by Nia Stephens
“What do we think?” Kiki asked, taking another bite of her leftover lo mein.
Jasmine made a horrible face. “We think that Lyman sounds like a freak.”
“Speak for yourself, Jazz,” Sasha said, folding her copy of Lyman’s e-mail into a paper airplane. “I think he sounds cool.”
“He sounds interesting,” Camille corrected her. “But interesting also means weird. What do you think?”
“Well . . .” Everyone paused, waiting for Kiki to say something. The silence went on and on, so Sasha threw her paper airplane at Jasmine, and Jasmine retaliated by throwing some of her microwave popcorn back at her.
“I think he sounds distracting,” Kiki announced before the food fight could get out of hand. “And I want to be distracted.”
“He sounds like Mark on crack,” Jasmine said, ducking behind an armchair. Sasha was pitching ice cubes at her head.
“What are you talking about?” Kiki knew her voice sounded funny, but she couldn’t help it. The truth of Jasmine’s words hit her like a wave of feedback blasting through stadium speakers.
“He’s like Mark two-point-O, the debugged version, with better graphics.” Jasmine held up her hands for a truce and Sasha dropped her ice cube back into her soda. “Lyman is smart, like Mark, but even smarter. He’s got to be, to write like that. Mark is musical, like Lyman, but Mark only got into it because you and Franklin made him. Lyman is so into it he’s competing. And he’s got serious talent. Well, you heard him.”
“Yeah.” All four of them sighed. They had listened to Lyman’s music in homeroom on Kiki’s iPod. The three tracks from Lyman’s website were pretty amazing. All three began with a piano solo, but they were layered with samples of choirs singing, or a single, scratchy vocal track that had to come from the ’20s or ’30s, and traffic sounds, and crickets, and all kinds of things that you wouldn’t normally think of as music. The production quality was bad enough to give Kiki goosebumps, but the music was phenomenal. No matter what happened between her and Lyman, she was definitely going to get her managers to listen to his demo. His music was a lot better than some of the electronica already in the RGB catalogue.
“I see what you’re saying,” Camille said. “But there’s one important difference between Mark and Lyman.”
“Lyman’s cuter?” Sasha suggested, sprawling on one of the dusty couches, rejects from the teacher’s lounge downstairs.
“Maybe. I think both of them need a haircut.” Camille frowned, trying to decide which one was better-looking. Of course, now that Jasmine had mentioned their other similarities, Kiki realized that they even looked a lot alike.
“The big difference between Mark and Lyman is that Lyman actually wants to go out with me,” Kiki said, trying not to sound pitiful.
“I already said that Lyman was the smart one,” Jasmine said.
“But you also said that he was a freak.”
She shrugged. “He is. But I didn’t say that was a bad thing.”
Kiki sighed, then ate another bite of lo mein. She always meant to wake up early and make herself a real lunch, but she always slept in and wound up eating leftovers.
“Home-school kids are always weird.” Jasmine settled next to Kiki on the couch. “But let’s face it, K.—you’re not exactly the queen of normal.”
“I’m not a freak.”
“You’re a very freaky girl,” Jasmine sang in her creaky, atonal alto voice, which always made Kiki laugh. She almost fell off the couch when Jasmine’s voice broke on, “The kind you don’t bring home to Momma!”
“It’s ‘mother,’ Jazz, and I’ve never met a mother who didn’t like me. They usually think I’m a good influence.”
“You usually are a good influence, ’cause you’re hanging out with musician types. But you could probably corrupt this Lyman guy, hard-core. I’m telling you, home-school guys are weird little momma’s boys.” Jasmine paused thoughtfully, then said, “I wonder if he’s gay.”
Sasha caught Kiki’s eyes across the battered coffee table, covered with all that was left of their lunch, and made the “redneck face”—a special combination of lolling tongue and rolling eyes that meant that somebody, usually Jasmine, sounded like a backward and countrified Southerner stereotype.
“Well, I’ll let you know if he’s gay or not on Saturday morning. We’re going out Friday night.”
“WHAT?” This time Camille almost fell off the sofa. Kiki didn’t know why they were so surprised. She loved her girlfriends, and she always wanted to hear their opinions, but she would never let them tell her who she should go out with.
“We IMed during study hall.” The looks on their faces were so funny, Kiki had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. “What’s the big deal? Everybody plays around on computers during study hall.”
“They check their e-mail and do research. They don’t IM guys they’ve never met!” Jasmine said severely.
“That’s because most people are at school. But I knew he wouldn’t be, so I logged into HelloHello. It said that he was online, so we talked.”
“What did you talk about?” Sasha asked.
“Nothing really. How tired I was, how bored he was. I was only online for thirty minutes.”
“Did you ask him out?” Jasmine asked.
“He said, ‘Busy Friday at seven?’ I said, ‘No,’ and that was that.”
Of course, it was a little more complicated than that. Kiki didn’t mention that she had IMed him because she was afraid to call him, or that her hands were shaking as she typed. It wasn’t just that she was weirded out by this whole boy-shopping thing, though she still thought it was pretty strange. Kiki felt, for reasons she couldn’t explain, even to herself, that going out with Lyman meant that she had given up on Mark for real. She didn’t know why this was so different from Jason Wrightman, Luke Sheppherd, or any of the other boys she had dated, but somehow it was.
“Don’t you have a show?” Jasmine asked.
“We’ve already headlined the Exit/In and City Hall, and we opened at the Ryman twice this fall. RGB wouldn’t book us in a smaller venue here in town. The contract won’t let us travel more than one weekend a month, and we’re playing three shows in New Orleans Halloween weekend.” Kiki had already explained this two hundred times, but Jasmine could never remember their schedule. Kiki couldn’t blame her—she had a hard time keeping track of it herself. Even Mark, who had asked his parents for a PalmPilot for his thirteenth birthday, needed all the help he could get.
“So where’re you guys going for your first date?” Sasha asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You haven’t decided?” Jasmine asked.
“He won’t tell me.”
“What?” Camille sounded confused.
“It’s a surprise.” Kiki wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Lyman seemed pretty harmless, but what did she know? He could be a serial killer, planning to drag her into the woods and butcher her. But if he thought she was a pushover because she was a girl, he was in for a surprise. Her parents had forced her to take karate classes before hitting the road for the first time, and she still sparred with her sensei a couple of times a month.
“So what are you going to wear?”
“I don’t know. He said to dress up.”
“Oooh. Isn’t there some sort of costume ball this weekend?” Camille’s parents went to every black-tie event Nashville had to offer and were in the paper every other week. Kiki wondered if that had something to do with Camille’s hatred of dressing up, but she had never asked.
“I don’t think he’s taking me to a charity ball for our first date. He didn’t say anything about a costume, for one thing, just a dressy dress.”
“Well, you’ve got plenty of those. You’ll be fine.”
“Of course I will.” Kiki tipped the take-out carton and slurped the last few bits of vegetable. “It’s just a date.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jasmine grinned. “We’ll see how you feel on Friday night.”
&nbs
p; Sasha talked Jasmine and Camille into attending the Wentworth-Carroll football match with her, Thomas, and a couple of his friends after school Friday night, so they never got to see exactly how freaked out Kiki was an hour before Lyman was supposed to pick her up. Both of her parents were home, but they politely pretended not to notice that she was wearing a different outfit every time she marched from their huge master bathroom with its three-way mirror to the spare room where she stored clothes she didn’t often wear.
The problem was the phrase “dress up.” It could mean anything from church clothes to black tie, and Kiki was not about to ask Lyman what he meant by it. She hadn’t contacted him since the quick IM session at school on Wednesday—she didn’t want to look too eager. She might not get out much, but she knew that too much interest was a turnoff for every guy she had ever met. She had tried on everything she owned, from the little black dress her mom had bought her for her first dressy party to a full-fledged ball gown she found in New York, and had paid a fortune for. She still had no idea what to wear.
She was staring at three Kikis, all wearing a fragile midnight-blue silk gown from the 1930s, sprinkled with rhinestone stars, when her cell phone sang out, A friend in need is a friend indeed. A friend who’ll tease is better.
“Hey,” she said without checking the number. For everyone except her closest friends, the ring tone was an old Das EFX/Ice Cube song that began, “Check yourself, before you wreck yourself.”
“Hey,” Mark said, scaring Kiki half out of her skin. She just assumed it was the Pussycats, calling to check up on her. But Mark didn’t seem to notice that anything had changed between them. He had driven her to and from practice all week, and they had talked as usual: scheduling the scratch tracks due at RGB in mid-November, homework, how annoying Franklin was. He hadn’t mentioned taking Jasmine out again, and she hadn’t breathed a word about Lyman. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing. What’s up with you?” Kiki hoped she didn’t sound squeaky. She had a lot of talents, but lying wasn’t one of them, and her voice usually climbed half an octave when she was hiding something.
“Nothing much. Thinking about going to that Trip-Hop Triple Threat at the Maze. You going?”
“I don’t think so.” She almost added, “I’ve got a date,” but she didn’t. She was hoping, of course, that he would be jealous. But he was more likely to say, “Congratulations.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah, sure,” she answered, though she wasn’t at all sure where she was supposed to see him. Were they scheduled to be in the studio? Or maybe he just assumed that they would run into each other somewhere—Laura Keller’s party, maybe? She didn’t have time to try to figure it out—Lyman would be there in twenty minutes, and she had just discovered a moth hole in a place where it wouldn’t go unnoticed. It would be easy to fix if she had some spare rhinestones lying around, but she didn’t.
“Talk to you later, Mark.” She hung up and ran back to the spare room. She threw on a silver satin ball skirt that she’d bought because it had pockets, and a silk-knit tank top in basic black. The casual top balanced the formal skirt, making it appropriate for any special occasion—that’s what Kiki told herself, anyway. She didn’t have the time for another costume change. The doorbell rang as she was carefully lining her lips, jarring her so she drew way outside the lines. She cursed, dabbed on a bit of makeup remover, and started over. She knew that her father would trap Lyman with supposedly friendly small talk for ten minutes anyway.
When she made her way downstairs she could hear Lyman laughing at something her father had said. It was a nice laugh, low but light, and not too loud. It didn’t sound forced either, which said something about Lyman. Most of Dr. Kelvin’s jokes had to do with cutting into people’s brains, which was not a subject most people considered funny. Kiki couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or a bad thing that Lyman seemed to be getting along with her father just fine.
“Here she is. I told you she wouldn’t take long.” Kiki thought her father was standing somewhere near the fireplace. She wasn’t sure, because the instant she saw Lyman relaxing on the couch, she couldn’t look away.
“Maybe he is gay,” she thought once her brain started working again. He was wearing a simple black suit that fit—really fit, unlike the vast majority of suits Kiki saw on her classmates on Parents’ Day at Wentworth. Under it, he wore a fitted, faded purple T-shirt that matched both the lavender rosebud in his lapel buttonhole and the laces in his battered black sneakers. He had a bouquet of purple roses for Kiki, and a brilliant smile. His wild hair was paler in person than it seemed in the picture, and his eyes were more hazel than blue, but, if anything, he looked better in real life. If Jasmine were here, she would definitely pronounce him hotter than a biscuit—even if she would tease him mercilessly about all the purple.
“Hi,” Kiki said, hoping she didn’t sound as shy as she suddenly felt.
“Salutations!” He leapt to his feet, terrifying the cat, Mr. Lister, who was curled up at the other end of the couch. Mr. Lister shot toward the kitchen, which gave Kiki’s mother an excuse for wandering into the living room herself.
“Oh, a guest! I didn’t know you were here. I’m Janine Kelvin.” Unlike Kiki, her mother lied smoothly. “Let me put those in some water . . .”
“This is Alex Lyman,” Dr. Kelvin supplied on cue.
“Lovely to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Kelvin. And please, call me Lyman.”
Kiki looked on in horror as Lyman approached her mother with his hand outstretched. She thought he might actually bow and kiss her hand. She could deal with the ten-dollar words, but if he had eighteenth-century manners, too, no matter how hot he was they were in a lot of trouble. Mark and Franklin would make fun of him twenty-four-seven. Jasmine, too.
Fortunately, when he finally made his way across the room, avoiding the ottomans, occasional tables, and stacks of magazines, he gave Mrs. Kelvin a firm handshake before handing over the bouquet. Handshakes were fine.
“Katrina, come choose a vase,” her mother said, and Kiki reluctantly followed her into the kitchen.
“Where on earth did you meet that creature?” her mother asked, pulling a few dusty vases from underneath the sink. “He looks like he’s about to start tap dancing or something.”
“How about the blue vase?” Kiki suggested, carefully avoiding the question. She wasn’t sure how her parents would feel about her going out with a guy she met online.
“It clashes with the flowers.”
“I know. But I like it.” Kiki drifted toward the door. “You can just leave them on the counter. I’ll take them up to my room later.”
“Whatever you say, Kiki. Have a nice night.”
“Thanks, Mom. Don’t wait up.”
Kiki thought she heard her mother say, “Yeah, right,” but she wasn’t sure. Lyman and her father were laughing uproariously again at something her father had said, ending with, “Sure I expected to find it. But not up there!”
“Are you ready to go?” Lyman asked her as she entered the room.
“You bet. See you later, Dad.”
“Have a good time.”
Kiki paused for a moment, waiting for him to add his habitual threat. She sometimes thought he spent all week thinking them up—some of them were seriously disturbing, even if Mark, Franklin, and even Jason thought he was kidding. But her dad didn’t say anything about evisceration, abacination, or any other twisted, medieval methods of torture that Kiki had had to look up in the dictionary.
“Good night, Dr. Kelvin. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
Lyman opened the door for Kiki, then followed her down the walk. He helped her into his newish Volvo so politely that Kiki wondered if he thought her parents were watching from the window. Ordinarily they would be, but her mother was probably still in the kitchen, cutting the ends off the rose stems, and Lyman had charmed her father completely. Maybe he thinks Lyman’s gay, too, she thought, and she had to
stifle a giggle as Lyman let himself into the driver’s side.
“So, I’m Lyman, as you probably gathered,” he said, clearing his throat twice. His voice slid up and down anyway, the car keys jangling in counterpoint as he cranked the ignition. Kiki could see that he was as nervous now that he was alone with her as he had been comfortable dealing with her parents. This was a very bad sign. The whole point of trying HelloHello was to find boys who weren’t intimidated by her. If he couldn’t get through five minutes of small talk without blushing crimson, she was in for a long night.
“Yeah, I figured that much out.” She watched him wince, and had to stop herself from laughing out loud. This was ridiculous. He had to know how hot he was—there was a mirror in his house somewhere. And he came off as more than a little arrogant in front of her parents. If he didn’t pull himself together, this relationship would be over before it began, no matter how cute he was. “But your first name is Alex?”
“Only my mother calls me Alex,” Lyman told her. “So I seriously hope you won’t.”
“Okay, Lyman,” she said, drawing out his last name for emphasis.
“Your real name is Katrina?” he asked.
“Katrina Isabella Kelvin.”
“So ‘Kiki’ comes from your initials?”
“Nope.” She slouched in her seat, not exactly looking forward to spending the evening with someone who asked such boring questions. They were headed toward the interstate, which meant they were going someplace downtown. She crossed her fingers, hoping it would be someplace interesting.
