by Gen Phan
“Dude…” I was just about to launch into the whole story when I stopped. “What’s wrong? You look a little weird?” Because she did. One second she had a smile plastered across her face, and the next second it was gone.
“Ag, nothing.” She shrugged at me and turned away quickly.
“Where were you?” I asked. I’d gone looking for her after the kiss but hadn’t found her anywhere.
“I left. The party was a total waste of time.”
“Not for me,” I flopped down on her bed like I always do. “The weirdest thing just happened…guess?”
“Um…what?” She got up off the bed, walked all the way to the other side of the room and started doing something that resembled tiding.
"Are you okay?” She never tidied.
“Fine. So what’s this big thing that happened?”
I sighed loudly. “I think I’m in love.” As the words were out of my mouth I couldn’t help the fucking Cheshire cat smile that broke out across my face. That felt like it was going to rip my whole face wide open.
Maria swung around. “What!” The word came out loudly and she had this look in her eye that I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen before.I couldn’t figure out if my best friend was about to burst out laughing, or beat the crap out of me.
“Yeah. There was a power failure, and someone just kissed me. It was…” I trailed off as I thought about it again. My heart decided to beat a little faster. My hands tingled as I remembered how they’d felt on the small of her back. I could almost feel her tongue and taste her breath.
“Who was it?” She asked, still with that look in her eye.
“I don’t know. That’s what’s so weird.”
“You seriously have no idea? Seriously?”
“Nope.” I put my hands behind my head and stretched out across her bed. It’s so much more comfortable than mine and I can’t count the number of times I’ve slept on it. Sometimes, after a long gaming session I’ll just crash here. Brett thinks it’s weird that I’ve shared a bed with a female and nothing’s happened, but it’s not like that with us.
“But you have a suspicion? Right?” she asked, walking over and sitting down.
“Nope. But she did leave a calling card.” I took the gum out of my mouth and held it up in the air like it was some kind of treasure. “Behold, the glass slipper.”
“She left gum in your mouth?”
“It’s like the modern day version of Cinderella, right?”
Maria rolled her eyes. At least this was somehting I was familiar with. It was Maria's signature look.
“What happens in it again?” I asked, “ Does the guy get the girl and all that stuff?”
“In Cinderella?”
“Yeah. Do they get their happy ever after?”
“It’s a fairytale, they all live happily ever after, which of course is completely unrealistic and fake.” Maria paused, “But…it’s also not who he thinks it is."
I sat up, intrigued by this statement. Who did I think it was? Clearly it was one of the dancing girls, maybe one of the girls in the corner finally decided to stop waving and walk over, probably one of the dancing girls though. Not to sound arrogant, but I know a few have crushes on me.
“Who was she? Cinderella?” I asked.
She walked over to her desk and flipped her Mac open. Her desktop image was of some ruins in a jungle in South America, she wants to head there first. I jumped up, grabbed a chair and pulled it in next to her. I watched her fingers type fast and then the screen lit up with images of fairytale books. She clicked the Wikipedia link and it opened.
“She was poor and basically a slave to her wicked stepmother who forced her to work day and night doing menial tasks like a maid.” She squinted as she read the screen, “At night she would curl up on the floor by the fire in her small cold room to stay warm. She would often arise covered in cinders, giving rise to the mocking nickname Cinderella." Maria turned and looked at me. “So maybe the girl that kissed you isn’t who you expect her to be.”
“Well, I need to find out. And you’re going to help me.” I reached out and grabbed her by the shoulders. “I need to know who she is.”
*Chapter 3 (Maria)
Mike left after about ten minutes of Grand Theft. I could sense he was totally distracted though, so was I. Our fingers were moving over the controls, pressing buttons, our eyes glued to a screen, but our brains were elsewhere. We played in silence, as if we were both on some strange autopilot setting. Side-by-side our shoulders bumping from time to time and both thinking about the same thing... just, I'm the only one who knows it.
It’s awkward. No, perhaps awkward isn’t the right word, because I want to scream, pull my hair out or beat him over the head with the controls. Beat myself over the head perhaps for being such an idiot. I regret it. Not all of it, just the part that has reduced me to a confused, puddle of nervous, cuticle nibbling hormones. I was actually relieved when he left. I’m never relieved when he leaves.
A strange mixture of emotions was flooding me, I’m not even sure I could name them. It’s as if all the human emotions that have ever existed have been thrown into a blender and turned on. Whizzed around at high speed until all that’s left is a thick, sloshy goo of ugly stuff. And don’t get me started on my thoughts, because right now they were having their ownvery loud argument in my head. It’s hard to listen to all my screaming thoughts, and absolutely impossible to grab onto one that actually makes any sense. I tried to silence them by flicking through Netflix, nothing. I tried to distract myself by stealing a virtual car, nothing. So I climbed into bed, pulled the duvet over my head and purposefully plunge myself into darkness.
But the darkness only made it worse…
F R I E N D Z O N E D
It’s all I could see when I closed my eyes. It’s as if the word was blinking down at me from a giant wall of cosmic graffiti. It’s as if the bloody word was mocking me for my stupidity. After a while, and a few deep breaths, it finally stops blinking at me but that’s when the memories of the kiss come flooding back…
The delicious closeness and the feeling of his hands. His lips, his smell his…I sigh, I’m such a goner. Total. There’s no hope for me now. No hope for the poor sucker Maria Glover.
I think I only fell asleep that night at about one in the morning. I must have tossed and turned for hours thinking about it all, especially about the part where I was meant to help Mike find this mystery kisser that he was now supposedly in love with. I couldn’t help but feel like I was somehow a character trapped in the electronic pages of a cheesy coming-of-age YA book, or maybe even a movie.
Tomboy next-door falls in love with best friend jock boy and kisses him in the dark, only to be roped into helping him track down the mystery girl of his dreams.
It all sounded so ridiculous, it sounded like it should have a big movie soundtrack. It’s that stupid moment at the end of the film where the girl takes off her glasses, walks downstairs towards the guy in her prom dress and he realizes that he loves her. They stare into each others eyes lovingly but you know that they'll probably break up in a couple of months when they both go to different colleges or he meets someone hotter than her or--
Crap! What the F had I done? The part of me that was regretting the kiss was getting louder and louder by the second, but not loud enough to drown out the sounds of my sister and her friends coming home.
They’re clearing trying to creep though the house, since curfew was over an hour ago. Mckenzie's always pushed the limits, but never seems to get into trouble. I’m convinced her big blue eyes and perfect smile hold some kind of magical powers. She seems to flash them at our parents and get absolutely everything she wants. I’ve never really figured out how she does it, but she seems blessed with almost occult-ish manipulation skills. She once got the school geek to do her math homework for a whole semester, in return she said hello to him at school and even walked with him in the hall from time to time. Poor guy, I think he’s still nursing a broken, proba
bly safe to say destroyed heart that will probably never heal and will have him in extensive psychotherapy for the rest of his life. My sister seems to have that effect on people.
Our house is big, but tonight the walls seemed much thinner than normal and I’m plagued by the sounds of their loud giggling and general girl chatter. Their cackling makes it so much harder to sleep and I imagine them all braiding each others’ hair and painting nails while they do a thorough post-mortem on the party. Dissecting all the details with their surgical scalpels; who looked at who, who danced with who, what did so-and-so wear and who were they hooking up with? But my blood ran ice cold the second I heard Mike’s name being whispered, followed by even more giggling.
Knife stab and twist.
It’s not a secret that almost every girl at school wants him. And no secret that he’s dated a rather substantial amount of them either – not that I’m counting, or maybe I am. I’ve always given him crap for that because on the outside he’s everything they want, but on the inside, he’s nothing like them at all.
The giggling finally tapered off at some stage and I must have fallen asleep, or fallen into some version of a sleep filled with strange swirling thoughts of Mike. One thought bled into the next, which blurred into an image and into another and another and–
“What the?!” The sun came screaming into my room and slapped we through my sleepy face. “Hey, what time is it?” I turned to the window and tried to open my eyes, even though they felt like they had been superglued shut. Through the half-closed slit I could just make Mike out. Maybe this was another dream? No one should be that bright eyed and bushy tailed so early in the effing morning, and not to mention how loudly he was calling my name.
"What you doing?" The words struggled out of my dry throat.
“Time to get up.” I felt the duvet being rudely flung off me and a hand pushed my shoulder.
“Seriously, what time is it?” I tried to pull the duvet back but Mike had a firm grip on it
“It’s already eight.” Suddenly two hands grabbed my arms and without warning I’m standing on my feet face-to-face with him. Good thing I’m not one of those girls that wears cute night dresses, or sleeps in my underwear. In fact, I always make sure I sleep in a baggy shirt and gym shorts in case I’m ambushed in the morning by Mike. Mind you, I don’t think it would make a difference if I was standing in front of him wearing some Victoria’s Secret lacey thing. I am so firmly in the friendzone right now, maybe even worse, the sister zone, that I don’t think Mike would notice if I were half naked and giving him a lap dance with tassels and Perspex heels. In fact, I don’t even think he considers me to be an actual female.
“Remind me, why are we up so early on a Saturday?” I rubbed my face, which still felt half asleep and wiped a tiny bit of drool away with the back of my hand.
“We’re off to investigate.”
“Investigate what?”
“The mystery kisser, and the only lead we have for now.”
Suddenly it hit me all at once and I was now very wide awake. He was serious about this. He hadn’t been joking last night! And to top it all off, he was using the collective ‘we’, which was just so horrific and totally inappropriate under the circumstances, considering that the other half of the “we” was the person standing right in front of him.
But the only sensible thing to do right now was to play along, well just until I figured out a better way of dealing with this. “What lead is that?”
“The gum. It’s all we’ve got to go on. If we can figure out what brand it is, at least I can narrow it down, if I see someone at school chewing it.”
“So we’re going to go to the shop and buy every flavor of gum and try it?”
“Exactly.” He clapped his hands together looking far too excited for my liking.
One thought went through my head. Shit… what the hell have I started?
Chapter 4 (Mike)
I knew it was minty, with a hint of cinnamon, at least that narrowed it down somewhat. Because as I stood in the / and looked at the shelves, there were at least fifty different flavors to choose from. Winter this, Ice that, fire and berry blazing and blasting and exploding in your month. Long lasting, teeth whitening.
I grabbed all the cinnamon mint flavors off the shelf, there were six different brands and Maria and I walked off to the counter together. Walking... it was more like dragging her, she still looked fast asleep.
“Wait, if you’re going to drag me around at this time I need sustenance, and you’re paying.”
She slapped a large doughnut and a soda down on the counter as well as a few chocolates. “For my stash,” she said.
Maria has a secret stash of sugar under her bed. Her mother banned sugar from the house about three years ago so Maria keeps some for emergencies.
“Sure.” I happily paid for all the stuff, even though Maria’s dad has more money than God, but Maria doesn’t act like that at all. In fact, if you met her you wouldn’t think she came from tons of money. I like that about her. She’s down to earth.
We left and without even thinking about it, or discussing it, we both instinctively started walking in the direction of the park. Maria and I have this special place in the park, tucked away from the crowds, a place that no one knows about and that we have been going to for years. We discovered it as adventurous kids and have spent days there, watching people, concocting plans for world domination, planning our adventures around the world that would take us to far off unexplored places— apparently there are still places in South America that haven’t been explored, tribes of people that have never even seen outsiders and know nothing about the modern world. We’ve spent hours talking about everything, and sometimes absolutely nothing at all.
We got to the old oak and climbed. The thing looks like it’s been standing there on the hill for centuries. Two huge branches that lie parallel to each other have become our kind of home away from home. We assumed our usual sitting positions on the branches that are now decorated with engravings and graffiti from the years of going there. When were about eight, we carved a large skull and cross bones into the thing to ward off any trespassers—it was during our pirate phase.
Maria doesn’t waste any time, and before I’ve even taken out the gum, she’s tucking into the doughnut. She’s the only girl I know that doesn’t exist solely on a diet of air, Diet Coke, and carrots. She eats more than me sometimes. I like that about her too. I like that she doesn’t walk around obsessing about her figure and the caloric content of a lettuce leaf. That drove me mad about my last girlfriend, especially when she used to criticize my diet. Apparently carbohydrates are from the devil and sugar, well that is just about the ultimate sin. It got old pretty quickly.
“So what’s the plan, are you just going to chew each one until you find it?” she asked in-between big bites.
“Basically.” I looked up at Maria, she had a smear of white sugar on her chin. “You’ve got half a doughnut stuck to your face.”
She tried to wipe it but totally missed. “Here.” I reached out and wipped the stuff off her chin and suddenly she’s looking at me strangely again. She had that same look plastered across her face last night.
“What’s up?” I can’t help thinking that something is bothering her, but I can’t figure out what.
“Just exhausted because someone kept me up late and woke me up at the crack of dawn. So…start chewing.” She pointed a sugary finger at the packets of gum I had in the bag.
I ripped the first one open and shoved it in my mouth, the flavors hit me immediately. Cool mint, hot cinnamon. I can’t say I’ve ever liked this flavor, until now. I closed my eyes for a moment and I could almost feel the kiss again. I chewed a few more times, then pulled the gum out and smelt it.
“Eeew,” the peanut gallery spoke.
“Nah. Too minty, not enough cinnamon.” I pushed the chewed gum back into its packet. I needed to be strategic about this. Eliminate them one by one.
The next one we
nt in, and the next one, and the next until…The familiar rush of flavors hits me, bringing with it a million memories and emotions.
“Got it!” I held the packet up like it was a prize. It’s bright red with a blue strip down the side, easy to spot. I waved it in front of Maria’s face. “Look at it. Burn it into your mind. Commit it to memory, because you’re going to be on the lookout for the girl that chews this gum.”
She shot me her famous unimpressed, slightly rude sarcastic look. “Um…and how would you like me to do that?”
“Use whatever means necessary, riffle through their jeans at gym, fucking watch them all like a hawks, walk around and ask for some gum…you’ll think of something.”
“What? I’m not walking around the school spying on people and asking them for gum. You do realize it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I burst out laughing but quickly stopped when it looked like she was being serious. She didn’t have her usual I’m being badass and hardcore but you can twist my rubber arm if you ask nicely kind of look.
“Dude, you have to help me. You’re a chick, you can get close to them, you have the best chance of finding out who chews it. Besides, where’s your sense of adventure now?”
“I would hardly call this adventure. And what if there are ten people that chew the stuff?”
“That’s okay, once I see them all, I’ll just know who it is.”
“You’ll just know?” Another severely sarcastic look is thrown in my direction, but once again it seems loaded and laced with something else. I know she absolutely hates being roped into my dating stuff, we’ve had this conversation before.
