Kiss Crush Collide

For my Freddie
and my Yorke

“Leah!” My mother rolls her eyes, sounding completely exasperated as she steps down the three thick stone slabs at our front door, her heels clacking. Leaving the double doors flung open behind her, she bends down and examines one of the yellow rosebushes that line every inch of our driveway.

Shane slowly rolls the convertible alongside her, and we grind to a stop on the thick carpet of gravel, just behind a small red M3 I don’t recognize. Shane pulls up the emergency brake with a crank, and my mother stands, smoothing the hem of her sweater, wilted yellow petals drifting to her feet. “Thank God you’re finally home.”

“You know I have practice till four,” I say. Her heels sink into the sea of salt-and-pepper pebbles with a crunch, the bright metallic sound of the three thin silver bracelets she never takes off trailing behind her as she walks out into the middle of our circular drive.

“We were starting to get worried,” she says, raising her eyebrows at me, ignoring my scowl. The bracelets slip down her arm one by one,
shink, shink, shink
, as she reaches up and gives my boyfriend her standard greeting, a kiss on the left cheek that leaves a coral stain.

“Just like always,” I mumble to myself, and lean over, pushing the heavy car door open with a huff. I feel the part of my butt cheek that has become one with the sun-baked seat peel away as I climb out of the car. I kick the door shut behind me with my heel before Shane can even manage to untangle himself from my mother and jog his way around the front of the car to help me out.

“Oh, Shane.” My mother’s laughter bubbles up, floating over the sound of his size twelves chewing up the gravel, trying to catch up with me. “You’re too good to her. You know she’s kept us all waiting.”

I stop. Her bracelets brush together again with a silvery sound as my mother and my boyfriend step past me. She walks him up the front stairs and into the house, her heels echoing across the canyon of black-and-white tile we call a foyer. I unclench my hand just long enough to push the button on the side of my phone to check the time. It’s 4:12.

Standing on the curb in front of the school’s entrance exactly eight minutes earlier, I cocked my head and twisted my hair, cursing Shane under my breath.

“Come on, come on, come on,” I breathed, my unwillingness to drive factoring into my frustration, ratcheting it up a notch, as I bounced impatiently in the tiny square of shade cast by a yellow school zone sign, while I watched the entire student body roll by in front of me, free for the day.

It’s not that I can’t drive. I just don’t. Shane asked me out the second day of our sophomore year. I slid into the passenger seat on our first date. Shane climbed behind the wheel, smiled, crooked two fingers around the curve of the wheel, and dropped his other hand onto my left knee. It’s almost two years later, and not much has changed.

I got a car, just like my sisters did—it’s a sweet sixteen standard—but mine just seems to sit in our driveway. It’s cute and fun, a shiny bright blue convertible bug, and I think it’s in the exact same spot it was when my dad handed over the keys, hugged me tight, and wished me a happy birthday.

Sometimes he threatens to drive it himself when he goes to the golf course, and I try to picture his fuzzy covered clubs sticking out of the tiny backseat, but he always ends up backing out the company truck instead,
JOHNSON
CUSTOM
CONSTRUCTION—WE
BUILD
BIG
HOUSES
, sliding past the kitchen window as he drives off in the early-morning light.

My parents have been together forever, high school sweethearts destined for domestic bliss. My dad started his construction business right after school, building a tiny house for the two of them. Over the years the business got bigger, the houses got bigger, and his truck got huge.

It’s so big now that it beeps when it backs up, driving my mother crazy if she hasn’t had her morning latte yet. She yaps around the kitchen like a little dog until he shifts into drive and rolls away.

I don’t know why my parents don’t get rid of my car. I wouldn’t mind. But my mother says of course I’ll want a car when I go off to college. My oldest sister, Yorke, drives her car everywhere on campus. I can picture her, all ballsy and blond, double-parking her
BMW
in front of every lecture hall, carelessly dropping cardboard boxes onto her leather seats when she makes beer runs for her sorority sisters, pissing off the campus cops on a daily basis. I am sure my dad has the tickets to prove it.

My cell said 4:04. Which meant that I had gotten out of practice, collected all my stuff, and jogged out here in less than four minutes. It’s Friday, and that means yet another Friday night family dinner at the club. It’s a tradition my mother instituted when we were little, back in the days when she could dress us up in matching pastel dresses.

Tonight we will be celebrating my sister Freddie’s valedictorianness. Freddie is less brassy than Yorke, in color and volume. She is perfection. Her big graduation party with the tent and the band and the whole world invited is tomorrow. Tonight is just for family, and I can’t be late.

Not that I can ever be late, really, with my mother running the show, but especially not tonight. I’m sure she was expecting me at least four minutes ago. She seems to think that Shane drives a time machine, not a convertible Mercedes.

I looked up from my phone and saw Dani and Len waving to me from the parking lot, red and gold poms stuffed under their arms, purses and bags slung everywhere. I smiled and waved back.

Valerie Dickens, math genius and serious contender for future senior class valedictorian, was slinking along the hot pavement, lurking a few steps behind my two best friends. Valerie and I used to be close. Until the fourth grade, when the geography of our new house and her serious competitive streak separated us.

Thin, spindly, and slightly translucent, she slid around the cars like something you would poke at in the bottom of a petri dish. She looked over at me with a scowl.

I dropped my hand so fast when her eyes met mine that my bag slid off my shoulder with a jerk and practically yanked my hair from my head.

She stuck a key into the door of a dark green VW, an oversize rusty cheese grater with bald tires and a bad dent in the back end. I watched her pry the door open. The stack of books that had been cradled in her arms slipped and spread out across the sticky blacktop, spines cracking. I didn’t have to watch her stoop to pick them up, I knew what they were:
Trigonometry
,
Applied Mathematics
, and
the Catcher in the Rye.
She stood, frizzy hair hanging in her face, and gave me the same knowing look she had given me only an hour before.

The final bell had just rung, waking up half the class, when Mr. Hobart stopped by my desk and said, “Johnson, hang back for a second. I have a matter to discuss with you.”

It is not a treat to have AP Calc as the last class of the day. And toward the end of the semester even the thought of the class has been leaving me with a burning knot in my stomach.

I used to not even think about AP Calc. It used to be like most of my classes—easy, doable, not a lot of effort. Then somewhere during these last few weeks we took a quantum leap and entered a world that makes absolutely no sense to me. Zero.

I have been getting by with a lot of guessing and by copping Freddie’s old notes and papers. She keeps
everything
, every bit of schoolwork, every scrap of paper, anything she ever did since kindergarten. It’s kind of sad.

My grades must finally be slipping or why else would Mr. Hobart want to talk to me? Fighting the urge to curl up like a shrimp and rock back and forth at my desk, I got up, grabbed my bag and my books, and walked toward the front of the room, thinking, Say good-bye to ever being valedictorian.

Mr. Hobart has a huge metal table parked at the front of his classroom that he uses as a command station. With stacks and stacks of papers, probably dating back to the 1970s, his organizational system is legendary. He can reach blindly into a pile while lecturing and extract exactly the right paper.

I was tempted to throw the windows open wide and watch the papers and his toupee flutter back down to earth. Instead I mentally prepared a speech about my trying harder and his being a great teacher and how much I have learned, and then I planned on finishing it all off with a big smile.

“So, Little Johnson,” Mr. Hobart said, his stubby, ink-covered fingers tapping along the edge of his tin table like he was sending a telegram. I smiled at him and his stacks of papers placed at right angles and remembered the first time I had heard someone call me that.

It happened the first week that all three of us, Yorke, Freddie, and I, were in high school at the same time. I had just shown up for freshman gym class, all short shorts and ponytail and fresh summer tan, when I heard some older boys up in the balcony. They were leaning over the railing, watching the freshman girls file into the gym.

“Look, it’s Little Johnson,” one of them said in a deep voice.

I glanced up, and some random guy I’m pretty sure I’d seen Yorke kissing in our driveway late one night pointed at me.

“Hey, Little Johnson,” he called out, and I looked around the room before I looked up at him again, very aware of myself standing outside the circle of girls on the shining, wooden floor.

Some other guy with big, meaty arms laughed and said, “I like me some Little Johnson.”

I was flattered and embarrassed and confused all at the same time. And suddenly very conscious of my exposed legs and how tight my T-shirt was.

Finally, Ms. Kemp blew her whistle and shouted, “Line up, girls!”

She called out our names, and we lined up, matching shorts and Ts all in a row.

When Ms. K got to me, she glanced up from her clipboard, smirked, and yelled, “Little Johnson!”

With a very Yorke-like curtsy, I took my place at the front of the third line amid low whistles and laughter from the balcony above. The name has been with me ever since. I just wish it didn’t make me sound like a tiny dick.

Mr. Hobart finally found the paper he was looking for and handed it to me. “Your ability to show your work really helped boost your grade,” he said.

I slowly reached for the paper. I recognized my deliberate, detailed work. It was my AP Calc final with a large A minus written in the upper right corner. I guess I had been holding my breath because when I finally breathed, it came out in a whoosh that disturbed the closest stack but not Mr. Hobart’s hair. He pinned the papers down with a thick thumb. I was a bit stunned.

“An A minus?” I asked. I was hoping for a C. To be honest, a C minus really seemed more likely when I remembered how much looking out the window and hair twisting I had done during the exam. I held the paper out toward Mr. Hobart, ready for it to be returned to its resting place at the bottom of a pile. It didn’t seem mine to keep.

He took the exam from me, lifted a year’s worth of papers like a magician splits a deck of cards, and inserted my paper deftly somewhere in the middle. I’ll bet he could find it again, even after a shuffle, with a blindfold on.

He stood and looked me straight in the eyes through his thick black-rimmed glasses.

“Your sister Freddie struggled a bit too during the last semester of my class,” he said.

He put his hand at the small of my back and spoke quietly, leading me toward the classroom door. “Consider it a sneak peak, if you will. Go off and enjoy your summer, Leah. Rest assured that our hopes for a third Johnson valedictorian are intact.”

He stopped abruptly. Valerie Dickens was milling about in the open doorway, her arms laden down with textbooks, her expression unsettled, obviously having heard everything. Mr. Hobart waved me out the door, and I slipped past Valerie without meeting her eyes.

I headed toward the gym for my last practice of the year. I am sure Valerie had studied her ass off for that test. In fact I am sure she had studied her ass off all semester. I recognized that look on her face. I’ve seen it before, at dances, tryouts, parties, in the girls’ bathrooms, school hallways, and classrooms, all my life actually.

My mother and sisters say it is just jealousy, but I have the feeling there is more to it than that. I get that girls like Valerie might want something to hate about me—herpes, dandruff, even the occasional breakout—because mostly my life happens while I smile and watch. But they put in the time. They aim for the prize, stay home on Friday nights to study, get up early on school days to practice. They read and memorize and put their hearts into it and ache for boys who pay no attention. I just show up and get everything they’re after. I would probably hate me, too.

But summer is almost here. Graduating seniors were done today; the rest of us have three long days of exams, results, and hot, closed classrooms still to go. I heaved a sigh and cracked open the tall metal gym door for my last pep squad practice of the year.

A loud, pounding dance beat and the stale smell of sweat hit me along with the realization that Valerie was going to spend the summer waiting and wondering about her class standing, but being third in such a fine line of sisters, I was all set. I had three whole months of sunny absolution spread out in front of me. So I did what any good Johnson would do; I smoothed down my shirt, shook out my hair, and bounced out onto the gym floor with a big smile.