slides off the hood and stands next to Alex. “Al?” He doesn’t look at her or say anything. At least he doesn’t walk away.

“Alex, what’s the matter?”

Silence.

“Alex, I’ll apologize but you need to tell me what I did wrong.”

“Jesus Christ, Izzy. You really don’t know, do you?” Alex turns and faces her. Izzy can’t read him. He sounds mad but the night shadows are mottling his face so it looked like a mask is covering it.

“No. I mean, I told you I wanted to do it.”

“But I didn’t!”

Alex’s voice slaps Izzy. She can’t think. Her brain is scrambling, trying to find the right answer. It feels like she flunked the final. She had that sick “I’m going to fail” feeling in her stomach.

“Izzy, replay that whole scene. Only this time, I’m forcing myself on
you
.”

“But, Alex, I was trying to lose my virginity with my friend.”

“What the hell?”

Alex’s question gives Izzy an opening. “It was that date with Tim. He wanted to kiss me but he was nervous. So I kissed him and then he wasn’t nervous. I thought I could do the same thing with my virginity. You know, not have it hanging over me. You know, like how people stress out about the right time and the right person and the right everything.” Izzy can hear herself babbling. She sounds desperate. And stupid. As stupid as all those girls talking about their virginity.

“You wanted to lose your virginity so you’d be less nervous about having sex?”

It sounds so selfish the way Alex says it. That isn’t how she meant it. It’s like he’s sneering at her. More than anything, she wants him to understand. “I thought if I lost my virginity in a controlled environment with my friend, then I would be less nervous and be able to make a clearer decision when I wanted to make love with someone else. In the future.” Izzy wills herself to keep standing there. She knows her friend Alex would think about this hypothesis. But this person standing in front of her doesn’t sound like Alex. He sounds mean and angry. He sounds like someone who doesn’t like her.

“So you fucked me to lose your virginity.” His voice is sharp. It echoes in the silence.

“But that’s not what I…” Izzy fumbles, trying to find the words that will explain.

“That’s not what you meant?”

Izzy can hear the sarcasm in Alex’s voice. She wants to get her friend Alex back. “I’m sorry, Alex. I thought that you would want to.”

“Because I’m a guy? Because my dick is erect? Geezus, Iz, for being one of the smartest girls at Fred High, you are really stupid.”

“Ouch.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did that hurt you?”

“Alex … please…”

“What, Iz? What do you want now? You want me to understand your hypothesis and be okay with it? You want to discuss it? Do you want to call me after you made love to some guy and tell me the results of your hypothesis? You know, you can let me know if you were less nervous the second time. Oh wait, you won’t need to, because now I can have sex without worrying about losing
my
virginity.”

Izzy had never heard Alex sound this mad. Every word felt like a push. A slap. Usually their arguments were competitions, like who was better at computer games (Alex) or logic puzzles (Izzy) or sports (Neither). Izzy couldn’t remember a time when one of them wasn’t elbowing the other to share something mind-blowingly cool or gross or stupid. They’d had one awkward time in middle school when Alex said he had a crush on someone but wouldn’t tell her who. Izzy remembered she got so mad at being kept in the dark that she didn’t speak to him for weeks. Somehow, they started talking again. Izzy couldn’t remember how. She never asked him who he had a crush on. She was just glad the fight was over and they could be friends again.

In a way, Izzy feels that same mad, desperate feeling she felt in middle school when Alex wouldn’t tell her what she wanted to know. He is so stubborn sometimes. Why can’t he understand what she is trying to do? It had all been so simple when she’d thought of it. Nervousness before a first kiss? Get it over with and then the next kiss isn’t such a big deal. Worried about your virginity? Have sex with a friend so the whole virginity issue isn’t a factor when you decide to have sex with someone. Maybe she set it up wrong. She wants to turn him around and explain it again to him. But touching him, even his arm, seems like a really bad idea. She knows better than to defend herself. That will make him madder. All she can do is stand there and take it.

“I’m sorry, Alex. Maybe I should have changed the experiment so that you knew what I was trying to prove. Maybe I should have factored you in.”

“Ya think? Or maybe you shouldn’t have done it.”

Alex’s words make Izzy back up onto the hood of the car. Now what? She’d explained. She’d apologized. She’d said she did the experiment wrong. There was nothing else on the checklist of fixing a problem.

“Where did I go wrong, Alex?”

He turns away from her.

“Please. I don’t understand.”

Izzy thinks she hears him sigh. She isn’t sure if it’s an irritated sigh or a ready-to-give-in sigh.

“Iz, you’re
supposed
to feel nervous when you kiss someone.”

Izzy feels a “but” ready to pop out of her mouth. She stops it from coming out.

“You’re supposed to feel out of control when you let someone kiss you. And then you’re supposed to let go and trust that person.”

It’s like she’s in a class where the teacher is explaining something for the fifth time and everyone else understands but her. “I don’t get it.”

Alex turns and faces her. “You really don’t, do you?”

“No.” Izzy hates admitting that. She likes being in the driver’s seat. She likes feeling like she figured it all out. She doesn’t like standing in front of Alex feeling more exposed than she was on the hood of her car. “Explain it to me again.”

Alex leans down and kisses her. His arms reach behind her. She feels him pull her up and into him. His lips are soft. Izzy can’t keep from wondering why he is kissing her, when he stops. She knows the kiss is meant to be the explanation but she doesn’t get it.

Izzy looks up at Alex. His fingers thread her hair and then trace the side of her face. The way he smiles reminds her of the way Tim looked at her. But that isn’t who Alex is to her, right? She wants to land someplace certain. That’s how she likes her life to be. But right now, the only certainty is that she is standing in the Stillwell pull-out, about twelve miles outside of town. That’s it. She isn’t sure Alex is her friend anymore. “Please. Explain it to me again.”

“I can’t, Iz.”

“But everything can be explained.”

“Maybe. Maybe even this can. But I don’t want to map it out with charts and graphs for you. I like the nervous feelings. I like feeling tipped upside down inside when I’m kissing someone special.” Alex shrugs his shoulders like he doesn’t care if he convinces her. Then he turns and walks in between a cedar and a mesquite tree at the edge of the pull-out.

The way he disappears made Izzy think of Tommy. The way he used to vanish at the end of class. The way he was gone one day and now no one can find him. A lot of kids at school are saying that because no one had found his body, Tommy must have figured out a way to step into another dimension. Izzy wonders if going into another dimension looks like Alex walking through those trees. Is that really possible? Of course, it’s possible. If you can lose a best guy friend in one night, anything is possible.