‘Wait. Norah. That was supposed to be a joke,’ I hear him say as I slam the front door shut.
I’m dissolving. I feel like I’ve been scrutinized, judged. Like I was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan I’m Odd written all over it. Worse than that, I feel like I said the wrong thing. This is why my Hub page goes weeks without an update, because I’m awkward, and awkward people always say the wrong stuff. I have this thing about looking stupid, which, only after I’ve hidden back in my house, I realize I might have just exacerbated.
Resting my forehead against the door, I stare at my curled toes, wishing I were normal, when a folded piece of paper pokes its way through the mail slot and flitters to the floor. I push my ear against the wood, listening for sounds outside, but I don’t hear anything.
I crouch down, stare at the paper for a long time, like maybe it’s an animal lying in the road and I’m trying to decide if it’s dead. No envelope. Just a single yellow leaf folded into a square. I reach out, don’t pick it up, but peel it apart with the very tips of my fingers, right there on the floor.
Neighbour,
I heard you were good at jokes. Maybe you could teach me how sometime?
Luke
PS: Do you like the Transformers movies?
PPS: My favourite is the first.
Hang on a second.
The sound of overworked cogs is crunching in my ears. You see, for the last sixty seconds, I’ve been breaking out in goosebumps, shrinking inside myself, convinced that he’d be laughing at me and prefixing my name with words like crazy.
I fall back on my butt, smack my spine against the radiator, but the pain doesn’t register because I’m too busy wondering why he’s reaching out instead of building barriers between us. And, because crazy isn’t totally inaccurate, I’m admiring his penmanship. He writes in really straight lines, even though the paper is plain, and all his letters are the same size.
For the rest of the day I do the usual: build things out of various foods, watch television, read, line up the slightly out-of-sync corners of my DVD collection. I learn how to order a sandwich in French. Just. The whole time I’m doing stuff, my head is foggy, distracted by something I can’t put my finger on. It’s like that feeling of forgetting something you know you were supposed to be doing. I consider an internet search of my symptoms, but the brain tumour diagnosis of last spring is still fresh in my mind, so I decide against it. If it bleeds or makes you feel dizzy, the internet will tell you it’s cancer.
It’s hormones.
Hormones have me in a chokehold. I know this because when I finally sit down and turn on my laptop, I don’t research medical journals or even check my social media. Instead, I google kissing.
At first it’s a cute thing. I watch black-and-white filtered videos of cuddling couples hugging and rubbing noses in striped sweaters against fall backdrops. They hold each other tight, mashing their mouths together like the world is about to end. It makes my heart hurt.
I’ve never kissed a boy before.
I grab the sanitizer from my bag and smother my hands, just so I can touch my fingers to my lips while I watch.
I’ve never wanted to kiss a boy before.
Kissing wasn’t a thing when I was thirteen. We hadn’t got there yet. We were too busy battling Pokémon and reading Harry Potter. And, well, I got sick right before the want-to-kiss thing kicked in. Now, the thought of someone touching me, with hands I can’t be sure have been washed, is as terrifying a prospect as a plane crash. I’m not sure of statistics, but I’m pretty certain there’s only a small portion of people in the world who will ever be able to understand what that feels like.
I lick my lips, rest my chin in my hands, and without so much as a flicker of the heebie-jeebies, I’m wondering if Luke holds hips or butt when he’s making out.
I settle on butt, think maybe if you have pockets on the back of your jeans, he’ll slide his hands in there.
Alas, three videos later and I’m struggling to maintain. I’ve stopped sighing wistfully and dreaming up ‘Dear Diary’ moments as the romanticism dies a slow, agonizing death at the hands of my OCD.
The thing is, this one guy licks the tip of his girlfriend’s nose. Her nose. That thing on your face that snot seeps out of. Snot: that mucus shit that is basically a fishing net for bacteria. Does nobody even do science any more? My lunch turns cartwheels in my stomach as I watch him shove his tongue in her mouth and they continue trying to devour each other.
All I can hear now, in stereophonic sound, is the slurping, squelching, and popping noise of spit being swapped.
My fingers hit the keyboard and I start researching like a scientist on speed. Suddenly the only thing I want to know about kissing is how much bacteria there is in saliva.
I pull up pictures of petri dishes under microscopes. Discover microscopic buds of fuzzy pink stuff living under your tongue, and civilizations of invisible white stringy things snaking around your tonsils.