Kissing Ezra Holtz (and Other Things I Did for Science)

by Brianna R. Shrum

  The couples will meet at least twice a week for the six weeks of the experiment, if possible. They’ll answer some questions. Hopefully they like each other.

  “A combination of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin—”

  Love.

  “At the experiment’s conclusion, participants agree to stare into one another’s eyes for four minutes, based on conjecture that doing so triggers mirror neurons in the brain—

  The staring is weird, okay, but it really does do something in your brain that causes you to want to mirror the other person. To view them as deeply human. To empathize with them. So it’s weird but it’s important.

  We lay out our parameters, the teacher approves it, and that afternoon we put out a notice on the school’s little social media page that I feel like hardly anyone uses.

  Fingers crossed I’m wrong.

  MEET YOUR MATCH

  Do you believe in love?

  Do you believe in science?

  Do you believe in helping out your friendly neighborhood matchmakers, toiling with you through this long torturous social experiment we call high school?

  Let a couple PROFESSIONALS* match you up with the future love of your life.

  FOR SCIENCE.

  (Please please please help us we need this grade.)

  *We are not professionals

  We slap contact info on the bottom and post it online, then print out copies to plaster through the halls and just pray that someone, anyone responds.

  Ezra is all keyed up about it—someone gets just a little too jazzed about academics—and he says we should meet up after school, probably. To monitor responses. To fine-tune the specifics. To really get started on the report already, at least the introduction.

  I say, “I can’t.”

  He says, “Why not? Hot date?”

  I say, “With Mr. Thompson.”

  He spits out his water. “I’m sorry?”

  “Detention.”

  Ezra narrows his eyes and shifts the slightest bit closer to me. “For how long?”

  I shrug. “Just until the end of the week.”

  “Well that’s perfect timing.”

  “Please. Our project’s barely even started.”

  “How did you land two weeks’ detention this early in the semester?”

  My hand goes to my hair and I glance at the ground. Something about his scrutiny makes it a little hard to keep eye contact. A little hard to breathe. “I just—I talked back in class. Swore at him. He was being a jackass—”

  “We have this huge project and your mouth landed you in detention already. Jesus, Amalia.”

  I try to protest.

  He throws his hands in the air.

  And leaves.

  By the weekend, both our inboxes are flooded. I mean, flooded as in we have way more applicants than the six I predicted. We narrow it down to forty-five applications after several days of answering a billion asks for more details, and going back and forth with an exhausting number of people who can’t decide/are thinking about it but it’s kind of embarrassing/might be getting back with their boyfriend but like, maybe not, should I just apply anyway?

  Ezra and I have managed to get things done, like I knew we would, despite Ezra’s concern about my attitude, and here we are, sitting on my bedroom floor that I should have vacuumed, maybe, buried in paper. Rest in peace, entire forest. I wanted to go digital with everything but Ezra insisted we print off the applications. He had this whole tabbing and filing system worked out and when I started to nix it, it was like I’d suggested killing his dog. Well. Spider.

  We’ve mapped out kids’ political preferences, social strata, favorite TV shows, extra-curriculars. It’s not like it’s a blind study exactly, because we know people at this school. Both of us have gone here since the ninth grade. But we intentionally asked kids not to write their names at the tops of their applications so that, clues in their email addresses notwithstanding, we could be as neutral as possible when we matched them by their apps.

  We are scientists, after all.

  It’s nearly eleven p.m. and we have two couples matched. We are, of course, arguing about the final.

  “Ezra, I’m telling you. This is a perfect match on paper.”

  He rolls his eyes and leans back on his elbows, knee bent up, bare foot pressing into the carpet. “This? Is a perfect match? Look at the couples they both love in fiction. This guy loves Kaz and Inej. Han and Leia. Mr. and Mrs. Smith. She, however, has listed Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, Lara Jean Covey and Peter Kavinsky, Gomez and Morticia. Simon and Blue.”

  I shrug. “And?”

  “And that means she wants romance. He wants . . . people who want to kill each other. It means they’re incompatible.”

  “It means they both like to read. Both of them listed book couples.”

  He blows out a breath. “Beside politics, he just has: ANARCHY.”

  “She’s a socialist.”

  “Exactly.”

  “No, they’re both leftists, Ezra.”

  “Why are you so invested in this couple?”

  I run my hand over my head. “I don’t know, I just—I see it. Neither of them is religious, and they say that explicitly, which, in the South? Talk about common ground. They’re both, uh . . .”—I scan the page, needing something—“. . . straight.”

  “Well then in that case, let’s just draw up wedding invitations. They’re both straight.”

  I narrow my eyes. “I’m saying they have things in common.”

  “And I’m saying they’re extremely different. She does cheer. He’s a band kid who’s in debate.”

  “Our first couple has eighteen billion things in common. They have everything in common. Are you saying people who have a few differences can’t make it as a couple?”

  Ezra pushes his glasses up and stretches a little, lengthens his torso and chest, and finally completely sinks down onto my floor. He looks up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. Are you saying that they can?”

  I say, “I don’t know why not.”

  I crawl across the floor and sit next to him, where he lies, top of his head touching the bed frame. “You need to be more open-minded,” I say. He groans and I flick his nose.

  I don’t know what possesses me to do that—to touch him. It’s just a little bit of a mixed bag with Ezra. Being very deeply familiar and very extremely not all at the same time. I immediately want to take it back.

  But he doesn’t say anything that makes me feel like I overstepped. He just says, while looking at the ceiling, “You’re going to match this couple and they’re going to hate each other.”

  It’s getting kind of late, which makes me feel like an old person—it’s not even midnight. I settle down on the floor next to him, papers rustling at my feet. I grab a pillow and lie on my back, hair spread out just everywhere under me. “Because they’re different?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that doesn’t make things interesting?” I glance at him and he turns his head over so he’s looking right at me. I realize now how close our faces are.

  Maybe he does, too.

  Because he doesn’t answer. He just . . . looks. Breathes. I am close enough to him that my breath is fogging up his glasses and I wonder if he’ll move but he doesn’t.

  It’s so quiet.

  My brother’s Irish punk filters up from his room downstairs through the floor of mine, and there are cicadas outside. The only thing that keeps this from being awkward. Or maybe it wouldn’t be awkward no matter what, maybe I’m just being weird because Ezra is so close and he’s so. He’s so confident and hot.

  I think I’ve always thought this? Well. Not always. I’ve known the guy since before his bar mitzvah, and I remember when he was nothing but limbs and braces, and when he wasn’t being over-studious, he was being obnoxious. But since the guy hit puberty, of course I’ve known.

  It’s just that I’ve known in the same way you know that a wall is professionally painted. You walk by it o
ver and over and think, “That’s a pretty room,” in the right lighting, but it’s not like . . . well.

  It’s not like you’re nose-to-nose at midnight on your bedroom floor.

  I say, I whisper: “What happened to your nose?”

  I watch him swallow. Watch him turn his whole body so he can fully face me, hip to the ground, resting his head in his hand. He looks comfortable.

  What else is new; Ezra nearly always looks comfortable.

  I feel like that is something that, up until this semester, people would have said about me. Look at her, feet up on a desk, hair wild and who-gives-a-shit. Is there anywhere, anywhere that girl isn’t just obscenely comfortable?

  Now, though, I am in academia—Ezra’s world. And I feel like I’m constantly worrying, wondering, evaluating where I measure up.

  And Ezra Holtz is lying in mine, and it looks like the most natural thing on the planet.

  Ezra loosens the knot in his tie with one hand; his knuckles brush his throat.

  “Why are you wearing that?” I say.

  “What am I supposed to answer first?”

  His hair slides over his eyebrow in a way that is shockingly devil-may-care for him.

  I just sigh and roll my eyes.

  “I had to give a speech in class today.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Which class?”

  “Speech,” he says flatly. Adjust his glasses again; they’re always slipping a little. “It had to be about current events. Mine was on whether the use of force is ever justified for political means.”

  “So you gave a speech about punching white supremacists.”

  “I did.”

  My eyebrows fly up. Ezra does not exactly seem like the punching type so I have some idea where he falls on this—

  “I obviously spoke in favor.”

  I open my mouth. Close it again. Open it to croak out, “Oh.” Jesus, he just gets hotter and I don’t know what to do with it.

  He taps that crooked break. “And this, nosy, I got from a fight.”

  I choke. “You’re lying. Get out of my room.”

  He says, “You think?”

  “How? Who? You’re lying. I don’t believe you.”

  “Eighth grade.” His mouth turns up. “I wish I could tell you it was something cool and chivalrous but it was this guy—Rodney Baker—who’d been riding me all year. He was just a giant of a dude. The kind of guy who, the first day, you think might be the gym teacher and then he opens his mouth and you are certain you are wrong. The kind of guy you don’t want to set his sights on you. I don’t even remember what I did to get him to look at me wrong.”

  “Could have been anything,” I say. I raise an eyebrow with pointed meaning.

  “Come on. I wasn’t that bad.”

  “Please. You and Mike and Moshe were a nightmare running around synagogue, and if I recall, Moshe went to school with us—”

  I see the instant shift in his face when I refer to Moshe in the past tense, and for the second time tonight, want to take it back. “Shit. I’m—yeah, sorry. I didn’t . . .”

  “It’s fine,” he says. The quick pain vanishes and he’s back to relaxed. Back to comfortable peace here on my bedroom floor. I don’t know if it’s real, but I know he means it when he says, “I like talking about him.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. It’s good.”

  I swallow hard. “Okay.” It’s a little painful for me to remember Moshe and he wasn’t even my best friend. Anyway. Anyway . . .

  I chew on my lip and look down at the carpet.

  Ezra says, “I do take one issue with your statement. I was not a nightmare! I’ve never been a nightmare.”

  “You’re still a nightmare,” I say.

  He flattens his mouth into a displeased line.

  “And just because you follow the rules,” I say, “doesn’t mean you can’t be a total delinquent.”

  “I’m sorry, I think it means exactly that.”

  His eyes are sparkling. Sparkling. Ezra Freaking Holtz is having fun.

  With me.

  And I . . . I’m having fun, too?

  I say, “Yes. Yeah, it was totally fine when the youth group all came to my house and Moshe somehow hacked our smart speakers to play ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ every time someone used the word never.”

  “I had nothing to do with that.” His mouth is twitching. Suddenly I need to see that quirk widen into a real whole smile.

  “You’re good with parents, Captain America.”

  “Is that a crime?”

  “You totally distracted them so Moshe could get the job done and we had to unplug the system.”

  That twitch twitches harder and wider. I don’t know if it’s me or the memory of Moshe that’s doing it, but I will take being part of that bittersweet cocktail.

  “You did not,” he says.

  I shoot him a challenging look. “Yeah?” Then I stand and retrieve the skeleton of an old speaker from my underwear drawer. I slam it shut and feel this surge of victory when Ezra loses it. He almost chokes he’s laughing so hard, and he has to wipe off his glasses then put them back on his face.

  He rolls back over, hand on his chest, and says, “Oh my god,” through laughter. “I’d forgotten about that.” When he catches his breath, he says, “And you think I’m intolerable now.”

  I make a noise of disgust. “You were way worse in middle school.”

  “So what are you saying?” He cocks his head and smirks. “You like me more now?”

  I furrow my brow and wrinkle my nose even though my pulse is going absolutely nuts in my throat. In my wrists. In my everywhere.

  Ezra’s eyes flick down for a second to my hands and catch there. Then it’s like he realizes what he’s doing and he looks back at my face. His own is a little red.

  I look down at my wrist and say, “Oh god.” When I pulled the speaker out, apparently a bra came out of the drawer with it. A little, like, shockingly lacy one with rainbows all over it.

  “It’s fine,” Ezra says. He clears his throat.

  “Good lord. Just. Finish your story. About the nose.” Shit, I’m going to die.

  I tuck my bra back into my underwear drawer and sink down to the floor right there. No way I’m risking getting close to his face again, not now.

  He says, “Just that guy, he’d been messing with me all year—shoving me, screwing with my books, getting on me about my parents.”

  My hand digs into the carpet, on instinct. I’m immediately bizarrely protective.

  “About them being gay at first, and then when he found out through someone, I don’t know who, that Dad is trans, he kicked things up a notch and I just kind of lost my shit and—well. Wound up with a broken nose.”

  I say, through gritted teeth, “What an asshole.”

  “Eh,” he says. He looks very self-satisfied when he says, “I knocked his tooth out.”

  “What?”

  “That so hard to believe?”

  “No, I just—yes. Yes, it is hard to believe.”

  I lean against my dresser and yawn.

  Ezra says, from the floor, “What time is it?”

  “12:19.”

  “I gotta get home,” he says. “You know what—you win. Match them up.”

  “Yeah?”

  He stands and stretches, that tie hanging loose around his neck, hair and face and eyes all looking adorably—alarmingly adorably—sleepy. “You’ve convinced me. They kill each other, though, it’s on you.”

  “O-okay.”

  “I’m gonna head out.”

  “Think you can find the door?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “I think I’ll make it.”

  He leaves, and I am exhausted and wired all at once.

  I am twisted eighteen thousand different ways and he’s probably completely fine and I’m so tired but damn. I lie in bed for . . . a while. Before I finally fall asleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TEST GROUP PAIR A AND B

>   INT: Wall, pale green. Low hum in background paired with bright edges of hokey wall décor suggests location as the computer lab. Camera flips to selfie mode.

  VIEW: Location confirmed. In frame, Person A, a thin, dark-skinned Black girl with short, natural hair, two piercings in her right eyebrow, bright smile, just this side of embarrassed. She holds the camera in one hand, other resting on her lap. She sits in a sleek gray and black wheelchair, decorated on the sides and on sections of wheel in plaid washi or duct tape—difficult to tell which from video.

  ENTER: Person B, a girl with long black hair down to her waist, winged eyeliner and subtle shimmer gold eyeshadow, medium brown skin. She is fat, face naturally siting in a position that suggests mischief, and in a plaid skirt that nearly perfectly matches Person A’s wheelchair décor.

  A’s eyes pop a little when she notices B in the selfie camera, and she smiles, nose wrinkled, then sets the phone down in front of her and adjusts it so that it captures necessary angles.

  A: “Person B, I presume.”

  B, biting her lip: “That’s what my friends call me. Come here often?”

  A, laughing: “No, actually, I’ve managed to escape computer classes up until now.”

  B: “If only we could all be so lucky. I’m Lina, by the way.”

  Lina holds out her hand and A takes it.

  A: “Tell that to the camera. I’m Janelle.”

  Lina: “Camera, I’m Lina.”

  She raises her eyebrow at Janelle, who smirks.

  Janelle: “Thank you. So we just got matched up, and I guess that means we’re gonna fall in love.”

  Lina: “I’m pretty sure that’s how relationships work, yes.”

  Janelle: “Well, it’s science, Lina. Do I—I feel like I know you.”

  Lina, running her hand through her hair, leaning in toward Janelle just a little: “I think we had the same drama teacher freshman year?”

  Lina blushes immediately and glances at the ground, body language shifting from open and confident to insecure. Closed, chin tipped down, arms folded over her chest. She glances back at Janelle.