Close Enough to Touch
Colleen Oakley
For my big sister, Megan, for everything.
I don’t want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music, and this dawn, and the warmth of your cheek against mine.
—Rumi
PART I
You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
(Twenty years ago)
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The New York Times
THE GIRL WHO CAN’T BE TOUCHED
by William Colton
At first glance, Jubilee Jenkins is your run-of-the-mill third grader. She can name all three Powerpuff Girls gracing the front of her tiny T-shirt (and will, when prompted), and she purposefully mismatches her socks, as is apparently de rigueur at Griffin Elementary. Colorful scrunchies secure her wispy russet hair away from her face.
And Jenkins is like a lot of other American third graders in that she has an allergy. According to reports by the World Allergy Organization, allergies and asthma in children have been on the rise since the mid-1980s, including food allergies, which is a growing concern to experts.
But Jenkins isn’t allergic to peanut butter. Or bee stings. Or pet dander. Or any of the other most common allergens.
Jubilee Jenkins is allergic to other people.
Born in 1989 to single mother Victoria Jenkins, Jubilee was a typical infant. “She was perfectly healthy. Slept through the night at seven weeks, walked at ten months,” says the elder Jenkins. “It wasn’t until she was three that we started having issues.”
That’s when Ms. Jenkins, who had just been promoted to manager at Belk in Fountain City, TN, began noticing rashes on Jubilee’s skin. But it wasn’t just a few bumps.
“It was awful—these huge raised welts, hives that itched her like crazy, long scaly patches of skin all over her arms and face,” says Jenkins. “She used to scream bloody murder from the pain of it.” In the space of six months, Ms. Jenkins made more than 20 visits to their family doctor, as well as the hospital emergency room—to no avail. Jubilee also had to be revived by an EpiPen three times for anaphylaxis. Physicians were perplexed.
They remained that way for the next three years, as Jubilee was subjected to every allergy test available in the twentieth century.
“Her little arms were like pincushions,” says Jenkins. “And we tried everything at home, too—changing detergents, keeping food diaries, removing all the carpet from our house, repainting. I even quit smoking!”
It wasn’t until they met Dr. Gregory Benefield, an allergist and then associate professor at Emory University in Atlanta, that they finally started to get some answers. (continued on page 19B)
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one
JUBILEE
ONE TIME, A boy kissed me and I almost died.
I realize that can easily be dismissed as a melodramatic teenager-ism, said in a high-pitched voice bookended by squeals. But I’m not a teenager. And I mean it in the most literal sense. The basic sequence of events went like this:
A boy kissed me.
My lips started tingling.
My tongue swelled to fill my mouth.
My throat closed; I couldn’t breathe.
Everything went black.
It’s humiliating enough to pass out just after experiencing your first kiss, but even more so when you find out that the boy kissed you on a dare. A bet. That your lips are so inherently unkissable, it took $50 to persuade him to put his mouth on yours.
And here’s the kicker: I knew it could kill me. At least, in theory.
When I was six, I was diagnosed with type IV contact dermatitis to foreign human skin cells. That’s medical terminology for: I’m allergic to other people. Yes, people. And yes, it’s rare, as in: I’m only one of a handful of people in the history of the world who has had it. Basically, I explode in welts and hives when someone else’s skin touches mine. The doctor who finally diagnosed me also theorized that my severe reactions—the anaphylactic episodes I’d experienced—were either from my body over-reacting to prolonged skin contact, or oral contact, like drinking after someone and getting their saliva in my mouth. No more sharing food, drinks. No hugs. No touching. No kissing. You could die, he said. But I was a sweaty-palmed, weak-kneed seventeen-year-old girl inches away from the lips of Donovan Kingsley, and consequences weren’t the first thing on my mind—even if the consequences were deadly. In the moment—the actual breathless seconds of his lips on mine—I daresay it almost seemed worth it.
Until I found out about the bet.
When I got home from the hospital, I went directly to my room. And I didn’t come out, even though there were still two weeks left in my senior year. My diploma was mailed to me later that summer.
Three months later, my mom got married to Lenny, a gas-station-chain owner from Long Island. She packed exactly one suitcase and left.
That was nine years ago. And I haven’t left my house since.
I DIDN’T WAKE up one morning and think: “I’m going to become a recluse.” I don’t even like the word “recluse.” It reminds me of that deadly spider just lying in wait to sink its venom into the next creature that crosses its path.
It’s just that after my first-kiss near-death experience, I—understandably, I think—didn’t want to leave my house, for fear of running into anyone from school. So I didn’t. I spent that summer in my room, listening to Coldplay on repeat and reading. I read a lot.
Mom used to make fun of me for it. “Your nose is always stuck in a book,” she’d say, rolling her eyes. It wasn’t just books, though. I’d read magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, anything that was lying around. And I’d retain most of the information, without really trying.
Mom liked that part. She’d have me recite on cue—to friends (which she didn’t have many of) and to boyfriends (which she had too many of)—weird knowledge that I had collected over time. Like the fact that superb fairy wrens are the least faithful species of bird in the world, or that the original pronunciation of Dr. Seuss’s name rhymed with “Joyce,” or that Leonardo da Vinci invented the first machine gun (which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, since he invented thousands of things).