I spent ninety-six glorious minutes kissing Kit Lowell. Ninety-six minutes where her mouth was against my mouth, or my mouth was against her neck, or my mouth was against that amazing freckle cluster at her clavicle. I could spend the rest of my living days kissing Kit without getting bored, without stopping except for the physiological imperative of occasional sleep and food and to relieve myself.
Best. Night. Of. My. Life.
After I drive Kit home, I lie awake on my bed. My mind is spinning but, for once, in a good way. No need to talk myself out of or down from this sensation. Kissing Kit wasn’t too tangy or too loud or too rough or too moist, like I had feared it might be. It wasn’t too anything. It was perfect. Kissing Kit was a privilege.
I replay the evening over and over again in my head, especially that very first minute. How Kit pulled my face toward hers, that feeling of her hands clasping my neck, the lack of ambiguity about what she wanted.
Everything was clear.
She picked me.
She kissed me.
Me.
For just tonight, I can pretend that I am something approximating cool. I wore a leather jacket that purposely looks worn in. My jeans were fitted, like a boy-bander’s. I looped my scarf around Kit’s neck and left it there, so she’ll have to see me again, if only to return it. I thought of that move all by myself. I didn’t learn it from YouTube or Miney’s instructions or a teen movie.
And now that I’ve been exposed to this feeling, perfect mouth against perfect mouth, the natural order of things, I wonder why people don’t kiss all day, every day. How does anything ever get done?
I feel reborn. No longer Mapleview’s resident hand-flapping weirdo. There is hope for me in the wider world, hope that I can leave this place one day and start over as someone else. Me version 2.0. Me smoothed out a little.
Love. I test the word in my head a few times. Let it bounce around my brain, the same way I tackle a formula, slowly at first, then accelerating exponentially, until it comes out the other end whole and solved.
Love.
Yes, it is clear what has happened here. What Kit has done to me.
She kissed me.
And then biology took over.
A dopamine rush. And maybe a hit of seratonin and adrenaline too.
A beautiful chemical reaction.
And just like that, I am madly in love with Kit Lowell.
Since love is new for me, I start as I would with any other intellectual exercise, and I Google: What do you do when you love someone? From there, I stumble upon the rules of courtship, which is a layman’s way of saying “human mating ritual.” Apparently, the surest indicator of a person’s attractiveness is whether their face is symmetrical, and so I measure mine and am relieved to discover my halves are of roughly equal dimension. Good. Next, in order to prove their reliability to support future potential offspring, men need to spend money on the object of their affection. Though I bring no income to the table at present, I decide the best way to show Kit that I’m a suitable partner is to demonstrate my other genetic attributes. I may not be good at small talk or making friends or abiding by high school social etiquette, but it’s incontrovertible that I’m exceptionally talented at science and math. I need to show off to her, just like a ribbon-tailed astrapia grows its tail feathers. I grab my notebook and write out my two-part plan.
First, I will stay up all night and finish the Accident Project. Show Kit the real-life applications of my skill set and the myriad and unexpected ways it can benefit her.
Second, I will invite Kit to the Academic League meet. It’s a bit obvious to use the event as a courtship display, but as Miney likes to say, if you got it, flaunt it.
Instead of sleeping, I draw diagrams, calculate axes and velocity, research car models and their various braking systems. My scientific calculator goes warm from overuse. On the Internet, I find experts on car collisions and delve deep into forensic message boards. Learn about head injuries, broken chest cavities, punctured hearts. I pull up the pictures I took of the accident site and blow up on my thirty-inch monitor the one Kit sent me of her dad’s car. A Volvo smooshed up like an accordion on the right side. I zoom in with my new camera software. Examine the blood on the passenger-side dashboard. Stencil the splatter pattern. I read the newspaper accounts of the crash, which has a photo of the other car, a navy-blue Ford Explorer with a shattered windshield, half-folded in on itself. A car reimagined as a paper airplane. In the background, there’s a Mini pulled over to the side that has minimal damage: just two broken headlamps, a big dent in its hood. The article doesn’t mention its involvement, but based on my own analysis, I assume it was behind the Volvo. Another car changes things. Adds a layer of complexity. I wish Kit had mentioned it before.
I line my three pictures up next to each other, as if they form a comic strip, though this is not at all funny.
No matter how many times I check my work—and I do, over and over again, maybe as many times as I have relived kissing Kit—the math does not make sense. By my calculations, the only calculations, Kit’s dad shouldn’t be dead.
“What’s wrong?” Miney asks when she comes into my room on Saturday morning and finds me at my desk in the same clothes as last night. I’m flapping. “Didn’t go well last night? I so thought that leather jacket would seal the deal.”
“What deal?” I ask. My head feels heavy. It is nine a.m. and I haven’t slept at all. I rub my face, attempt to wipe away the fatigue, which is a wasteful expenditure of energy at just the time I should be conserving. Fatigue is not something that can be wiped away like a smudge. I am not thinking clearly. “The party was great. Perfect, actually. Well, not the party part—parties are horrible, I don’t know why people go to them—but the rest of it, the Kit of it was great. Amazing.”
“Really? Then why do you look like someone ran over your dog?”
“We don’t have a dog.”
“Focus, Little D.”
“What?”
“Tell me what’s wrong.” Miney’s wearing pajamas, though it’s a clean pair I don’t recognize. Her eyes are less bloodshot. Whatever mysterious illness she was afflicted with seems to have resolved itself. “You do not look like someone who has had an ‘amazing’ night. Did you kiss her?”
“Yup. Well, actually she kissed me.”
“She kissed you?”
“Yup.”
“And?”
“And I’m in love.”
“That’s great. Though maybe you should slow down a bit. It’s a little early to be throwing the L-word around.” She plops down backward on my rotating chair, like she is a football coach in a movie about to deliver one of those huddle up speeches.
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters,” I say, and shiver because I already feel the loss before it’s even happened. I will never kiss Kit again. The whole thing is over no more than twelve hours after it began. Weirdly, this realization doesn’t just reset me back to my pre-Kit life, Me 1.0, when kissing her had seemed as impossible as crossing the space-time continuum. When I was resigned to a lifetime of solitude. Now it is so much worse. I can’t imagine going back to that empty lunch table on Monday morning. Being again that guy everyone used to call shithead. The longing for Kit feels physical. Like my heart is blinking.
Alfred Lord Tennyson was an idiot. He was wrong. It is not better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. If I had never loved at all, I wouldn’t be here flapping. I’d be downstairs, after a restful night’s sleep, reading the DSM and eating Saturday morning pancakes. I wouldn’t know what it’s like for everyone else. What it means to not be alone. Just how far and how long I’ve lived away from planet Normal.
“The Accident Project. I can’t figure it out,” I say.
“Please speak English,” Miney says.
“Kit asked me to do one thing, to help her figure out how her dad died—well, not how, exactly, but the when, the moment of braking, so the larger ‘how,’ I guess, and the math doesn’t work. The math always works. It’s the only thing I know how to do, and I can’t do it.”
“Little D, calm down.” She reaches to pat my back, but I jerk away from her hand. I don’t want to be touched. My body is flaring. “You have so much more to offer than math. That’s not why Kit kissed you. You realize that, right?”
“He’s not supposed to be dead. Dentist is not supposed to be dead.”
“Who’s Dentist? Kit’s dad? Of course he shouldn’t be dead. It’s a tragedy—”
“No, you don’t understand. The math doesn’t work.”
“So?”
“It’s not a tragedy. It’s a lie.”