Kiss Me Again (2 page)

I said, “Yeah.” She had obviously forgotten who I was, despite all the mergers-and-acquisitions photos with both families the day before. “What a house.”

She smiled even bigger, but just with her mouth. Her forehead and eyes didn’t move one millimeter. “Well, I’ll check upstairs. Are you a friend of Kevin’s?”

“Um,” I said, since I wasn’t sure I had a good answer to that one, either.

“Charlie!” Mom yelled from the kitchen.

“That woman keeps screaming,” the skinny grandma whispered on her way up my stairs. “Poor Joe. Well, his own fault. Made his bed.”

“Didn’t we all,” I answered, hoping I had in fact remembered to make my bed, or at least close my door.

“Charlie!” Mom screamed.

When I got to the kitchen, Mom was standing at the counter, dental smiling—like the pictures after your braces come off, where you show all your teeth but no humor.

“Hi,” I offered. “Nice party.”

“Who are all these people?” she muttered.

I looked out at the deck, which was packed, and then toward the driveway, which was full of cars, mostly SUVs.

“Your friends?”

“Ha,” she said. “My friends have never been on time to anything, never mind early. ‘A few people,’ he said.”

Kevin’s father had come up behind my mother. He mimed
Shhh
to me, and bent down to kiss my mother’s neck, melting the tension there into taffy.

“Who are all these people?” he whispered, and she laughed, a more rumbling, low, and, honestly—as gross as this is—
sexy
new laugh, in response. My armpits burst into a sweat attack.

“We’re out of coffee already,” my mother whispered up at her new husband. It sounded like some sort of inside joke, some coded thing all cool and private between them, rather than like a grocery issue.

“Hey, Joe!” a guy called. He looked like a bald, muscle-bound version of Joe, leaning in from the deck with Joe’s expression mirrored on his face. “Is there more coffee? We’re empty back here....”

“Working on it, Bill,” Joe said.

“Uncle Bill?” I confirmed with Samantha, who was leaning against the counter, watching me with her intense, unblinking eyes.

“My father’s brother,” Samantha whispered. She was chewing her cuticles. “He’s a caffeine addict.” Her eyes widened, as if she were saying he was a heroin addict.

“Ah,” I said. “Watch out for Uncle Bill. Any of your friends here?”

Samantha shook her head, her pale face serious. “Besides my Betta fish, I only really have one, and he moved to Japan last year.”

“Oh, that sucks,” I said.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “It does.” A hint of a smile twitched her mouth. She was wearing a long black skirt and a lacy-collared shirt, with a zip-up greenish hoodie sweatshirt over it, and tube socks with black suede Merrells. I smiled back at her.

Meanwhile, my mother’s head was tipped back onto Joe’s shoulder, and they were smiling full out at each other, like isn’t this the most romantic and private secluded beach honeymoon ever?

Joe said, “Kevin,” without moving his eyes from my mother’s. I half expected her to say,
Huh? What? My name is Elizabeth, not Kevin! There has been a horrible mistake—let us annul immediately!
But my witty mom had morphed into a romance caricature, so she just smiled dreamily. I suppressed a retch.

Kevin had a croissant, nabbed from the still-Saran-Wrapped tray, halfway into his mouth as his eyes flicked up to his father at the mention of his name. “Hmgh?” he responded, and a flurry of croissant snow-crumbs confettied out in front of his face like a blizzard.

Samantha and I both started laughing at that, which made Kevin choke a bit. That just got us laughing more.

“Kevin,” Joe tried again. “Can you go get more coffee? Here’s forty bucks—get two of those box things from Cuppa, okay? And bring me change. Take my bike.”

“I hate your bike,” Kevin said, grabbing the cash and shoving it into his pocket.

“It has a basket.”

“That’s why I hate it,” he said.

Mom gave me a look. “Charlie can go with you,” she offered.

“Mom!”

“Come on, Charlie,” Kevin said. “Keep the change, you said, right?”

“Ahhh, no!” his father called after him, but he was laughing, so I couldn’t be sure if he meant it or not.

I grabbed my bag off the hook and followed Kevin down the stairs through the basement, grumbling, “How did I get roped into this?”

“Please tell me you wouldn’t rather stay here with all my relatives,” he said, opening the door to the garage.

I hesitated.

“What?” he demanded.

“I’m thinking about it.”

He gave me a wicked grin and turned away. “Where’s your bike?”

“In the shop,” I lied, because I didn’t feel like going around back to jiggle it out of the shed. “Also, I’m wearing a dress.”

“I noticed.”

When normal people blush, their cheeks pink up a bit. My whole head lit up like a red version of Violet Beauregarde’s, midmetamorphosis into a blueberry. I could feel it heating up the garage.
He noticed
.
He noticed my dress. He noticed I’m wearing it.

I tried to talk my head into chilling by explaining to it that he had only meant that he noticed I was wearing a dress, no big deal—he hadn’t, for instance, added that I looked hot in it or anything. There was truly no need for my head to go all aflame over such a thing. The fact that I was wearing a dress was not that huge a mystery to have uncovered.

“Do you want to take Samantha’s bike?” he asked. “It might be a little small for you....”

“Whatever,” I said, trying to not look too hulkingly large, in case that was his point there.

“Take mine,” he said. “I’ll ride my dad’s basket-case bike.” He grabbed his father’s blue, basket-bearing bike and headed toward the open garage door.

We stood side by side, clicking the buckles of our helmets under our chins.

“Ready?” he asked. He had already put one foot on a pedal and was zooming down the driveway with his other leg up in the air and then somehow over the seat, onto the other pedal, before he got to the bottom of the hill. “Come on, Charlie!” he called back to me.

My cell phone buzzed inside my bag. It was George, texting that he was sorry, he’d be a little late to the party but would be there as soon as he could. I texted him back not to rush, because I was heading out to Cuppa to buy more coffee for the caffeine fiends. I didn’t mention that I was riding bikes there with Kevin, who was waiting for me down by the big evergreen at the bottom of the driveway.

I shoved my phone back into my bag without waiting for a response and slung the strap over my head, across my body. Then I gripped the handlebars and rode down the hill, toward the empty, quiet street and Kevin and everything else that was ahead.

KEVIN CHAINED THE
two bikes to the bike rack together outside of Cuppa.

“Hey,” he said when I started on shaking legs toward the door. I turned around to see what was up.

As a response, he touched my elbow.

“Kevin,” I answered, my eyes darting around. “What are you—”

“Chuck,” he whispered.

We were in public. Anybody could see us.

He smiled at me. “That was fun, last night.”

“Yeah, well, now it’s today.”

“I know,” he whispered. His fingers had dropped from my elbow, but he took a step closer to me. “But after we kissed, last night, I—”

“We shouldn’t have. We can’t. Ever.” I turned away and walked toward Cuppa.

“Because of George?”

“Yeah. And also, everything …”

His right shoulder shrugged microscopically as he looked past me to the window of Cuppa. “They need help.”

“What?” I turned and saw the
HELP WANTED
sign. “Oh. Well, don’t we all.”

“All what?”

“Want help,” I said.

He smiled at that. My heart cramped up. Damn.

“Maybe I should try for the job.”

“Don’t you have to be older?” he asked.

I yanked the door open, wondering what it would be like to be older, cooler, working at Cuppa, knowing by then how to manage all my tumbling, tumultuous, unruly emotions.

The lady behind the counter was beautiful, like someone who had just come to life out of a painting—all cascading, reddish curls and pale skin, green eyes twinkling as she watched us approach.

“We need two boxes of coffee,” Kevin said.

“Pretty thirsty,” the lady guessed. “For here?”

“No, to go,” Kevin explained.

“Okay,” she said, and smiled. There was a small silver ring through her tongue. “You sure?”

“Oh,” Kevin said. “Right. You knew that.”

“I’ve been in the business awhile.”

“You’re just like Charlie,” he said to the lady. “Two beats ahead of me at all times.”

“We girls can’t always slow down to boy speed. Hurts our engines.” She winked at me. “Right, Charlie?”

“I thought we were gonna drink it here,” I said.

Kevin’s fingers touched my back, between my shoulder blades. A shiver radiated up and down my body from that point, like ripples on a pond from a dropped pebble—or glass hit by a thrown stone.

The tongue-pierced lady watched us while that was going on, while I tried to hide the shiver and keep my face blank and unreadable. I’m not sure I succeeded, because she tilted her head slightly at me, the way cats do when yarn jiggles near their faces, then turned her back to us, to fill up two big boxes with coffee.

I forced myself to take a deep breath and step forward, away from Kevin’s lingering fingers.
Stop thinking about him! Focus. Where the hell even was I?

I hadn’t been inside Cuppa for almost three years, since Tess and I discovered it is apparently not a place for middle schoolers or even ninth graders unless you were extraordinarily cool. We were taught that fact by Tess’s older sister, Lena, who had been interrupted from making out with her boyfriend in one of the two back booths. By us. She explained the rules of Cuppa while she escorted us out the door sideways, by our ponytails.

Tess and I could hardly stand up after Lena stormed back in, we were laughing so hard. We ended up holding on to each other with tears bubbling up in our eyes out there on the sidewalk.

“She
evicted us
!” Tess said.

“Like a couple of hoodlums!” I added, which just doubled us over more.

“Hoodlums!” Tess kept repeating. “HOODLUMS!”

It’s a miracle we didn’t pee in our pants right there. I wasn’t sure if she was mocking me or not, but it didn’t really matter; we were too in love with ourselves to care if people were staring at us. Let them stare. We were twelve and happy and best friends.

But there I was, nearly fifteen years old, and not with Tess but with Kevin. The ache of lack-of-Tess kicked my stomach. I leaned forward onto the counter.

“You okay?” Kevin whispered. “Need some water before we go home?”

“Home?” I repeated.

“What?”

“That might be the weirdest thing you ever said to me,” I answered. “Home.”

“So far,” he said. “Give me time.” He was smiling at me, calm and intense, deep into my eyes.

“Okay,” I whispered.

Meanwhile, the Cuppa lady put the two boxes of coffee on the counter, along with a cup of water. I downed it while she took the money from Kevin, rang up the sale, and gave him change.

“I was wondering about the job,” I told her.

“You were?”

“Yes,” I said. “About, if I could please apply for it.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen,” I exaggerated, and then, when she and Kevin both looked skeptical, added, “Approximately.”

“Uh-huh,” the lady said. She handed me a pad and a pen.

I guess my look was blank.

“Give me your name and number. I’ll call you for an interview.”

“Okay.” I wrote down my information and handed the pad and pen back. “Thanks,” I said.

As I followed Kevin toward the door, holding one of the boxes, the woman said, “Charlie?”

I turned around.

“
Why
do you want the job?”

I stood there trying to think fast.
Spending money? Sure, though I don’t have anything I’m desperate to buy.

Because if I’m behind the counter at Cuppa, I won’t have to feel abandoned when I come in here and see the table Tess and I picked out as our own and us not sitting at it?
Well, yeah, that too.

I need a job here because … because I need to find someplace I can hide, since all my safe places are gone.

“A lot of reasons,” I said instead. “I … well, I’m a, interested in … want to …”

“Think about it,” the Cuppa lady said. “My name is Anya. I’ll call you.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “Thanks, um, Anya.” I had already blown my chance, obviously. I opened the door and Kevin stepped through it.