Lips Touch: Three Times (2 page)

Kizzy wanted it all so bad her soul leaned half out of her body
hungering after it, and that was what drove the goblins wild, her soul hanging
out there like an untucked shirt. No amount of grandmother-ghosts dancing
deasil would keep them from trying for so raw a soul. They just wanted her that
bad. She'd probably have been flattered to learn someone wanted her so much,
even if that someone was a goblin.

"Some of the goblins have tails and whiskers," went her
grandmother's story. "Antlers and snail shells and gills. Hooves, claws,
beaks! Creatures, they are, each as different from the next as God's creatures
in a zoo -- but they aren't God's! They work for Old Scratch and catch his
souls for him, and they almost had my sister's. She was ready to give it for
just one more taste of their fruit.

"She was a lot like you, Sunshine. Mairenni was always fierce
with wanting something, a new scarf or our brother's guitar or a wink from the
handsome blacksmith. And when the goblin men came through the glen, calling out
soft like doves cooing, 'Come

22

buy our orchard fruits, come buy!' she wanted that too and she had
it, handfuls and mouthfuls of that witched fruit. Pears, pomegranates, dates,
figs. And the pineapples! We'd never seen pineapples before. Mairenni was a
fool to trust their fruit -- where in our mountains did she think such things
grew?

"She said it was sweeter than honey and richer than wine, and
maybe it was, but it near carved her hollow -- because it's all she wanted
after and all she thought of, day after day, like it was a drug that shrank her
mind to a little nub of
want,
and she wanted and wanted and wanted after
it, but she couldn't have any more.

"She haunted that glen looking for the goblin men, but she
couldn't see them, even when they were there! I could hear their cooing,
coaxing voices and see their ugly shadows tramping up the hill, and so could
our cousin Peneli, but not Mairenni. It's how they do it, torment a girl with
wanting and lure out her soul like a snail from its shell, until she can barely
feel it anymore and it seems like a skimpy, worthless thing to trade away.

"A girl from the next village had died already. Wasted away.
I saw her near the end. Her eyes were huge in her face and all the juice looked
wrung out of her. She died on the full moon and they buried her in the
churchyard, but they dug her back out the next year because nothing would grow
by her grave, not even grass, and that's how they knew she was damned. Mairenni
started to look like that poor girl and I knew she'd die too. She was my sister
even if she was a fool. I had to do something."

At this point in the story Kizzy's grandmother used to shiver over
her memories and touch her lips, remembering how the crowd of goblins had
turned on her, their creature eyes flashing in the

23

gloom as they jumped on her and held her down, mashing grapes and
figs against her prim, clenched mouth.

"The goblins can't just
take
your soul,
Sunshine," she had said in her thick accent. "You have to
give
it.
It's an old agreement between God and Old Scratch. Older than eggs! A soul
that's taken unwilling spoils like milk and then it's no good to anyone, not
even Old Scratch. That's why he grows his evil orchards, because once you've
tasted his fruit you'll give anything to taste it again, and there's only one
thing he wants."

Mairenni had been ready to give up that one thing. But instead,
her sister had braved the goblins and come home bruised and bleeding, with the
pulp of that evil fruit still sticky on her skin, and Mairenni, wasted and
white, had clung to her and wept. She had kissed her and tasted the juice on
her skin -- the juice she was supposed to give her soul for, sipped for free
from her sister's skin -- and the spell had been broken. Mairenni had lived.

Kizzy had never met her -- Mairenni had stayed behind in the Old
Country -- but her grandmother said she looked like her. There was a single
sepia photograph of a girl in a doorway, full-lipped, with eyes that seemed to
sparkle with secrets. Kizzy had always been fascinated by her -- truth be told,
she had always identified more with that wild girl who almost sold her soul for
the taste of figs than with her grandmother who kept her lips tight shut and
never hungered for forbidden things. But though she stared at that photo, and
even saw the shape of her own eyes and lips mirrored back at her, Kizzy just
couldn't see herself in that long-ago girl, ripe and thrilling and flush with a
weird species of beauty the young have no vocabulary for.

24

Kizzy was so busy wishing she was Sarah Ferris or Jenny Glass that
she could scarcely see herself at all, and she was certainly blind to her own
weird beauty: her heavy, spell-casting eyes, too-wide mouth, wild hair, and
hips that could be wild too, if they learned how. No one else in town looked
anything like her, and if she lived to womanhood, she was the one artists would
want to draw, not the Sarahs and Jennys. She was the one who would some day
know a dozen ways to wear a silk scarf, how to read the sky for rain and coax
feral animals near, how to purr throaty love songs in Portuguese and Basque,
how to lay a vampire to rest, how to light a cigar, how to light a man's
imagination on fire.

If she lived to womanhood.

If she remembered her grandmother's stories and believed them, and
if none of the host of other things befell her that are always out there on the
fringes of worry, like drunk drivers or lightning or zombies or a million other
things. But Kizzy was ripe for goblins, and if anything got her, it would
probably be them. Already one had tracked the perfume of her longing past the
surly billy goat to peer in her bedroom window. Already it was studying her
every move and perfecting its disguise.

25

TWO Butterfly Rape

On Monday, there was a new boy at Kizzy's school. "Yum,"
said Evie weakly.

"Be praised, O lords of boy flesh. We thank thee for thy
bounty," whispered Cactus. "Amen," said Kizzy, staring.

They weren't the only ones staring. Even Sarah Ferris craned her
neck over Mick Crespain's shoulder to get a better look as Saint Pock Mark
guided the new boy down the hallway.

He was tall and graceful, with a frame of broad shoulders lightly
fleshed with muscle. Wheat-colored hair curled down over his collar, uncombed
and lustrous. His lips were red as angels' lips in Renaissance paintings, and
full and soft like angels' lips too. His eyes, very dark, canted elvishly
upward at the outer corners and were surrounded by delicate bruises of
sleeplessness, bluish and tender, giving him the look -- Kizzy fancied -- of a
poet who had been up all night with a candle and a quill, memorializing a
beautiful lady who had fallen from the aristocracy to die penniless of a fever,
perhaps in a snowbank, leaving, of course, an ethereal corpse.

"Hell's he wearing?" Cactus asked, breaking into Kizzy's
romantic reverie. "He raid his grandfather's closet?"

"That or he stripped a dead hobo," said Evie.

26

"Nah." Cactus shook her head decisively. "It's
old-man. Look at those suspenders. Total old-man fashion."

"Old men have fashion? Do they have, like, a catwalk?"
mused Evie.

"Yeah, and he totally just stepped off it."

"Please," Kizzy said, glancing at the boy's strange
tweedy trousers, loose at the waist, too short, and upheld by suspenders.
"That boy could wear a banana leaf and a propeller beanie and look
beautiful."

"That how you like your boys, Kiz?" asked Cactus.

"Oh yes.
All
my boys. I'll issue him a banana leaf and
a propeller beanie at once and induct him into my boy-harem."

Evie snorted. "Boy-harem! Imagine -- their little propellers
all spinning around as they fan you with palm fronds."

"While they satisfy my every whim," added Cactus.

Kizzy snorted. "Forget it. I don't lend out my boys."

"Come on, no one likes a greedy slave owner."

"My boys aren't slaves! They stay because they
want
to.
I give them all the elk meat they can eat. And Xbox, you know, to keep their
thumbs nice and agile."

"Spaz," said Evie, laughing. They leaned against the
lockers and watched the new boy out of sight. Just as he rounded the far corner
with Saint Pock Mark, he glanced back over his shoulder. A thrill went through
Kizzy. She imagined for a second that his eyes had silvered like a cat's. And
she imagined he had looked right at her. She blushed instantly, even though she
was sure she was wrong. Boys' eyes didn't find her in a crowd. Boys' eyes
didn't even find her when there was no one else around. They sort of glazed
over or fixed on some fascinating object in the distance.

27

"Wonder what his name is," she murmured after he was
gone.

"Beautiful Boy, capital B, capital B," said Cactus with
a sigh. "But, you know,
Mr.
Boy to the likes of us."

"Yeah," said Kizzy wistfully. "Welcome to Saint
Pock Mark's Finishing School for Cannibals, Mr. Boy."

She went to her class wondering how long it would be before some
leggy girl was sitting on his lap, snapping his old-man suspenders and tossing
her silky hair. Probably by lunchtime. Jenny Glass was temporarily between
boys; she'd be the lucky one. It was the natural order, Kizzy thought with a
flash of bitterness at the life and hips and hair and ankles she had been
dealt. Like attracts like, beauty finds beauty, and freaks look on from the
smoking section, aching.

But lunchtime brought an upset to the natural order.

Kizzy met Cactus and Evie in the usual place, behind a low wall at
a corner of the quad where some sort of steam billowed from a vent to disguise
their cigarette smoke. They slouched there and drank Cokes and ate flat
sandwiches they'd brought from home, and they could see through the cafeteria
window to the corner tables. Mick Crespain's lap was vacant, and usually
Kizzy's imagination would have slid her phantom right into place there, breasts
resting on knuckles and all, but not today. Mr. Boy had stolen her phantom out
of Mick Crespain's lap. She wondered if he had stolen Sarah Ferris out of Mick
Crespain's lap too. She furtively lit a cigarette and looked around, wondering
where he was.

He was much closer than she had expected. He was standing on the
other side of the low wall, looking at her. Their eyes met and Kizzy instantly
blushed to beet. His gaze was like physical touch, like a grabbed hand,
interlaced fingers, a squeeze. Like it

28

went through her eyes and entered her bloodstream. Her face felt
molten hot.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello,
Mr. Boy," she heard Cactus, behind her,
say with a chuckle.

He didn't look away from Kizzy, who began to feel acutely
uncomfortable. He was just
looking
at her. She felt entirely purple with
blushing. "Hi," she murmured.

"Those things'll kill you," he said, shifting his eyes
to her cigarette. His voice was low and a little raspy.

"Yeah, well ... maybe," Kizzy said, looking at it too.
Her heart beat fast against her ribs as she fumbled up something to say.
"But at least I'll die looking older than my age, wrinkly and dry with a
gross phlegmy cough."

He laughed. "When you put it like that, I'm surprised anyone
doesn't
smoke."

She was relieved to have said something, anything, instead of just
staring at him and stammering. Making him laugh was a bonus, which made her
blush deepen. "Me too," she said. "Plus, people are always,
like,
buy American.
And what's more American than cigarettes?"

He cocked his head to one side and raised an eyebrow. When his
hair shifted, Kizzy saw the glint of small gold hoops in both his ears.
"You know," she explained, babbling, "tobacco plantations?
Delightful American traditions like slavery?"

"Uh huh," he said uncertainly.

"Nothing to do with me, though. Only slaves my people ever
kept were their own children."

He gave her a bemused look and held out his hand. "May
I?"

29

"What? This?" With a quizzical look, Kizzy handed him
her cigarette and watched as he raised it to his red, red lips and took a long
suck. Her insides shivered a little, watching his lips close over her own lipstick
prints. It was the closest she had ever come to a kiss. It was a kiss by proxy.
She reached for the cigarette as he handed it back. "Do ... do you want
one?" she asked.

"No thanks. I'll just share yours."

Kizzy could hear Evie and Cactus stifling giggles. She glanced
back at them and saw their eyes were merry and astonished. She turned back to
the beautiful boy, more beautiful than she had even first realized when he
walked past. His face, his bones, were perfect as a statue's, like he was some
Greek god's loving, handmade paean to mortal beauty. Mr. Boy was
art.
Plus,
those tilted eyes gave him a sly, vulpine look that Kizzy liked.
A lot.

Her hand trembling a little, she lifted the cigarette back to her
lips and tried to seem nonchalant, but her eyes went back to his red lips as
her own closed over the moistness of the filter. Exhaling, she handed him back
the cigarette and pressed her lips together. Then she thought she probably
looked like she was trying to kiss herself, so she hastily unpressed them.