by Rachel Gold
I nodded, got my free hand to the side of her face. With my thumb on her cheek, fingers trailing down the side of her neck, I couldn’t turn her back to me. She pressed into my hand, brought her lips back to mine. I kissed her lips and then her cheek so I could kiss her mouth newly and then her other cheek and her nose, which made her laugh and sit back.
Her cheeks had gone the dark berry red they got in winter when she froze and then warmed up. I put my thumb there, grinning that I got to be the one who warmed her up now, and this winter, and…I wanted it to be forever.
“All those pictures you sent. I looked at them for so long,” she said. “You look great in every one. I want to kiss every one of you.”
Leaning forward, I missed her lips and kissed the corner of her mouth. She grinned and kissed me, longer.
And with all of that, I forgot to ask her out.
Chapter Thirteen
Early September 2017
All I remember of the week before starting tenth grade, official high school, was kissing Aisha. As soon as we were alone, one of us would reach over and touch the other, lightly, anywhere, to bring us together, I’d play with her hand, she’d touch my shoulder or my collarbone. We’d kiss at first on the lips and, as the days went on, soft kisses on each other’s faces, necks, she kissed my hands and wrists, I kissed from the hollow of her throat up to her ear until she laughed and pushed me away saying it tickled. I kissed her eyelids, she kissed the tip of my nose.
It was like a musical score in which the notes were kisses, layers of melody built over days, soaring arias of touch over the bass beat of our hearts.
She always sat next to me or sideways across my lap so when we kissed, we didn’t press chest to chest, and I was so grateful. She’d already been the best person in the world, so this made her double-best.
“You want to be my girlfr—, uh, my person?” she asked two days before school started.
I’d thought that was implied in all the kissing. And worried that I should’ve asked. I had my arm around her shoulders, both of us sitting against a pile of pillows in her bed, books fallen to the sides, her legs draped over mine.
“Yes,” I said, fast. “Do you want to be…er, will you be my girlfriend?”
“Kind of hoping I already am,” she said with a grin.
“Oh my God, you walked me into a formal girlfriend question and you’re not even going to say yes, you’re such a punk.”
She kissed me hard, but I could feel her suppressed laughter through her lips, then sat back and said, “Yes! Absolutely.”
“Good ’cause you kind of have been for a while.”
“I beat out all those trees?”
“Oh shut up.”
Aisha grinned and reached behind her shoulder to get the parasaurolophus and the hummingbird who was really a phoenix. Snuggling them together, she draped the phoenix’s wing over the parasaurolophus, the phoenix full of colors and the dinosaur speckled white and brown, slightly dapper with its head crest.
I plucked the phoenix out of her hand and kissed its beak. She pulled it away and gave me her lips to kiss instead.
When we stopped, we had to fish around in the pillows to find the little phoenix. She put it on the shelf, cuddling the parasaurolophus, to the right of the middle where she’d see it as she fell asleep each night.
She said, “You know, I think Day and Riq have been placing bets on us.”
“Are you going to tell them?”
“Soon. Not yet, if that’s okay,” she said. “I want them to know, and my folks and, pretty much, everybody in the whole world, but maybe not right away. I don’t want to know what they all think about this and you know they’re going to tell me.”
“Yeah, and then you’re going to tell me what they say, right?”
“Pffh, they’ll tell you too,” she said. “Is your family going to be okay with this?”
I shrugged. “Depends who. Milo will be great and she’ll make sure Pops is. Brock, you know a year ago I’d have said he’ll think it’s cool, but now, who the hell knows. But Milo will handle him if he gets shitty. Mom, I don’t know.”
She sighed and asked, “They know I’m black, right?” The words sounded like a joke, but there wasn’t any laughter in her.
“Nah, I never told them.” I said and kissed her cheek. She cuddled against me and traced a circle on my knee of my jeans.
I watched her finger moving on the light blue denim. I saw the colors of our skin differently when we were alone. Not some foolish “we’re all human” ideal that erased her experiences. When we were alone, her skin held so much information: temperature, softness, variations in texture and color, how she moved, her expressions, how my skin felt touching hers.
As soon as we went someplace with strangers, all that information collapsed down to one color and one idea. I watched how people looked at her. I worried about if she was safe or not. Weird because she was the one of us who really liked people and I was the one who wanted to stay home with Wolvie.
Wolvie had taught me a lot about how to handle people by the way dogs moved around each other at the dog park, deciding who should interact, who was okay. That helped me see when someone started moving toward Aisha in a way I didn’t like. Mostly that happened in stores. A clerk would start to follow her and then I’d move in, like Wolvie policing a badly-behaved dog, and put my body between that clerk and Aisha.
She’d see that, of course. Aisha was onto the store clerks before I was. But sometimes I could give her an extra few minutes to get what she needed, or she’d catch my eye and nod toward the door and we’d drop the stuff we were no way going to buy now and leave.
Since we were dating now, could she take my hand and pull me away? Or was that a terrible idea?
“How much of a thing is this going to be, me being white?” I asked.
“Way too much,” she said.
“And that didn’t happen with you and Meta, or did it?”
“Not the same. Her family…well, Indian American and black are pretty far apart sometimes. But out in public we were two brown girls together and that’s great even when it’s bad. Darius was trying to tell me because he dated a white girl for a while—not that I’m calling you a girl, but same dynamic—”
“Got it,” I said. “And thank you.”
She nodded and placed a tiny kiss on my jaw before saying, “Some people, here, maybe a lot of people, are not going to be okay with us. Badly not okay. And I don’t know what that means because all this Minnesota nice…“ She trailed off into heavy silence.
“Hey,” I said. “Maybe I’ll finally get my superpowers and then I can beat them up.”
“Yeah,” she said, but her voice stayed low.
“You’re scared?”
Aisha pressed her cheek to my shoulder. She said, “Sometimes I think I know this place and I don’t. Minnesota is different. Back home, I wouldn’t care. If someone had a problem, they’d say it to my face. Here people don’t say anything but you’ve seen it. Harder to deal with when I can’t see it coming, when I can feel it but folks want to tell me I’m making it up.”
“Yeah,” I said and held onto her tighter. “You’re not making it up. I see it. Hear it, too.”
“I hate that. But thanks. At least it’s not like it used to be.” Her voice fell all the way to a whisper. “Mom’s grandfather, my great-grandfather almost got killed for dating a white woman.”
“Fuck.”
“They got stopped by the police and it was just luck she was driving. She was a court stenographer but she played it like she was a lawyer. Police wanted him to get out of the car and you know they were going to beat him, not care if they killed him, probably try to. She told them she was taking him to the courthouse for a trial. She had to tell them if he showed up at the courthouse all beat up, the jury might feel sympathy. If she’d hadn’t been smart like that…”
That wasn’t so long ago. Milo’s mom had been alive when I was born. I hadn’t thought that when Milo and Pops�
�� parents were young if they’d tried to date like this that it was life and death. That people killed people like us for a whole lot of reasons.
“I’m scared for you. Is that okay?” I asked.
“Heck yeah, I’m scared for you enough, might as well.”
“Yeah, sometimes I’m scared for me too. So we agree to never leave our houses again.”
“No. We’re going to leave the house, Kaz. And we should tell people.”
“Can I be the one to tell Riq?”
“Sure.”
But we didn’t tell him before school started. And once it did, we had a lot more to worry about.
* * *
Our junior high hadn’t been that big. You could walk across it before you realized it: one main hall with classrooms off it and one hall along the back with our lockers. Each of the three grades held about two hundred kids. A bunch of them I’d gone to elementary with. I had my same group of friends all three years, mainly Jon and Sofia, with Aisha joining us in eighth grade. Aisha had that group plus some girls from the soccer team, plus some friends from her Spanish class. Each semester, she picked up more friends. She liked people; I did too, but at a distance.
This high school was three times bigger than the junior high, nearly two thousand students. Aisha and I didn’t have as many classes together. Since we were Kaz Adams and Aisha Warren, the alphabet split us any time there were multiple sessions of a class.
At least we had World History and AP Chemistry together and lunch. The first few days the two of us ate lunch sitting at the end of a long table of studious kids who ignored us. Brock had a different lunch period. Not like we’d sit with him anyway. He was popular and hung out with a bunch of other popular guys. Jon wasn’t in our lunch period and we hadn’t seen Sofia at lunch yet.
Those first few days of school, I spent too much time trying to figure out where I was supposed to be, what the class was doing, where my next class was, how these textbooks could be this many pages. Luckily we only had three days until the weekend.
On Saturday, I fell asleep leaned against the wall, sitting in Aisha’s bed. I woke up tipped sideways with my head on a pillow on her leg. I still had a headache. Aisha had her other leg bent up, a textbook braced open on it.
“Is that Chem?” I asked groggily. “Read it to me?”
“You okay?”
“I’ve had a headache for two days,” I admitted. “Two thousand students is so many. It doesn’t bother you, does it?”
“I like all the rush and busy and noise. You could ask them to move your study hall so it’s not last period, give you a break mid-day.”
“You’re a genius,” I told her and closed my eyes.
She curled a lock of my hair around her finger and dramatically read me the intro to our Chemistry book.
I thought high school would be perfect if Aisha and I could navigate it from a two-person bubble, but that Monday, walking into the cafeteria, Sofia stood up from a table and waved at me while I was in line. I waved back. She texted: Come sit with us.
I couldn’t see who “us” was over the crowd. The juniors and seniors were way taller than anyone in junior high had been. I got to the end of the line and waited for Aisha.
“Sofi said we should sit with her,” I told her.
“She’s in this lunch? Why hasn’t she been sitting with us?”
I shrugged. “We’re bottom of the pack again.”
Aisha flashed me a smile and wrapped her finger in my sleeve, pulling it tight so it hugged my wrist. I grinned back and rubbed my shoulder against hers. If I hadn’t been holding a tray, I’d have taken her hand, except we hadn’t talked about touching at school and how out we wanted to be. I assumed pretty out because she’d been out with Meta last year, but then I was white and everything felt so new. Better to ask.
Sofia waved us to the empty spot on the bench next to her. The purple streak at the front of her black hair looked freshly dyed and she wore a burgundy sweater that managed not to clash with that vibrant purple. There wasn’t quite enough space for two people, but we made it work. We were used to sitting close, especially in the treehouse when we had a ton of comics covering the floor.
Across from Sofia sat a tall girl, short bleached hair, tan white complexion, sports jersey, broad mouth that turned down at the corners even though she was smiling. Next to her sat a smugly pretty girl with creamy pale skin and eyes about the same color as her long, wavy brown hair. Her stylized athletic shirt was mostly frill.
“This is Kaz and Aisha,” Sofia told them.
“I’m Trina,” the brown-haired girl said, looking at me. “And Eve.” Eve nodded as Trina said her name.
“Kaz is Brock’s little sister,” Sofia said.
“Oh? Is Brock still dating Jillian?” Trina asked.
“He broke up with her mid-summer. He’s going out with Lisa from the cheer squad,” I said, then shut my mouth, wondering why I was gossiping about my brother with this stranger.
“She’s so pretty,” Trina said. She turned and looked across the room like she was going to see Brock and Lisa. She elbowed Eve and said, “Look, you could go for him. He’s almost tall enough for you.”
Eve shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll find out if he likes you,” Trina said. “How about you, Kaz? Seen anyone cute yet or did you have a boyfriend last year?”
Blood rushed into my cheeks. My face felt heavy enough to fall off, slide right down into my mashed potatoes. My favorite person in the world was sitting next to me—and the only person I’d ever really kissed or wanted to. And she was being much too quiet.
“Oh there is someone? Who is it?” Trina asked.
Aisha put her foot over mine and pressed, I thought about what she’d said about her great-grandfather, took a big bite of my hamburger and shook my head.
Trina laughed. “You can’t keep it a secret forever. Sofi, did you find out the name of that guy in your homeroom? Or a pic of him?”
“Not yet,” Sofia said.
The table got quiet. Trina scrutinized the room while the rest of us ate.
“You came from the smallest junior high, didn’t you?” Trina asked me. “What do you think of this place?”
I had my mouth full, and I didn’t have a good answer anyway, so I shrugged and looked at Aisha.
“I like the academic standards,” she said. “Junior high was too easy. At least I can get college credits here.”
A flash of shock crossed Trina’s face. Then her eyes narrowed, mouth tightening. What did she have to be angry about?
Trina corralled her face into a plastic smile. “You have to pass the exams to get college credit.” Her tone suggested that would be way beyond Aisha.
Aisha’s face was expressionless, which meant she was pissed. But she kept her voice even as she said, “I know. I’m going to.”
Trina shrugged and gazed across the cafeteria. “I guess you like a challenge.”
“I’ll let you know the answer to that when I find something challenging here,” Aisha said and turned her attention back to her lunch.
Next to me, Sofi wasn’t breathing. I contemplated our hands on the table: Sofi next to me with naturally tan skin and Eve across from her with sun-tanned, almost as close in color, but worlds apart in meaning. Trina’s pale white was one shade pinker than mine.
Eve had been eating her hamburger, but now pointed with the half-eaten hamburger, reaching across Trina. “There’s Caden, who’s he sitting with?”
“Oh those lacrosse guys. He could do better. He needs to try out for football. I’m going to tell him.” Trina pushed up, holding her tray. She bussed the tray and went over to hang on the guy who had to be Caden. He had a very defined chin and beyond that I’d never be able to pick him out in a crowd of brown-haired white guys.
“They’ve been together all summer,” Sofia said. Her gaze flicked to Aisha and her eyebrows went up like she was worried or sorry.
Aisha didn’t see it. She stared steadily
down at her tray, stabbing at the green beans.
“You play basketball?” Eve asked Aisha. She didn’t look up at first so Eve repeated it, louder, “Hey, you play basketball?”
Aisha’s face came up, jaw set. “Soccer,” she said.
“Huh, really? How tall are you?”
“Five-four.”
“Kind of short I guess. Still you could try out,” Eve said.
“Um, thanks? I’ll think about it.” Aisha folded her napkin, put it on her tray under her fork. “I’ve got to stop by my locker. See you.”
She walked away with her shoulders rounded in. I got up without saying anything and followed Aisha.
As I bussed my tray, standing a few people behind Aisha, giving her a minute, I played through the conversation. How quickly had Aisha seen this group wasn’t safe for us? When Trina didn’t say anything to her or even look at her as we sat down? Or before that, when Sofi only called me over, not Aisha? But that could’ve been because I spent more time with Sofi this summer.
Definitely by the time Trina demonstrated how shocked she was that Aisha was articulate. I’d seen that look way more times than I ever wanted to, since Aisha tended to speak up first and said things better than I did. Seen how a white person’s eyes would widen and their head jerk back a fraction. Watched how fast they caught themselves. Mom did it plenty. Not sure if Milo ever had because two years ago I wouldn’t have noticed. And for every time I noticed it, Aisha had to see it two or three times as often.
And Trina’s anger? What was that about? Plus the way Eve asked her about basketball, the demanding sound of her “hey,” like Aisha owed her an answer.
I caught up to Aisha in the hall. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, but low and quiet.
“I’m sorry. That was fucked up.”
She peeked at me, corner of her mouth lifting. “Thanks. Was it all the way as messed up as I thought?”
“I’d give it a seven, maybe eight,” I said. Aisha had introduced me to the zero-to-ten pain scale doctors used and we now used it for all kinds of painful situations.
