by Rachel Vail
I was standing an inch away, practically between them, with the heat of the pizzas in their boxes behind me and the kissers in front of me, trapped and sweating.
I didn’t want to stare but I think, in hindsight? I was staring.
I felt a tug on my wrist. It was Chase, pulling me to the side. Thank goodness. Chase has the kind of laugh that sounds like a threat, and his smile seems more angry than happy, but he pulled me to the side at just the right moment, so I whispered, “Thanks.”
That’s when the kiss finished.
Isabel opened her eyes and turned toward the pizza boxes, like nothing had happened.
“Who’s hungry?” she asked.
Everybody was. I was afraid to make eye contact with anyone because what if my eyes were boinging out of my head in shock like a cartoon character’s, and everybody else was like no big deal, who doesn’t go around kissing like that, you baby who probably still wants to jump on beds?
“Milo thought you hadn’t even heard about the party,” Isabel whispered to me.
“What?” I said. “Oh, I . . .”
“I told him Ava had invited you but you said you didn’t like parties.” She handed me a slice of pizza on a paper plate. “He seemed bummed.”
“I said what? When did Ava say that?”
“Last week!” Isabel said. “Oh, I didn’t take it personally, don’t worry.”
“No, no, the thing is I didn’t . . . Last week? You said Ava told you she invited me last week and I said no?”
“I think Milo is glad you changed your mind too.” Isabel winked. “Maybe you should go get some soda.” She turned me by the shoulders toward the beverages.
“I didn’t change . . .”
Bradley grabbed her by the hand while I was talking. She spun around toward him and they both kind of melted toward each other.
I mumbled, “Oh, okay,” toward her back, and went obediently to where the drinks were. I hate soda, so I was looking for some plain water, and also something to do as an activity.
“What’s your favorite soda?” Milo asked, standing up behind the bar.
“None,” I admitted.
“Me either,” he said. “I was looking for plain water back here.”
“Same,” I said.
“Also scallops,” he said.
“You’re looking for scallops?”
“No. I don’t like soda or scallops.”
“The texture,” I said.
“Slimy,” he agreed.
“My parents love them.”
“Mine too,” he said. “And okra.”
“Never had it.”
“Also slimy,” he said. “Trust me.”
“I do,” I said.
He smiled a tiny bit, which made my hands all twitchy.
OMG, how am I thirteen years old without a clue how to have a conversation?
“But the thing I hate about soda is that it’s too spicy.”
“Spicy?”
“It makes my eyes cry.”
“Just your eyes?” Shut up, Niki, why are you mocking him?!
“Yeah,” he said. “Soda doesn’t make me sad. It doesn’t make me cry from my soul. Just from my eyes.”
“Sometimes you cry from your soul?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“I don’t . . .”
“You don’t cry?”
“Not lately,” I lied.
“Oh,” he said. He nodded and looked at his sneakers.
“Niki!” Ava called. “You are the slowest person! What are you doing?”
“Getting a . . . Be right there. Do you want soda?”
“No, I’m good!” she yelled.
“I know exactly what you mean, though,” I whispered quickly to Milo. “It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“Funny,” I said. “Too spicy, and your eyes crying versus . . .”
Man, how dark brown are his eyes? Like, you-can’t-even-see-the-pupils dark. Weird to imagine them crying. Ever. Do eighth-grade boys cry? Does Milo cry? From his SOUL?
“Funny like weird?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
I went back to the green chair and squished in next to Ava. Chase sat down on the chair’s arm, next to me. “You’re the best wingman,” Ava whispered. “I knew I could count on you.”
I turned to her like, For what?
“We were shooting hoops before,” Chase said.
Ava swallowed the pizza that was in her mouth. “Amazing,” she said.
I looked from one to the other of them. Amazing? Okay.
Ava took another big bite. Chase shoved half his slice into his mouth. We all chewed. Chase is such a skull-head, you could see his jaw mechanism working at it.
Ava leaned close to my ear and whispered, “Pretend I’m saying something funny but also a little evil, so he thinks I’m cool.”
I swallowed, opened my mouth wide, then clamped my hand over it. “Ava!” I gasped.
“What did she say?” Chase asked.
“I’ll never tell,” I swore, then whispered in Ava’s ear, “Like that?”
She nodded, glanced at Chase, then down at her pizza.
“Like I care,” Chase said.
“What?” Ava asked. “You’re so funny, Chase.”
“I am?”
Ava stared at her pizza. I could see she was trying not to laugh.
“I freaking love pizza,” Chase said, picking some rubber off his flip-flop’s sole. “I could probably eat a whole pie myself.”
I had just taken a bite of my slice but Ava’s little strangled laugh-noises set me off. That and how she kept staring at her pizza slice, like, Are you a good slice? Do I want you? I wasn’t even faking; I was totally having a giggle attack from it, and from I freaking love pizza. But mostly from the happiness of being smooshed into a chair with Ava, laughing together, like it used to be.
Ava started choking on her pizza, laughing too. I hit her on her back and she was like, “STOP, STOP, why are you beating me up?”
I answered, “DON’T CHOKE TO DEATH, AVA!”
“I’m not!” she managed, between coughs and laughs.
“Well, good job so far, then,” I said, as Isabel had said to her granny.
Ava and I opened our mouths all wide and doubled over, laughing uncontrollably again. Anytime I glanced up, Chase was just calmly chewing his pizza, which just started me dying of laughter all over again.
Then Ava leaned over and whispered to me, “Now.”
“Now, what?”
“Find out if he likes me, doofus. Don’t be dim.”
Oh. We weren’t mocking the boy Ava thought wrongly that I liked. It wasn’t about me at all; it was about her. Of course. It’s always about her. She liked him. Oh.
I stood up, which made the chair tip. Ava toppled toward Chase, which cracked her up that much more. I tried to laugh too, but the hilarity had passed, for me at least. So that’s why she wanted me there. To be her minion. To laugh at everything she said, even if she didn’t actually say anything at all, to show Chase how amazing she was. To find out for her.
To order around.
“What are you DOING, Niki?” she asked loudly enough for everybody to hear. “You’re just standing there like d’oh!”
I managed to laugh a little, which made her double over, head down toward her shoes, laughing. Her backbone, above her thin T-shirt, looked like a string of beads. Really pretty. I caught Chase noticing too.
“I’m gonna, uh, go to the bathroom,” I said. “I’ll be, I’ll talk to you, well, soon.”
Ava glanced up at me and burst out laughing again, like what I’d said was the most hilarious joke any comedian had ever come up with.
I love the bathroom in Isabel’s cell
ar. They call it the poetry bathroom. There are poems printed out and taped all over the walls, so you can just read poem after poem while you pee or poop or stall for a few minutes, away from dealing with all the people.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room . . .
The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means . . .
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways . . .
As I washed my hands, dried them, and stood there holding the thin green towel, I read poem after poem, reassuring myself that Ava trusted me, wanted me there, wanted me as her best friend. I’m the one she can trust.
You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting . . .
Chase was right outside the door as I walked out; I didn’t even notice and kind of smashed into him.
“Sorry!” I quickly said. The last lines of the last poem I’d read were still echoing in my head: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
“Shhhh,” Chase answered.
“Oh!” I whispered. “I have to ask you—”
“Can I, I need . . .”
“Oh, sorry, go ahead,” I said, stepping to the side to let him into the bathroom. How embarrassing. How long had he been standing there waiting to use the bathroom while I feasted on poem after poem? He must’ve thought I was having a poop attack.
He stepped to the side, like we were dancing, instead of going into the bathroom.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t—I was just reading the . . .”
He was staring into my eyes. “Shhhh.”
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
He pulled me by the elbow away from the main room, back toward the storage area, where the shelves full of big plastic boxes and cardboard boxes and old broken toys line the cement walls, and the, I don’t know, machinery of the cellar is. Where it’s dark and the rug gives up, so it’s just the cold concrete floor.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
“I have to ask you a question,” Chase whispered, leaning close so his mouth touched my hair.
“Okay,” I whispered back. “I have one for you, too. It would be pretty funny if it’s the same question, right? Or, about the same person . . .”
“Shhh,” he hushed. “You can’t tell anybody. You promise?”
I nodded. I didn’t want to mess up, even though, yuck, Chase Croft. How could Ava like him? But that’s not fair. He’s always been nice enough to me. And, people have different taste. No commenting on other people’s food choices. So what if Ava likes Chase, and shoplifting, and the Squad? Why am I so judgmental?
Chase pulled back a little and looked at me. His eyes were cold, Squall-Pond-in-early-May blue. He narrowed them, and tightened his mouth. “Niki,” he whispered. “I . . .”
I nodded. He was nervous. Scared, even. That made him seem less scary and tough than usual, less like his picture should be on the outside of a bottle of poison. Some defenselessness under the tough thugishness.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, wondering if he had a problem, something in his family, maybe. Feeling jealous that his best friend, Bradley, has a girlfriend, or maybe he’s having trouble in school, like with math. Maybe he likes Ava and feels worried she doesn’t like him back. Well, he was in luck, if so! Maybe he had a sense he could trust me for exactly the reason Ava likes (or used to like) me—good listener, caring, wholesome. Not in the Squad. So he trusted me enough to confide what was troubling him.
That’s what I was thinking.
Then he kissed me.
34
I TRIED TO push him away, but his hands were holding my arms and his mouth was clamped hard onto mine. I could feel the solid teeth behind his slightly chapped lips, and his bony body pressed against mine. I was trapped between him and the cold concrete wall. I couldn’t breathe.
My first kiss, I was thinking, and also, OH NO OH NO.
I yanked my head backward, which detached me from him, at least my face.
His eyes opened.
His fingers were still tight on my arms, digging in, making tide-pool dents.
I picked up my hands and pushed back against his chest, but he didn’t let go. I waved my fingers between us, to show I wasn’t trying to attack him or push or make it into a thing. I held them up, like surrendering.
He let go of my arms.
I still could feel the imprints of his fingerprints on the flesh of my arms, and of his mouth on mine.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
And I ran into the main area, away from him.
35
WHEN I GOT back into the main room of the cellar, Ava looked up right away, like so?
I shook my head microscopically, like, Sorry, no, doesn’t seem like he wants to ask you out actually. Which felt almost like a lie, because it was so much worse than that.
No way I could just sit back down and eat more pizza and laugh. If I opened my mouth to speak, a swarm of bees might fly out.
Or, worse, sobs.
I heard Chase’s footsteps approaching from behind me, from the dark place.
I turned around, opened the sliding door to the backyard, and started throwing up before my back foot was all the way out.
I could hear everyone behind me screeching and cursing and jumping away, but there was nothing I could do beyond finish puking up all the pizza and the feeling of Chase’s mouth against mine.
Like a bruise.
Like it was going to mark my lips forever in Kiss Sharpie.
No eraser would ever be able to wipe my mouth clean of it.
Ava’s hand on my back. “Dude,” she said.
“Ugh,” I groaned.
“Could you stop?” Ava demanded, whispering so our friends inside Isabel’s cellar wouldn’t hear. She had one hand on my back and the other holding her nose to avoid smelling my puke, so she sounded like she had a cold.
I glanced up at her, like, as if I am doing this on purpose?
“Are you sick? Why did you come to the party if you were just gonna puke? Did you ask Chase? What did he say?”
I closed my eyes and tried to stop being distracted and think fast: what and how much to tell Ava.
The tricky part was, what if she somehow felt like I was showing off, that Chase kissed me instead of her? Ava’s fragile.
My stomach swirled around and around. Then a weird scary thing seized up my body: it went through the motions of puking in an even bigger way than before but there was nothing left in my stomach to puke. Nothing came out, just a bit of spit.
“What, are you faking now?” Ava asked.
“No,” I managed. Then I did it again, the whole, everything a body does when it’s puking, except the puking bit.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know, man,” I said.
“Are you possessed by evil spirits or something?”
“Maybe?”
“Close the door!” Bradley yelled. “We can smell it in here.”
Ava closed the door behind us.
“Niki, really, are you sick?”
She sounded worried about me. She really is a good friend and she wanted me here because I’m the one she trusts with the secret that she likes Chase and she’s vulnerable, which she hates—and now I have to tell her this? Ugh. I closed my eyes. “I’m okay,” I said.
She put her cool palm on my forehead. “You don’t have a fever.”
“I know
it. It’s not that.”
I would want to know. If the roles were reversed, I would want her to tell me what the boy had done to her, right away, and then I would be hundred percent on her side, hating that boy, comforting her, yelling at him. She would never hesitate to tell me, if it had happened to her. Of course. What kind of person would hesitate to tell her best friend when something awful had happened to her? Why am I so distrustful? You can tell me anything, we always tell each other.
“So? What happened?” she asked.
I wiped my runny nose on the back of my hand and told myself to just tell her, just be honest. “Chase tried to kiss me,” I said. “It was horrible. I came out of the bathroom and he . . .”
“You kissed Chase?”
“No,” I said.
“You just said . . .”
“He kissed me.”
“Uhh, kissing is a mutual . . .”
“Yeah, it’s supposed to be,” I said. “That’s what I’m . . .”
“You knew I liked him. But you . . .”
“I nothing!” I took a deep breath and tried to settle both my stomach and my voice. “This is what—listen. I came out of the bathroom and . . .”
“And he just kissed you, without saying anything?” Her hands were on her hips, her pink lips tucked in, a tight line across her angry face. Doubting me.
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“He said . . .” I tried to think. “He said he had a question, and I figured it was about you, so I was like, okay.”
“You said okay.”
“I said . . .” She’s jealous, I reminded myself. She seems so strong, but I am the only one who knows she’s actually fragile.
“Ava,” I started again. “It was nothing, I just, I’m overreacting . . .”
“He went to kiss you and you said okay.”
“Oh, Ava, no, that’s not what . . .”
“So you were lying? You just said you said okay.”
“I don’t remember exactly what I said! I wasn’t recording it.”
“You don’t have to get snotty,” Ava said.
