Kissing in America (23 page)

A
s soon as Annie left my sight, the lack of sleep caught up with me and I felt like I was walking underwater. Henry, the assistant leading us to Room 2, brought us by the set. A pink neon
THE SMARTEST GIRL IN AMERICA!
sign sprawled across the wall. Rows and rows of seats towered above us, for the studio audience, which would be made up entirely of teen girls, Henry told us. Black cables snaked around the ceiling, over monitors and lights.

Hundreds of lights. Why did they need so many lights? And so many cameras? Wasn't one camera enough? And why were some of the cameras so huge, mounted on black moving frames like giant dinosaurs, like oversized versions of those roaming X-ray machines at the dentist, which always looked slightly sinister to me?

“Um, where do the companions sit during the show?” I asked Henry.

“The Companion Chamber. That place is sealed,” he said. “It's like a vault. Off-limits to everyone till we start. They want it to have an air of secrecy.”

“Are there this many cameras in there? This many lights?”

He shrugged. “Pretty much.”

I took a deep breath and tried to ignore the hot prickles on my skin. Grace tapped my shoulder. “Your eyes are bugging out. I'm kind of nervous, too. Of course today's the day my face decided to explode with zits.”

Why was she being civil to me, all of a sudden? Probably out of necessity, like the people on wilderness reality shows who have to be nice to each other to survive.

Grace glanced at a blond girl in the corner. I recognized her from the audition—she'd been the one wearing her school uniform.

“I talked to her this morning before you guys arrived. Her name is Lauren. Her parents hired five tutors for all different subjects. Not just run-of-the-mill tutors—for economics she had a Nobel Prize winner coaching her,” Grace said.

Oh god.

“And an acting coach so she answers confidently. And a stylist added hair extensions.”

Lauren's blond hair waved over her shoulders like the tresses of a teen Barbie.

“And she had porcelain veneers put on her teeth. I wanted to get veneers too, but my dad said they were too expensive.”

Veneers? Last night I hadn't even
brushed
my teeth.

Grace wrinkled her nose. “Do you smell horse?”

I took a step back. “Excuse me,” I said. I held up my phone, went to the corner, and checked my messages. I texted Will.

We're here in LA at the studio. See you tonight? Filming ends at 5pm-maybe then?

Room 2 was filled with acres of food: a table was stocked with bagels, pastries, muffins, cheeses, fruit, and cookies. I filled my plate, and then everyone took turns sitting in a swivel chair in front of a lighted mirror. Henry gave us more forms to fill out while we waited. When it was my turn, the makeup artist cocked her head, squinted at my hair, and said, “I've seen worse.”

She took out a giant bottle of dry shampoo and plugged in a straightening iron the size of a sword. “Don't worry. We'll get you fixed up in no time.” She took out an airbrush machine, which looked like a large motorized pen, and began to spray foundation on my face. Then she opened a tiered box that seemed to contain the entire contents of Sephora: highlighters, eyeliners, blushes, lip stains and glosses, and dozens of colors of eye shadow, which she mixed like a painter.

When she finished, I could barely recognize myself. I looked like I'd actually slept the night before. And not in a VW Bug.

“I love you,” I told her. “You're a miracle worker.”

Grace came over to me. I practically bumped into her eyelashes; she'd had about ten pounds of mascara applied to them. She fidgeted and kept picking under her fingernails. My anxiety had congealed into a jittery simmer, a runny glue clogging my veins.

“Hey,” Grace said in a quiet voice, “there's something I wanted to tell you.” She looked directly at me.

“What?”

“Annie had never told me about—your dad. But Janet mentioned it to my mom . . .” She paused, trying to finish the sentence. “If I'd known—”

I felt something in my pocket. My phone buzzed.

Hey! It's Will. Where are you now?

My heart jumped into my throat.

“Um, hold on a second,” I told Grace. I turned away.

My fingers felt weightless, floating on top of the screen, but as I typed, my hands shook.

At the studio. Getting ready for the show. Will I see you tonight?

Can't tonight. Free this afternoon. Can you slip away before it starts? I can meet you there when you're on a break.

“Who's that text from?” Grace asked me. “Your whole face is red.”

“No one.”

Her eyes lit up. “It's from him. That guy. The poet guy.”

I ignored her.

Now. He wanted to see me now.

I turned to Henry, who fluttered around, collecting forms and checking tasks off his list. “Are we going to have any free time before the show starts?”

He shook his head. “No. No way.”

“But I thought we don't start taping for three hours.”

He shrugged. “It's the rules. We can't go through the hassle of checking everyone in and out, in and out. Sorry.” He sped off down the hall.

“Jeez, even your scalp is blushing,” Grace said. She blinked. It was amazing she was able to blink with all that mascara. “So Poet Guy wants to see you now?”

Not only my scalp blushed, but my arms and legs and hands and face, too. Why could he only see me
now
? Why not tonight? I felt angry at that part of him that I'd used to love—that mysterious, elusive part. Why had I ever liked that about him?

“Listen. I can help you.” She checked her watch. “Eddie is the guard on duty in the booth today. I slipped away from my dad this morning and had a smoke with him out there. Talked to him for a while. He's super nice.” She handed me two long brown cigarettes. “Give him these—they're Gau­loises, he loves them—and he'll let you out and back in, no problem. If Henry asks where you went, I'll tell him you're in the bathroom. We have two hours before they round us up
for the set, so that should give you plenty of time to get back.”

I didn't know if I should trust her.

“I'm not always a total asshole.” She smiled. “Just let me help.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

I texted Will:

If you can get here ASAP I can sneak out for a little while. We can meet by the fountain in front of the studio. I'd love to see you.

He wrote back:

See you soon

I
left the building. I walked past the sound stages, the golf carts roaming, and people walking everywhere. I found Eddie in the entrance booth and gave him the cigarettes.

“Cool, thanks,” he said. “I'll let you back in, no problem. Don't worry about it. See you in a bit.”

Outside the gate, I sat on the bench by the fountain. Will wasn't there yet.

I waited.

And waited.

The manicured grass looked too green, too perfectly trimmed. I stuck a toe into it. How did they manage to make real grass look completely artificial?

My entire body buzzed; I'd drunk one cup of coffee but felt like I'd drunk ten. I didn't have my phone or my bag with me—Henry had collected all our things and put them in the studio lockers.

I felt grateful for the hair and makeup. If Will had liked me before, with frizzy hair, then there was no way he wouldn't like me now. I wore the vintage black dress and red high heels
my mom had let me borrow. I felt a pang thinking of her, a small sharp knot of love.

Finally, a beat-up green Cadillac from the seventies turned into the parking lot. The door opened with a metal squeal.

His hair was longer, curling to his cheekbones. He looked taller, larger, his shoulders wider. Everything about him seemed absolutely familiar and completely foreign at once.

He loped toward me and enveloped me in his arms. The scar on his chin seemed more noticeable now, or maybe I just knew to look for it.

It all rushed back, the hours in the north tower, week after week, the van ride home, the bakery, our kiss on the street, our entire night in the roof garden. Everything.

Here. Now. For
real
.

Real. The word seeped under my skin. I buried my face in his T-shirt. The same smell: sugar and soap. It must've been embedded in his pores. I dissolved with relief.

He pointed to the car. “So I got a new one.” He sounded apologetic. “Cupcake-free. I'm still not used to driving without a giant pastry on my roof.”

I nodded. I couldn't say anything because a thousand things crowded my throat, drowning each other out.

He touched the back of my neck. “You look beautiful. Did you do something to your hair?”

I managed to say, “They did it for the show.”

We sat down on the bench. The fountain sparkled; not
a speck of dirt or a fallen leaf or a single blade of dead grass wrecked the water.

I sat right next to him but I could barely see him. Dark jeans, navy T-shirt, black shoes; I had to force myself to notice these things because after all these weeks of hoping and dreaming, I could barely absorb that he sat beside me now.

He looked up. The sky seemed bluer than it ever was in New York or Tucson or Texas or Tennessee or anywhere—maybe it could only be this blue in California.

“Nice day,” he said.

“It is.” Clunky words. I could practically see the words clang off the bench and onto the grass. I'd spent so much time imagining what I'd say, and in my head now those ideas all sounded stupid.

That's okay, I told myself. This is normal. We just need time to get used to each other again.

“I loved all the letters and poems you sent,” I said. “And the songs—I listened to them the whole trip.”

“Thanks.” He smiled awkwardly, the way I'd seen him smile at Mrs. Peech when she sat too close to him, or asked him how he'd become such a wonderfully accomplished swimmer.

I said, “I can't believe you're here. I was so afraid I wouldn't get to see you.”

He touched my hand, grasped it lightly—his hand that I'd held in the roof garden—then clutched the edge of the bench. “How was the trip?”

“Ohhh.” Where could I start? “I shot a gun in Texas. And fought a crazy woman on the bus. In Tucson I almost got bit by a
rattlesnake
.”

“Wow. You're like a superhero.”

“A road-trip superhero.” I smiled. “They need a cartoon about that.”

“I wish I'd driven out here. Cross-country.”

I thought for a second. “Come back with us—at least part of the way. You'd love Tucson. And Texas. You have time before school starts, right?” I waved toward his car. “I bet that thing could make it, even if it doesn't have a cupcake on its roof.” I touched his arm. “Or maybe in December, on your break. We could take a trip.”

He flinched, almost imperceptibly. A twitch of his shoulders. If I hadn't spent so much time staring at him in the tutoring center, watching his smallest move, I wouldn't have noticed it. But I'd seen him do that when he'd talked about his dad, and about Gia, just before they broke up.

“Everything feels so crazy right now.” His voice was soft. He looked away from me. At the ground. The concrete, the genetically engineered grass.

“What happened? Is everything okay with your dad?”

He nodded. “I took your advice. We went out for dinner. Talked for hours. He apologized. He even planned this whole trip for us—we're supposed to drive up the coast tonight and camp on the beach. Not with my car—I don't think this one
would make it—we're taking his Jeep, just the two of us.”

“Tonight? For how long?”

“Four days.”

“I'm only here two more days. We're leaving Sunday.” I tried to keep my voice level, though an icicle melted down my spine.

“I know—I'm sorry. I tried to change things, but my dad's show at LACMA opens Wednesday, so this was the only time we could do it. He wanted to leave this morning, but I put him off so I could see you. He's had dinners with donors every night, and after the opening he goes to Italy for an artist's residency for three weeks—this was the only time he could do it.”

“Maybe you can come back sooner. Tell your dad we came all this way.”

“We can't.”

I couldn't process what he was saying. It was too different from what I expected. A person you loved couldn't tell you they're leaving tonight and not seeing you again, not after you'd come all this way, it wasn't possible.

“I'm sorry. I didn't plan it like this.” His voice sounded genuinely sad. Why was he saying this? His jeans were the same jeans he'd worn in the roof garden, a quarter-size tear at the right knee. I remembered touching those jeans, the belt loops, the soft worn fabric. He could change his mind. I could change it.

“Just stay tonight then. I'll see you after the show.” I was pleading now. I couldn't help it. I wanted to sound normal, but everything I said was soggy with need.

He gazed at the fountain. His T-shirt had a tiny bleach stain on one sleeve, and I thought of the time I'd stared at him in the van, memorizing the moth holes of his black coat.

“I'm starting college soon.” He spoke slowly. “I live here now. You're in New York.”

“I only have two more years of school—sometimes you can skip a year and go right to college.”

He looked away. “Eva—”

“I could move here. We could—I could get emancipated. Anything is possible . . . anything is possible.”

Those were things I'd planned to tell him. Out loud, they sounded nothing like they had in my head.

He stared at his hands. “All this summer I was hoping we could—I don't know.” He paused. “Maybe that it could happen without someone getting hurt, or that we could keep it casual. But we can't keep it casual.”

You
can't keep it casual was what he meant. Writing
I love you
and traveling three thousand miles to see someone wasn't keeping it casual.

“You sent me that e. e. cummings poem. And the CD. I thought—”

“I shouldn't have sent that,” he said. “It was a mistake. I was thinking—” He paused. “Well.”

My stomach plummeted. My insides began to crumble. Everything inside me crumbled. “You were thinking what?”

He glanced at his shoes. “I'm sorry. Even before we started this—I started this—I think I was afraid it would be a mistake if I did, because I never wanted to ruin our friendship. I never want to hurt you.”

Too late.

He turned to me and kissed my forehead. It was partly a chaste kiss, and partly not chaste at all—his lips lingered too long, too softly, his hands stroked my shoulders, my back. He put his arms around me. He was saying one thing and his body said another.

He didn't mean what he'd said. Deep inside, he didn't.

His tone softened. “Sometime, in the future, we'll see each other again.”

“When?”

“Someday.”

Something began to move inside me, birds' wings fluttering through my blood. “They may have found my dad's body.” The words tumbled out of me; I had to tell him, and telling him would bring back the old Will, the roof garden Will, who didn't hold back, who made me feel, more than anyone had before, that I wasn't alone. The Will who understood.

I told him about the eleven bodies, and the fight with my mom, and how I'd stopped answering her calls. The words kept pouring out like a waterfall. I told him I was going to
contact the NTSB on my own, making the decision to as I said it. If I could travel across the country, I could call some official and demand to be notified about whether they'd found my dad. “I'm going to call them tomorrow,” I said.

He nodded, his arms tight around me. “I hope you do.”

For a few minutes it felt good to be in the folds of his arms, confessing. And then I hated myself for it. I pulled away. Maybe Will could only be that Will in the roof garden. Maybe we could only be us
there
. Not now, in a parking lot in Burbank, staring at too-green grass.

I sat an inch from him.
This isn't happening.

He shook his head. “Listen, I'm not going to bullshit you. I wish things were different. I wish we could run off, away from everybody else. Away from the whole world.” He paused. “But I'm starting school soon. This isn't the right time. Sometimes people meet at the wrong time.”

I thought: People overcome wars and storms and pirates and diseases every day and they're still together. Time is easy. Didn't he know that? Didn't he know that tomorrow we could die, or—

“I need to feel free when I get to college. To start over. No responsibilities.”

It knocked the wind out of me, stamped all my stupidity and useless love on my forehead. Was that all I was? A responsibility? Did he want to forget the whole past and start over like my mom did?

We sat there silently for a while. I thought I'd cry but I didn't. I felt numb. It didn't make sense.

I thought: we're not in a romance novel. The words fell into my head. In a romance, if a person said,
Sometimes people meet at the wrong time
on page 50, then they'd still get married by page 250. They'd have their happy ending.

He checked his watch. “You probably need to get back.”

I nodded. He stood up and I walked him to his car. Walking isn't the right word—I was hovering, making the motions, footsteps, barely aware. We stood at his car door and he hugged me one last time, and told me to keep writing him letters, though I knew I wouldn't, that letters alone wouldn't be enough, but even then there was still this hope deep in me, trilling—
he could still change his mind
—hope singing out, every moment, arm in arm with the humiliation, until his car turned the corner.

Then the hope disappeared in one swoop. Only the humiliation was left.

I'd imagined it so differently that the reality felt like a slap. And now all these things sat inside me waiting to burst. He was the hook I'd hung all my dreams on, and now they fell, evaporated.

Everything ached, and I didn't know why they called it heartache when it was chest and stomach and skin and flesh and blood ache. The fountain ached. The clouds ached. I started revising every single thing I'd said to him. If I'd only
said the right words. If I'd been funnier and smarter, everything would've been different.

If I hadn't tried, if I'd stayed in New York and waited for his visits—surely he'd come visit to see his mom in December—if I'd waited till December, kept it casual, not taken this trip—

I walked past the fountain and sat down in the grass, pulled up blades of it.

Why did the happy and hopeful feelings never last? Why did the things I loved not last? The emptiness and hollowness and disbelief were familiar—they dug up the old grief, split it open.

There was so much more I'd wanted to tell him, so much I'd been certain we'd talk about in the long days and nights I thought we'd have. I'd thought that the things we'd shared as we talked in the stairwell and on the roof had bonded us together in this dark space, and I could tell him anything, anything.

I'd wanted to tell him about Janet and Grace, Irma and Lulu.

I'd wanted to tell him that my grandmother said good-bye to her parents on a train platform and never saw them again.

I'd wanted to tell him about Lulu's baby who died, and how she was expecting a new one.

I'd wanted to tell him about “The Floating Poem,” to give it to him.

I'd wanted to tell him about the letter I'd written to my dad in the old diary.

And I wanted to tell him about the fight with my mother and the memory of the funeral, the worst memories that I never talked about with anybody, but I'd hoped to talk about with him.

Now as I sat in the grass, I kept pulling it up in clumps, until all around me I'd destroyed a tiny patch of earth.

It was late. I didn't know what time it was. I had to get myself together. I had to hurry. Maybe the producers would let me talk to Annie before the show, and I could tell her what happened. All I wanted to do was to see her and speak to her. I stood up and walked back toward the entrance.

Eddie was gone. Someone new was there now. I told him I had to get back inside right away.

“Name?” He glanced at a list in front of him.