The Serious Kiss

by Mary Hogan

  “What?” I burst out. “Why?!”

  “This is a grown-up decision that your father and I had to make,” Mom said. “I’m sorry that your lives will be disrupted, but there’s no other choice. We’ll pack up the house this weekend and move early Monday morning.”

  Early Monday morning. Those three words echoed in my head. Early. Monday. Morning. I wouldn’t have the chance to say goodbye to anybody at school?! What about Nadine? What about Zack? What about congruent triangles? How could this be happening?

  “No way,” I said.

  Dirk asked, “Is Barstow a street near us?”

  “I’m not going.” I crossed my arms firmly in front of my chest.

  “Barstow is a city, you idiot,” Rif snapped at Dirk. “It’s about halfway between here and Las Vegas.”

  My mother glared at him. How did he know that?

  “I don’t care where it is,” I said. “I’m not moving. I’ll live with Nadine.”

  “If Libby lives with Nadine, can I have her room?” Dirk asked.

  Now I glared at Dirk. Is that all I meant to my little brother? I felt like shoving a dustball up his nose. But I was too upset to do anything.

  Disrupted? Had my mother apologised for disrupting our lives? Wouldn’t ruining our lives be more accurate? Why Barstow? And why now, just as Zack Nash and I were on the road to becoming the friends that would eventually lead to becoming the serious kissers?

  “What’s going on?” I asked, near tears. “You can’t just dump this on us!”

  “Hey, I’ll be sprung from community service,” Rif said, grinning. “Cool.”

  “Sometimes adults have to make difficult, adult decisions,” Mom said. Dad memorised his slippers.

  My eyes nearly popped out of my head. They pick now to act like adults? What about last month when I needed a ride to the library and Dad suggested I hitchhike? Or the time I asked Mom the difference between a French kiss and an American kiss and she totally bailed on the truth by telling me that the French only kiss cheeks?

  “I don’t understand what’s going on!” I repeated, my voice becoming desperate and whiny.

  “There’s nothing to understand. We’re moving on Monday and that’s that.” Dad sighed and stood up. “It’s late. We should all get some sleep.”

  Nadine spent the weekend at my house sobbing. “It can’t be true! Tell me it’s not true!”

  “It’s true.”

  “It can’t be true!”

  “It is.” I was numb. I moved like a robot around my room, throwing stuff into cartons without caring if it broke or not. My life was over. Why should I care if I busted a CD player?

  “How could you do this to me?” Nadine wailed. “What about our serious kisses?”

  That’s when I started to cry. “You’ll have to have yours without me.”

  “It won’t mean as much if I can’t tell you about it.”

  “Call me. If phones work in the armpit of the world.” I sniffed hard and threw my reading lamp into the box.

  By Sunday evening, the only things left to pack were the sheets on my bed and my toothbrush. Like zombies, Nadine and I left the Chatsworth house and wandered the streets of our neighbourhood in an emotional daze.

  “I need you to do something for me, Nadine,” I said, as it began to get dark.

  “Anything. You name it.”

  Stopping on the sidewalk, I faced my best friend and took a deep breath. “Will you please tell Zack I said goodbye?”

  “Zack Nash? The maths guy?”

  “Yeah. Tell him what happened, okay? Tell him I won’t ever forget hi—”

  Greg Minsky suddenly appeared behind me on the sidewalk. He clamped his hands over my eyes, which he always did, which always annoyed me. His palms were clammy. He held on way too long, after I shouted, “Greg! Let go!” a million times. Pressing his body to my back, he wriggled with me. I could smell his Right Guard deodorant.

  “Greg! Let go!” Really, I was in no mood.

  “Let go of her, Greg. God.” Nadine gave him a little shove.

  Releasing me, he asked, “Is it true?”

  I ran my thumb under my bottom lashes, adjusted my dishevelled shirt. “I hate it when you do that.”

  “I hate it when you do that.” Greg mimicked me in a sappy, singsong voice. Boys are so immature. “Libby, is it true?”

  “Yeah. It’s true,” I said.

  His face fell. “Man,” he said.

  “I know. It sucks.”

  “Man! ” For a second I thought Greg Minsky was going to cry. Hanging his head, he jammed the toe of his sneaker into a crumbling crack in the concrete. I felt awful. I liked him, but he liked me that way. Story of my love life. I mean, Greg’s a nice guy, but I can’t get past the zit clusters on either side of his chin and his unibrow. Not that I’m Miss America. It’s just that I’ve never been able to drum up an attraction to him. I knew I’d never want to seriously kiss Greg Minsky. Never.

  “Here,” he said, crowding Nadine out and shoving a letter at me. I felt queasy, didn’t know what Greg Minsky had to say – in a letter, no less. So I just stood there. If I didn’t touch it, I didn’t have to read it, right?

  “Take it,” he said. Sighing, I reached out and took it.

  “Read it,” he commanded.

  “You want me to read it now? Like, in front of you?”

  “Yeah.” That serious action was going on in his face again. Like the time he’d planted the slobbery kiss on me. Nadine stepped back, sniffed. I felt like I’d swallowed a shovelful of mud. Obviously he wasn’t going to budge. So I opened it. Right there in front of him.

  Greg Minsky had written me a poem.

  Once a Life

  Two souls floating, searching,

  passing in the dark night.

  One soul turning, seeing.

  Who’s there?

  Is it you?

  No answer.

  Hello?

  Silence.

  The room is empty.

  It’s cold and colourless.

  The walls are bare.

  The only sound is the hollow echo of a beating heart.

  Instantly, I felt like I always feel when I read a poem – panic. Am I getting its true meaning? Was he saying that we were two souls passing in the night? Was his heart hollow, or mine? And, what, he expected me to concentrate on deciphering poetry with him staring at me like that?

  “Get it?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I lied. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s a going-away present,” he said. “For you.”

  “It’s beautiful.” I racked my brain for something else to say, but what else could I say?

  The three of us stood there in awkward silence until Nadine sniffed again and said, “I’m so sorry, Lib. I’ve gotta go. Curtis is supposed to call.”

  “I should go, too,” Greg said. “I have homework.”

  My two friends hugged me hard. Nadine kissed my cheek and told me she loved me; Greg, thankfully, didn’t do either.

  “Call me as soon as you can!” Nadine said. Then she added, “I can’t deal with saying goodbye.”

  “Me, either,” I said.

  Both of my friends promised to visit as soon as they could drive. Then suddenly, just like that, they left. I watched them grow smaller and smaller on the sidewalk, looking back only once.

  PART TWO

  Barstow

  TWELVE

  At first, I wept dramatically in the back seat of the Corolla, clutching a wadded-up Kleenex to my red, runny nose. But each time I wailed, Juan Dog lifted his little head and wailed with me.

  “Mom, how could you dooooo this!” I bellowed.

  Ahhhoooooo! Juan imitated me. Oooh, oooh.

  Juan’s howl made Mom, Dirk, and Rif laugh, which really made me mad. So, eventually, I let the tears flow soundlessly down my cheeks. I suffered in the loudest silence I could muster.

  I’d seen the outskirts of Barstow before. On TV, when the new rovers landed on Mars
and dune-buggied around and sent those orange pictures back to us. That’s what Interstate Fifteen to Barstow looked like. Mars. Only without the orange colour. As far as the eye could see was dirt and sand and scruffy scrub dotting the planetary landscape. As we drove further into oblivion, I felt so low I could walk under a snake with a beehive hairdo. There wasn’t even a Burger King. I mean, you could die out there.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” It was all I could say between bursts of tears. Over and over, “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “It’s a desert, honey,” Mom said by way of explanation.

  “No way.”

  “Really, it’s the Mojave Desert.”

  “I know it’s a desert! No way am I living in the middle of a desert. What’s going on? Why are we here?”

  Mom ignored my questions, just as she’d done for the past hour. After fourteen years of watching her not tell us the truth about all kinds of stuff, I knew she could easily not tell us why we were moving to Barstow for the entire car ride there. Which is exactly what she did (and didn’t) do. Stubbornly, she stared through the windshield, following Dad in the U-Move truck, with Rif, Dirk, Juan Dog, and I squished into her car. No one wanted to drive with Dad because the U-Move wasn’t air-conditioned. Even in November, even before noon, it was hotter than baked asphalt.

  We drove forever on the freeway. At first, it was bumper-tobumper traffic, one driver per car, cell phone in one hand, coffee mug in the other – the typical southern California commute. Angelenos would rather spend hours in traffic than be caught dead riding a bus. Mom didn’t seem to care, settled her fannywannydingo into the car seat, and propped her elbow on the windowsill. I leaned my head against the window and let Juan lick the tears off my face.

  By the time we reached Pasadena, the traffic had thinned out and the U-Move became a small square ahead of us. At the junction to Interstate Fifteen, Dad was hardly visible, he was so far ahead.

  “Do you think he’s trying to ditch us?” Rif asked, joking.

  Mom barely smiled. She said, “Apparently we’ll have to make it there on our own.”

  Briefly lifting my head from the window, I blew my nose.

  By the time the landscape became lunar, we’d driven about two hours. I was cried out, exhausted by despair. Fernando High, Nadine, Zack Nash – they all seemed a gazillion miles away. Juan Dog was softly snoring on my lap. Dirk opened the back window and pelted us all with sand and heat.

  “Shut the window, you moron,” Rif snapped. The sweltering, overhead sun made Chatsworth seem balmy. The dry, hot wind made everyone squint. Quitting smoking hadn’t been easy on Rif or us. He was in a perpetual foul mood, and he dragged everybody down with him.

  “Plants don’t even live here,” I moaned, looking at the desolation stretching out in every direction.

  “You’re the moron,” Dirk said to Rif, rolling the window back up.

  “We stay on this road, right?” Mom asked Rif. Dad was long gone.

  After gazing through the windshield, Rif concluded, “There’s no other road.”

  So we drove. Eventually we saw a flicker of white, then neon, then what looked like a mall up ahead. “It’s a mirage, right?” I asked haughtily.

  “Outlets!” Mom’s face lit up. “In-N-Out Burger! Kids, look! Del Taco! Shall I pull off?”

  “No,” said Rif. “Turn around.”

  My sentiments exactly. Mom said, “We’ll scope out the outlets another time. We’re almost there!”

  “Almost no where,” I said. Mom merrily continued to ignore us. She pulled off the freeway, followed the signs to Barstow. Which I noticed wasn’t necessary. Rif was right – Barstow was the middle of absolutely nowhere. It’s an old, medium-sized town surrounded by endless, flat Californian desert. The only way you’d miss it is if a humongous tumbleweed blew into town and got stuck on one of the ugly brown stucco buildings.

  Mom saw it differently. Turning onto Main Street she chirped, “Oooh, look down there at the old railroad station! Look at the quaint shops!”

  I said, “Oooh, look at the tattoo parlour.”

  “And look, Mom, body piercing!” said Rif.

  “Military surplus.”

  “Knives, new and used!”

  Mom’s look was a knife, a dagger, actually, catapulted into the back seat. We shut up, suffered in silence. Juan, shaking, looked up at me, then out the window as Mom drove through the dreariest downtown I’d ever seen. The women looked like truck drivers, the men looked like Hell’s Angels. The whole dirt-brown town seemed like time had forgotten it entirely. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid could have been hiding out there for fifty years and no one would have bothered to look.

  “Can’t you feel the history here?” Mom squealed. “This used to be part of old Route Sixty-six!”

  “Where’s the new house?” Even Dirk was getting impatient.

  “Look at the cute McDonald’s! It’s built into railroad cars!”

  We all groaned at that one. Even the McDonald’s looked old.

  “Are we almost there?” I asked, dejected. I couldn’t wait to lie facedown on my bed until college.

  “We have to make one quick stop first,” Mom said.

  Now, we groaned even louder.

  Mom consulted a crumpled piece of paper she pulled from her handbag, kept driving her one-woman tour. “It’s not nowhere, Libby! Wal-Mart! Did you kids see the Wal-Mart we just passed?”

  “A trailer park!” said Rif sarcastically. “Did you kids see the trailer park up ahead!”

  With that, Mom flipped on her blinker and turned into the trailer park’s front entrance, underneath the arched sign that read WELCOME TO SUNSET PARK.

  “Ha-ha, Mom,” I said.

  “Har-de-har-har,” said Rif. “We get the joke. You don’t have to continue the white trash tour.”

  Mom disregarded the howls of her young. She drove down the little streets of the trailer park, past white rock lawns, brown rock lawns, beige rock lawns, green Astro Turf, metal awnings, “patio” tables made of cinder blocks, ceramic guard dogs, and row after row of large rectangular metal trailers.

  “Are we even allowed in here?” Dirk asked. Mom said nothing, just kept driving. The paved streets were covered in desert sand.

  “There’s a communal pool,” she said. “A rec room. Look! A tree!”

  Rif and I peeked at each other and instantly knew the score. Mom had gone mad. She’d seat-belted herself in an old Toyota and chosen Barstow, of all places, to lose her marbles.

  “Feel like an ice cream coney-woney, Mom?” I asked gingerly.

  Suddenly, the car stopped with a lurch. “Eureka.” Mom sighed. Stunned, we watched her release her seat belt, unlock the car door, and reach for her handbag. Rif and I simultaneously turned our heads to stare out of the window. The abrupt stop had engulfed us in a dust cloud. It took a few moments to settle down, but out of the grit emerged the figure of a woman, floating toward us, dressed in a flapping orange kaftan, weighted down with a thick turquoise necklace.

  “Nana!” Mom cried out.

  Who?!

  Nobody moved. We sat there, flabbergasted. Except Mom, who heaved herself out of the Toyota and ran in small baby steps across the gravel road to kiss, kiss the wrinkly old woman with her arms extended. My brothers and I just stared at the two of them.

  Yip.

  “Kids, come meet your grandmother.”

  No one stirred. As far as I knew, all my grandparents were dead.

  Yip. Yip!

  “Come on, gang!”

  Yip! Yip.

  “You keep sitting in that car you’re going to turn into three fried eggs!”

  Yip! Yip! Yiiip!

  If Juan Dog wasn’t licking his lips in the way that let me know he had to go to the bathroom real bad, I never would have left the car. I would have refused to budge until my mom got back in the car, deserted the old lady, and drove us home to Chatsworth where we belonged. I’d learned from studying the Civil Rights movement in sch
ool how powerful passive resistance could be. Dead weight in the back of a two-door sports coupe would be near impossible to dislodge.

  Yiiiiip! Yiiippppppp!

  “All right, you little runt,” I snapped at Juan. Rif opened the passenger door and Juan leaped out. Slowly, the three of us unfolded out of the car.

  “You must be Richard,” the woman said to Rif, shaking his hand.

  “We call him Rif,” Mom said.

  “And you must be Dirk,” she said to Dirk. Dirk shyly hung his head and smirked. “Yeah.” He giggled. Rif disappeared behind the trailer.

  “And you . ” She wafted toward me like a giant orange manta ray. “You must be Elizabeth.”

  “Bethy,” said Mom.

  “Libby! ” I shot my mother an incredulous look.

  “Bethy Libby,” said Nana. “How unique!”

  “It’s Libby. Period.”

  “Libby Period? Is that like Cher?”

  Oh, brother. I just looked at her. Mom stepped in. “Nana, our Elizabeth prefers to be called Libby. For now.”

  “Of course!” said Nana. “Libby suits you perfectly. Libby Period is so . cumbersome.”

  The elderly woman cupped my face in her hands and stared at me. Her eyes were watery but an intense contact-lens blue. In the blinding sun, her short, spiky hair was so red it was almost violet. Each finger on her bony, speckled hands was ringed with blobs of silver and coral. Her fingers clacked when she moved them.

  “Absolutely magnificent,” she said as she hugged me. I tensed.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” I said into her shoulder, “but who are you?”

  Pulling back, the woman teared up and bit her lower lip. “Your parents never spoke of me? Never showed you any photographs?”

  I shook my head. Mom looked down at her chubby toes.

  “I’m your father’s mother, Libby. I’m your grandmother.”

  I just stared. Clearly, this was some kind of trap. Even the worst parents in the world wouldn’t deny their kids a nana. Would they?

  “By the way,” my, uh, grandmother said, sniffing, “where’s my son?”