A Kiss For You

by Rachel Van Dyken

  Although there were bumps in the road, a little juvie, a little jail, and whole lotta shit I can’t talk about here. I don’t look back at those things as poor choices. I see them as part of the highlight reel of the most epic fucking journey of my life. A journey I never thought I would see. Shit, I never thought I would live past the age of 14, and if it wasn’t for my best friend, and him saving my ass one night, I wouldn’t have.

  I want to send a shout out to Bear. Big-ups to you, you big fucking animal. Go travel. Go do you. Go do all the shit you want to do before that club of yours swallows you whole and you can’t see where your ideas start and their ideas end.

  No shit. At first, I thought you were just an annoying hanger-on, but it turns out that I was capable of having more than one friend after all, and I’m fucking glad it was you, man.

  Bear, you need to look out for King and Doe. Lord fucking knows those two will need all the help they can get. I mean, they fucking love each other, but both are too fucking stupid to see past their own crap long enough to keep their shit together.

  I see major fuck ups in their future. Be there for them. Help them see past their ridiculous issues and preach to them about the joys of honesty and anal sex.

  Continuing on.

  I’ve done shit I’m not proud of. Thanks to all of you for not judging me. Thanks to all of you for being my friends in spite of it. Thanks for giving me a life that was worth dying for. I would do it all over again if I fucking could. So don’t fucking cry for me, be happy for me. Be happy that I had friends like all of you who I loved more than fucking family, who I loved more than myself, and we all know how crazy I am about me. Be happy that I was happy and that all you fuckers were a part of that.

  Doe, if King doesn’t get his head out of his ass and marry you and impregnate you with millions of his little man-children, he is a dumb fuck and I promise I will rise from the grave to take his place. It may take me a while to figure out how, but if anyone can do it, it’s gonna be me.

  King, my brother, thanks for taking a chance on a skinny geek all those years ago. Thanks for fucking saving my ass, but you did more than that. You saved my life. You gave me a life.

  I love you, man.

  Be happy kids.

  I gotta go be dead now. No after funeral bullshit. I fucking hate that shit.

  Go get laid. That will make me happy.

  Fuck. Party. Make merry. And know that I fucking loved all of you.

  -Prep

  PS-I have also written my own obituary which I would like published in all the local papers. I’m serious about this. I will haunt you if this doesn’t happen.

  “Ummm, I don’t know if I should read this next part out loud.”

  “Do it!” Bear cheered me on. Even from the other side of the tent, I could see the tears in his eyes, but now there was a smile on his face. “Let’s fucking hear it!”

  The crowd joined in, and I was left with no choice.

  “Oh, fine,” I said, taking a deep breath and speed reading through Preppy’s autobiographical obituary.

  Samuel Clearwater

  26 years old

  Badass MoFo

  Went out like a boss

  Leaves behind the family he chose: King, Doe, Bear, and the GG bitches.

  May God rest his soul…and his ten-inch cock.

  The entire group of mourners burst out laughing. Not just a few chuckles, but knee-slapping, belly laughter. As I put the note away and took my seat next to King, I realized what Preppy had done. He was the kind of guy who couldn’t bear the thought of us crying over him, so he did what Preppy always did.

  He made us laugh.

  I looked over to King, who wasn’t smiling at all. I tugged on his hand, but instead of getting his attention, he stood up.

  Before the preacher said his final words, King was already long gone.

  King

  My girl had been raped, and it had been a week since we put my best friend into the ground. In that time, I didn’t know where to place my anger at the person I hated most in the world.

  No, not Isaac. I killed that motherfucker. Splattered his head wide open with a bullet at close range.

  The person I hated most in the world was me.

  After everything Doe had done for me, after everything we’d been through, she deserved better than to live a life in fear of being raped or shot. As much as I wanted out of the life, it wasn’t something I could just jump out of in an instant. I needed to do something for her, but no matter what came to mind, it wasn’t big enough to make this huge wrong, right again.

  Then, it came to me.

  There was one thing I could do for her.

  One fucking reverse GOOGLE image search. That’s all it took to find out who Doe really was. I’d uploaded a photo of her I took from my phone the first night she’d slept in my bed and pressed search and there she was, staring into the camera like she was looking right into my eyes. I wished I’d never done the search. I wished I’d never known who she really was.

  I’d used the fact that I knew who she was and what that could do for me as an excuse to bring her back to me. Even though it was her I wanted since the very first moment I saw her.

  I’d planned to keep her forever, and her secret even longer if need be.

  Until now.

  Seventeen-year-old Ramie Elizabeth Price.

  Either the police were really shitty at their jobs, or they never really tried to find out who she was to begin with, because for the second time after searching her image, less than a second after pressing search, I was staring at multiple images of the girl I’d fallen in love with on my laptop.

  There were no articles about her going missing, just pictures of her from various events. Balls, galas, fundraisers. It was her in the pictures, but it wasn’t. The gowns, the makeup, the fake smile, if there was any smile at all.

  The last picture of her I found was taken almost a year ago. She had a blank look on her face. Her eyes were vacant.

  I knew that look. I’d regrettably put it on her face myself. It was a look that broke my fucking heart.

  Indifference.

  She was holding the hand of a boy who looked a little older than her, who was smiling from ear to ear.

  I wanted to reach through the computer and break his fucking hand and then break every single one of his pearly white teeth.

  Senator Westmore Bigelow Price, with daughter Ramie Elizabeth and long-time beau Tanner Preston Redmond at the Heart Ball Gala to raise money for pediatric cancer.

  Even though it was my second time scanning the pictures, my blood boiled. I don’t know what made me madder. The boy who was touching my girl. Or the man they listed as her father.

  A senator running for president. A man who would want to avoid scandal at all cost. That’s probably why they didn’t even try to find their missing daughter.

  Fucking asshole.

  I stood from the kitchen table and threw the laptop across the room. It smashed against a cabinet and fell to the floor in a million pieces.

  Bear came storming into the kitchen. “What the fuck?” he asked, looked over at the broken laptop. “You on the rag man?”

  “We have to take a trip,” I said, staring down at the now broken laptop as though the image of Doe or Ramie, or whatever the fuck her name was and her boyfriend were still up on the broken screen that was flashing from blue to black over and over again.

  “Where we going?”

  “Tell me something, Bear, and be honest. What are the chances of us getting the kind of money we need for the payoff to the senator for Max?”

  My eyes met his for the first time since he came into the kitchen.

  “Slim to fucking none, man” he answered honestly.

  “Then, get the fucking truck. I’ll drive.”

  “But you still haven’t said why I’m getting the truck.”

  “Because, my friend, there is a deal with the devil that needs to be made.” I looked down the hall at the closed door of
my bedroom, where the girl I’d fallen in love with slept peacefully in my bed. She was mine, and I would always think of her that way. But she deserved a better life than the one I could give her, which seemed to only hurt her at every turn.

  After Preppy’s funeral I was thinking about giving her the truth.

  Now, I was just going to give her away.

  “And who is the devil in this scenario?” Bear asked, shrugging on his cut.

  I was going to see the senator and offer Doe in exchange for him making sure that I had signed custody papers for Max.

  The only family I had left.

  I stared out the kitchen window, but couldn’t see a thing. It was like I was staring into a white abyss, a place I was about to go, that I wasn’t ever going to be able to come back from.

  “Me.”

  King

  When you fall in love, you know it’s the real deal because you come to the realization you would take a bullet for that person. And when you become a parent, you realize that you would not only use your own body but the body of the person you love as a human shield to protect your child.

  That is the place where I existed.

  The Senator had a daughter who had a life, a boyfriend. I wasn’t doing Doe any favors by keeping her with me, involved in shit she shouldn’t be involved in. It got Preppy dead. I wasn’t doing my daughter any favors by leaving her hanging out there in the world without protection. She needed her father. She needed her family.

  She needed me.

  I was going to give it all up for her. I couldn’t manage the payoff, but if the senator accepted my offer of a trade, then I could keep what money I did have and that was enough to sell the house, and disappear off the radar to somewhere where nobody knew who we were.

  Me and Max.

  I was going to be a good father to her. A good influence. A good role model. I would get us a house in a good neighborhood and send her to a good school. I would read to her at bedtime. I would make this fucking work because it had to fucking work. I was going to disappear because my life was going to reappear.

  I lost my best friend, and that made me realize that sooner or later I was going to lose my girl, too. Because as soon as she learned that I’d known who she was from the very beginning, she would hate me forever.

  I needed Max because she was all I had left, and I was bound and determined not to fuck that up. I prayed to any god who listened that if I could just be with her, I would make things right. I would give her my all.

  My love.

  My heart.

  My daughter.

  My everything.

  I made a decision that broke my fucking heart and made it sing all at the same time. So what if I felt like a piece of me would always be missing? Fuck it. I would have my daughter.

  And she was my heart.

  In exchange for Max, I was going to give Doe, or Ramie, or Pup, or whatever you want to call her, back to her father.

  By not telling Doe about what was going to happen, I wasn’t giving her an option. But there was no doubt in my mind that when she found out what I’d been hiding all along that she was going to look at me like the monster I am.

  But then again, she might be grateful to me for giving her life back.

  Maybe, not.

  I pretended not to care all the way to the senator’s office.

  I was going to have to be prepared to pretend for the rest of my life.

  “Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist with curly black hair and dark freckles across her nose asked, without looking up from her computer.

  “My name is Brantley King, and I don’t need a fucking appointment. Let him know I’m waiting. Give him this. He’ll want to see me.”

  I placed the folded-up picture on his desk, one I took of Doe this morning while she was sleeping. I didn’t wait for her to answer. I took a seat in the waiting area in a plastic chair that faced her desk. When she finally looked up from her computer, her jaw dropped. She’d probably never seen someone who looked like me waiting to see the senator. I didn’t have the patience to be inconspicuous. I needed to make shit happen and make it happen before I changed my fucking mind.

  The receptionist stood and walked down the hall. She emerged a few moments later and dialed a number on her phone. She held her hand up over her mouth as she whispered into the receiver.

  “Senator Price will see you now,” she said, with a fake smile, setting the phone back on its cradle.

  She stood, and I followed her down the hall until we came to an office with a double-door entry. She opened it and stood aside to let me through. When I stepped inside, she shut it behind me. There was another click, which I’m sure meant that she locked it as well.

  “I know who you are, Mr. King, and the only reason I’m even letting you in this office is because I know you had to pass through the metal detectors. So, I know you’re not armed,” the Senator said, standing up from behind his oversized mahogany desk, holding the picture I’d given his receptionist in his hand. He was trying to even the playing field, but he didn’t seem to understand that I was the one holding all the cards.

  “That’s where you would be wrong, Senator.” I lifted up the front of my shirt and removed the pistol from the front of my pants. I was wearing my big metal junior rodeo belt buckle trophy. The one I got for looping a sheep at the fair. “Crazy thing about those metal belt-buckles. They make the alarms go off every single fucking time.”

  The senator sat back down and folded his hands on the desk, gesturing to the chair in front of him. “Let’s cut the shit then, shall we?”

  A picture on a shelf beside his desk caught my eye. It was my Pup, several years younger than she was now, on some sort of beach, her smile bigger and brighter than I’d ever seen. She’d been happy once, and it was seeing that bit of happy that made it easier to propose my deal.

  “I have your daughter. You have ten-seconds to tell me why you don’t know where she is and why you aren’t looking for her. The truth. Not some bullshit lie either,” I warned.

  The senator’s eyes grew wide. “You better not have harmed my daughter so help me…” He stood abruptly, his chair tipped backwards and crashed onto the floor. “What do you know?”

  “Calm the fuck down. What I know is that she has big blue eyes and a tendency to talk too much when she’s nervous.” And then just for fun I added, “I know how her heart beats faster when she’s turned on.”

  “What the fuck did you do to my daughter?”

  “Oh, no. That’s not how this works. You need to answer me first. Why haven’t you reported her missing? Why haven’t you looked for her?”

  “Why do you think we haven’t been looking?” the senator asked, settling back into his seat, nervously wringing his hands.

  “Because if the senator’s daughter went missing, you would think it would be kind of a big deal. All over the news and whatnot. And it isn’t.”

  Senator Price picked his chair up off the floor and sat down, rubbing his hands over his eyes.

  “We’ve been telling people she’s studying abroad in Paris. But as you already know, that’s not the truth,” he admitted. “We didn’t report her missing because Ramie is a troubled child. She started hanging with the wrong crowd. Disappearing for weeks at a time. This time, it’s been months, and she hasn’t so much as used my credit card. Her mother and I thought she was rebelling, teaching us some sort of lesson. We’d gotten into a huge fight before she stormed out. We haven’t seen her since.”

  “So, you didn’t report her missing, because she was a troubled child? Or because you were up for reelection and you were afraid the story would taint your oh-so-perfect political image?”

  “Did you see what happened to Sarah Palin when they found out she had a sixteen-year-old who was unwed and pregnant? It killed her! I couldn’t do that to my party, and I knew Ramie wasn’t really missing. She’d just run away like she’d had so many times before. So I made up excuses, lies. I told people what they wante
d to hear, and her mother and I prayed every day she would at least call.” He looked distraught. “Tell me she’s okay.”

  “Yeah. She’s fine.”

  The senator let out a relieved breath.

  “Why did she never come home? Does she really hate us that much?” he asked, his fingers pressed to his temples.

  “She doesn’t remember. She was in some sort of accident. She woke up with no memory. She doesn’t even know her own name.”

  “What?” He stood up again. “Take me to her. Now! I need to see her!” he demanded.

  “Not so fast.” I held up a hand. “Sit the fuck back down, Senator. It seems we have a little trade we need to work out.”

  He sat back down. “Yes, of course. What are your terms?”

  “No bullshit. No money. What I’m offering is a flat trade. Ramie for Max. My daughter. Here is her information.” I placed a receipt on his desk. “On the back is my daughter’s name, social security number, and the address of the foster home she’s been living in, as well as all my information. Be at my place. Tomorrow at noon. Bring Max and all the custody papers, giving me full rights to my daughter and then and only then, you’ll get yours back.” The words hurt coming out of my mouth, but they needed to be said because the trade needed to be done.

  “That can be arranged, but I’ll need more than a day,” the senator said, nervously shuffling his thumbs one over the other over and over again. I stood and walked to the door.

  “Tomorrow at noon. If you’re not there, if you don’t bring Max—” I turned and faced him one last time. “I’ll slit your girl’s throat. No hesitation. If I can’t have my daughter, I won’t let you have yours. I don’t give a shit what happens to me after that.”

  I waited until I was in the car and Bear was driving out of the parking lot to exhale.

  “How did it go?” Bear asked.

  I sighed.

  “That bad?”

  “It went about as good as it could have gone. It’s what I did that I’m sighing about.”

  “What exactly is it that you did in there?”