A Curious Affair

by Melanie Jackson

  By the way, a wedgie is what happens when someone, usually someone a lot bigger and stronger than you, reaches down the back of your pants, grabs your BVDs, and gives them a yank. Depending on the seriousness of the reason for the wedgie, it can be used as a mild reminder or a major reprimand, actually lifting the target clean off his feet or even tearing the underwear if they’re an old, favorite, heavily worn pair. Depending on the hygiene of the guy getting a wedgie, the wedgie can cause a monster skid mark in the underwear that Mom can’t even get out with Boraxo.

  One final note: It’s worth mentioning that no one ever gives a girl a wedgie. I think this is either because no one wants to put their hand down there since they’re afraid of what they might find, or because girl’s panties don’t work like guy’s underwear so that you couldn’t give a girl a wedgie even if you wanted to.

  “There’s no such thing as cooties, numbnuts,” said Randy Smith in reply. Randy was the member of our group who was always coming up with neat new expressions he heard from his two older brothers, Hiram and Lenny. I had heard the numbnuts one before, and although I knew what nuts were and what could make them numb, I still wasn’t sure what accusing a kid of having been kicked in the “family jewels”—another of Randy’s expressions—had to do with anything.

  In any case, Randy had in a roundabout way supplied support for my own feeling that cooties were like Santa Claus: fun to believe in but a bunch of malarkey. That word is a favorite of my dad’s.

  “He’s right,” I stated confidently. “There’s no such thing as cooties.” And with that, I turned away further discussion of the topic … only to be brought up short by my second best friend, Billy Moony.

  “They do have The Siff,” Billy announced.

  All eyes turned his way. I knew I needed to regain control of the conversation fast.

  “The Siff,” I said in disgust. “What’s that supposed to be?”

  Billy seemed hurt by my response, but had obviously come prepared to defend his beliefs.

  “It’s something girls get on their lip from the toilet seat,” he replied confidently.

  “How do you get something on your lip from a toilet seat?” I asked.

  Billy looked a little uncomfortable about my challenge, but then he explained.

  “My oldest brother told me he got The Siff from either being with a girl or the toilet seat,” he began. I accepted this as fact, but still felt like he had fallen short of a full explanation. Apparently Billy was only beginning to outline a string of well-thought-out facts because he soon continued. “He told me that being with a girl means kissing and stuff. So, he could have gotten The Siff off a girl’s lip. Since girls don’t kiss girls, that means that girls can only get The Siff from a toilet seat.”

  It took a while to mull this over, but in the end I couldn’t argue with the facts as he’d laid them out. Besides, Billy always gets better grades in everything than I do. Also, I could tell when Billy was lying, and this time, he wasn’t lying.

  “So, how can you tell if a girl has The Siff?” I asked. “I mean, what does it look like?”

  “I’m not sure, but it’s supposed to itch and I think it doesn’t smell very good,” Billy responded, throwing up his hands to show that the well was now dry.

  “So, all you gotta do is watch to see if she scratches a lot and pull back quick if she smells funny,” Johnny Westbrook offered.

  “That’s no help,” Alex Bateman replied. “All girls smell funny.”

  With this, an argument broke out. I lost track of what anyone was saying, but in the end was told that no one had seen Maureen scratching at her face and I should turn tail and run if I found out she smells worse than Eddie Randle’s older sister’s bedroom—a place Eddie and I sneak into to use her makeup to make realistic war wounds on our G.I. Joes.

  It still didn’t make sense that a girl could get something on her lip from a toilet seat, but then I remembered the time in fourth grade when Jimmy Bolton was thrown into the girl’s bathroom. Jimmy is the smallest guy in our class and I guess it was just his bad luck to be walking past Mike O’Reilly the day Mike failed his math test. Mike hung out with a bunch of the bad boys in his sixth-grade class, and seeing Jimmy walk by, they decided to work out some of their anger by grabbing him and chucking him into the john. Jimmy stayed in there a long time, at least long enough for the catcalls to end and the sixth graders to get bored and wander off. After he came out he seemed confused. I asked him what happened and that’s when he told me: There are no urinals in the girl’s restroom. Since they have to use the toilet for everything, it seems to make sense that they are doing some strange stuff in there. Thus, what ever they’re doing may result in lip-to-toilet contact.

  At this point in the debate the bell rang, putting an end to both recess and further discussion. Although I felt that more information could only help, I was also pretty glad to stop talking and head back to class, disappointed that it took so little time to learn all that my pals knew about both kissing and girls. So, I joined the stream of kids marching back to their classrooms. Sitting down at my desk, I was without a plan and running out of time. But at least I would be running out of time slowly, since this would prove to be the longest afternoon of my life.

  The hands on the clock across the room slowed to a snail’s pace. School clocks don’t have second hands, probably to keep kids in predicaments like mine from simply watching the them go round while attempting to psychically speed them up—like Dr. Strange in that comic book. Time was definitely crawling.

  Mrs. Hanson began the afternoon with spelling. I hate spelling, probably because I can’t spell. To hear Dad talk about it, I would guess I inherited it from him.

  Of course, my favorite part of any school day is when Mrs. Hanson reads to us from a book. We’re currently doing Charlotte’s Web, which is kind of a girl’s book, but pretty good anyway. It’s about a talented, loving spider and a pig. I was excited to make it to the ending when we got to hear about Charlotte, the spider, and Wilbur, the pig, going off together to live happily ever after. Unfortunately, I was going to have to wait two more days, for Friday to arrive, before hearing the next installment of the story. In the meantime, I had to endure spelling along with waiting for the school day to end.

  I was glaring up at the clock, trying to psychically will it back to its normal speed, when Mrs. Hanson called on me.

  “Stephen?” she asked, and from the tone of her voice I could tell that she already knew I hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Hanson,” I replied. “I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t hear the question,” I confessed.

  Possibly due to the hangdog expression I was wearing, but more probably due to the fact that she had already caught word of my plans for this afternoon, Mrs. Hanson decided to take pity on me rather than read me the riot act.

  “That’s alright, Stephen,” she replied, flashing me a really convincing concerned look of her own. Mrs. Hanson could sometimes be unexpectedly kind. “It’s obvious that you have important things on your mind. So, we’ll move ahead to Joey Beckman,” she continued, finding a new victim to drag from his daydreams into her dreary world of words.

  Of course, being left out of the spelling and vocabulary milieu—which proves that I’ve paid enough attention to pick up some pretty big words along the way—also left me to stew in my own juices. And boy, did I stew. As I came to terms first with the fact that I was indeed going to be kissing a girl in a little under an hour, I then found that I needed to consider just how to go about it. I mean, I didn’t want to come off like a complete ignoramus in front of Maureen and who knew how many other kids. As I started considering the finer points of kissing—whether and where I should touch her, how long to kiss her, whether to wet my lips first, and if so how wet, and if not, what to do if our lips stuck together—I felt my intestines seize up, and I wondered if I would need to emerge from my comfy classroom exile to beg permission to run to the bathroom.

  Uncoiling m
y legs from around the legs of my chair, I was preparing for a potential dash when I noticed first that I’d had my legs tightly coiled around the legs of my chair, and second that my heart was racing like a stallion running the Kentucky Derby. (Dad’s phrase again.)

  I tried to steady my heart, but the more I tried I realized I just wasn’t going to pull it off. I would never have admitted this to another guy, but had to admit it to myself—I was excited. I was curious about what it would be like to kiss Maureen. I was scared that I might not do it right. I had short fantasies of sweeping Maureen into my arms like in the movies and then leaving her yearning after me as I went off to war. I wondered if she’d taste good, like candy, or bad, like liver. In the end, I wondered if she’d like it or hit me in the face after I was done.

  I was pondering all of these thoughts, and many, many more, when all thought was suspended by the sound of the bell tolling the end of the school day. I could have sworn I heard the class share a collective intake of breath, but realized it was probably just me gasping for air. I noticed that this day had not ended with the typical excited talk of kids waiting to be dismissed, and looked around to find all eyes turned my way, even Mrs. Hanson’s.

  “Class dismissed,” Mrs. Hanson announced, sounding like the voice of doom. I rose from my seat on legs of rubber, and was glad to feel a hand slip under my arm to steady me. I turned to find Jimmy at my side. He guided me like a blind man out of the room and back onto the playground where this whole stupid mess had begun.

  Once more on dry ground, I soon found my land legs and started to walk. I rounded the corner of bungalow 12B to find what looked like the people on either side of a street waiting for a parade to pass. What boys weren’t already following me lined one side of the alley between the bungalows leading to the far corner of the school grounds. The girls were all on the other side. I was expecting cheers and confetti to start flying any time. But as I walked through the crowd, instead of cheers, I heard nervous laughter and whispered words; instead of confetti I saw anxious looks of concern and disbelief. I guess the kids who had stopped by to see the show were surprised that the lead hadn’t decided to take a powder.

  Assuming that Maureen was most likely already waiting for me, I led my posse to the farthest bungalow on campus, 13A, intending to continue behind it to meet my fate.

  “No,” a voice announced to accompany an outthrust hand. “Only Steve may pass.” It was Margaret, of course, Maureen’s right-hand girl.

  Margaret Slizbury was large, smelled bad, and had the beginnings of a mustache. She was the kind of large that’s just short of fat. She wore thick, black, plastic-rimmed glasses and had black, frizzy hair that came down to her shoulders, making her look like the sphinx. And she was strong. We found out how strong she was the day she got tired of being teased by Freddy Shultz and decided to throw him down and sit on him until his face turned purple. I figured I could take her, but it would hurt.

  Turning back to my buddies, I indicated that they should stay behind rather than rushing Margaret and pinning her down while the rest of us passed. I wanted to avoid any unnecessary violence; there’d already been enough of that, and besides, I didn’t think that an audience would help with what needed to get done.

  Taking a deep breath, I put one foot in front of the other and ended up walking around the bungalow into the secluded alleyway formed by the building I’d rounded and a large oleander bush growing along the fence marking the edge of the school grounds. Someone once told me that oleander is poisonous, which made me wonder why you could find it growing at every school I’d ever visited. Looking up, I spotted Maureen about ten paces ahead, midway down the alley. I cleared my throat and she twirled to face me.

  The dress she wore, I only just noticed, was white and had little flowers on it. Although stained in several places with black smudges, especially in the back, it was pretty. She wore short white socks, with a decorative fringe on top, which were folded down to make them even shorter. These socks rode within a pair of nicely polished black, patent-leather shoes in which I felt I should be able to see my own reflection. Her golden hair was pulled back away from her face and gathered in one of those springy hair things. The left half of her face was covered by a barely visible purple stain that looked like a birthmark. It was where I’d hit her. When I saw this, the fascination I felt in examining her gave way to shame, and I felt my own face turning red.

  I walked forward to get closer and she shyly looked down at her feet as I approached. I stopped in front of her, and she looked back up with a smile that made me smile in return.

  “Hi, Stephen,” she said, using the formal version of my name like she was one of my teachers.

  “Hi, Maureen,” I replied.

  “I didn’t think you were going to show,” she said, cocking an eyebrow to show her curiosity.

  “Neither did I,” I found myself confessing.

  I was surprised that she seemed so calm, considering the situation. Then, as she walked over to toy with an oleander blossom, she explained.

  “You don’t have to worry, Stephen,” she began. “I’m not actually going to make you kiss me.”

  “You’re not?” I asked, a little shocked. I was also shocked that it was actually possible to feel both relief and disappointment at the same time.

  “No,” she said smiling back at me. “That’s why I decided to meet you alone. We only need to wait a few minutes, then walk back out and tell the others whatever we want them to believe.”

  Wow, this girl’s mind had a seriously devious streak running through it. It’s like I told Billy Sayer after he got back from a route I sent him on to catch a long bomb behind a parked car for a touchdown: Sometimes you’ve got to be tricky to get what you want. Maureen was apparently quite tricky. Her stock had just jumped several points in my books.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I answered. “That’s a really clever idea,” I had to admit aloud.

  Maureen’s smile broadened as she walked back to stand next to me.

  “Although I should make you pay for putting this ugly purple splotch on my face,” she said. “Maybe pin you down and give you an Indian rope burn. Isn’t that the standard price for such an offense?”

  “Yeah, that would be about right,” I admitted as we shared a laugh. I couldn’t believe how quickly a person’s world could change. A few moments ago, I had been afraid I was going to puke, and even more afraid of this girl standing beside me. Now I felt great and was really beginning to like her a lot.

  “Well, that’s probably enough time,” Maureen said, beginning to walk to the corner of the bungalow. “Let’s go show our faces and tell our tales,” she concluded.

  “Maureen,” I said, stepping up to her as she stopped, then forgetting what I was going to say. “Thanks,” I offered as the obvious choice, then added something a little closer to what I was really feeling. “You know, you’re alright.”

  This last statement seemed to please Maureen, since it brought a huge smile to her face. I liked that smile a lot, and I wanted more.

  “Maureen,” I began, then simply decided to go for broke one more time.

  What happened next happened even quicker than the dodgeball fiasco, but in this case I knew that what was happening was something I’d replay many times in slow motion for the rest of my life. I grabbed Maureen by the shoulders and pulled her to me, surprised at how light she was in comparison to any of the guys. She seemed a little shocked and scared, but I didn’t have long to check on her expression as my face moved quickly toward hers. I was pleased that I had the intuition to turn my head sideways to avoid a nose collision. Then our lips were touching. I continued to press my lips against hers and was at first concerned by the rigidity of her response, but then felt her relax as both our lips parted slightly to more fully experience the contact. Her lips felt good, and she sure didn’t taste like liver. Of course, she didn’t taste like candy, either. She tasted different, but really, really good.

  I have no idea how long
we remained with our lips together. At first I thought that I wanted the kiss to last forever, and then I started to feel self-conscious. I began to wonder if I should be moving my lips, or my head, or squeezing her tighter. Guessing that I had probably reached the point at which the spell had been broken, and finally understanding what that meant, I gently pushed Maureen away, causing our lips to part. I then felt the muscles of my face tense in preparation for getting hit, but Maureen didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me. Her eyes were still closed and she was rocking slightly on her heels. Her tongue poked out of her mouth to lick her lips, like she was getting a tasty bit of sauce off her mouth after spaghetti night. Then she opened her eyes and smiled real hard. I felt her grab my hand and was afraid I was in for another lip-lock, but instead she simply squeezed it twice before turning to run around the corner of the bungalow. She never said a word and didn’t even look back. Just like that, it was over.

  My name is Steve Merriman and I’m eleven years old. Today, after school, I kissed a girl. They say that being a leader is hard, but being a follower is even harder. I don’t know much about that, but I do know that I plan on doing a lot more kissing in the future. It isn’t always easy, but it needs to be done.

  Jillian, why are you crying? Atherton was at my side, a paw resting gently on my arm. Without thinking, I reached out and stroked his head. He let me do this, perhaps even enjoyed it though I could feel his concern for my sudden shift in mood.

  I reread the last paragraph to myself.

  “Am I crying?” I finally asked, finding this odd because I was also smiling. I touched my lips, still tender from Tyler’s last kiss. “I…This is hard to explain. I think it’s because my husband just told me that it’s okay to get on with my life. He’s saying it’s all right if I see Tyler.”