Kissing in America (8 page)

I
t's not happening. No way.” Annie shut the dryer door with a clang.

“Think of it as an honor. Marie Curie would've kicked ass on this show. And every quiz show on the planet.”

“No self-respecting intelligent person would go on a show produced by people who spell
teens
with a
z
.”

At least I hadn't asked her to be on
Promzillas
.

“You love reality shows though,” I said.

“Because they're like rubbernecking at a traffic accident. I don't want to
be
on one.” She opened another dryer, removed a load, and dumped it into one of the huge rolling metal baskets. “They're not looking for the smartest girl. They're looking for the girl who's most willing to flash her underwear or make out with someone just to get on TV.”

“That's not true. Look. It's sponsored by Girls Strive. They're fostering female academic achievement.”

She wheeled the basket to the folding table. “I can't believe you want me to go on a crazy show just because you've got a crush on some guy.”

“It's not a crush on some guy. It's Will. It's the real thing. I have to see him again. We have limbic resonance. He resonates my limbs.”

She pointed at me. “Dopamine. Your brain is flooded with dopamine and norepinephrine every time you think of him, which makes you act kind of nuts. And by the way, those are the same brain chemicals associated with falling in love and with drug addicts and people with OCD.”

I folded a fitted sheet. “I'm not a drug addict and I don't have OCD. I just want to see him again. I have to.”

She shook her head. “‘Smart girl' and ‘reality TV game show' should not be in the same sentence.”

“The grand prize is a two hundred thousand dollar scholarship.”

“Two hundred thousand dollars for whoever strips naked on TV.”

“It's not like that.” I went back to the computer and read more of the site, in case I'd missed a sentence requiring everyone to be naked.

An hour later, I'd read everything. There was nothing about being naked. In fact, the more I read, the better it sounded. One of the show's sponsors was the Mirabelle Resort, an oceanside hotel that was offering three nights' free lodging to contestants and their companions. When I clicked a link to the “Companion” page, it said that contestants were allowed to bring a friend, sibling, or parent who would serve
as their lifeline, offering help whenever they floundered on a question. “Every time the companion successfully answers a question, they will receive a ten thousand dollar cash prize,” I read aloud. “The companion will have the opportunity to earn up to fifty thousand dollars.”

With $50,000 I could
move
to California.

“We have to do this,” I said.

Annie had been collecting scholarship information for years—she had folders full of applications for grants and loans. She dreamed of going to MIT; she drooled over pictures of their laboratories and had lists of all the classes she wanted to take. But MIT cost an insane amount of money.

“You told me once that the only way to make sure you get a scholarship is to apply for as many as possible,” I said. “Just read it. Read the site. Please?”

She put down the laundry, sat in front of the computer, and squinted at every page of the site like she was expecting it to reveal a diabolical darker purpose.

I stood at the table matching socks. “You're a shoo-in,” I told her. “If you win, you'll have college completely paid for. You can go to MIT and study brain chemicals and chromosomes and animal behavior for four whole years and not worry about financial aid or loans or anything. What's there to lose?”

“My self-respect? My pride in not having anything embarrassing about myself on the internet?”

“You were thinking of trying field hockey just so you could get a sports scholarship. This would involve a lot less pain and humiliation.” And with our athletic abilities, the only sport we qualified for was the Scrabble team.

She tilted her head and studied the site for a long time, reading every page and sidebar and pop-up window. Eventually, her face began to soften, and she got that dreamy look she often had when gazing at the pages of
Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory
.

“It says, ‘Professors from Princeton and Cornell are developing the quiz show questions,'” she read aloud. “They've even linked to the professors' websites.” She read their bios. “I guess this is legit,” she whispered. “It says, ‘The grand prize winner will also have the opportunity to attend a summer program at the National Science Foundation, the Princeton Laboratory Learning Program, or'”—her voice thickened— “‘
the MIT Research Science Institute
.'”

Her face flushed. She looked the way I did when I read about Gurlag or dingle starries.

“Do you know how hard it is to get a spot in MIT's RSI program?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

“It's almost impossible.”

She stared dazedly at a dryer for a moment, then started typing. I set down the socks and peered around the computer screen. She'd typed her name and address into the online
form. She paused. “This is crazy,” she said.

She bit her lip. Her fingers hovered over the Enter button.

“
Two hundred thousand dollars
,” I said.

She sat still.

“An internship.
And
four years at MIT completely and utterly
free
.”

She pressed the button.

T
he waiting room of Reel Life, Real Teenz Productions on West 23rd Street swarmed with girls. One stared at the book on her lap so hungrily, it looked like she wanted to eat it; another listened to her earphones and chanted mathematical theorems. In Latin.

Annie had been in the audition for over two hours. I was getting worried. We hadn't told our moms we were coming—we'd decided to tell them only if we got picked, since Annie's mom would probably expect her to get chosen, and my mom would freak out and find a million new things to worry about.

Would they pick us? They had to pick us.

She stood beside Will on the deck of his ship, the
Black Dawn
, off the coast of California. She smelled the wind and sea and his wild manly tang.

“I waited a fortnight until word came that I was to see you again, dear Eva. But I'd wait an entire lifetime for you.” He kissed her with a fiery, ancient need and carried her to his love grotto.

“You okay? You look dazed,” said the curly-haired girl sitting beside me. She wore a navy skirt, white knee socks, saddle shoes, and a navy blazer embroidered with “Lillian
Birch School” in gold thread, even though it was a Saturday.

“I'm okay,” I said. “Hey—good move, wearing the uniform.”

She shrugged and scratched beneath her sock. “My friend I'm here with wanted me to wear it in case it helps. No uniform at your school?”

I shook my head. “Nope.” If my school had uniforms, they would be orange jumpsuits, since the powers that be seemed to try to re-create the experience of prison as closely as possible. Guards at the front doors, metal detectors. ID numbers. I sometimes thought that we were part of some disturbing psychological experiment being performed on New York City public school kids. I thought again of the photo book Will had showed me, and the roof garden. The other world on top of our school, that barely anybody but us even knew about—I hoped that the next time Will was back in New York, we could somehow sneak up there again.

“At least you don't have to wear white knee socks and saddle shoes every day,” the girl said. She adjusted her matching navy headband.

“True,” I said, but I wondered if we'd be any match for the private school set.

A few minutes later her friend returned. She was about six feet tall and wore the same uniform. A blond version of Gia Lopez. She smiled and held up a golden envelope. They both squealed.

“Good luck,” the curly-haired girl said to me as they headed out of the waiting room. “Maybe we'll see you in LA.”

“Maybe,” I said.

I drummed my fingers on my lap and then turned on my phone. The Wi-Fi network was named ReelTeenzDrama­Queenz. That didn't bode well. As always, my Crapphone took an ice age to connect.

Sitting there in the waiting room alone, with the fate of my future in the hands of some TV game show producers, I felt my chest beginning to hurt.

Don't panic.

Annie would get chosen. We'd get to LA. We had to.

The anxiety always built slowly, simmering. I was afraid everything could change again in a second. Someone could die. Someone could stop loving you. Tragedy was always peeking around the corner.

I tried to ignore the pain in my ribcage. I needed company. I opened a new window on my phone and went to the message board.

There were 102 new messages.

The recorders have been recovered. It will be announced to the media tomorrow. It will take a week or more to examine them and see if the data is intact, and then several more weeks to transcribe and analyze it. We've waited this long to know. It will only be a month or two longer. The bad news is they still can't retrieve the second part of the wreckage from the ocean floor. He assured me they'll keep trying.

Fran (husband Frank, daughter Lisa, 22C, 22D)

I'm relieved that after years of waiting, we'll finally have answers.

Erin Farwell (Malcom, 19E)

I read the messages one by one. My blood pounded in my ears. I wanted to know what the data said—what had happened, how he died, what he felt—but I was scared to hear the answers, too.

In a grief group session after the crash, a girl had asked Wonderboob if she thought her mother and little brother, who'd been on her mom's lap in the back of the plane, had been afraid. Wonderboob said no. She said it was common for passengers to fall unconscious from the sudden change in cabin pressure. They wouldn't know what was happening. They wouldn't be afraid.

It was so swift, they never felt a thing, she said.

I ask you: How did she know that? Have they done studies, dropping people at hundreds of miles per hour and tearing their limbs apart, then asking them how they felt? How could they possibly know this? How could they know?

On the message board a year later, the subject came up again. Fran said the unconscious theory wasn't always the case. Unfortunately the passengers might have felt the plane's violent lurching movements and have known what was happening. Or so Fran said.

I wanted, more than anything, for Fran to be wrong, for them not to have known the plane was going down, for my
dad not to have been scared. “He didn't know, he never knew, he didn't feel a thing,” my mom had said. “We're lucky it wasn't a long, painful, drawn-out illness.” I'd asked her about that a few days later, after the words had sunk in.
Lucky?
She shook her head and never mentioned it again.

In my first letter to Will after he'd left, I'd told him how nervous I was about the recorders being recovered. He'd written back:

The recorders will confirm what you already know: he wasn't scared. I'm glad you're coming out here. It will be great to see you.

He sounded so confident, so sure, and I thought of how he walked down the halls of our school, fearless as a cowboy, as if he knew what was out there and was ready to face it. Unlike me. I was always shrinking back, peering around corners, trying not to panic. My insides felt like a mushy mess, and the part of me that loved him also wanted to soak up his strength and fearlessness and become like that, too.

The door to the waiting room opened and I looked up: Annie stood in front of me, holding a golden envelope.

A
nnie cradled the envelope. She didn't seem to believe it herself.

My whole body felt warm and cold at the same time. She told me about the audition, the screen test, the interviews, the exams, the mock quiz rounds, and the endless forms to fill out.
We were going to California.

I caught my breath. I couldn't get too excited yet: I still had to figure out how to pay for the trip. And I had to convince my mother to let me go.

We walked toward the elevator. I knew that as soon as I mentioned the word
bus
, my mom would recite all the bus accidents that had happened in the last ten years. She didn't even like the idea of me crossing the street, not to mention crossing the country.

I thought of my mom's research papers and the talks she gave about women and economics. The only thing that might convince her was the hope of winning the money.

“I don't have enough saved for the bus fare, though,” I told Annie.

“I can lend you the money. Then when we win, you can pay me back. Even more motivation for us to kick some ass.”

“I love you,” I said. “I'll pay you back with interest. Unless my mom locks me in my room forever, which will probably happen after I tell her this whole plan.”

I spent the next twenty-four hours memorizing passages from
Women and Economics
, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The troubles of life as we find them are mainly traceable to the heart or the purse”), which was the subject of my mom's PhD thesis. Annie helped me put together a spreadsheet about what the $50,000 might mean for my future wealth, success, happiness, and achievement (especially if, according to Annie's calculations, it accrued interest at an annual 6 percent rate).

The next night, I practiced what I'd say to my mom as I cooked dinner. I chopped garlic and parsley, and stirred the tomato sauce. The kitchen was my favorite room in our house. When I cooked, I forgot about school and Will and everything for a little while.

When my dad cooked, he'd hum or whistle and enter this happy sort of trance. Sometimes, what I missed most about him was this secret well of joy he always had, how he made everything fun. Whenever I had a bad day, he'd say, “All is not lost, is it?” He'd make tea (he only liked Tetley, sent from his London friends—he said the kind sold here wasn't the same) with sugar cubes on the saucer, and there would be Toffee Crisp bars cut into small pieces, and Jammie Dodgers and Rich Tea biscuits on a tray. On cold nights—our stingy
landlord always kept the heat low—he'd fill up a hot water bottle and put it in my bed, so the sheets were warm when I got inside. Once a week, he bought my mother flowers from the bodega on our corner.

Tonight, as we ate dinner, I twirled and retwirled the spaghetti on my fork. My mom seemed distracted; she kept glancing out the window. She always seemed in her own world lately. She'd leave little Post-it notes all over the place—
Tuesday: department meeting, pick up dry cleaning, pay electric bill, committee report, grades due
—and forget about them. I'd find them and stick them in her bag. Or she'd forget that she'd left the iron on, and I'd have to turn it off. She had insomnia, and sometimes I'd hear her up at three thirty in the morning.

I took a breath and finally told her, “I've been reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She's amazing. The best part is when she says—”

My mom wasn't listening. She stared into space and tucked a gray strand of hair behind her ear. She'd stopped dyeing it in the last year. She touched the edges of the faded, worn Pucci scarf around her neck. She used to love to hunt through thrift shops in the bowels of Queens and Brooklyn and unearth vintage Lanvin skirts and Yves Saint Laurent shoes for dirt cheap. When I was little, I'd hide in the middle of the clothing racks and squeal when she found me, and she'd always let me pick out a little treasure—a glass heart-shaped box or a wind-up toy.

We never went shopping together anymore, and she hardly went out for fun at all now, except for her weekly dinner with Larry at Meredith's restaurant in Bayside (if you could call that fun).

Now, my mom took a deep breath, looked up from her plate, and met my gaze. “Larry and I've decided to get married,” she said.

“
What?
” I almost spat out my iced tea.

“We started thinking about it when he got laid off. He needs insurance . . . and it seems like the right time for me to consider marriage.” She said the word
marriage
the way one might say
back surgery
.

“I don't want to worry you, though,” she added. “Larry and I will keep our separate apartments and assets. Our lives won't change much.”

“You're freaking kidding me.” I put down my fork. It clanged on the table. Annie and I still called Larry the Benign Fungus, or sometimes the Sad Fungus, because he was a disaster magnet. He kept losing things: wallet, keys, library books, his job—recently, the accounting firm where he worked laid off Larry's entire department. If someone threw a soda can out a window, it would hit him on the head. Birds aimed at his bald spot. Ceiling leaks dripped only onto him. He'd met my mom when he accidentally dumped an entire glass of kosher wine on her thrifted vintage shoes. He tracked down a replacement pair on eBay and hand-delivered them to her office, along with a first edition of Anzia Yezierska's
Bread Givers
, her favorite book.

I couldn't think of anything to say. It wasn't that I hated Larry—it was that I knew she'd decided to marry him because it would be the final, most permanent way to forget my dad.

“Do you even
love
him?”

“He's a good person. I like him very much.”

“You hardly know him.” I should've seen this coming, that they were getting serious. A month ago, Larry's mother, Irma, had flown from Texas to New York to meet us. Irma's hair was whipped into a frothy golden swirl; her teeth looked as white and thick as bathroom tiles. She'd taken us to dinner at a barbecue place in midtown where you could drop your peanut shells on the floor, and kept smiling at me somewhat creepily and saying, “Isn't she cute?” as if I wasn't actually there.

“We know each other well. Really well,” my mom said.

“You said
like
. You didn't say
love
.”

“Not every relationship involves sunsets and pirate ships.”

We left most of our dinner on our plates.

In my parents' wedding pictures, my mom literally had stars in her eyes, bright glints in the photos. They'd gotten married at City Hall and then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in the rain. In the pictures (taken by Lulu) my mom wore a vintage white short dress and carried a white umbrella; my parents' faces glowed beneath it, beaming.

When my mom looked at Larry, her eyes said,
Please don't spill that on me
.

Now my mom washed the dishes while I hid in my room.
Sunsets and pirate ships
. She was always saying things that squashed little bits of my soul. She'd see me wearing one of Annie's sister's old miniskirts and say, “Where'd you get
that
?” Or she'd look at my romance covers, or walk in while Annie and I were watching a Lifetime movie, and make scoffing noises. Annie and I even had a hand motion for it: we'd mash an invisible flea with our thumbs. It had become a joke, but it was telling the truth, too: every time she said these things, she crushed tiny little bits of me.

I decided to call Lulu and ask for advice. She told me, “This trip to LA is perfect timing for both of you. You each need some space right now. You can give her some time alone with Larry, so she can be sure she's making the right decision. And maybe time away will help you wrap your head around it, too. Remind her of that and she'll let you go.”

I hoped she was right. My mom had to agree that it was a good idea for me to go away right now. And I was sure the uninterrupted time with Larry would make her come to her senses and call it off.

My mom knocked on the door. I was still talking to Lulu on the phone, so I said good-bye and passed the phone to her, and they talked for a few minutes.

“What were you and Lulu talking about?” she asked me after they hung up.

“Nothing,” I said. “School stuff.”

I knew Lulu wouldn't tell my mom what we spoke about. They had sort of an agreement—my mom liked that I had
“another female role model” to confide stuff in, and so she let us talk without making Lulu share it with her. It was good that Lulu lived in Arizona, since otherwise my mom might make her crack under pressure.

I decided to tell my mom about the trip the next night. After our shift at the laundromat, Annie helped me put together an entire file folder of stuff about the show, and when my mom walked in the door at six o'clock—Larry followed behind her—Annie and I stood up. I handed the file to her, and I told her about the $200,000 scholarship for Annie and the $50,000 bonus for me.

“I need to make a brave choice and take this economic risk. This opportunity could change the course of my future. And you and Larry need time alone right now. So Annie and I are going to leave threeweeksfromThursdayonabus.” I said the last phrase really fast, hoping she wouldn't notice the last word.

“On a what?” she asked.

“On a very, very safe”—I said it quietly—“bus.”

She glanced at the pages we'd printed out. “On a bus. And where is this bus going—where's this show taking place?”

“Los Angeles,” Annie said.

“Two sixteen-year-old girls alone on a bus? Cross-country?” My mother laughed. She looked stunned that I'd even asked to go, as if I'd just asked if I could perform brain surgery on her with my fork.

“My daughter, my only child, is not taking a bus trip across
the entire country with no adult supervision,” she said. “The bus is for society's underbelly. For sex criminals and moral degenerates and psychotic rapist-murderers.”

I shook my head. “This is all Aunt Janet's fault. She's poisoned your mind.” When my aunt Janet lived in Syracuse, she'd take the bus to see us once a month and always arrived with stories of the crazies on board. One time she sat next to a recently paroled man from Auburn. The man wore an eye patch and proceeded to slowly eat his hair; he'd pick out a few strands and then munch the hairs in his gnarled paws like a squirrel. His patchy head resembled a checkerboard. Then he asked Janet on a date.
Tonight's yer lucky night. I'm gonna take ya out and buy ya an ice cream.
She'd told him:
No thank you
. I'd thought it was a funny story. My mom and Janet hadn't laughed.

Now my mom shook her head. “It's not just Aunt Janet. You remember that beheading in Canada.” Years ago, a crazy person had stabbed and decapitated a young guy on a Greyhound. I knew my mom would file that story away and use it against me someday.

“We could take the train instead,” Annie suggested. “Though it's more expensive.”

My mom shook her head. “It's no safer.”

“They could just fly,” Larry said brightly. “It's an easy hop to LA—I did it lots of times for my old job. Unaccompanied minors get special treatment.” He had a large yellow stain on
his button-down shirt; it was a rare day when he appeared stain-free.

He glanced at my mom and me and suddenly remembered why we didn't fly. He picked up the newspaper and hid behind it, as he always did whenever anything remotely relating to my father came up. My mom's face hardened and she looked away.

She asked, “Annie, is there someone else you can take with you? Your mom, or another friend?”

Annie shook her head. “My mom can't take off work. Eva has to come. She knows the most about my weakest subjects, like literature and women's history. I can't do it without her.”

My mom seemed unconvinced. She glanced at the file we'd given her. “I just don't think it's a good idea. I'm sorry.” She handed the folder back to me, then turned and went into her bedroom.

“You have to let me go,” I called after her. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman says all troubles are traceable to the heart or the purse, so this could save me from a lifetime of trouble—”

My mom's door closed with a thud. I heard perfume bottles clinking. Whenever my mom had a bad day, she'd stand beside her dresser, remove the little crystal stoppers of Coco and Opium, and inhale. She guarded them Gollum-like and forbade me to try them on, since she didn't want me wasting or breaking them.

I returned to the kitchen and stared at Annie. “What now?”

She shrugged. We sat down at the table. Larry busied himself in the kitchen. He took a package of pistachios out of the cupboard and cracked one nut with his molars.

“I was in the Academic Bowl in junior high, but we only won gift certificates to McDonald's,” he said between chews. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and scratched his elbow; a bandage covered his fleshy arm.

“What happened to your arm?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “I was turning the corner on 42nd Street and a hot dog cart ran right into me. Gouged a hole here. Scratch on my leg too.”

“Larry,” Annie said with a sigh. Everyone always said
Larry
with a sigh.

He picked at his bandage. “Maybe I can help,” he said. “I can talk to your mom for you. The chance for that kind of money doesn't land in your lap every day.”

I doubted that it would help—it might even make things worse, knowing Larry. “I don't know,” I said.

Annie was more optimistic. “It's worth a try.”

I touched the dented edge of our kitchen table and looked at him. “Just please don't make her more angry. Don't make her ground me for the rest of the month.”

“I won't. I promise. Here goes.” He tossed his red pistachio shells in the trash and wiped his hands on his shirt, leaving pink streaks. “Wish me luck.” He disappeared into the bedroom.