“That was your first kiss,” Grant said, tapping his chin and looking up at the ceiling, “but it was my best.”
I touched my lips and looked down at my knees, my cheeks burning. I had been so afraid I would be a bad kisser or, worse yet, that I would kiss like a boy. I closed my eyes and remembered the kiss and my heart began to race. When I calmed down enough to look back at him I saw him blushing as well. I laced my fingers in his and said, “We can’t just let that record stand, can we?”
“Why, no ma’am,” Grant said, leaning toward me, “I suppose we cannot.”
The kiss outside the apartment was beautiful and nervous and almost chaste. The kiss on the bleachers was tender but fleeting. What happened next was different. Our mouths connected and somehow I found myself in the driver’s seat, poised above him with my hands on his hard, broad chest and my hair draped around us like a curtain. I pulled back for a moment and we just breathed, staring into each other’s eyes. I felt something brush my waist and looked down to see his hand inching toward the hem of my shirt, his gaze questioning if this was okay. I bit my lip and answered by kissing his neck and biting his ear. His fingers burrowed beneath my shirt and drifted past my belly button, where they stopped for a moment, and then I felt them near my ribs.
“Hey!” Rodney yelled, pounding his fist on the window. I screamed and tumbled back to the passenger seat, banging my head in the process. “Come on, y’all, that’s new upholstery!”
Grant stammered an apology as we stumbled out of the cab, both of us red-faced with embarrassment and stifled laughter. Rodney climbed into his truck in a huff and sped away, splattering both of us with mud.
We stood there in silence for a moment, shaking and smiling, until Grant leaned over and smeared some of his mud into some of my mud and the laughter we’d been holding in finally escaped in a rush.
12
I sat with Bee beneath a canopy of brown and red leaves behind the art building, wisps of smoke rising from our lips as we talked. She fiddled with the settings on a new digital camera while I tried to draw her without her noticing. The cicadas had died off a few weeks before, and everything from the wind to the scratch of my pencil as it moved across the page seemed raw and loud in their absence.
“How was your report card?” I asked, my voice croaking as I handed the joint back to her.
“Shitty,” she said. “I would’ve done okay in English if Mr. Robinson didn’t have it out for me, but I managed to pull out a B anyway. Got a C in chemistry and a D in calc, but who cares, right?”
“I care,” I said, rolling the tension out of my neck as I turned my attention to her hair, trying to translate its movement in the breeze in frozen graphite.
“Oh yeah?” Bee said. “What do you wanna do with your life anyway?”
“I want to go to school up north,” I said. “NYU maybe, if I get in. No idea what to major in though.”
She leaned over suddenly and examined my drawing. I tried to hide it from her, but she grinned.
“I’m like forty pounds heavier than that, but I’m not gonna complain,” she said. “Can I have that when you’re done?”
“Sure,” I said, turning to a new page. “But yeah, I’m not dead set on New York. I just know I want to get as far away from here as possible.”
“Word,” Bee said, holding the camera close to her face and screwing her nose up in concentration. “Fuck this place.” She pointed the camera my way and snapped a few photos before I could turn away—a reflex from years of being unable to stomach the sight of myself in photographs. “Why a girl like you doesn’t want to be seen is a mystery to me,” Bee said, shaking her head. “How’s that boy of yours by the way?”
“Good,” I said, sketching out a bunch of random shapes that I would go back later and fill with faces. I felt my cheeks burn the way they always did when I thought of Grant. I thought of the movies we hadn’t paid any attention to, and the rolled-up-jeans walks by the lake, and fingertips brushing and smiling glances in first period while Parker glared sullenly. “Great, actually. Except…” I trailed off, unsure how much I wanted to say.
“Trouble in the garden?” Bee said, grinning. “Does he have bad breath? Is he, like, super racist?”