Soul Kiss

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “As long as my dad says it’s okay. But I’m warning you, he may have some ulterior motive, like wanting to call you the next time his computer crashes.”

  “That’s fine.” He smiled, and I felt kind of gooey inside. I covered it up by pushing his side and telling him to get a move on.

  We went to this chain place that specialized in burgers and chili. We both got lemonade and burgers—bacon and Swiss on mine, some kind of spicy salsa on his. “But hold the onions, please,” he said to the waitress.

  “You don’t like onions?” I asked as she walked away.

  “They make your breath smell bad.”

  I nodded. Then I realized what he was really saying, that he was planning to kiss me again later and he wanted his breath to smell good.

  My whole body shivered, and Daniel noticed. “Are you cold? We could ask them to make it warmer, or order you something hot to drink.”

  “No, I’m fine. So tell me something about Cuba. That’s so exotic. My family never goes anywhere cool because the Big Mistake is so weird.”

  “You couldn’t go to Cuba even if you wanted,” Daniel said. “It’s restricted. Only Cubans who have relatives there, and journalists and humanitarians and stuff.”

  “Have you been back since you left?”

  He shook his head. “My mom says it’s too dangerous. Plus I don’t know if she even has any family left there.”

  “What do you mean? Don’t you have, like, aunts and uncles and cousins?”

  “I don’t know. My mom won’t talk about it.”

  That was definitely weird. Though my mom was an only child, she had a lot of cousins, and my dad had two brothers and a sister, and we took a lot of day trips around the greater Northeast to see them for dinner or for birthdays or funerals.

  I was right in the middle of all the cousins, age-wise, so we were starting to go to graduations and even a wedding. I couldn’t imagine not having all those cousins in the background. Some of them looked like me. Some were around my age. Some had jerky brothers like I did. It was cool knowing that I had all those connections out there in the world, and I felt sorry for Daniel not having them.

  The burgers came and we dug in, then we shared a big chocolate ice cream dessert. Every time my spoon clinked against his I felt these weird sensations travel through me and I thought about kissing him later that night.

  As we walked out of the restaurant, Daniel took my hand. His was cool and dry, and my fingers wrapped around his.

  Because the mom-mobile was so much bigger than Dad’s car, It was hard to snuggle up together. There was this major box full of crap between me and Daniel, stuffed with parking passes, CDs, candy wrappers, tissues, and cough drops. I was afraid to take my right hand off the wheel to hold Daniel’s, though I did for a couple of minutes when we were cruising along the highway.

  I pulled into the parking lot of his building and shut the car off. Daniel leaned across the pile of junk between us, and I turned toward him. Our lips had just met when we heard the rattle of an old clunker and the sound of loud hip-hop music.

  “You should go,” Daniel said, backing away from me. “As soon as I get out, lock the doors and drive away.” He opened his door and jumped out. “Hurry, so I can see you’re safe before I go inside.”

  I didn’t know what else to do, but that rattling car was approaching and Daniel was obviously nervous, so I turned the car on. As soon as I did, he turned and went into his apartment. I locked the doors but had to wait for the old clunker to pass by me before I could back out of the space. There were three guys in it, older than Daniel and me. All three looked Hispanic, and they all wore ball caps backward and had tattoos on their necks. The way one of them looked at me gave me the creeps.

  As soon as I could, I backed out of the spot and went in the opposite direction from the way the clunker had gone, even though that took me deeper into Levittown and farther from home. My hands were shaking on the wheel, but I remembered my dad saying, “Ten o’clock and two o’clock, Melissa,” and that kept me steady as I took a couple of wrong turns, trying to find my way back to the highway.

  My parents were still up when I got in, watching TV in the living room. “Have a nice dinner?” my mother asked.

  “Yeah.” I told her where we went, and handed her the keys back. I went to give my dad the change from dinner, but he told me to keep it.

  They were definitely acting weird. Usually everything revolved around the Big Mistake—what he was eating, how he was feeling, was there anything going wrong with him. I slipped beneath the radar. Even the night I ducked out to have dinner at Brie’s, and they caught me, they didn’t seem to care that much that I had disappeared. It was strange to have them asking me so many questions. Finally I escaped to my bedroom, and called Daniel’s house.

  “I am glad you got home safe,” he said.

  “Who were those guys? They gave me the creeps.”

  “Bad men. Drug dealers. They terrorize the whole neighborhood.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We didn’t have drug dealers in Stewart’s Crossing, at least not that I knew of. And we didn’t have guys who cruised the streets in old cars with stereos booming. It made me realize what a different world Daniel lived in.

  We talked for a while longer, mostly me teasing him about his driving, and then we hung up. I dozed off, but I kept waking up from dreams of men in cars chasing me and Daniel. I didn’t know what they wanted with us, but they really scared me.

  Dinner Table Conversation

  Sunday afternoon Brie texted me because she had heard from Military Boy and wanted to tell me all about it. I went over there and we hung out. I was freaked by what had happened when I dropped Daniel off, and I was worried that Brie would be just like Chelsea, telling me that I shouldn’t get involved with him.

  Military Boy’s parents lived in North Jersey, and he was getting the next weekend off for a long break over Columbus Day. “He invited me to come stay at his parents’ house!” she crowed. “My parents said it’s okay as long as his parents are always there and he has a sister I can share a room with. My mom just has to take me to the train station in Trenton, and then I’ll take the train up to where he lives, and his mom will pick me up, and we can spend the whole weekend together!”

  “That’s great, Brie.”

  “He is just so totally my soul mate. Imagine, some day I could be Mrs. Oliver Michaelson.” She leaned back against the big study pillow on her bed. There were a whole bunch of other little pillows all around her, mostly in pink, which was her favorite color. I thought it was kind of nauseating.

  “Oliver?” I asked. I was sure she’d never told me Military Boy’s first name before. “You mean like in the movie? That one with the orphans? Please sir, can I have some more?”

  “Don’t be like that, Melissa.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Oliver is a very distinguished name. Oliver Wendell Holmes was this amazing judge, or lawyer, or politician or something. The name means of the olive tree. Isn’t that romantic?”

  “If you like martinis.”

  “What about you and Daniel? Did you give him his driving lessons yesterday?”

  I leaned back in the big armchair across from her bed. It was usually covered with underwear and stuffed animals, but she had put all the clothes away and piled the bears, walruses, and monkeys in the corner. “Yeah. It was kind of sweet. I mean, he’s so good at everything in school you would think that he’d be some ace Indy driver or something, but the whole time he looked like there was an animal in the dashboard that was about to jump out and eat him.”

  “Is he going to be able to go to college?” Brie asked. “I mean, if his mother doesn’t have any money?”

  “There are all kinds of scholarships,” I said. “And he’s so smart I bet he could get into Harvard or Yale just on his brains and his SAT scores.”

  “How did he do?”

  I realized that I didn’t know, and that I’d never talked about college with him. My parents were so
totally into my college applications that I let them handle everything. I just wrote the essays they told me to.

  I figured they were just eager to get me out of the house so they could concentrate on the Big Mistake. Robbie wasn’t exactly stupid, but he was nowhere near as smart as I was. My parents had wanted him to take all AP courses, like me, but he didn’t test well; his brain was always going in a hundred different directions, the doctors said, so he couldn’t concentrate on any one thing.

  I thought that was a bullshit excuse, but my parents bought it. I guess those first years of him being a total wacko, banging his head against the wall and not wearing clothes, made them lower their expectations. I thought it was strange how they didn’t seem to transfer all their hopes to me, though. I mean, you’d think they would be happy I was smart enough to go to a good college, that I could be depended on to get myself an education and then a career.

  To shift things away from Daniel, I sat up in the big armchair and said, “What about Oliver? Where does he want to go to college?”

  “He’s trying for an appointment to West Point. He wants to be a general.”

  “I think you have to start out lower than that,” I said drily. “Like private or something.”

  “Oh, no, once you graduate from a service academy you go right in as an officer. If he goes to West Point then he would graduate as a second lieutenant.”

  “Sounds second-rate,” I said. “Kind of like an under-secretary. You always wonder what they have to do while they’re under the secretary.” I looked at her. “What about you? Do you suddenly want to go to West Point too?”

  “Oh, no. But I’m going to apply to Vassar. It’s in Poughkeepsie. That’s right near West Point.”

  “Poughkeepsie? That sounds like a euphemism for poop. Oh dear, the baby made a Poughkeepsie in his diaper.”

  “You’re an ass, you know that, Melissa?” Brie said. She threw one of the pillows at me, a heart-shaped pink one with a dark red lace border. It said, Daddy’s little sweetheart on it.

  I threw it back at her. “You could apply to Smith or Mt. Holyoke too. I don’t think they’re that far from West Point. My parents are saying that I should apply to some of those Seven Sisters, just in case the Ivies don’t work out.”

  We pulled out a big atlas and started looking up college towns. “You should totally apply to Columbia,” Brie said. “I can see you in Manhattan. You’ll get a big trench coat and a porkpie hat and wear combat boots.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not even sure I want to go to school in a city. There are a lot of bad people in places like that.”

  Brie looked at me like I had two heads. “You’ve been wanting to get out of the suburbs for years,” she said. “Why the big change?”

  I held the pink pillow close to my chest and told Brie about the gangbangers in the car at Daniel’s building. “They really scared me. I’m not sure I could handle living in a city.”

  “But there are bad people everywhere,” Brie said. “Case in point, in Levittown. At Daniel’s building. You can’t hide under a rock for the rest of your life. You just have to be careful. Didn’t Daniel tell you to lock the doors and drive away? See, he knows what to do.”

  I wasn’t convinced, but eventually we shifted over to our history homework, both of us reading and trying to keep the other awake with questions. The next morning I saw Daniel in school, but I didn’t ask him any more about the gangbangers, or how he knew how to deal with them.

  Thursday afternoon, as we were leaving history, Daniel asked, “Do you think you could help me with driving lessons again tomorrow? A guy I work with at ComputerCo has a used car I can buy really cheap, but I have to get my license first.”

  “I can ask my parents,” I said, and he ran off to catch his bus.

  “I think Chelsea is secretly jealous of you,” Brie said, when we were on the bus together. “She just can’t stop talking about you and Daniel.”

  “Jealous? But she hates Daniel. She’s always saying mean things about him.”

  “Yeah, but she sees that he’s smart, and that he’s helping you. She’s worried that she won’t do well this semester and her parents will really come down on her.”

  We spent the rest of the bus ride talking about Chelsea, and Mindy, and what we thought might be on the AP history exam we were going to have in a week or so.

  At dinner that night I asked my mom if I could borrow her car again on Saturday afternoon to give Daniel another driving lesson. “You like this boy, don’t you?” she asked.

  “He’s nice, and he’s smart. And he really helped Dad with his computer, right?” I looked across the table at my father.

  “He did,” my father said.

  “I’m just worried,” my mother said. “He lives in Levittown. I don’t like the idea of you going over there by yourself.”

  I hadn’t told her about the gangbangers in Daniel’s parking lot, and I wasn’t going to, especially when she already had the attitude that things weren’t safe over there. I know, I should have listened to her, but she was my mother. If she said turn left, I turned right. It was just a mother-daughter thing.

  “Mom. Lots of nice people live in Levittown.”

  “And he has no father,” she said.

  “Lots of nice people don’t have fathers in the house. I think his father passed away.”

  My mother looked at my dad, one of those “help me out here, Richard” looks. Usually he just caves in, says something dumb like “listen to your mother.” But this time he said, “I agree with Melissa. Just because his family is poor doesn’t mean he and Melissa shouldn’t be friends. And besides, maybe his good study habits will rub off on her.”

  That clearly wasn’t the answer my mother wanted. I could see from the grimace on her face that she didn’t know what to say.

  My parents were both die-hard liberals. They believed that everyone was equal, that the government should look out for the less fortunate, that we should respect planet earth, all that stuff. It looked like she was wrestling with her conscience, that liberal bent fighting against wanting to protect her daughter.

  She caved. “Yes, you can borrow the car,” she said. “But I want you to be careful.”

  From the way she said it, I knew she meant I should be careful in more ways than one. “Don’t worry, Mom, I know all about birth control.”

  Her mouth dropped open, and Robbie snickered. “That is not dinner table conversation,” she said. My father shifted uneasily in his chair.

  “I’m not having sex with him, Mom. I’m just teaching him how to drive.”

  “Again, not dinner table conversation. We’ll talk about it later.”

  I went up to my room after dinner, while the Big Mistake stayed downstairs to watch some over-muscled guys beat each other up on some kind of field. I was just waiting for my mother to come in and get all serious with me. Instead, it was my dad who knocked on my door.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  “Sure.” I picked up some T-shirts and sweaters from one of the comfy chairs and threw them on my bed next to me.

  He sat down. “Your mother likes to look out for you, you know. Both of us remember what it was like to be your age, even though you don’t believe that.”

  I didn’t say anything, and I watched him squirm around in the chair. “This country is weighted against minorities,” he said finally. “When my grandparents came here, there was a lot of prejudice against Italians and Roman Catholics. Then when my dad, your Grandpa Joe, wanted to marry Grandma Cynthia, it was a big deal for Grandpa Joe’s parents because Grandma Cynthia wasn’t Catholic. And her parents weren’t happy either. They were worried because she would have an Italian last name, and there was a lot of discrimination back then.”

  “That’s silly,” I said. “We know lots of people whose parents aren’t from the same religion, and lots of people with Italian last names.”

  “That’s true. But those prejudices don’t die out. They just shift to the newest imm
igrant group.”

  “Like Hispanics.”

  “Exactly. And it’s not just that Daniel is Cuban. I’ll bet your friends don’t really like him, do they?”

  It was my turn to squirm. “They just don’t know him.”

  He nodded. “All we want is for you to be careful. Don’t do anything crazy, just because you think it will make your mom and me angry. Don’t get careless—with Daniel, or any boy. You’re smart and beautiful and you have a bright future ahead of you.”

  He stood up, then leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Understood?”

  I said, “Understood,” even though I was completely confused. Did my parents want me to date Daniel or not? Were they worried that I’d get involved with a poor Spanish kid, or just that I’d fall in love with any boy? And why were they suddenly paying attention to me after years of ignoring me in favor of the Big Mistake?

  Electric Flashes

  Saturday afternoon, my father didn’t offer me any money to take Daniel out after our lesson, and he even asked if I’d be home for dinner.

  I could have rocked the boat. I could have been all defiant, but I was still so confused myself. What did I feel about Daniel, anyway? I just didn’t know.

  “Yeah, I’ll be home,” I said. “Six thirty?”

  “That works. Have fun and be careful.” He handed me his set of keys to my mom’s car. For a minute I was confused—why not the Mercedes? I started reading all kinds of things into that. Did she not want me to go out with him? Had she and my dad been fighting about it? Then I remembered I was supposed to be teaching Daniel to drive.

  This time I didn’t go into ComputerCo. I just waited in the parking lot for him to come out, and as soon as he did, I shifted over to the passenger seat. I pointed to the driver’s seat, and he got in.

  “You sure you want me to drive?”

  “You’ve got to be able to drive around on streets if you want your license,” I said.

  He was super careful, looking around like twelve times as he backed out of the parking space, then focusing completely on driving. I didn’t even talk to him. I just let him go wherever he wanted, making turns, even getting on the highway for a mile or so, just from one exit to the next.