Kiss Me Again (22 page)

We let the air fill in, between us, a bit.

At the elevator, I realized there was something I had to do. “I’ll meet you up there, okay?” I turned to watch the doors slide shut between me and them, then dashed to the gift shop.

WHEN I GOT
up to Sam’s room, there was a crowd clogging the hallway. A few adults I didn’t recognize were chatting with Mom. To the side, surrounding Kevin, was a clump of my friends.

Felicity dashed toward me, helium balloon in hand, and threw her arms around me, hugging me hard and tight.

“Um. Hi,” I said, too perplexed to hug her back.

“Oh, Charlie,” she breathed. “Are you okay? You totally saved poor Samantha’s life!”

“Huh?” I said.

Felicity bent close to me and whispered, “We already heard the whole story from your mom. Don’t be humble. You’re a hero. Samantha could have died, if it hadn’t been for you!”

“Not really,” I had to say. “It turns out she just had a migraine.”

“If she had died, my goodness,” Felicity said, her hand over her heart, tears beginning to sparkle in her eyes as she wrapped her arms around Kevin’s neck. He stood there stiffly, looking at me like
What the heck is going on?
while he patted Felicity on her back.

“She didn’t die,” I said, a little too loud. “She had a headache.”

Tess had come toward us by then, with Paige and Darlene, who had nervous smiles on their faces and helium balloons just like Felicity’s in their hands.

“How did you even—what are you guys
doing
here?”

“You texted me last night from the ambulance,” Tess whispered.

“I did?” I had zero memory of that. I texted Tess? In the middle of everything? What?

She nodded. “So I went by your house this morning to see if everything was okay, because you weren’t answering your cell again. Which you know pisses me off. Nobody was around at your house, so I waited for a few hours and then, I just, well, came here.”

Kevin had stepped away from Felicity and was standing by my side.

“Why were you calling me?” I asked Tess. “Everything okay?”

Tess nodded. “I guess I just wanted to talk with you. Like always.”

“And of course, when we found out where Tess was going, and why, we all wanted to be here,” Felicity said, blinking her big, pretty eyes. “For you, and for Kevin, and of course, for Samantha.”

A ball of bile started to well up in my gut, a loud shout of
You are just like every shiny-haired, crying girl in every TV story about a dead teenager—but Samantha didn’t die, so leave us alone.

But that wasn’t fair, not really. Maybe she was just trying to be nice. Maybe she just was nice. Also, Kevin had stepped away from her. So what I said was, “Thanks, Felicity.”

She hugged me again, then graciously stepped aside to let Darlene and Paige take their turns at hugging me, too. We were like ladies at a luncheon. When Tess hugged me, she held on tight and didn’t let go until eventually she straightened up and asked, “When did you get a hammock?”

I laughed. “I know.”

“I mean, a hammock?” she asked. “Does anybody ever actually sit in a hammock? On purpose?”

“Some people, I guess,” I said, a smile stretching out my unprepared face. “But why?”

“They just droop empty between trees, getting moldy, symbolizing the lifestyle people want to have,” Tess said.

This was the conversation I had been wanting to have, with everybody—with Kevin, with my mom. But they didn’t go there with me, couldn’t, maybe.

“Or think they should want,” I said.

“Yes! You’re right.” Tess beamed. “
Think
they want. But do they really want it? Laziness? That’s the goal?”

“Exactly.” Tess was a drama queen, it’s true, and made me feel bad about myself sometimes in comparison to her—or maybe I couldn’t blame her for that, maybe that was on me. Maybe she had even invented the thing about Kevin and Felicity hooking up—they seemed friendly but no more than usual, and Felicity was definitely acting more like
my
friend, there in the hall, than like Kevin’s.

But. But Tess could talk about the whys of hammocks and the deeper meanings of types of cookies, and she said she called, all full of crisis—why? Because she wanted to talk to me,
like always
.

“A hammock,” I said, “is never just a hammock.”

“I know it.
Hammock
. How is that even a word? I think you’re supposed to put it in soup.”

“I think that’s a ham hock,” Darlene piped up, which had me and Tess doubled over in laughter.

“Hey,” Kevin said behind me. “I like hammocks.”

Which totally cracked us up even more. Tess might not be the perfect, flawless, most generous friend, or one I could share all my secrets with, but man, I did love her laugh.

“On the other hand,” I said, once I had caught my breath, “I kind of like how it looks, there between those trees. The ham hock. Hammock, I mean.”

“You do?” Kevin asked.

I nodded. “It’s growing on me.”

“Charlie?” my mother called from the doorway of Sam’s room. “Samantha wants to see you.”

“Coming!” I managed to not skip up the hall to Sam’s room. I yanked open the door, and Samantha grinned as soon as she saw me. She looked little but superstrong in the middle of that white bed. Behind my back I hid the bag that held every last damn piece of bubble gum that the pathetic hospital gift shop had in stock.

As the door closed, Tess yelled to me, “I’ll call you later!”

She always used to say, “Call me later.” It was a small difference, but nice.

“That would be great,” I answered.

“WHAT DID SAMANTHA
mean?” Kevin asked me in the kitchen when we were home hours later, staring starving into the refrigerator together.

“About what?” I asked, though I knew what he meant. I didn’t want to talk about that, though, so in a rush I went on: “When she said the thing about wanting to be a neurologist if the rock-star chess-champion thing didn’t work out? I think she has a little crush on her doctor, or maybe she really—”

“No. Not that.”

“No?”

“About forgiveness,” he said.

Yeah. That. I studied the back of the orange juice carton.
Lots o’ Pulp
. “You really hate pulp?”

“Yes,” Kevin said. “Gross. Just before we left. She said you were right about forgiveness.”

I closed my eyes and gripped the fridge handle for steadiness. “I told her one time that people forgive each other sometimes.”

“Oh.”

I pulled out some cucumbers and a hunk of cheddar. “When the parents were fighting a few days ago, and Sam was all stressed.”

“And us,” he said, taking out the Lactaid milk.

“Maybe.” I really didn’t want to look at him, so I pulled out the cutting board and started chopping up all the stuff we’d unloaded onto the counter for refrigerator salad.

He pulled out the freezer drawer. “You like pigs in blankets?”

“They make me burp,” I said.

“Awesome. Me too,” he said. He lined the little hot dogs up in neat rows on the toaster oven tray, his back to me. “Bet I can burp louder.”

“No way,” I said.

“What do you want to bet?”

Awkward moment. Last bet we’d made had been for a kiss. He’d bet me my mother would love the hammock. I’d won, but not collected a kiss, not even close.

“Bet you that picture,” I offered. “The one you drew, of the trees.”

“Don’t know if you’ll want it now.”

“Why?”

“I added the hammock.”

“Good.”

“Yeah? Okay, then, the picture.” He clunked the tray into the toaster oven and turned the dial to 350. “What are you putting up, Burp Master?”

“Anything you want.”

“Yeah?” he asked softly.

Oh. “Within reason,” I hedged.

He smiled without opening his lips, a mercy smile. I knew him well enough now to know where his mind had gone.

“They said it wasn’t from stress,” I whispered. “That it was just how her brain is. Her brain anatomy or chemistry or something.”

“I know.”

“It’s not our fault.”

He turned around. “I know.”

I chopped up an onion, which made my eyes water, and then dumped in a half bag of corn from the freezer before starting in on the grape tomatoes.

“You’re pretty good with a knife,” Kevin said.

“Yeah,” I said, chopping a tomato. “So watch out. Hey, maybe that’s my thing. Knife skills. That or making tea. I learned how to make a perfect pot of tea.”

“Sexy.”

“Nobody’s asking you, you coffee-drinking heathen. Watch your fingers.”

He pulled his hand away, unscathed, but with a stolen grape tomato dangling like an earring from it. He popped it into his mouth. “I’m starving.”

“You can really say all the presidents in order?”

“In under a minute.”

“You cannot.”

“Time me. Washington/Adams/Jefferson/Madison/Monroe/Adams …” On and on, in a rush, all of them.

“Fifty-two seconds,” I said. “Very impressive.”

“You have an excellent upper back.”

“I have what?”

“You do,” Kevin said. “Brad noticed last September. It was like the talk of school for a few days. You could be out-of-proportionately proud of that.”

“That’s a weird—my upper back?” I tried to get a look, over my shoulder. “Is that even a thing?”

“On you it is.”

“Huh. Okay. What about my neck? I was thinking maybe I have a nice neck.”

“Never noticed,” Kevin said. “I don’t drink coffee, either.”

“I can bend my thumb backward to touch my arm,” I bragged, and showed him.

“Ew, that is just disgusting!” Kevin turned his face away. “Never do that again!”

My phone buzzed. I grabbed it, and Kevin crowded in right behind me to read the text over my shoulder, figuring, as I was, that it could be news about Sam. It was Tess, though, asking if everything was okay and if I was still going to see the band tonight with Toby.

I texted back, with Kevin watching:

All good and No.

“You can, if you want,” Kevin said.

“I don’t want to,” I said, finally telling the truth.

“You don’t?”

I considered admitting that I was never actually planning to go to a concert with Toby, that Toby had just been a friend in a clutch, a good guy, a good
co-worker
—to buck me up in front of him and my other friends. Because of that whole telling-the-truth idea I kept trying, I took a deep breath and mentally zoomed through all the ways of explaining what I had done.

On the other hand, I decided, I didn’t owe anybody a full account of every thought in my head. Not Tess, not my mom, not Kevin.

“I want to eat hot dogs,” I said instead.

Kevin smiled. “And burp,” he said, checking on the dogs. “Good. Me too. Think I’ll call my dad and see how they’re doing. Unless, do you want to?”

“You can.” I just needed a moment to bask in how well I’d handled that not telling everything but not feeling guilty or betraying about it. I felt weirdly sturdy.

Kevin was shaking his head. “I’m a little phone-o-phobic.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I noticed that when we had to call nine-one-one.”

He stared at me.

“Too soon?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Sorry.” I ate half a grape tomato, still sturdy. “Rockin’ phobia, though.”

He smiled a tiny bit. “Shut up.”

“You tell me to shut up a lot.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “You deserve it.”

“I do not.”

“True,” he said.

So I threw a grape tomato at his head. It was the most eloquent response I could come up with. Hit him smack in the nose. He threw one back at me. When all the remaining tomatoes were scattered around the kitchen floor, we sank back against the counter.

“My phone is dead,” he said.

“Surprise, surprise.” I shook my head at him. “I’ll call.”

Samantha was asleep, as was Joe, so my mother was whispering. The doctors were almost certain Sam would be discharged in the morning.

“You okay there?” Mom asked.

I looked around the ravaged kitchen. “Yup.”

“Everything’s fine,” I told Kevin after I hung up. “Maybe we should go buy Sam a new Betta fish. Or a tortoise? They live for, like, a hundred years. And doesn’t she seem like someone who should have a tortoise?”

“Yes,” Kevin whispered, his intense blue eyes unblinking. “She does.”

The toaster dinged; the hot dogs were done. Neither of us moved toward them.

“I don’t know how much they cost,” I said. “Tortoises. But I have twenty-one dollars from Cuppa. …”

Kevin leaned forward and held out his hand to me.