Eternal Kiss

by Trisha Telep

  The good mood lasted until I tried to shave my legs and cut a gash in my leg with the cheap-ass razor. I bled all over the bathtub while the sun went down, and all of a sudden I was sure he wouldn’t show up. I’d wait out there in Gwyneth’s shirt and my school skirt and feel like an idiot.

  I stopped and put my sweating forehead on my knees. In summer, the tepid water that squeezed out of our ancient plumbing was pretty much a blessing. Right now I was thinking it would do me good. The wind licked the sides of our trailer, and I surprised myself by laughing again, a hard jagged sound.

  If he didn’t show up, I would know. And I’d call Gwyneth. And forgive her.

  But if he did, I’d be ready.

  It was a tinderbox night, the kind that usually starts with heat lightning and ends with a fire out in the hills and everyone jumpy. The Bleu was packed. It always was, even on school nights. I didn’t mind, and Johnny didn’t seem to either. We were glued to each other in the middle of the crowded dance floor. It was dripping hot, everyone breathing on everyone else, glowsticks flashing and the lights smearing over blank young faces.

  The music hit a thumping groove and stayed there for a long time. It was like swimming next to someone else’s body. Johnny held me, and I got flashes of peppermint and clean heat whenever he leaned in.

  Losing yourself in the middle of a mass of kids is easy. Losing yourself with someone else, that’s hard. We made up a little private universe in the middle of the dance floor. When the lights went out, the only illumination was from the glowsticks and the sheen of sweat, and Johnny nuzzled along my neck. He had swept my hair aside and his chest was against my back. I tilted my chin up when his fingertips pressed gently, and his other arm turned hard across my waist.

  His breath was hot on my skin, and I melted into him. I thought he was just giving me a hickey, but a weird thing happened.

  Johnny tensed behind me. The music thundered, some singer wailing over the top about a missionary man, and a spot of heat began in my throat. It flushed down my entire body like lava running down a hillside, working inward from my skin and settling in the pit of my belly. Pounding bass drew it deeper and deeper, through my bones and down into the core of me, and the entire club went dark red. Like how you close your eyes against a searchlight and your eyelids turn everything into a crimson haze. The throbbing of my heart melted into the bass and slowed down, my hips jerked forward, and everything inside me exploded.

  In the Bleu with the music going full-bore, nobody can hear you scream. Nobody can hear when everything inside you gets smashed. And nobody sees if you’re dragged outside by a boy in a white shirt, darkness smeared on his lips and his shades on even in the middle of the night.

  I huddled against the car door. He turned the engine off and sudden silence filled the interior. We sat there for a little while, the wind scouring at the respectable paint job.

  “It’s not like you’ve been told,” he repeated. “Forget all that. Just think about it this way: I’m Fate. And I’m choosing you. Inviting you.”

  My throat hurt. I clutched the rough paper towel to the side of my neck. It was damp, but I couldn’t tell if it was with sweat or … something else. I had to swallow twice before I could talk.

  “Why me?” The words were husks of themselves.

  “You said it yourself. You’re not one of them. And we get lonely, those of us out in the cold.” He measured off spaces on the steering wheel with his fingers. Measured them again, like he expected them to change. “You can be. With me.”

  I swallowed again. It felt like I had strep or something. My fingers were numb, even though the air pressed, crackling and electric-hot against my sweat-wet skin.

  Then I asked the million-dollar question. “How?”

  He smiled at me, and took his shades off. The red glow was vanishing, drawn back into the whites of his eyes in thin threads. His irises were dark now, like the first night I met him. “Are you sure you want to?”

  I set my chin stubbornly. “First tell me how.”

  “All you have to do is give me a present, sweetheart. It’s not so hard.”

  Jesus, I don’t have anything. “I live in a trailer park. I don’t have—”

  “It’s not money.” He reached over and took my hand, and I didn’t pull away. His skin was dry and warm, normal against mine.

  Then he told me. I went cold all over. Ice crackled and settled over me, ground itself together in my heart.

  “I do that, and then what?”

  “Then you come with me. And there’s a whole world out there for us. I won’t be lonely, and you won’t ever have to worry again.”

  He just said it, the way nobody had ever said anything to me before. He couldn’t be lying. He sounded too matter-of-fact for it to be a lie.

  And my throat gave another hot flare of pain. I was all frost except for the live coal on my neck, under my clutching fingers and the wilted paper towel.

  “So, mystery lady? What’s it going to be? You’re going to spend your short little life playing by their rules, or are you going to take your chance?”

  I thought about it, worrying my frozen lower lip between my teeth. Then I made up my mind.

  “It wasn’t my fault.” Gwyneth was still on it. She hunched her shoulders, her golden hair playing over them. “I had no idea. Honest, I didn’t.”

  “It’s okay.” I even sounded all right. I didn’t have any Band-Aids, but the small twin punctures on my neck were white and worn-looking. You couldn’t even tell they were there. “What are you doing tonight, anyway?”

  “I thought you could come over.” She slouched even further, the dappled fig-tree shade painting shadows on her arms and face. “We could watch a movie or something. Pajama party.”

  I couldn’t agree right away. “What about Mitzi?” I glanced past Gwyn, to where the blonde bitch queen of Crispie cast a venomous little darting look our way.

  “She’s a bitch. You know she’s dating Holder now?” Gwyn rolled her eyes. “It’s amazing. The two of them are like two vacuum cleaners talking to each other. Let’s skip fourth, too, and go shopping. Come on. What do you say?”

  What else was there to say, except yes? And I already knew Johnny wasn’t picking me up.

  Not today.

  Her parents were out and Marisa was in bed. I lay very still until Gwyneth’s breathing evened out, her old pajamas feeling like friends against my skin. I hadn’t packed or even told Dad where I’d be. It was Friday, he’d gotten paid. He might have been at the bar even now. If he was at home, he was missing me.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now but the waiting.

  She lay next to me the way she always did, elbows and knees poking. Even with a queen-size bed she took up all the space.

  When she started the heaviest breathing of all, I slid carefully out of the bed. I got dressed quietly, my white shirt a ghost in the gloom. Tiptoed down her hall, avoided every squeak in the stairs with the ease of long practice. The kitchen was spotless and dark, the wind scrubbing the corners of the house and flinging dusty grit against the windows. Soon there would be a spark and the constant smell of smoke.

  The glass diamonds on the kitchen door held nothing but the glow of a porch light. I stood there, my throat itching and my hand reaching for the knob and the mellow golden glow of the deadbolt lever. Each time the wind mounted another pitch, I would snatch my hand back.

  He’s not coming. Then I would think—He is. I know he is.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, feeling like an idiot in my rumpled school clothes, before a shadow appeared at the door. Just appeared. One moment, nothing. The next, a ghost of a white shirt and even through the distortion of the diamond panes, I could tell it was him.

  I reached for the knob. Snatched my hand back again and stood there trembling as he waited. I didn’t know how long he’d stay, and if I didn’t open the door he would be gone in the morning. Just like that.

  If I kept that door closed, I knew what would hap
pen. I’d go to school. Go to college. Keep slogging away hoping the golden people would throw me a bone or two. And sooner or later Gwyneth wouldn’t need my forgiveness. She’d go back to hanging out with her own kind and forget I ever existed, and there would be no more of this pale perfect seashell of a house that I could pretend was mine.

  The deadbolt slid back. He didn’t move.

  I was cold all over and sweating again. The knob slipped in my fingers, and I heard a restless murmur. It was impossible to hear either Marisa or Gwyn muttering in their sleep, but I thought I did.

  I twisted the knob and opened the door, and the wind came in full of dust and the smell of smoke. I guess the fires had started early.

  Go wait in the car, he told me. So here I am in the Jetta. There’s nothing in the glove compartment, and up at the top of the hill the house is completely dark. The porch light was on, but about ten seconds ago it flicked off. The wind rocks the car a little on its springs, mouths the paint job, and brushes velvet fingertips over the windshield. Something white flickers up on the hill.

  I am shaking all over. My schoolbag sits obediently at my feet on the clean mat. The entire car smells new. I am cold even though it’s ninety degrees and dry as the inside of my mouth out there.

  I don’t know what Johnny is. There’s not a word for it. I don’t even know if he’s really coming back to this car. To me.

  An orange wisp sparks up on the hill, behind one of the upper windows. Gwyneth’s room, looking down over the semi-circular driveway and the manicured lawn. The wisp unfolds. It isn’t electric light. It’s something older.

  If he comes down the hill I’ll see him silhouetted against the flames. My fingers are twisting together, slick with sweat. The puncture wounds on my throat feel hot and wet.

  I am not sure if I want to see him coming down the hill. If he doesn’t, what am I going to do?

  What am I going to do if he does?

  WITH A POWDERY crunch, the tip of the pencil lead snapped and slid uselessly out of the wood beneath her fingertips. It rolled across Becky’s paper, leaving a gray smudge across the question she’d been attempting to answer.

  She threw down her pencil in disgust.

  “Now what?” her friend Robin asked in a hushed whisper, looking out from under her carefully styled-to-look-messy thick, blonde hair. Robin glanced around quickly, looking for Mr. Nairhoft.

  “My pencil is being stupid again! Besides that, I really don’t think writing an essay about the Spanish conquistadors is going to help Nana remember where her bedroom is, or not to turn on the stove,” Becky sighed, glaring at the offending question on her assignment. “I need to get home!”

  “Well at least make it look like you’re working,” Robin replied with another fast glance around for the detention room monitor. “Getting another detention isn’t going to help your Nana either. It’s a good thing she can’t remember when you’re supposed to be home anymore, or you’d really be in trouble!”

  “Shh!”

  “Is there a problem here, ladies?” Mr. Nairhoft said in a smooth, arrogant voice. “Rebecca?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Nairhoft,” Becky apologized with a sweet smile. She really, really hated it when people called her “Rebecca.”

  “This is the third time today my pencil’s broken,” she went on. “And I got frustrated with it. I’m sorry to have caused a disruption. May I go sharpen it again? That might help it, at least through the end of detention, anyway.”

  Becky gazed up at the tall, rail-thin Mr. Nairhoft, hoping her repentant smile would earn her his permission.

  “Does anyone have an extra pencil Miss MacDonnell can borrow?” Mr. Nairhoft asked loudly, turning around to view the detention hall, which was really just the cafeteria with the tables moved around a little. He’d glanced around so fast that he couldn’t have even bothered to see if anyone had an answer to his question. “No?”

  Mr. Nairhoft turned back to Becky with that stupid fake smile he always had plastered on his face.

  “Well—”

  “Here, Mr. Nairhoft,” said a voice from the far table in the corner.

  Becky turned around to see who had spoken, as did Robin, and Mr. Nairhoft. Actually, everyone in detention swiveled their heads to see who was denying Mr. Nairhoft the occasion to be his usual unpleasant self.

  A boy about her age, sitting at a table by himself, wearing a black leather jacket, faded jeans that were more gray than black, and a T-shirt in the same condition, waved a yellow pencil in the air.

  “She can use this one.”

  He said it almost defiantly … like he was daring Mr. Nairhoft to come over and take it himself.

  “Mr. Dugan, surely you haven’t completed all of your long overdue assignments,” Mr. Nairhoft said, folding his arms.

  “I’ve completed all I’m going to,” the boy replied, matching Mr. Nairhoft’s tone exactly. The boy looked at Becky. “Want this?”

  Becky nodded and stood up slowly, her frustration with her own pencil, assignment, Mr. Nairhoft and detention forgotten as all the attention shifted from her onto the boy.

  “Becky, no,” Robin hissed in a whisper.

  The boy’s eyes went back to Mr. Nairhoft’s as he held the pencil out for Becky to take.

  Ryan Dugan wasn’t just a bad boy, he was the bad boy; everyone knew it. Always in trouble, always getting sent to the principal’s office, always in detention. There was even a rumor that last summer he wasn’t in summer school like he usually was, but in Mariposa Juvenile Detention Center three towns over.

  And Ryan never, ever gave you anything without expecting something in return.

  It felt good though, doing something Mr. Nairhoft couldn’t really complain about, even though she was technically breaking the “don’t leave your seat without permission” rule. Still, Mr. Nairhoft had asked if anyone had a pencil she could use, and Ryan did, so she was going to take it no matter what everyone else thought. Really she just wanted to see the look on Mr. Nairhoft’s face as she took the pencil from Ryan with a quiet “thank you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ryan said with a big grin. He winked—actually winked—at Mr. Nairhoft as he held onto the pencil before letting Becky take it. “Wouldn’t want you to get in any more trouble now, would we?”

  Becky shook her head, stunned, and hurried back to her seat where she sat down quickly and bent her head over her assignment. She wondered if he knew what had landed her in detention. He sounded like he knew. Like he knew, and approved.

  Becky’s mouse-brown hair hid her blue eyes enough that it kept Mr. Nairhoft from seeing that she was secretly glancing at Ryan while she pretended to work. Her eyes went to the clock on the wall. Twenty minutes of detention left, then she could get home to Nana.

  Ryan sat back, clasping his hands behind his head as he leaned against the wall. Mr. Nairhoft berated the boy until he was blue in the face, said something about “another week’s worth of detention!” and stalked away to harass another student he didn’t think looked busy enough.

  Ryan just grinned and caught Becky looking at him. He winked at her.

  Becky blushed and bent her head back over her paper, trying not to think about how much time she had left to sit there.

  Or that Nana might be setting the house on fire.

  Everyone else had someone to pick them up when detention was finally over—even Robin, whose dad looked unhappy as Robin got in the car, even though he smiled wanly at Becky.

  Although Becky would have been perfectly happy taking the bus, Nana used to drive her to and from school, when Nana could still be trusted to drive. Nana hadn’t driven in about three years. They’d taken away her license when Becky was eleven. Not that Nana was that old; there were plenty of drivers on the road older than Nana, but they could remember which house was theirs and which gear made the car reverse, and where they were going.

  Nana couldn’t.

  The doctors called it “early onset senile dementia,” but everyone knew that was
just a polite way of saying that Nana was really too young to have Alzheimer’s, even though it was obvious that she did.

  The school buses only ran before detention, not after, so that meant someone had to pick you up, or you had to walk home. Becky offered Robin and Mr. Turnbull a little wave of apology—after all, Robin wouldn’t have gotten into trouble if it hadn’t been for her—and then shouldered her backpack and turned quickly away to begin the long walk home before Mr. Turnbull could offer her a ride. There was just no way she wanted to be in the car with that much tension, and she really needed to clear her head before getting to her house. Who knew what disaster would be awaiting her today.

  The last thing Becky wanted was for Nana to catch on that she’d been in detention, and if she saw Mr. Turnbull dropping her off, Nana would probably notice how late Becky was getting home. That is, if Nana even noticed. If there was anything good about Nana losing it, it was that Becky could get away with a lot more than most of the kids in her grade.

  Becky didn’t see any smoke coming from the general vicinity of her—well, Nana’s—house, or hear fire engines, so it seemed pretty safe to take a little time to breathe on the way home. She lost herself in thought as she walked, remembering all the little “funny” things she and her Nana used to laugh about, like Nana putting her keys in the fridge, or putting toilet paper on the paper towel rack. Then things had started to get scarier, like Nana leaving the gas stove on, or forgetting to turn off the water she was running in the stoppered sink for the dishes and flooding the kitchen.

  I don’t suppose I should complain too much to Robin about Nana, Becky thought as she pulled her jacket around her. Because she could have given me up for adoption or something, after Mom and Dad died in the crash, and she didn’t. Becky sighed deeply. She looked after me all these years, so it’s only fair that I look after her now.