At breakfast, Miney is again wearing her odd-duck pajamas. She’s sulking because my mom woke her up this morning, even though she is legally an adult and has nowhere she needs to be. The cold medicine I bought is still unopened on the countertop. Something is wrong with Miney, but I’m starting to think it’s not congestion.
“Be careful with the texting. You could put yourself in the friend zone,” she says.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“She licked your ice cream cone. That’s called flirting.” Miney freaked out last night when I told her about that. She kept repeating, No way, no way, over and over again and clapping her hands. To which I had to say, Yes way, yes way, until she believed me. It was her idea to start texting Kit in the first place, and I have to admit now that I’ve started doing it I’m not sure why I was ever opposed to the idea. I no longer have to suffer through that thick silence while I translate what people are saying into what they mean and then wait again while I process the appropriate thing to say next. Leave it to modern technology to find a brilliant work-around to my social problems. With the obvious exceptions of my parents, Miney, Kit, and Siri, whose hands-free capabilities are helpful when driving, if I could I would text all the time and never speak out loud again. “You want to kiss her, right?”
“What?” I have lost track of our conversation. I was thinking about how if Kit called me her friend, then I would have multiplied my number of them by a factor of two. And then I considered the word flirting, how it sounds like fluttering, which is what butterflies do. Which of course looped me back to chaos theory and my realization that I’d like to have more information to provide Kit on the topic.
“Do. You. Want. To. Kiss. Her?” Miney asks again.
“Yes, of course I do. Who wouldn’t want to kiss Kit?”
“I don’t want to kiss Kit,” Miney says, doing that thing where she imitates me and how I answer rhetorical questions. Though her intention is to mock rather than to educate, it’s actually been a rather informative technique to demonstrate my tendency toward taking people too literally. “Mom doesn’t want to kiss Kit. I don’t know about Dad, but I doubt it.”
My father doesn’t look up. His face is buried in a book about the mating patterns of migratory birds. It’s too bad our scholarly interests have never overlapped. Breakfast would be so much more interesting if we could discuss our work.
“So if you want to kiss Kit, that means you want her to see you like a real guy,” Miney says, and points at me with her cup of coffee. She’s drinking it black. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with Miney. Maybe she’s just tired.
“I am a real guy.” How come even my own sister sees me as something not quite human? Something other. “I have a penis.”
“And just when I think we’ve made progress you go and mention your penis.”
“What? Fact: I have a penis. That makes me a guy. Though technically there are some trans people who have penises but self-identify as girls.”
“Please stop saying that word.”
“What word? Penis?”
“Yes.”
“Do you prefer member? Shlong? Wang? Johnson?” I ask. “Dongle, perhaps?”
“I would prefer we not discuss your man parts at all.”
“Wait, should I text Kit immediately and clarify that I do in fact have man parts?” I pick up my phone and start typing. “Dear Kit. Just to be clear. I have a penis.”
“Oh my God. Do not text her. Seriously, stop.” Miney puts her coffee down hard. She’ll climb over the table and tackle me if she has to.
“Ha! Totally got you!” I smile, as proud as I was the other day for my that’s what she said joke.
“Who are you?” Miney asks, but she’s grinning too. I’ll admit it takes a second—something about the disconnect between her confused tone and her happy face—and I almost, almost say out loud: Duh, I’m Little D. Instead I let her rhetorical question hang, just like I’m supposed to.
Day five and Kit is again at my table. Which means she has sat here, with me, for an entire week. Five consecutive days. This makes me elated, a feeling that is as good as it is unfamiliar, especially at school.
“So I just want to say something to you and it’s kind of embarrassing, but I think I just need to get it off my chest,” Kit says, and I can’t help it, I look right at her chest, which is small and round and perfectly proportional. I have imagined what she’d look like without her shirt on, what is hiding there under her bra, which I guesstimate is a size 34B, and it takes effort for me not to think about that right now.
Of course, it’s disrespectful to think about her breasts when she is sitting directly across from me and trying to tell me something. I’ll think about them later, when there’s no chance of her knowing about it.
“I’m sorry about licking your ice cream cone yesterday. That was sort of, I don’t know, inappropriate,” she says.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I say, wondering if this is the equivalent of her taking back her flirting, and a tiny, immature part of me wants to scream out: No backsies! “I’m happy to share my ice cream with you anytime.”
I look at the food in front of me—my chicken sandwich, a bag of chips, a banana—and wonder if I should offer up something as a gesture. I like sharing food with Kit. It makes me feel like we are in cahoots, an expression that had little meaning to me until recently.
“Okay, then,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, though I have no idea what it is, exactly, we have just agreed on.
“You’ll be proud of my lunch. It’s exceptionally well balanced.” Kit takes a paper bag from her backpack and presents me with one small cup of Greek yogurt.
“That’s it?” I ask, suddenly worried that she is not taking proper care of herself. I preferred it when she was overeating. “No leftovers today?”
“Nah. We had cereal for dinner last night. It’s like my mom has forgotten how to cook or something. Not that she cooked all that much before, you know, before, but now it’s like feast or famine in my house. Excessive amounts of takeout or nothing at all.”
“Do you know how they make Greek yogurt?” I ask her.
“No, and I don’t want to know,” she says, and the smile still on my face gets a little bit bigger. I like that Kit tells me what she does and doesn’t want to talk about. It keeps me from going on about stuff she’s not interested in, which according to my mom and Miney is one of my biggest problems: I don’t always notice when other people do not share my fascinations.
“Okay, then,” I say, a callback to her earlier use, since that technique is often used in movie banter. “We could discuss string theory instead.”
“Nope. Not that either.”
“We could start on the Accident Project,” I say, because I am eager to help Kit understand what happened to her dad. I’ve read all about the five stages of grief and I assume this endeavor means she’s already moved passed denial.
“Not here. Not at school.”
“Okay.”
“So that history quiz? If you tell me it was easy I will smack you.” I think about Kit hitting me, and it doesn’t sound altogether unpleasant, because it would mean her hand would have to touch my face. We have only touched twice. On Monday, when I helped her stand up in the concession hut, and yesterday, when she linked her arm with mine on Main Street.
“It wasn’t hard,” I say. And then she does it. She really does it. Kit leans across the table and playfully taps my face with the palm of her hand.
One early summer morning, when I was four, my mom took me to the Y to go swimming. Before then I had refused to get into the pool: too many kids screaming, and splashing, and throwing around fluorescent polyethylene foam cylinders—Miney called them “noodles,” but they were neither edible nor harmless. That day the pool was deserted and I was wearing Wonder Wings, which disappointingly bestowed neither the gift of wonder nor of flight and were tight and unfamiliar. I complained, already imagining the red ridges they would leave behind on my arms, but then my mom held my hand and we stepped into the water, and I felt that first cold gasp. I somehow got the courage to put my face right into the pool, all the way past my ears, and the world went blue and dimmed and muffled and finally, finally quiet.
This is my home, I remember thinking. This. Here. Where there is room to breathe but no air. This is my home.
And that’s exactly how it feels when Kit’s palm touches my face. Like swimming for the very first time. Like discovering the magic that is water. Like coming home.