Soul Kiss (6 page)

"Just practice," my father said. "That was the secret with Melissa. You have to get behind the wheel and build up those sense memories." He held his hands at the ten o'clock and two o'clock positions and mimed turning the wheel. I thought I might die of embarrassment.

"That's the problem. My mother has no car, so the only practice I've been able to get has been with the school cars. And now I won't be able to drive them anymore."

"We can do something about that," my father said. "Melissa, why don't you go out with Daniel this weekend? You can take your mom's car."

"I have errands to run all weekend, Richard."

"Saturday afternoon," my father said. "I'll run you around in my car, Caroline."

I looked from my mother to my father. I didn't know which one I wanted to win. Usually I side with my father in any argument against my mom, even if it's against my own interests, just on general principle. But I kind of wanted to spend some time with Daniel, and I did feel like I owed him a couple of favors by then.

"Fine," my mother said.

We agreed that I would pick Daniel up at ComputerCo at four and take him to the high school, which had big parking lots people often used for driving practice.

Through the rest of the meal, my father peppered him with computer questions. By the time dinner was over Daniel had agreed to show my dad how to defrag his computer and give him some tips for using Word that would improve his productivity.

After dinner Daniel trailed behind my dad into the study, and I hovered in the doorway as Daniel walked him through some stuff he had read in the Word manual when he had some free time. It was about as big as the Bible, so it probably took him an hour or so.

"Wow, I never realized there were so many keyboard shortcuts," my father said, shaking his head, after Daniel had lectured him for a while. "I need to write these down."

Daniel started the defrag process on the laptop, and then my father gave me his car keys. "Drive carefully. You're going to have to set a good example for Daniel."

I groaned. But what the hell, I was getting to drive the Mercedes again, and that was hella cool. As we were threading our way through the local streets of Stewart's Crossing, I saw Chelsea standing in front of her house talking on her cell phone. I slowed, rolled the window down and waved at her. Her mouth gaped open.

I didn't need Daniel's directions to get back to his apartment building. I pulled up and put the car in park. Then I turned it off. I was always scared I was going to accidentally hit something that would make the car take off.

"This was really nice," Daniel said. "Like being part of a family."

It was like an arrow had pierced my heart. Poor Daniel. All the things that Brie and Chelsea and I took for granted were the Emerald City for him. "My family likes you too." I leaned over and kissed his cheek.

He turned and kissed me back, our lips just touching. I had kissed boys before, just so I wouldn't turn into some kind of old maid by the time I was eighteen, but kissing Daniel was different. He didn't try to force his tongue into my mouth, the way Richie Prior had tried after the spring formal. Instead, we just pressed our lips gently against each other and I inhaled his scent, Irish Spring overlaid with something deeper, something essentially Daniel.

He pulled back after a while. "Thank you for the dinner and the drive home."

"I should thank you for helping me study. I really feel like I understand the math now."

"I'll see you tomorrow." He opened the car door, then leaned over and kissed me one last time on the cheek. As he walked away I sat back and smiled like an idiot.

I was sure Daniel aced the math test, and I was pretty sure I did well myself. Even better, I heard Chelsea comparing answers with Brie and realized that Chelsea had gotten a lot of questions wrong.

Daniel and I still didn't do anything overt at school, but I was starting to feel like he could be my boyfriend. I just prayed I would never get so goofy over him the way that Brie mooned for Military Boy. That would be so not me, and my mother had always told me that I should never feel like I had to change who I was for a boy.

Oh, God, I was starting to listen to my mother's advice. I was really in trouble.

Saturday afternoon as I was getting ready to leave my father gave me a couple of bills and said, "Take Daniel to dinner when you finish. He's a nice kid."

It had been gray and gloomy in the morning, with a drizzle of rain, but by four o'clock it had cleared up and the sun was out. A few trees were starting to turn color, and some people had fall decorations in their yards--scarecrows and bundles of Indian corn and the occasional pumpkin. Driving the mom-mobile was nowhere near as fun as driving Dad's Mercedes, but it was still great to feel like I was totally in control of my destiny. I could play anything on the radio, run the air conditioner and have the windows open at the same time if I wanted.

I got to ComputerCo a few minutes early and went inside to browse the cell phone accessories. Daniel came over and said, "I can clock out in five more minutes."

"No rush. I need a new pair of headphones. Which of these is better?"

For once his encyclopedic nerdiness came in handy. He knew all the specs for each pair of headphones, and we figured out which was the best for what I wanted. While I went up to the register to pay he went in the back to clock out, and we met in the parking lot.

"You want to drive over to the high school?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No, you drive there." Even when we pulled in, he wasn't that eager to get in the driver's seat. He kept asking me what all the dials were, how easy the car shifted and all that sort of stuff.

It was interesting to see something Daniel wasn't good at. He had been a star in English, math, and history--but that was because success in those classes was all about reading, memorizing and understanding, and he could do that. But driving was totally different. I finally got him to switch seats with me. I could just imagine telling my father that the whole time I was with Daniel all we did was sit in the car and look at the dashboard.

"It's like I know in my brain what I'm supposed to do," he said, carefully shifting the mom-mobile into drive. "But my body still doesn't know."

"I had the opposite problem," I said. "I sat over in the driver's seat and I was like, okay, I'm ready to go, and I'd be reaching for stuff and pressing on stuff and my dad would be like, no, Melissa, that's the cigarette lighter, not the gear shift."

He pulled forward a bit jerkily, like he was afraid to press the gas pedal. "Use a constant pressure," I said.

Then I realized that I had totally channeled my father, and it freaked me out. The only difference was that he would have added 'sweetheart' to the end of the sentence, and there was no way I was using that word with Daniel. It also made me feel bad that Daniel didn't have a father to tell him those kind of things. The Big Mistake had finally started shaving a couple of months ago, and I remembered my dad showing him how. Who taught Daniel? His cheek was smooth, but I could see he had a faint beard shadow.

We drove along one edge of the lot, and I had Daniel do a three-point turn at the end. Then we went back to where we had started. It was strange driving over the lot without regard to any of the parking lines, but there were no other cars there so it didn't matter.

Daniel started to gain confidence the more we went back and forth. "My dad gave me some money for dinner," I said when it was starting to get dark. "You want to go?"

"Sure, that would be nice. But you have to drive. I'm exhausted."

I laughed. He had driven the mom-mobile up and down for about an hour and he was exhausted? Then I remembered when I was first learning to drive, how I focused every fiber of my being on doing that one thing, and how tired I was afterward.

"After that performance, you didn't think I was going to let you drive my mom's car on the road, did you?" I asked, as he came to a jerky stop. "That has to wait at least until next week."

"So you'll keep on teaching me?" he said, putting the gearshift in park with a sense of relief.

"As long as my dad says it's okay. But I'm warning you, he may have some ulterior motive, like wanting to call you the next time his computer crashes."

"That's fine." He smiled, and I felt kind of gooey inside. I covered it up by pushing his side and telling him to get a move on.

We went to this chain place that specialized in burgers and chili. We both got lemonade and burgers--bacon and Swiss on mine, some kind of spicy salsa on his. "But hold the onions, please," he said to the waitress.

"You don't like onions?" I asked as she walked away.

"They make your breath smell bad."

I nodded. Then I realized what he was really saying, that he was planning to kiss me again later and he wanted his breath to smell good.

My whole body shivered, and Daniel noticed. "Are you cold? We could ask them to make it warmer, or order you something hot to drink."

"No, I'm fine. So tell me something about Cuba. That's so exotic. My family never goes anywhere cool because the Big Mistake is so weird."

"You couldn't go to Cuba even if you wanted," Daniel said. "It's restricted. Only Cubans who have relatives there, and journalists and humanitarians and stuff."

"Have you been back since you left?"

He shook his head. "My mom says it's too dangerous. Plus I don't know if she even has any family left there."

"What do you mean? Don't you have, like, aunts and uncles and cousins?"

"I don't know. My mom won't talk about it."

That was definitely weird. Though my mom was an only child, she had a lot of cousins, and my dad had two brothers and a sister, and we took a lot of day trips around the greater Northeast to see them for dinner or for birthdays or funerals.

I was right in the middle of all the cousins, age-wise, so we were starting to go to graduations and even a wedding. I couldn't imagine not having all those cousins in the background. Some of them looked like me. Some were around my age. Some had jerky brothers like I did. It was cool knowing that I had all those connections out there in the world, and I felt sorry for Daniel not having them.

The burgers came and we dug in, then we shared a big chocolate ice cream dessert. Every time my spoon clinked against his I felt these weird sensations travel through me and I thought about kissing him later that night.

As we walked out of the restaurant, Daniel took my hand. His was cool and dry, and my fingers wrapped around his.

Because the mom-mobile was so much bigger than Dad's car, It was hard to snuggle up together. There was this major box full of crap between me and Daniel, stuffed with parking passes, CDs, candy wrappers, tissues, and cough drops. I was afraid to take my right hand off the wheel to hold Daniel's, though I did for a couple of minutes when we were cruising along the highway.

I pulled into the parking lot of his building and shut the car off. Daniel leaned across the pile of junk between us, and I turned toward him. Our lips had just met when we heard the rattle of an old clunker and the sound of loud hip-hop music.

"You should go," Daniel said, backing away from me. "As soon as I get out, lock the doors and drive away." He opened his door and jumped out. "Hurry, so I can see you're safe before I go inside."

I didn't know what else to do, but that rattling car was approaching and Daniel was obviously nervous, so I turned the car on. As soon as I did, he turned and went into his apartment. I locked the doors but had to wait for the old clunker to pass by me before I could back out of the space. There were three guys in it, older than Daniel and me. All three looked Hispanic, and they all wore ball caps backward and had tattoos on their necks. The way one of them looked at me gave me the creeps.

As soon as I could, I backed out of the spot and went in the opposite direction from the way the clunker had gone, even though that took me deeper into Levittown and farther from home. My hands were shaking on the wheel, but I remembered my dad saying, "Ten o'clock and two o'clock, Melissa," and that kept me steady as I took a couple of wrong turns, trying to find my way back to the highway.

My parents were still up when I got in, watching TV in the living room. "Have a nice dinner?" my mother asked.

"Yeah." I told her where we went, and handed her the keys back. I went to give my dad the change from dinner, but he told me to keep it.

They were definitely acting weird. Usually everything revolved around the Big Mistake--what he was eating, how he was feeling, was there anything going wrong with him. I slipped beneath the radar. Even the night I ducked out to have dinner at Brie's, and they caught me, they didn't seem to care that much that I had disappeared. It was strange to have them asking me so many questions. Finally I escaped to my bedroom, and called Daniel's house.

"I am glad you got home safe," he said.

"Who were those guys? They gave me the creeps."

"Bad men. Drug dealers. They terrorize the whole neighborhood."

I didn't know what to say. We didn't have drug dealers in Stewart's Crossing, at least not that I knew of. And we didn't have guys who cruised the streets in old cars with stereos booming. It made me realize what a different world Daniel lived in.