The Art of the Kiss

by Holly Schindler

  “He what?” I pressed.

  “He kissed me. And I—wished I had a picture of it. Like that one up there.”

  “That good, huh?”

  Heather shook her head. “That confusing. I wish I could have seen it, to understand it better.”

  I barked out this weird laugh. I couldn’t help myself.

  “It is kind of silly, isn’t it?” Heather asked with a blush.

  When I didn’t respond, she shrugged, asked, “Is it okay for me to come back? To develop the extra pictures I take for Liu? I want to put together a whole new portfolio.”

  “Develop? So you’re going to use the old Nikon, then?”

  “Of course. You said it yourself. It’s…”

  “…magic,” I finished quietly.

  ~On Air~

  Prince Charming.

  I worry about that guy.

  Sure, it appears he’s got nearly everything a man could ask for. He’s handsome—and usually rich—powerful. He’s got some sort of status. So much in his life is settled. The one thing missing is love.

  Or so we’re told.

  What else do we really know about him? I mean Prince Charming as a person. Does he like music? Does he prefer ketchup on his eggs? Does he get teary-eyed at sentimental coffee commercials during the holidays? Does he follow football?

  I think he is, arguably, the worst character in all the fairy tales. The least interesting. Because he’s the flattest. He’s Mr. Perfection. He can do no wrong.

  Only, that can’t be right. No one can literally do no wrong.

  Seems to me, poor Snow White should have been far more interested in one of the dwarfs. All seven had such strong personalities, they were stamped right into their names: Sleepy, Dopey, Sneezy. You remember.

  Prince Charming never even has his own name. It’s a generic Prince Charming in one fairy tale after another. Not Prince Harold or Prince Arthur.

  Prince Charming, the lot of them sharing the same overly sweet-sounding moniker.

  Prince Charming is the grand fantasy, you say. When he frees the damsel from a spell—and he’s always freeing some poor damsel—why, that’s a metaphor for the awakening of a heart. He’s a symbol for what it’s like to fall in love.

  Could be. It’s nice to think that way. I’m a big fan of metaphors, after all.

  But I can’t get past how painfully dull the guy is.

  The girls in fairy tales, all of them, have far more to recommend them. We see their kindness, their hope for a better life, their perseverance in times of trouble—and their beauty. Lots and lots of beauty.

  Excerpt from

  The Fairyland Times

  Entertainment Section

  May 7, 2018

  Local rock band The Tommies brought their talents to the stage of Murio’s last Saturday, and judging by the audience’s enthusiastic reception, it won’t be their last appearance. The Tommies, founded by childhood friends Ryan Withersby and Fayth Johnson, are a somewhat eclectic foursome. Still, the band manages to successfully blend strong pop-rock melodies with infectious hip-hop beats. Withersby and Johnson write all the band’s original material, as they have since The Tommies (a shortened version of their original name, Tomfoolery) were formed by the two in high school.

  “We’ve seen a few drummers and bassists come and go over the years,” Johnson admitted. “But this time around, I think it’s safe to say we’ve finally got the perfect lineup.”

  Asked if she or Withersby could have foreseen it taking twenty years to assemble the kind of lineup that could garner three encores, as the band did last weekend, Johnson replied, “Sure, it took a little longer to get there than we planned. But Ryan and I have been dreaming about creating a whole lifetime of music together ever since we were kids. It’s the dream that you never let go of that tastes the sweetest when it finally comes true.”

  ~Michael~

  Explaining life’s mysteries in fairy tale terms had begun to infiltrate the entire town. My words acted like germs, infecting and swirling through everyone’s heads.

  Fayth Johnson listened to my latest radio spot as she biked to band practice. “Prince Charming,” she grumbled. “You gotta be kidding.”

  Maybe it was a little old-fashioned to listen to the radio, but Fayth preferred it. There was something about bumping into the just-right song at the just-right moment that felt like fate. Like you’d run headlong into someone you were about to fall in love with.

  Deciding she’d heard enough, she fumbled with the dial, attempting to search for a new station. She didn’t hit the frequency dial, though. She accidentally hit the volume. My words pounded through her earbuds at about the same level as a hundred jackhammers. She flinched, swerved without meaning to. Her front tire whacked the curb, and the bike wobbled ferociously.

  She recovered quickly. It’s what Fayth did. She recovered quickly. She’d always lived up to her name.

  She steered toward the ugly shed behind the gas station—space the band had been renting for months. She locked her bike to a nearby lamppost, wondering—like everyone else in Fairyland was at that point—who the guy spouting all the fairy tale stuff could possibly be.

  Somehow, bumping into my words already felt like fate, every bit as much as finding the just-right song at the just-right time. Like something she was supposed to hear.

  She tugged out her earbuds. A frown etched itself into her face as she tried to figure out how she could have found so much truth in the words.

  Had she, for the vast majority of her life, been personally acquainted with a real-life Prince Charming?

  Fayth let out a short get real guffaw.

  Preposterous. And yet…

  Ryan had exploded into her mind as soon as she’d heard me mention Prince Charming. Ryan, her best buddy for more than two decades. They’d gravitated toward each other time and again. Comforting each other, crying on the other’s shoulders, hanging out in-between loves.

  But then again, that’s what friends did.

  That did not mean she had been thinking of him in any kind of romantic way. Ever. Prince Charming. Come on.

  Ryan’s car pulled into the gas station. He waved at her through his rolled-down window. Fayth waved back limply to the one person in the world with whom she had shared everything: her childhood and her trials and her hopes. She and Ryan knew each other’s favorite desserts and had written songs for each other and slept in the band’s van all curled up in each other’s arms.

  Did friends really do that? Had something else actually been going on all along? Had another feeling been growing inside Fayth? The kind of feeling that had been forced to live in the shadows beneath their friendship?

  Fayth frowned, a new question hitting her with the force of a Midwest windstorm: What have we been doing all this time?

  ***

  A good hour and a half later—long after the other two members of the band had shown up, plugged their instruments into amps, and kicked the practice session into gear—Prince Charming struck another sour chord.

  He growled, throwing his arm out wildly, accidentally scattering emptied soda cans and takeout containers from the top of a Marshall amp. The band had all chipped in to purchase the amp together, with the idea that someday, it’d be perched on a stage in front of a sprawling crowd, the size of which would merit using a whole wall of giant, powerful amplifiers.

  Had Ryan been an actual rock star (at the height of the era of much-adored yet pampered and indulgent rock stars), his actions might have been seen as cool—or, at the very least, tolerable. He could have immediately struck a pose while whipping his long hair behind his shoulders and twirling a silk patterned scarf, perfect for the cover of Rolling Stone.

  “Poor tortured guy,” his fans would have said. “Oh, well, bet it’ll lead to a really good album.”

  As it was, in a cramped, dark, cheap, and often somewhat smelly space behind the mid-town gas station, it seemed pathetic.

  And annoying. Really annoying.

 
; Matt raised his sticks and thumped out the “bah-dum-pah” drumroll usually reserved for punctuating the end of a joke.

  Ryan growled in frustration. He felt like a joke. An even bigger joke than their crummy practice space.

  Fayth read his mind, recognized his mood. She’d seen it before. After all, they’d been friends and confidants since the days of kickball and lunch boxes.

  But is that all? The question kept swirling through Fayth’s mind, growing louder and more insistent with each appearance.

  She clenched her jaw, resenting me at that moment—even though she didn’t so much as know my name. Why’d I have to hijack one of the few radio stations in Fairyland? Start in with all that fairy tale nonsense? Get everyone talking? Make her switch over from the stations she usually listened to, the Top 40 stations, the hip-hop stations, the rock stations that never would have put these thoughts in her head? Why’d I have to make her question everything that existed between her and her closest friend?

  Especially since everything, before she’d started overthinking it, had seemed perfectly fine. Comfortable. Solid.

  “Take ten,” she sighed. Not only to give Ryan a little breathing room. She needed a break too. His incessant mistakes, leading to constant do-overs, were killing her voice.

  “You don’t get it together soon, poor Fayth’s going to start growing polyps the size of cannonballs,” Matt grumbled.

  Ryan grunted as he propped his guitar into the instrument stand.

  “You want some tea, Fayth?” Matt asked.

  “Oh, come on. I didn’t injure her,” Ryan argued. “She doesn’t need to be babied.”

  “Hey,” Matt barked. “I gotta have Fayth.” On cue, Drew plunked on his bass and began to sing the chorus of the old George Michael song. Matt’s joke had truth to it. The entire band was protective of its lead singer, whom they’d collectively referred to as “their girl.” She was the band (as Matt frequently liked to remind them all). Fayth and Ryan had grown up together, but she had come up listening to mostly hip-hop and R&B, and her rhythm and phrasings were different from the rock and pop sensibilities of Ryan and his music store co-workers. She gave the band a different sound. Without Fayth, The Tommies would be a different band completely—one of those dime-a-dozen old-school garage bands.

  At least, that’s what Matt said. More than once. More than often.

  Like Fayth would have ever left Ryan for another group.

  Now, she wondered if that was because of her devotion to music...or to him.

  Ryan walked outside and slumped down on the back step. He leaned back on his elbows, trying to relax.

  Fayth grabbed a beer from their small cooler and followed, plopping down on the step beside him.

  The summer evening draped itself like a cool bed sheet across the back of her neck. In the distance, a familiar song poured from a car radio in the gas station parking lot. One from their high school days. The Goo Goo Dolls. Ryan still loved old pop songs—three-minute bursts of pure emotion. He’d made sure Fayth loved them too.

  But the song wasn’t nearly as forceful as the echo of my words, still ringing in Fayth’s head. That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, she told herself. Some crazy old guy who doesn’t think Prince Charmings are ever interesting. Why, Ryan was talented and kind. Didn’t you have to be exactly that in order to be “charming”? And his music—that showed personality, didn’t it? Maybe that guy on the radio wasn’t looking hard enough. Maybe he’d been distracted by bibbidi-bobbidi-boos and glittery wands.

  That had to be it.

  So why was she still feeling so defensive? Why was she thinking of him as a Prince Charming at all? And if she wasn’t a princess, then who was she to Ryan? What role did she play?

  How about Tinker Bell? The bright spot in Peter Pan’s life. Not one of Grimms’ characters, but a fairy who fixed things. And one, it seemed, she had been somewhat fond of as a kid.

  Fayth cringed against the idea. Wasn’t Tinker Bell really no more than a Peter Pan groupie?

  She raised a perfectly sculpted black eyebrow at Ryan. The kind of eyebrow raise that she’d often used to call him on his b.s. This time, the raise told him she knew all those excuses he’d tried to give for his poor playing for the past hour and a half were lies: everything from having a headache to struggling with a hangnail to worrying about rent. They both knew what was really going on. His head wasn’t in it today. Because of his breakup with Heather.

  Fayth felt no reservation about calling him on it. In the going-on thirty years they’d known each other, she’d never missed an opportunity to call him on his b.s.

  Yeah. Most definitely not a groupie.

  He sighed. “I know. Sorry.”

  She leaned back on her hands, knees jutting up into the sky. She’d worn her shortest cutoffs to rehearsal, along with a floppy striped shirt hanging off one shoulder, vintage Flashdance style. Not that she truly expected Ryan to notice.

  Did she want him to notice?

  Why was she thinking about this?

  Now that she didn’t have to stand in front of her first-grade classroom, she’d dyed her teeny weeny Afro purple. It’d be black again come fall, but this was when Fayth felt the prettiest. When she was herself, short shorts, purple hair, and all.

  At that moment, she figured any other red-blooded guy—especially one recently single—would have looked at her with his own sense of what if floating in the back of his head. Another guy would have leaned closer to her, whispered something slightly indelicate, even borderline risqué. Tried to get a laugh or at least a smile. Wormed his way closer to something physical.

  Ryan grunted and looked away.

  Why would she have suspected there’d be even the slice of a chance he’d respond differently? With all that history between them? Their friendship had started before their ages had turned double-digits, when Fayth had attacked a playground bully who was teasing him—for what, who could remember anymore? Poor bully had underestimated her. But then again, how could he have known she was already working on her green belt in taekwondo?

  And besides, there was a chance that Prince Charmings did not like the fact that they’d been rescued themselves. Maybe that one act of childhood kindness at the start of it all had forever erased the possibility of there ever being something more between him and Fayth.

  That couldn’t be right.

  Could it?

  Itching to find out for sure, she dipped her toe in the water by joking, “So Prince Charming got a chance to rescue the girl and it’s messed with his head.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Last weekend—Heather. You rescued her.”

  “I told you, I gave her a ride. That’s all. She called. She needed help. She didn’t have anyone else. So I helped.”

  “Huh-uh. Rescue. In your head, it was a rescue. Wasn’t it?”

  Ryan rolled his eyes.

  Fayth nudged him, encouraging him to take the beer bottle from her hand. She liked the dark stuff—the porters and stouts. He still hated the taste of any kind of alcohol, but if he didn’t at least take a swig, he knew she’d probably use it as an opportunity to tease him about being a softy.

  He took a sip, surely grateful it wasn’t the Four Roses whiskey Fayth was also fond of.

  “I’m telling you, that girl doesn’t want to be rescued,” she warned. “Maybe she and I aren’t exactly besties, but she’s been around enough for me to figure her out. She’s doing it all on her own. She could have done a hundred different things. Gotten married. Gotten a real nine-to-five. Anything. But she’s in that crummy apartment by herself, working her tail off. Seems to me, the last thing she wants is somebody to rescue her.”

  “I didn’t think I was.”

  “You have a thing for it. Saving damsels in distress.” Is that part of the reason why you’ve never seen me in that way? I’m too headstrong. Too independent. Is that it?

  “I do not have a thing for…It was just a ride. Besides, she ca
me back to see me yesterday.”

  Fayth’s stomach bottomed out. “She did?”

  Ryan nodded. “Yeah—to thank me for taking her out there to her shoot. And to tell me that it could open up to a better job for her.”

  “And?”

  “She kissed me. Or I kissed her. I think I started it. But she kissed me back. I mean, not like a kiss kiss. Kind of a peck, but…”

  “And?”

  He shrugged, running his fingers through his hair.

  “You’re so pathetic,” she grumbled. “Seriously.”

  Why did it pinch to hear that Heather had kissed him?

  “It’s barely been any time at all since we split. I’m supposed to be completely over it, with somebody new?”

  “I’ve seen you do it before.”

  “I’m older now.”

  “And oh-so-much wiser, eh?”

  He shrugged again. His eyes grew distant as he relived the kiss. Fayth could read his mind.

  “This breakup hit you hard. Heather got to you.” Fayth wasn’t trying to convince him of Heather’s worthiness. And she wasn’t trying to put the two of them on an even plane—two girls who would never need saving. She was trying to shake some sense into him at that point. And—okay, so she was also trying to find out what he really felt. She needed to know how serious he was about Heather. She needed to know if he’d ever once thought of her the way she was beginning to think of him now.

  Knowing what was in Ryan’s heart could help her make sense of her own feelings.

  She squirmed uncomfortably on the step.

  “She did not get to me.”

  “Bull.” She could hardly breathe. She found herself wishing he would fight her on it. Prove he didn’t care. Not about Heather.