Lips Touch: Three Times (5 page)

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But it didn't have to be some fabulous Parisian cemetery for the
idea of a picnic in it to bloom in Kizzy's imagination into something daring.
She imagined herself telling Evie and Cactus. A
breakfast picnic
in the
cemetery
with
Jack Husk!
Their eyes would bulge with glee and envy and they'd
want to know everything. They'd want to know if he'd kissed her. She stole a
glance at him and caught him looking at her lips, and she looked away, blushing
hotly, and found the voice to say, "Yeah, okay," in what she hoped
was a casual way.

They went through the cemetery gate, arm in arm in their antique
clothing, and it was then that the ghosts, all of a sudden and with only a
flitter of grass blades for a warning, hit Kizzy like a maelstrom.

Her skirt flared and twisted itself tight to her legs as a rush of
cold wind swept around her. It circled deasil, thrice, just like her
grandmother's ghost had done the day of her burial. But Kizzy felt a whole
swelling of ghosts around her this time, a tide; her grandmother might have
been there, but she wasn't alone. Kizzy froze in mid-step, chilled and
startled, and looked up at Jack Husk. For a second some look passed through his
sly eyes, some intelligence ... a hint of a sneer? And Kizzy almost thought he
knew the sudden wind for what it was: an onslaught of ghosts. Had they swept
around her only, she wondered now, or around them both? Had they included Jack
Husk in their circle of protection? Or had they wound up Kizzy alone? Had that
wind tried to slide between them, like a wall?

"Brrr ..." he said, shivering slightly. To Kizzy's
dismay, he unhooked his arm from hers, but then he settled it around her
shoulder, drawing her neatly against his side, and her dismay evaporated,

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along with any question she'd had about his awareness of rampant
ghosts. "Cold wind," he said simply.

"Mm hm," Kizzy agreed. The velvet of his jacket was now
snug against her cheek, and there was very little room to think of anything
else but the feel of it, and of the way she'd caught him looking at her lips,
and what that might mean.

As they walked through the cemetery, tucked together, she heard
words as she used to when she came here as a child, snippets of speech as murky
as gutter water draining through a clog of leaves. "The wintermen are
gleaning," said one, and another intoned "butterfly," and
"hungry." "Stove burning," said a flat voice, and then
suddenly, a familiar voice hissed, "--
knife, Sunshine --"

Kizzy's eyes went wide and she looked around and over her
shoulder, inadvertently nuzzling Jack Husk's hand with her chin. Despite that
smooth jolt of a touch, she had the wherewithal to realize she'd left her
grandmother's knife in her jeans pocket. All the years of wanting it and she'd
left it behind! She wanted to ask her grandmother what she was doing here. She
should be far away by now, navigating labyrinths, fending off shadows, lapping
water from stalactite tips with her ghostly tongue, and answering riddles to
win passage through gates made of bones. She should be singing beasts to sleep
with lullabies and bribing otherworldly coyotes to smuggle her deeper into her
new world. She shouldn't be
here,
among these fainthearted cemetery
ghosts! This eternal loitering wasn't for Kizzy's folk, least of all her
grandmother, her strong, untemptable grandmother. Kizzy wanted to ask her --
but she was warm against Jack Husk's side and didn't want to step away from him
to whisper her question to the dead.

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"Did you hear something?" Jack Husk asked suddenly.

"What?" Kizzy asked, startled and strangely guilty, as
if he'd caught her hoarding the whispers of the ghosts to herself.

"I don't know. Sounded like a twig snapping. I wonder if
anyone else is here."

But there didn't seem to be anyone else in the cemetery, or even
any sign of recent visitors. It was a lonesome place, and Kizzy wasn't
surprised the ghosts came to her messy yard to while away their days among the
cats and chickens.

Jack Husk's fingers began idly stroking Kizzy's shoulder as they
walked between the rows of graves. It happened slowly, imperceptibly, but she
realized he was pulling her little by little closer to him, the stroking
deepening into rubbing, so his whole hand was cupped over her shoulder, his
thumb making little circles. She could smell boy spice beneath the thrift-store
aroma of his jacket, and the rubbing and the smell began to work to soften her
-- like butter before you add sugar, in the first step of making something
sweet. It was her first experience of how bodies could meld together, how
breath could slip naturally into rhythm. It was hypnotic. Heady.

And she wanted more.

"They have teeth," whispered a ghost. Kizzy ignored it.

"They have nectar," said another, very faint and filled
with longing. Kizzy felt a small chill, but ignored that too.

"Hungry?" Jack Husk asked, as they pivoted to walk
another cemetery row.

Kizzy shrugged. She had little interest in eating just now. But
spreading out the checked blanket someplace quiet and sitting down, leaning
back on her elbows beside Jack Husk, that
did
interest her. She couldn't
stop glancing at his lips, and she kept pressing her own

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together, hyperaware of them. She remembered babysitting an infant
cousin on the day he'd discovered his tongue; he'd kept wagging it and touching
it, making a whole repertoire of new sounds and trying to stick it out far
enough to see it, obsessed by the discovery of this new appendage. Kizzy felt
like that about her lips today, like she was just now finding out what they
were for, but she hoped she was more discreet than her baby cousin had been.

"Let's go over there," Jack Husk said, nodding his head
toward a distant corner of the cemetery where there looked to be a sort of
overgrown garden. They made their way slowly, Kizzy scarcely noticing the graves
they passed, so wrapped up was she in this newness of strolling like lovers,
slow and fused. But at the end of the row of graves, she did notice something.

She walked on past it; it took a moment to register, but a few
steps later her head swung around and she looked again, recognition tingling in
her.

The frowsy green of the unkempt cemetery lawn was disturbed by a
patch of brown, stark as a wound. It seemed to describe a radius around one
particular grave, and Kizzy squinted to see what the tombstone said. She
couldn't read it, and Jack Husk was tugging her gently in the other direction.
She surprised herself by reaching for his velvet lapel and tugging him back.
"Over here," she said. "I want to see something."

"What?" he asked, coming easily along with her.

"This." She stopped before it. A grave where nothing
grew, not even grass. She read the name on the headstone.
Amy Ingersoll.
"I
knew her," Kizzy said, surprised.

"You did?" asked Jack Husk.

Kizzy nodded. "I was a freshman. I think she was a junior,
but

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I barely saw her because she got taken out of school. She was
sick. She ..." Kizzy's voice trailed off. She had almost said,
She
starved herself to death.
But seeing this dead brown grave, other words
came to her mind.
She wasted away.

"Sad," said Jack Husk. "She was your age when she
died."

"Yeah," said Kizzy, thinking of the picture of gaunt Amy
Ingersoll she'd seen in the paper, her eyes seeming huge and haunted in her
pinched face. There had been a special assembly in school about eating disorders.
A doctor had talked about anorexia and bulimia. After, Kizzy and Evie had
pinched the generous skin of their hips and joked crassly that they could use a
little anorexia themselves, and Cactus had said they could start by switching
to Diet Coke.

"I wonder why the grass is all dead here," Kizzy said,
wanting there to be some other explanation than the one buzzing in her
thoughts. Surely in this dull town the wild things her family believed in were
just stories. Such things happened far from here, on cobblestones, and in the
haunted dooryards of ancient churches.

"Damned"
said a ghost right in Kizzy's ear. She
shivered.

Jack Husk felt it and let go of her shoulder to shrug off his
velvet jacket. "You're cold," he said. "Here." He draped it
over her shoulders and drew her back against him. Her brow rested against his
jaw briefly, skin against skin. "Come on," he urged.

She went with him to the little garden in the corner, and Jack
Husk laid out his checked blanket behind some stone urns overflowing with ivy
and scant alyssum blossoms left over from summer. They settled down and he
opened his picnic basket and produced from it a loaf of golden bread and a
round cheese with an artisan's stamp in its thick rind. Things like that,
cheeses signed like

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artworks, were unknown in Kizzy's house, where they had either
salty lumpish cheese her mother made or an army-feeding slab of impossibly
orange stuff from the superstore.

Tucking her dress around her knees, Kizzy watched Jack Husk lay
out purple linen napkins and a real silver knife with just a hint of tarnish on
it, and then a footed silver bowl of chocolates wrapped in foil, and she was
wide-eyed with the elegance of it. If she had ever thought to dream up a
cemetery picnic, the cemetery would have been a different, better one -- in
Paris or New Orleans, somewhere " with moss and broken statues -- but the
picnic would have been just like this.

"Nice," she murmured inadequately. Jack Husk smiled at
her, and he was so beautiful it almost hurt. A wave of skepticism swept over
her, not for the first time.
Why,
she wondered.
Why me?

"Silly girl --" she heard or imagined her grandmother
hissing in her ear.

"Chocolate first," said Jack Husk, the raspy edge of his
voice erasing the faint, ghostly one. "That's my only picnic rule."

"Well,
okay,"
Kizzy said, feigning reluctance and
unwrapping one of the chocolates. It was so dark it was almost black and it
melted on her tongue into an ancient flavor of seed pod, earth, shade, and
sunlight, its bitterness casting just a shadow of sweet. It tasted ...
fine,
so subtle and strange it made her feel like a novitiate into some arcanum
of spice.

The cheese was the same, so different from anything she'd tasted
she could scarcely tell if it was wonderful or terrible. They nibbled it with
the bread, and Jack Husk asked Kizzy if she thought it was too early in the day
for wine, which he produced from his basket and poured into dainty etched
glasses no bigger than Dixie cups.

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It was as earthy and dark as the chocolate and Kizzy sipped it
slowly, softening and softening, stretched out on one elbow, her hip full as an
odalisque's hip, a lush hummock of apple green for Jack Husk to lay his head
on, and he did, and closed his eyes while Kizzy lightly teased the ends of his
unruly hair.

After a little while he sat up and reached one more time into his
basket. He took out an apricot, which he cupped in his hand, and a peach, which
he handed to Kizzy. She took it and held it. Its skin was as soft as the velvet
of Jack Husk's jacket and the scent... she could smell the honey sweetness of
it even through the skin, and she lifted it and took a deeper breath.
Nectar,
she thought dreamily. But she didn't take a bite. She didn't want the
juices dribbling down her chin. She just smelled it again and watched Jack Husk
eat his apricot and toss the pit. Then he leaned back against one of the stone
urns, arranging the billow of ivy and blossoms around his head to look like a
wig.

Kizzy laughed. "It's a good look for you," she said.

"Like it? Here." He lifted a heavy cluster of ivy beside
his head to make a wig for her too, and he motioned her to sit close. She
scooted into the space at his side and held still as he arranged the flowers
over her forehead, pausing to gently tuck one stray curl of her real hair back
under her scarf.

His face was so near hers. She couldn't keep her eyes from
straying to his lips; she could smell the sweetness of apricot on his breath,
see a trace of moisture on his red lips. He was looking at her lips too. She
was suddenly very nervous. He leaned closer. Kizzy froze, not knowing whether
to close her eyes or leave them open. She had a horror of being one of those
girls in movies who closes her eyes and puckers up while the boy sits back and
smirks.

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And seconds later she was glad she hadn't closed her eyes, because
Jack Husk didn't kiss her. He took the peach from her hand, lifted it to his
lips, and took a bite. So close, the perfume it released was like a drug, and
Kizzy had a powerful urge to lean in and taste it too, to taste the nectar on
his lips. She couldn't take her eyes off his lips. She moved forward ever so
slightly. Jack Husk saw, and leaned closer.

This time it was real; it was really going to happen. Kizzy was
going to kiss a beautiful boy. Why then was she thinking about the peach, of
how his lips would taste of it?

Why was she imagining how delicious Jack Husk's kiss would be?