Soul Kiss

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Little did I know.

  Grounded

  I pulled out my house key and opened the front door. My parents and the Big Mistake were in the living room, my mom on the house phone, my dad on his cell. Robbie was sitting on the sofa like a lump. Nothing new there, except why wasn’t he in bed?

  “Oh my God, she’s here,” my mother said into the phone. “I’ll call you back later.”

  She jumped up and ran across the room, pulling me into a big hug. Then she backed away. “Where were you? Your father and I were so worried. We thought you ran away.”

  I looked from him to her. “Ran away? I went to the movies with Brie.”

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  I pulled it out of my pocket. “I turned it off in the movies and never turned it back on again.”

  “I told you she was with Brie,” my father said. “We called Brie’s parents, we called her cell phone, but we didn’t get any answer. Your mother has been frantic. She called every one of your friends, and your Aunt Rita, too.”

  “Mom,” I said, drawing it out over several syllables. “I told you, I just went to the movies. No need to have a cow.”

  “You know you’re supposed to tell us when you go out,” my mother said. “And why do you think we let you have a cell phone in the first place? So we can get in touch with you if we need to.”

  My father stood up. “We’re glad you’re home safe, Missy. But you’re grounded, effective immediately. You can’t get away with everything you want, you know.”

  I looked from him to my mother. She had her hands on her hips. Usually she’s the disciplinarian, and I can apply to my father for mitigation. But with him doling out the punishment, I knew I had no hope of appeal. I couldn’t resist saying, “My name is not Missy,” as I turned and stalked out of the room. Behind me, I heard the Big Mistake snickering.

  Saturday morning, I was kind of hoping they would have mellowed out. But no such luck. My mother made me go with her on her errands, from the dry cleaners to the Office Barn superstore to the grocery.

  She did let me get the mail by myself, but considering the mailbox was at the foot of our driveway that wasn’t a big stretch. I came back up to the house waving my letter from the Educational Testing Service. “I got my second set of SAT results,” I said, tearing open the envelope. I looked at the score for a second, not believing what I saw.

  “What?” my mother asked.

  I handed her the results. The SAT ranks in three categories: Literature, History and Social Studies; Mathematics; and Science. The top score possible in each is 800. I got an 800 in lit & history, a 780 in math and a 780 in science.

  “Melissa, these are wonderful,” my mother said. “Congratulations.”

  “So I’m not grounded anymore?”

  She looked at me like I was from Mars. “Of course you’re still grounded. Your brain has nothing to do with your poor judgment.”

  “That is so unfair.” In what was turning out to be a very distressing pattern, I stalked down the hall to my room.

  On my way, my mother called, “Don’t even think about climbing out your window. I had your father put a lock on it while we were out.”

  The violation! My father had gone into my room while I wasn’t there and messed around with my window. I hurried over. Sure enough, there was a latch drilled into the window frame with a combination lock on it.

  I went back to my doorway. “I’m a prisoner!” I called down the hallway. “I demand my rights according to the Geneva Convention.”

  I didn’t know what the Geneva Convention was but I had heard it a lot in the movies.

  “Look it up online,” my mother called. “If it says anything about grounding a teenager, let me know.”

  I did look it up, but of course it was totally useless. Even I could see that I wasn’t a prisoner of war, and I didn’t need access to the Red Cross or anything.

  I logged into the SAT site as Daniel and read his results online. He had gotten 800s in each of the three subjects—a perfect score. That had to help him get into Penn. And my application was looking a lot better now that I had improved my own scores.

  It was kind of irritating that he did better than I did. I knew he was smarter than I was, but still. I tried to call his house but there was no answer. We hadn’t made plans for that night, though we had been spending every Saturday night together for a while. It didn’t matter since I was grounded, but I was still mad that he never called me to check in.

  I texted back and forth with Brie, telling her I had been grounded. “Not surprised,” she texted back.

  My parents made a point of taking us all out to dinner on Saturday night. “Just like a family,” my dad said, as the Big Mistake and I piled into the back seat of the mom-mobile. “We should do this more often.”

  I remembered we had tried going out as a family when the Big Mistake and I were both little kids, but he made a scene everywhere. He’d scream and yell and pound the table. He’d kick and bite my parents. I always made sure to sit as far away from him as possible.

  That night, though, he was the model child. I knew he was doing it just for effect, but he opened the door of the restaurant for my mother and even for me, ushering me forward with a big sweep of his arm. He walked up to the hostess stand first and said, “We’d like a table for four, please. The name is Torani.”

  I saw my parents exchanging astonished looks. When we sat down, he was so polite to the waitress, all “please ma’am” and “thank you ma’am.” I wanted to throw up.

  He quizzed the waitress about the ingredients in the dish he wanted, just like my mother had to do, and he was all apologetic. “I’m sorry, but I have food allergies,” he said. He flashed the waitress a big smile and she just melted.

  “I’ll ask the chef to be extra careful,” she said.

  When we had put in our orders, my father said, “Your mother told me about your new set of SAT scores, Melissa. We’re very proud of you.”

  “The other day you thought I had a brain tumor.”

  “They’re just trying to watch out for you, Melissa,” the Big Mistake said. “They’re your parents, and they love you despite your faults.”

  I kicked him under the table.

  “I’ve been thinking,” my father said.

  I resisted the urge to make a smart comment.

  “You did such a good job with that public relations text, maybe you can help me with a problem we’ve got at work. You know one of our clients is Office Barn, right?” That was hard to ignore, since he was always bringing home their key chains and copier paper and mouse pads.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “They’ve been doing customer relations surveys and the results aren’t good.”

  The waitress brought us a big bowl of salad and my mother started serving it.

  “What do you mean, not good?” I asked. “Is the data unreliable or are the results negative?”

  Hmmm. That didn’t quite sound like me, but I remembered that as one of the points from the textbook I’d read.

  “Negative results,” my father said. “Customers have a perception that it’s hard to find what they’re looking for in the stores, even though the aisles are very well-marked. They perceive that the sales staff isn’t helpful in finding things either.”

  I thought about it as we all ate our salad. I remembered going to the Office Barn with my mother that morning. She needed a three-ring binder, and we had a lot of trouble finding one. I closed my eyes, and the store’s layout came right back to me. It was wild—I couldn’t remember ever remembering a place so clearly. As we finished the salad, I visualized walking through the store, and then I thought I had an answer for my dad.

  “If I help you, will you take me off grounding?” I asked.

  My father and mother looked at each other. “You’re still going to be grounded,” he said. “Let’s say a week. So you can go out with Daniel on Saturday night if you want.”

  That was, if I was still ta
lking to Daniel by then. Or if he was still talking to me. If he found out that I’d applied to Penn on his behalf, the grounding order might not matter at all.

  “Why don’t you adjust the customer survey,” I said. “They do it online, right?”

  He nodded.

  “So ask them how they would like to see the aisles described. Given them a bunch of choices, and then once the survey is complete, relabel all the aisles based on the results.”

  My father nodded as the waitress delivered our entrees and took away the salad plates. “That’s a good idea. I’ll suggest it on Monday.”

  “Glad to be of help.” I looked across at the Big Mistake and gave him a big shit-eating grin. He slumped down in his chair.

  The next morning Brie texted me before I was even out of bed. Fortunately it was Sunday so there was no bagpipe music. U call DF? she asked.

  No. He’s at work. Let him cl me.

  U think he’s mad?

  Don’t know. Don’t care.

  I knew that wasn’t the truth as soon as I hit send, but I had an image to protect. If Daniel dumped me I would be heartbroken but I would have to make it seem like it was all his fault.

  I was irritated that he hadn’t called me, and then worried. I almost asked my dad if he needed anything from ComputerCo so I could see that Daniel was all right, but I decided that if he wasn’t calling me, that was his problem, not mine.

  That afternoon we had to play happy family again. My mom and dad took us up into the country to a big flea market. I got a plate of funnel cake, even though I didn’t like it that much, just to piss off the Big Mistake, who was allergic to it. My dad got caught up at this vendor of antique books, and my mother nearly fainted when she saw an ancestry table with family crests and stuff. I decided to stick with my dad when my mom started looking at kilts. The Big Mistake busied himself pawing through a pile of used video games.

  To cut the boredom I picked up a tattered paperback called Kiss of the Spider Woman. I thought maybe it would have something to do with actual kissing and stuff transmitted that way, like spider venom. But instead it was about two prisoners in jail in Argentina.

  Once I started reading, though, I couldn’t stop. As my dad pawed through old books with leather bindings and water-stained pages, I flipped through the pages.

  My dad interrupted me just as I was getting to the end of the book. “Do you want to buy that, Melissa?”

  He was standing up by the cash box with his wallet in his hand. “Nah, I read it already.” I scanned the last couple of pages and then put it down.

  As we were walking away, he said, “When you said you read it already, did you mean…”

  “I read it while I was waiting for you.”

  He just shook his head. I wondered if he thought I was turning into a freak, the way we had all looked at Daniel when he showed up on the first day of school. But you know, that kind of didn’t bother me.

  Friends and Family

  Monday morning I saw Daniel in AP English. We both slid into our seats just as the bell rang so we didn’t have time to talk. But as we left class, he said, “I thought about what you said all weekend, and I’m sorry I got mad at you. I know you were just trying to be helpful. But you have to let me work this stuff out on my own, all right?”

  Well, that wasn’t the time to tell him I’d applied to Penn for him. “I understand.”

  He smiled. “Good. And I’m sorry I didn’t call you Saturday night. I just stayed home and brooded.” He took my hand in his.

  “It didn’t matter. I was grounded.” I told him about going to the movies with Brie on Friday night and how my parents had reacted.

  “That was dumb, sneaking out like that,” he said. “If you’d asked if you could go to the movies with Brie, they’d have said yes, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “I was mad at them. Don’t you ever get mad at your mom?”

  He shook his head. “She’s all I have. If anything happened to her, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  I squeezed his hand. “She’s not all you have.”

  He smiled and kissed my cheek just before we walked into math.

  That afternoon as we studied in the library, the knowledge that I had gone behind his back to apply to Penn for him ate away at me. I felt like it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him. Usually I don’t have much control over what I say—I open my mouth and it all spills out. But I kept struggling not to say anything, even as we studied and talked about other kids and all the dumb stuff we filled up the day with.

  That night at dinner my dad said, “I pitched your idea to Office Barn, Melissa. They loved it. They put a programmer right on changing the survey.”

  “Cool. Do you want me to take a look at it?”

  He looked at me, cocking his head like he was confused. “Would you like to?”

  “If you want.”

  “Great. I’ll e-mail you an entry code.”

  After dinner the Big Mistake and I were both walking up the hall to our rooms. He said, “You’re a big suck up, Missy.”

  “And you’re not? Give me a break. The good news is I’ll be out of here in nine months. And you’ll be stuck here for two more years after that.”

  “Won’t be so bad without you.”

  I knocked into him, and he pushed me back. But I knew if we got into a fight I’d get my grounding extended, so I ducked into my room. I’m sure he knew that too, the jerk. I spent some time plotting revenge against him, but I couldn’t come up with a plan that wouldn’t lead back to me.

  The next morning Daniel and I talked about Thanksgiving. “My aunt and uncle are coming down from Scranton with my cousins,” I said. “Are you and your mom doing anything special?”

  “We’re going to church,” he said. “They have a worship service in the afternoon and then a turkey dinner.” He smiled. “I remember when I was in elementary school I really wanted to have turkey for Thanksgiving. But my mother didn’t know how long you had to cook it, and it took forever. It was like eleven o’clock at night and it still wasn’t done, so we just ate some pork. Since then we go out somewhere.”

  I wished I could invite Daniel and his mother to join us, but I didn’t know how they would fit in. My uncle is a big Republican, and I was sure he’d get into some kind of immigration debate, or worse, go off on Fidel Castro.

  “Will your grounding be finished by Saturday night?” Daniel asked. “Can we go out?”

  “Yeah. That would be cool.”

  “I feel bad that I don’t have a car to take you around.”

  “What happened to the one you were going to buy?”

  “He got a better offer. I was bummed.”

  “Don’t worry, my parents don’t mind letting me drive. They think you’re having a good effect on me. That is, once they got over the idea that I was getting smarter because I had a brain tumor.”

  “They’re just looking out for you, Melissa,” he said, and I heard the echo of what Robbie had said at the restaurant. “I wish I had a family like yours.”

  Well, that just tore my heart out. I wanted to wrap my arms around Daniel and promise him that I would always be his family. And I was so tempted to tell him right there that I had applied to Penn for him so we could be together—but I held back.

  That night I surfed around the Internet and found some recipes for Thanksgiving dinner, and convinced my mom to let me pick up all the ingredients. Not that it was all that hard—since my shopping extravaganza she was eager to shift grocery responsibility to me.

  I woke up early on Thursday morning, even before my parents, and started cooking. I made us a big mushroom and cheese frittata for breakfast and then baked a pumpkin pie and a cranberry tart with a gluten-free crust. I even found a recipe for stuffing that Robbie could eat, and by the time everyone woke up I had prepped the turkey and had it ready for the oven. As they started filing in, I pulled the fritatta out and served it.

  My
parents looked at me like I was from Mars, but they dug right in. “My grandmother used to make a dish like this,” my dad said. “But hers wasn’t this good.”

  “How did you learn to make all this?” my mother asked.

  “I just read the recipes.” I kept bustling around the kitchen, mashing the sweet potatoes and slicing green beans for a casserole. It felt good to be so busy. I was kind of hoping we would have leftovers and I could take them to Daniel’s the next day, to show him what a family Thanksgiving was like.

  My aunt and uncle and cousin showed up around noon. My dad, my uncle, Robbie and my cousin went into the den to watch football, and my mom and my aunt sat in the kitchen with me as I started pulling stuff out of the oven and getting the meal ready. “You’re going to make someone a wonderful wife, Melissa,” my aunt said.

  “Gag me with a chain saw,” I said. “Just because I can cook doesn’t mean I want to be someone’s wife.”

  But did I want to be Daniel’s wife? I had already told him I loved him, that I would always be there for him. But geez, we were only seventeen. Who gets married that young?

  Everybody complimented me on the meal, and I was happy everything had come out so well. But I missed Daniel and decided that I would make sure he and his mom were invited to anything we did at Christmas.

  It was late by the time everyone went home, and there wasn’t much food left over, which bummed me out. “You should be glad, Melissa,” my mother said, as we loaded the last platters into the dishwasher. “Everyone loved the food so much.”

  “Whatever.”

  She sat down at the kitchen table and pushed another chair toward me. “Sit down. Please.”

  I sat.

  “What’s wrong? You haven’t been yourself for a while now.”

  “Mom. I don’t have a brain tumor, all right?”

  “That was your father’s idea, not mine. But I can see that you’re changing. Not just the way you think, but the way you act too. A year ago you wouldn’t even eat with the rest of the family, and this year you’re cooking the whole meal.”