We should take a whiff walk later.
At that, he wrote back quickly, It’s Friday.
We didn’t hang out on Fridays, usually. I don’t know what Kyle and Yael did, but my Fridays had been reserved for Whit, up until the breakup.
Yeah, well, I have lots of free time these days, I wrote back, adding the flatlined smile. I could use the company. Or maybe we could go out and do something distracting.
Dots bubbled on my phone, and then, finally, Sure. I’ll tell Yael.
Let’s give her a night off, I wrote back before he could approach her. I could use a night of no girl talk. Don’t ever tell her I said that.
Sure, he said.
Yael walked in then, speaking Hebrew on her cell phone. The conversation sounded heated, but it probably wasn’t. Kyle and I often thought Yael was fighting with her family only to find out she was just chatting with them about something innocuous. “Hebrew is bigger than English,” she told us. “It’s a more passionate language.”
I gave Yael a nod and found myself too embarrassed to make eye contact with Kyle, like we shared a secret. In reality, I was the only one with something to hide. It wasn’t as though Kyle and I were texting love notes; we’d just made plans on our own. I doubted Yael would even mind.
* * *
Almost as if she knew we were waiting for her to disappear, Yael announced at five thirty that she’d be heading out. She had a phone “date” with her girlfriend Amit, who was staying up late for the scheduled call.
“I know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but it feels like I’ll never get to her,” Yael confessed before leaving. “Three years feels so much longer than I thought it would.”
“Don’t think about that now,” I said, offering love advice like I had any idea what I was talking about. “Just get to your date.”
“Right. Date,” Yael said, letting out a sigh before she ran out the door, her bag making clapping sounds as it slapped against her back.
* * *
Kyle and I decided that instead of the usual shrimp and chicken skewers, we’d go to the pizza place and bowling alley in Davis Square.
We split a mushroom pie, and once we started eating, it started to feel normal, like we were just hanging out the way we always did. Kyle asked about Bryan’s play and whether I had received my dorm assignment for the fall. I told him how I’d requested a single room, and he teased me for being an only child who likes her space.
I got brave and asked about the state of his degree, and whether his adviser thought he had a good shot at trying school again in the fall.
The question made him pause. We’d never talked about it before.
“Do you know what happened? Why I had to take time off?” Kyle asked, his eyes on the pizza.
“Yael told me you were failing some classes. I didn’t ask for any information; it’s none of my business.”
Kyle folded his hands together, his elbows on the table.
“I have a tough time explaining it without it sounding bad.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
Kyle shook his head. “No, I want to.”
I took another slice of pizza, feeling shy as I waited.
“You’ve always been good at math and science, right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m bad at many other things, but yeah, I’m good with science.”
“Well, me too. This kind of work has always come really easily to me. I skipped seventh grade, and then in high school, everything was kind of easy. Math, English, soccer—being soccer captain—all easy. I started at MIT, and that was easy too.
“But then, junior year, like halfway into fall semester, things weren’t easy. Like, things were really not easy . . . I’d never been in an academic situation where I didn’t just get it. And in two classes, I was dragging. I couldn’t make it easy. And what kills me is that I should have stopped to figure it out before I fell behind and started messing everything up. But instead of admitting that I needed to work at it—to maybe get some help—I kept pretending that I was just going to magically figure it out. I ignored it and went out all the time. There were girls and parties, and it was about everything but sitting down and making sense of it. I think I figured that it would just click after a while, but then I was behind and failing, and it felt like I couldn’t dig my way out of it.
“My dad was furious. He called my adviser, the school, everybody. He was looking for anyone to blame, but it was all me.”
“Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to tell him.
“Anyway, my adviser came up with the idea to take time off. He said that because I skipped a year before getting to college, and that I was starting MIT at sixteen going on seventeen, maybe it was an adjustment thing, or something to do with maturity. I don’t know, maybe it was.”
“If it helps, you do seem really immature,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.
“Thanks,” Kyle said, with a laugh. “That makes me feel better.”
It was a lot of information, and it felt nice to be trusted with it, but my brain hung onto three words: “There were girls.” Kyle looked like he played soccer in high school because he did. I wondered if he would have even noticed me if he’d been at my high school.
“So, like, are you going to be a superstar researcher like your mom? Sorry for your loss, by the way. I’ve seen her picture in that big frame outside Dr. Araghi’s office.”
“Thanks. Yeah—she and Dr. Araghi were super close. They were, like, inseparable when she was coming up in his lab. I’m sure that’s why he reached out to my dad about me doing the internship this summer. I think he somehow feels responsible for me, like a grandparent . . . And yeah, I want to do my mom’s kind of work with disease and epigenetics. I’m sort of obsessed with figuring out why her cancer spread. I think about it a lot, like why the cancer cells in her body did what they did—why they traveled. What causes that? I guess I don’t want that to happen to other people.”
Kyle’s eyes were sad.
“Sorry. Depressing cancer talk.”
“No, it’s impressive. You’re really thoughtful.”
I felt heat creep up my neck.
“Come on,” Kyle said, downing the rest of his soda. “Let’s bowl.”
I nodded and glanced at my phone on the table. It was nine thirty, and there was nothing notable about the evening so far, at least in the context of the experiment.
“I forgot that this was going to be candlepin. I’m terrible at this. You New Englanders with your small balls,” Kyle said as we approached the lanes. He groaned as he scratched his head.
“Candlepin is the only kind of bowling that counts,” I said.
“At home in Maryland, we play with big balls,” Kyle said. I rolled my eyes.
* * *
It turned out he was terrible at the game, the small balls hitting just one pin or barreling into the gutters after every toss. I was having a good night; three spares in a row.
“How are you so good at this?” he asked.
“It’s all in where you look,” I said, approaching him with a ball in my hand, realizing that I was in a position to get close. I stood right behind him and placed one hand on his back.
“Don’t look at the pins,” I said, pointing at the end of the lane in front of him. “Don’t look at the ball. Keep your eyes on the spot where you want the ball to land. The brain will correct your arm.” I took a step to the right of him and tossed a ball underhand, down the alley. All but one pin fell down.
“Now you,” I said after pressing the button to clear the lane.
He shook his head as he took a step forward, winding his arm back like a softball pitcher. He focused, his eyes narrowed.
“Forget the arm,” I reminded him. “Just keep your eye on the target.”
Kyle relaxed his shoulders, dropped the ball in front of him, and watched as it took down all but two of the pins.
“Whoa,” he said, whipping around.
> “I know, right? It’s all in where you look. My dad taught me that trick.”
He hugged me then, just like he had after the breakup.
I noticed our alignment, which was becoming more familiar.
There’s a thing that happens when you hug someone over and over. After the fifth or sixth embrace, your bodies just know how to slide together. Bryan is a side hugger; he throws his arm around my shoulders and pulls me in, like we’re posing for a picture. At five foot ten, my dad can place his head right on top of mine for a totem-pole hug. With Whit, my head fell right into his neck. He’d wrap one arm around my lower back and place one on the back of my skull, holding me in place.
But Kyle was an inch or so taller than Whit, and his arms were stronger. He squeezed me without thought, my face mushed against his chest so that all I could do was inhale him. When he let go, I staggered back.
I hoped he’d inhaled me, too, but the hug didn’t seem to faze him; he just grabbed another ball to continue the game. As we wrapped up, our score tied, I started to worry that I didn’t have enough data from the evening. He had hugged me, but he wasn’t flirting, just excited about improving his bowling skills. I didn’t know what I thought would happen—it’s not as though any of my subjects were going to tell me that because of some phantom smell, they suddenly found me irresistible.
“Too late for a whiff walk?” I asked when we threw money on the counter to pay for the lanes. I was desperate to extend the night.
“Are you kidding?” Kyle said. “It’s, like, ten thirty. You want to hike back to Main Street?”
“I’m just a little wired for some reason. What if we, like, watched a movie or something?”
“Your dad won’t mind if I come over this late?” Kyle asked.
He wasn’t even looking at me now. He was checking his phone like he was done with me and wanted to go elsewhere. I felt defeated.
“He’ll be psyched I’m not moping. I haven’t exactly been the best company since Whit and I broke up.”
Kyle shot me a pitying glance. That did it.
“Well, now I have to come over,” he said. “But no girl talk.”
“No girl talk, I promise.”
* * *
My dad was upstairs when we got back. I could hear him in the bathroom, probably washing up for bed.
Kyle looked tall in our living room as he eyed the titles on our bookshelf and the pictures of my mom and dad and me on vacations, sometimes with Cindy and Pam.
“You used to have bangs,” he said.
“Don’t remind me,” I said.
He smiled. Then he walked to inspect my dad’s bike, which was resting against the wall in the hallway. I shook my head at the mud that had accumulated around it on the floor. We needed to get better about cleaning.
“Nice ride,” he said, touching one of the tires.
“And that’s not even his best bike. There’s a fancier one out back. My dad sort of became an Activities Person after my mom died. Activities all the time. He spends every weekend on a bike trip or hiking in New Hampshire, and the new thing is rock climbing. It’s like an addiction. My aunt says it’s a grief coping mechanism and that he’ll slow down when he’s ready. I guess it could be worse.”
“Yeah, not bad as far as addictions go.”
“I guess,” I said.
I took out my phone and texted my dad upstairs. He had the bedroom television on now. I could hear the theme song to Nova. Kyle is here, I wrote. Don’t do anything embarrassing, please.
Tell him I said hello and welcome. Unless that’s embarrassing, he texted back seconds later.
I sent back a smiley face, feeling guilty for the first message. He wasn’t an embarrassing dad; I was just nervous.
“We should watch Hanna,” Kyle said. He was sitting on the couch now, his feet up on our coffee table like he had been here a million times.
Kyle had talked about the movie before; it was his favorite. Yael had said she loved it too.
“It’s that good?”
“You’d be so into it,” he said. “It’s about this young girl, and she’s genetically modified to be a killer. It’s really clever. And very feminist, or so I’m told by Yael.”
I found the film, pressed play, and went into the kitchen to get us water. It was now almost eleven; usually I took the serum drops around now. Ann and I never discussed whether delaying the routine would mess with its effects. In a panic, I ran to the refrigerator and dug out the serum bottle from where I had hidden it, in a brown bag behind the condiments. The vial had to remain refrigerated. I counted on the fact that my dad rarely used ketchup.
“I’m pausing it; you can’t miss the beginning!” Kyle yelled from the other room as I let the drops soak the space under my tongue. “The beginning scene sets up the whole thing.”
I hurried back with the drinks and fell into the couch, taking a moment to notice that Kyle sat in Whit’s spot, with the pillow on his lap that Whit usually put under his feet. I sat down next to him, trying not to let it upset me.
The movie was riveting, as Kyle had promised, and more up my alley than anything I’d watched from Whit’s list of favorites. It was violent—the genetically modified girl killed a lot of people—but it was mostly about how she related to the regular humans she met on her journey. The way the girl talked, in staccato, monotone sentences, reminded me of Ann.
I was so into the story that I forgot about my own experiment until Kyle turned to me and asked what I thought so far. He looked excited, maybe nervous. The tops of his cheeks showed a blush. It could mean that the serum was having an effect, that he was feeling an attraction, but it could also mean that the room was warm or that the movie was really good.
Ann and I had made a list of some biological and behavioral indicators to consider during our research, but they weren’t as obvious as I thought they would be. I ran through them in my head as Kyle yawned.
We were “mirroring,” which was what behavioral psychologists would call simple imitation, what people sometimes do when they find each other attractive. Sometimes people laughed the same way, or copied each other’s speech patterns, or even sipped a drink at the same time. But to be fair, Kyle and Yael and I had been mirroring one another ever since we had become friends. We had inside jokes and developed the spoken shorthand that close companions often do.
“I am in love with this movie. It’s so good,” I told him, turning back to the film, my eyes fixed on Cate Blanchett’s rubber smile. “I wonder if Bryan has seen it. He wants to be Cate Blanchett.”
I turned to Kyle to get a response and was surprised to find his face coming at mine, our mouths attaching for a kiss that was surprisingly not awkward, given how we were sitting and the fact that I didn’t see it coming. Our lips fused, mouths closed. After a second or two, he pulled back about an inch and waited for a response. All I could think about was the fact that I had just put the drops under my tongue, and how he probably tasted some of the sugary liquid that was now penetrating my bloodstream.
I thought, in those seconds, that I was also a bit like Hanna, the genetically modified girl in the movie, who, based on what I could see out of the corner of my eye, was about to slaughter more innocent people.
I took a breath, my mouth falling open.
My silence must have served as an affirmation, because Kyle went for another kiss, this time with his mouth open. I made a noise, not one of objection but of confusion, because that’s what I was—confused and sort of excited and surprised by the fact that I didn’t want to stop. Kyle was only the first subject in this experiment. A test run. There was not supposed to be kissing.
He tipped me back so that my head rested against a couch pillow, and then he was half on top of me, one leg on the couch, one on the floor. Every time he pulled back a little to catch a breath or check my expression, I noticed something new, like the tiny hairs that came out of the top of his T-shirt, or the little smile lines, like baby parentheses, next to his mouth. He ran hi
s hand up my neck as he kissed me, and tucked my hair behind my ear. I shivered and found myself placing my hand on the back of his neck, urging him to continue.
After a few minutes or maybe longer, he pulled back and asked, “Are you okay?”—a question I took to mean, “Do I have permission to do more than just kiss you right now?” The pause lasted long enough to remind me of my original mission.
“Kyle,” I said in a rough voice as I peered into his dilated eyes, “have you wanted to kiss me before tonight? Or, like, before the past week? Or is it something that you just decided you wanted to do just now?”
He opened his mouth but snapped it shut before speaking. After another second he asked, “Is that a trick question?”
He was propped up on top of me, his hands on the armrest of the couch behind me. I wanted to ask a more specific question, but I was distracted by his muscle control and how his arms framed my face.
Kyle finally answered by leaning in again to give me another kiss. I placed my hand on his cheek and tried to estimate his temperature. He pulled my hand away and kissed me again.
I attempted to make the mental notes—to pay attention to all the observations I knew I’d want to document later. It wasn’t just his attraction that was important; it was my response. My sex drive wasn’t something I had even considered. But it seemed that it had been affected by the serum, because why else would I be tracing the line of muscle in Kyle’s shoulder while I leaned into his hand on my waist?
He shifted so that his knee fell in between my legs. Then I felt a wave of embarrassment—because this was Kyle, and because it had taken me months to get to this physical place with Whit.
“I want you,” Kyle whispered, which made me shift my head to the side and sit up.
This wasn’t Whit, and it didn’t even seem to be Kyle. He looked totally different, like someone who wanted us to be naked, as opposed to the friend who took me on whiff walks and sent me geeky fan fiction.
“What’s wrong?” he said, looking panicked as he sat up.
Chemistry Lessons Page 9
