Soul Kiss (9 page)

After class Daniel fell in next to me as we were walking to math class. "That was a really good point you made," he said.

"You read the whole book too, didn't you?"

He nodded. "Once I pick up a book I mostly finish it, except for text books. It's just easier that way."

Easier. Shit. Homework had never been particularly easy for me. Not hard, either, just something you had to slog through. But if I could read a whole novel in an hour at home, not even noticing the time passing, what else could I do?

I wanted to ask Daniel about it, but we were already at Iccanello's classroom. Then we went off in different directions, and then there was lunch and AP history. I hadn't tried anything with the history textbook, so I kept quiet during class, afraid Mrs. Berger would call on me.

As we were walking out of history, Daniel said, "I told my mother about you."

I looked at him. "And?"

"And she wants to meet you. She wants to know if you can come to dinner with us on Saturday night. She says your family have given me so many dinners it's time for me to pay you back."

I didn't know what to say. I had a feeling that if I asked my parents they would say no, but I couldn't say that to Daniel. "I'll have to ask. I think maybe we were supposed to go to my aunt's or something on Saturday."

He looked disappointed. "Well, if not this Saturday, maybe another?"

"Like I said, I'll ask." Brie came up then, and I split off to head toward the bus with her.

"You're really getting serious with him, aren't you?" she asked.

"I don't know." I felt like there was some kind of wailing in my voice, something very unfamiliar to me. "My parents like him but they're worried about me getting involved with him. Maybe Chelsea's right and I shouldn't see him anymore."

"You're taking relationship advice from Chelsea now?"

I looked at her, and we both burst out laughing. Chelsea couldn't hold a boyfriend if he was super-glued to her hands. Every boy who liked her was chased away by her attitude within a couple of dates.

When the Big Mistake and I got home, he went up to his room, and I sat down in the living room, where my mom was reading a textbook for renewing her real estate license.

She put down her reading glasses and looked at me. "How was school?"

"Okay. We're reading
The Catcher in the Rye
for English class."

"I loved that book when I was your age," she said, leaning back against the sofa. "How far have you read?"

"I finished it. It was good, I guess."

"You finished it? When? I haven't seen you reading."

"I read it in bed, all right? Is this the Spanish Inquisition or something?"

She held up her hand. "Hey, I'm glad you liked it. I was in an interpretive reading contest in high school, and I was up against this boy from one of the Catholic high schools. He chose a passage from
Catcher in the Rye
, but his coach made him cut out all the bad words. It was silly."

"Were you a geek in high school, Mom?"

She ran her hand through her hair. She had taken the French braid out and it hung to her shoulders in a sleek, straight drop. I couldn't understand why I hadn't inherited her hair.

"My friends and I were all smart," she said. "But we had other interests too."

"Dating?"

She picked up her glasses and played with the earpiece. "In a way. Mostly we went out as groups, boys and girls. Wayne Greer's mom had a big Ford station wagon, and so he usually drove. We would go out to the movies and then maybe for ice cream or something afterward."

"Did you have boyfriends before Dad?"

"I wasn't a nun, Melissa. And your father and I don't expect you to be one either." She took a deep breath. "Daniel isn't asking you to...do anything, is he?"

"He is."

She put the glasses down and looked at me.

"He asked me to come to dinner with him and his mom on Saturday night." I smiled sweetly. "Can I go?"

"Why did I ever want to have children? You just love to torment me, don't you?"

"I have to have some fun." I toyed with the strap of my backpack. "Do you think I shouldn't go out with Daniel because he's poor and he lives in Levittown and he doesn't have a father?"

She sighed deeply. "When I met your father, he was working two jobs because his parents couldn't afford to give him any money, and his scholarships and loans didn't cover everything. I never let that stop me from dating him. And you shouldn't let Daniel's family situation stand in the way, either. I just want you to be careful, that's all. So far, Daniel has been a very good influence on you."

"But you wouldn't want me to get pregnant, drop out of high school, and move to Levittown," I said.

"True. I don't think you'd do that, though."

"Mom." I drew the word out into multiple syllables. I couldn't look at her eyes. "I'm confused. I don't know what you want me to do. Should I go out with Daniel or not?"

She shook her head. "I know you, Missy. If I say black, you say white. If I say don't see Daniel, you'll date him. If I say he's a nice boy and you should go out with him, you'll drop him. So I'm not getting caught in that trap. You're a smart girl and I'm confident your father and I raised you right. You make your own decision."

I glared at her. "Have you been reading a parenting book or something?"

She laughed. "No, sweetheart. I've just been your mom for seventeen years."

"But what about Saturday night. I told him we might have to go to Aunt Rita's in case you wanted me to say no."

"I think it would be nice for you to meet his mother. We'll talk about what you should take after dinner." She stood up. "Which I'd better get started on, if we expect to eat."

"My name is Melissa," I said, as she walked away. "Not Missy."

"I know," she said over her shoulder.

The next day as we were leaving math I asked Daniel if he wanted to sit together at lunch.

He smiled. "Sure, that would be great. You want me to come to your table?"

I shook my head. "I'll come to yours."

Brie, Mindy, and Chelsea looked surprised when I passed their table to sit with Daniel. "We're talking about math," I said.

"Right," Chelsea said.

I didn't deign to respond. I sat down across from Daniel with my tray--a mutant small pepperoni pizza with a Coke and a chocolate-chip cookie. He was eating another one of his sandwiches. "I asked my parents and I can come to dinner on Saturday night. But my mom says I have to bring something. Dessert?"

"Awesome. Can you cook?"

"I can bake if I pay attention. Anything in particular you like?"

His eyes got this faraway look. "When we lived in Nashville my mom worked with a lady who made carrot cake. It was the best thing I ever tasted. Can you make that?"

"I can try."

We sat there eating for a while, and then I asked, "Have you always been able to, you know, read so fast?"

He shrugged. "I guess so. I mean, once I learned to read. I learned first in Spanish, back in Cuba. Then we came here I had to learn English."

"Was that hard?"

"Not really. I listened to everybody talking English around me, and watched TV for a while, like
Sesame Street
and stuff, and then I just started to read." He looked at me. "Why?"

"This really weird thing happened to me on Saturday night."

His eyebrows went up and he smiled.

"That wasn't the weird part." I hesitated. "When I got home, I picked up the book for English class. I figured I'd read for a few minutes and it would put me to sleep. But I got into it and when my Mom told me it was time for bed I realized I'd read the whole book."

"What's weird about that? Sometimes when I'm reading something I like I don't notice how much time has passed."

"But it was only like an hour. For the whole book."

"You don't usually read that fast?"

"Are you kidding?" I laughed. "In an hour I could read like fifty pages, if I was really into the book. But this was almost three hundred."

"I can read faster than that."

"It gets weirder." I told him about reading the article in the Sunday paper, how all the stuff in it made sense in a way that things hadn't before.

He chewed the last couple bites of his sandwich as he thought. The cafeteria was noisy all around us, kids laughing, music playing, the sound of chairs scraping and trays banging. But it felt like Daniel and I were in our own little cocoon, separate from everyone else.

"It sounds like the way that I think," he said. "All the stuff coming together without my having to work at it. But you said this is the first time it's happened to you?"

I nodded.

"You're right, it's weird."

The lunch bell rang and we walked to history class. Daniel had to leave right afterward to go to work, so we didn't get talk any more about it.

Brie was already on the bus when I got on. I sat down next to her and she said, "So you're sitting with me now?"

"It was just lunch. I had to talk to Daniel."

"Uh-huh. Chelsea wouldn't shut up about you two."

"Chelsea's a bitch."

"And your point is?"

We both laughed, and then we went on to talk about other stuff. The next day I sat with Daniel again, and Mindy followed my lead, going to sit with a boy named Brandon she liked. That left Chelsea and Brie by themselves, and I felt bad about abandoning my best friend to Chelsea Scalzitti.

"I've been thinking about what you said yesterday," Daniel said, as we sat down to eat. "About the brain thing. It made me start to wonder why my brain works the way it does."

"What do you mean?"

"I've always taken it for granted that I can read so fast, that I can make these connections in my head. I thought that other smart kids must think the same way. But then as I got older and started to know other kids, and study with them, I realized that wasn't the truth."

He ate some of his sandwich. I didn't say anything, just waiting for him to finish his thought.

"So I started to think I was some kind of freak. I wondered if I was a genius or an idiot savant or something. So I read all about them, as much as I could, but nothing seemed to fit. No one described feeling or thinking the way I did." He looked up at me. "Until you."

"But this is all new to me," I said. "I never could read that fast, or think that way, until I met you."

We just looked at each other. Both of us were completely baffled. "Maybe we should do some more research," I said. "Like in the library or something."

He had to work that afternoon at ComputerCo, and I had literary magazine with Miss Margolis, so we agreed to meet in the library the next afternoon and see what we could figure out. They didn't have a big selection of books, but at least there were computers there and Internet access.

I walked to history with him, and he whispered something to Mindy as we walked in. She switched seats with him, so that he was sitting next to me. That afternoon I read ahead a few chapters in our history book. It was interesting the way things started coming together--I could see the way that the French revolution had inevitably led to Napoleon's rise, and how the way he organized laws spread around the world. For the first time, I found history interesting.

The next day at lunch, Brie and Chelsea attached themselves to a couple of cheerleaders and made their own new group. It was strange to see things shifting. But I had always known that we were going to split up when we went to college, make new friends and develop new interests, and while that was scary it was also something I was looking forward to. I figured it wasn't a bad idea to get a head start.

I did worry, though, that if I broke up with Daniel (God, I was thinking about breaking up when we weren't really even dating) that I wouldn't have friends to go back to. I'd end up a solitary geek, sitting by myself at lunch while everyone gossiped about me.

Daniel and I walked to the library together after history. Shyly, Daniel reached out to take my hand, and I put mine in his. I guess that meant we were really boyfriend and girlfriend.

His hand was cool in mine, and it felt nice to be that connected to him. We passed Brie, on her way to her piano lesson, and she didn't say anything, but I saw her look at our hands.

In the library we grabbed adjacent computers. "How do we start?" I asked, as I opened up a browser.

"How much do you know about how the brain works?"

"Nothing more than we learned in biology. And I forgot most of that already."

"So start there. If you could understand that article you read in the paper on Sunday, you can probably figure out a lot just by reading stuff about how the brain functions. I'm going to see if I can find anything about people sharing brains."

"Yuck."

"Not like that. Did you ever watch
Star Trek
?"

I groaned. "My father is a total science fiction geek. He used to make us watch those old episodes when we were kids."