Chapter 7: SAT questions and first kisses.
I sit across from Jenny, twitchy. Her hands are still, neatly laced on top of the table; my own fingers fiddle with the white wrapper of my straw.
“We should eat black-eyed peas and collard greens,” I tell her, breaking the silence.
“Why?” she asks, genuinely confused.
I shrug, still not looking directly at her because it’s still like staring straight at the sun. “It’s what you’re supposed to do on New Year’s Day. For prosperity and good luck. It’s a southern thing.”
“Southern? Your dad’s Asian, and… didn’t you tell me your mom’s from New York?”
“Yeah, but my mom’s Grandpa Geronimo, he was from Alabama. Moved to Harlem during the Great Depression. And he was the one who taught my mom to cook. So I guess it comes from him.”
There’s a long silence emanating from Jenny’s side of the table, and finally she says, “Are you talking about black-eyed peas because you don’t want to talk about what happened last night?”
“I never said I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, defensive. “I’m here, aren’t I? If you want to talk about it so bad, talk. I’ll listen.”
She takes a deep breath, opens her mouth to speak… and is immediately interrupted by the waitress.
Fucking hell.
“You girls ready to order?” asks the fifty / sixty-something lady with dyed red curls. She looks tired and bored and like she’d rather be just about anywhere other than here, waiting on a couple of high school kids who don’t have the good sense to still be in bed like everyone else their age.
I get how the waitress must feel. Ever since my parents opened their crazy Nepalese soul food fusion restaurant last year, I get roped into waiting tables almost every weekend, plus a lot of weekdays after school — basically anytime I’m not at basketball practice or a basketball game. Waiting tables is a shitty job that leaves you with sore feet, too many one dollar bills, and clothes that never quite stop smelling like kitchen grease and garlic.
We order some food and a couple of sodas, and once the waitress walks off, I go back to fiddling with my straw wrapper. Waiting for Jenny to speak.
In the ensuing awkward silence, my mind flips back to the SAT prep class my dad’s been making me take. I’ve told him about the college scouts coming to watch me play ball, even though I’m still just a junior, but he doesn’t seem to get it. I’ve tried to explain that these schools aren’t after me for my brain, and they don’t give a crap about what kind of score I get on the SAT as long as I pass all my classes. But Dad won’t listen, yammers on about not taking my education for granted, and so I’m staying up late at night after ball practice, after waiting tables, and after homework with my fucking SAT verbal workbook putting together analogies like
Anika is to Jenny as
(A) A mountain gorilla is to Dutch
(B) Frankenstein is to a Disney princess
(C) The future crazy, crotchety old cat lady is to the future Miss Ohio
(D) All of the fucking above
“Anika…” Jenny starts, lamely saying my name because maybe, after what seems like three fucking hours of waiting, she can’t think of anything else to say. And although her clasped hands don’t move from their spot on the tabletop, I can see the knuckles going white. When she speaks again, her voice is so low that it’s practically a whisper. “I shouldn’t have manipulated you into kissing me last night. It was wrong to use you like that, and I - I’m sorry. I’ll understand if you never want to speak to me again after this.”
My brain freezes up like an old computer with too many tabs open, because I’m not capable of processing what just came out of her mouth. I rip the straw wrapper up into itsy-bitsy bits.
She manipulated me into kissing her.
She… used me?
Not possible. It was the other way around.
I shake my head slowly, finally look up and meet her eyes. “I don’t get it. How did you manipulate me? The way I remember it, I’m the one who got you under the mistletoe last night right as the clock hit twelve.”
I’d had a few drinks the night before, true, but with a frame as big as mine, it actually takes a lot for me to get good and drunk, and between that and the fact that I don’t have that many opportunities for teenage debauchery anyway, I rarely get drunk.
Jenny, on the other hand, drank almost as much as I did, but she more-or-less comes up to my kneecaps — when she’s wearing heels (which she was last night). Arguing that she was the one to initiate the kiss didn’t make any sense. She was too drunk to do any manipulating.
I was the one who’d put my palms on the wall on either side of her head when the kids started yelling, “TEN! NINE! EIGHT!…”
I was the one who’d leaned forward and down when they got to “TWO!,” the one whose eyes had skittered down to Jenny’s smirking smile, lips half-parted already, at “ONE!”
I was the one who had kissed her at “Happy New Year!”. She was the one who’d mumbled, “I’m sorry; I can’t do this,” and ducked out from underneath my outstretched arms ten seconds later, just as a drunken knot of jocks by the TV started singing their own off-key version of “Auld Lang Syne.”
But now, Jenny shakes her head, mouth twisting into an irritated grimace.
“No, Anika. You don’t get it. I set you up last night. Think about it — who invited you to the party in the first place?”
You did, I think silently, remembering the unexpected text message chiming on my phone on the last day of school before winter vacation.
“And who kept bringing you drinks all night?” she asks.
You did.
“And who kept complaining about her stupid ex-boyfriend and lamenting the fact that she wasn’t going to have anyone to kiss at midnight?”
You did.
I stab one of the white bits of wrapper straw with my index finger, the realization slowly dawning on me that Jenny’s telling the truth — she did set me up. She wanted me to kiss her last night. She was hoping I would. She’d engineered the whole night, guiding it to that moment, the moment where she leaned her back against the wall, hands pinned behind her butt, gazing up at me with big brown eyes and an open-mouthed smirk.
I look at her — the sun — and look away again. “Why? Why did you want me to kiss you?”
“Because I… I knew you were into me. I could see it in the way you watch me, in the way you can’t quite ever…” One of her small, porcelain-white hands reaches across the sticky surface of the diner table and gently covers two of my fiddling fingers. “Look at me.”
I follow her command, my hand falling still as I look up from the shredded wrapper, eyes meeting hers. And then I realize “look at me” wasn’t a command at all but the completion of her sentence.
She knew I had a crush on her because I can’t ever quite look at her.
She must not realize that she’s the fucking sun.
The little white hand withdraws, and then both hands disappear beneath the table. Jenny glances around the diner furtively, and the waitress returns with three plates of food — two for me, one for Jenny.
I take my fork immediately, but Jenny’s silverware stays untouched next to her hot plate of eggs and hash browns.
“I thought I could kiss you as a joke,” she says, resuming her half-whispered explanation. “It would be a story I could shock my friends with, something that might make Brett jealous.”
(Brett is her most recent ex-boyfriend, by the way. And Anika is to Brett as the ugly step-sister is to Prince Charming.)
Should’ve known.
Fuck, Anika, you should’ve known.
I look down at my plate because tears sting my eyes and I don’t want Jenny to see them. I attack the short stack of pancakes with a knife, not bothering with syrup or butter, just shoving the biggest forkful I possibly can into my mouth before I say, “Great fucking joke, Jen. Fucking most hilarious thing I’ve heard all year.”
All year, we’ve been sitting next to each other in trigonometry. All year, we’ve been checking each others’ homework. Working together on group projects. Studying together on weekends, before quizzes and big exams. And all year, I’d been the jokester, always telling stories to make her laugh, making fun of her to get her to relax when she came into class stressed about Brett or her friends or who-said-what at band practice. I was supposed to be the jokester, but I guess
“Joke’s on me,” I say, finishing my thought out-loud as I swallow a mouthful of dry pancakes. What Jenny doesn’t know — and what I’ll never tell her — is that last night’s kiss was my very first one. My very first fucking kiss, and I’d already been played, already been the butt of someone else’s joke.
It fucking figured.
“I’m so, so sorry, Anika. God, I’m so sorry.”
A small white hand reappears above the table, hovering uncertainly for a moment before it reaches across the divide again, fingertips brushing against my forearm.
“But what I’m trying to tell you,” she says, “is that I made a mistake. Because what happened with us last night… it wasn’t a joke to me.” The fingertips stay on my arm. The touch is light, barely there, but it burns like acid against my bare skin. I should move out of reach, but I don’t. I can’t. “It wasn’t a joke at all. From the moment you touched me… Something happened. Something I didn’t know I already knew until you kissed me.” She sighs. “That didn’t make any sense, did it?”
I shake my head.
“What I’m trying to say is, Anika… do you believe in love at first kiss?”
Slowly, I put my fork down. And slowly, I look into those wide, innocent brown eyes again. This time, I don’t look away.
“Yes,” I say, my voice barely audible.